Industrious Modernity. The Politics of ‘Changing the World’.

Our times are marked by a pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will, to use and old quote that Leftists sometimes throw around. Our intellectual pessimism manifests itself in the fact that no one seems to have a serious alternative to our present predicament. Our wilful optimism means that, despite the absence of alternatives, there is a general desire for change.

To Change the World has become the motto of a new generation. University University-educated knowledge workers are toiling away in start-ups and social enterprises; working in peer production projects and on new crypto ventures that they hope will have an impact beyond the, often elusive, prospect of economic gain. Even when they work in corporate careers, the hope is that their efforts will contribute to some overall transformation. From the downright fraudulent (as when the desire for change is appropriated in slogans of corporate organizations whose aims are far from progressive), via the sometimes silly (like post-it[I1] [e2] workshops) to the sincere and earnest toil of many, to be a ChangeMaker[I3] [e4] has become a common aspiration.

Clearly, the world needs changing. Virtually all serious observers agree that if we go on like this, the future will be grim. But what to change the world into? As of yet, nobody has envisioned a viable alternative to a social model in what appears to be terminal decline, much less any realistic strategy for confronting an ecological crisis of potentially game-changing dimensions.

Industrial modernity — the experience of modernity that prevailed until around the mid-1970s — also valued change. Indeed, change has been at the core of the modern experience ever since it came around. In his classic work, with the appropriate title, borrowed form from Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, All that is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman, the perhaps most famous theorist of modernity, described this condition as one of constant flux. : ‘To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world- — and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.’ The difference is that in industrial modernity, change came with a blueprint; there was a plan for the future, and everyone knew, more or less what they were striving for (communism, liberal democracy, national sovereignty, etc.). Today this sense of direction has been lost: we are left with change itself, as something of an empty signifier. We have no idea what this change will lead to or what the resulting future might look like. Yet, for a wide range of people there is no doubt that change is necessary.

In part the difficulty in imagining a direction for change results from a virtually complete colonization of the imaginary on the part of commercial culture, and the concomitant decline of politics and what used to be called the ‘Public Sphere’, a condition that Mark Fisher has called ‘capitalist realism’ where ‘there is no alternative’.[i] In part, it results from the radical nature of the ecological crisis ahead: a true singularity in the proper sense of the term, something for which all bets are off, and that we cannot see beyond. But perhaps another reason why we cannot imagine a different future is because it is still early days.

Indeed, to want to change the world without knowing exactly into what is not a historically new condition. It is a feature of what I call industrious modernity, a kind of modern experience that has been with us in the past. It accompanied the transition to industrial capitalism in the West (and possibly marked other parts of the pre-industrial world as well). Industrious modernity was the experience of the European long 16th sixteenth century (and, to some extent, of the medieval commercial revolution that preceded it). It was the experience of an emerging urban civil society organized around guilds and fraternities and built around new ideas of justice and freedom; of the ‘many-headed hydra’ of soldiers, sailors, beggars, convicts and other outcasts from a crumbling feudal order who, along with the new commoners, challenged ingrained notions of hierarchy and privilege. Starting with the 16th sixteenth-century German peasant wars, the Protestants united these diverse experiences into a common movement for ‘change’ that came to dominate the emerging political scene in northern Europe and the colonial United States. According to the sociologist Max Weber, the Protestants ushered in industrial modernity though their sheer industriousness, their hard work and self-sacrifice. They strove to improve themselves and the world around them, without really knowing what they wanted to achieve. Instead, their striving was clouded in the mystical concept of a ‘divine calling’. Like us, they had only a very vague idea of where they were headed, and they might not have liked the results of their strivings, had they come to known them. They were simply not able to see the future that they were in the process of making. Now a similar experience of industrious modernity is affirming itself again, as the ‘iron cage’ of industrial modernity is falling apart.[ii]

To some extent, the return of industrious modernity is a cultural fact. It is the result of the successive dismantling of the Grand Narratives that marked industrial modernity, like communism, liberal democracy or the affluent consumer society, along with the social movements that they inspired. When there are no great schemes left to give direction, the only way to give political or at least civic significance to one’s life is to try to change one’s own circumstance, or at the most to do good and to have an impact in some abstract and generic sense. But industrious modernity is also supported by a particular material condition. Life in industrial modernity might have been alienating and boring, a life for specialists without minds, pleasure-seekers without heart, as Weber wrote in the concluding pages on his essay on The Protestant Ethic. But at least people’s existential security was in some sense shielded. You could toil on in your corporate job faithful that, somehow, in the grand scheme of things, what you did made a difference and contributed to a greater cause. When these grand narratives have evaporated, the ‘bullshit’ nature of many corporate jobs reveals itself. Indeed, David GreaberGraeber, who coined the term, suggests that around 40 per cent of workers in middle management jobs like PR, human resources, brand managers or financial consultants ‘feel their jobs are pointless.’. Many people now escape such careers if they can, sensing that a bullshit job will not allow them to make the kind of change they desire, or even realize their own ambitions. In addition, a growing amount number of people are cast out form from corporate careers, because of redundancies, because what they do has been outsourced and they are forced to go freelance, or because they were never able to enter[I5] [e6] the ladder in the first place, despite an expensive university degree. To these outcasts the existential threats of a precarious existence have to be faced head on. Industrious modernity is the experience of people who face insecurity without the shield of a corporate organization and ever less of a protective welfare state; people who have to eke out an existence in the middle, between the destitute reality of employment and the safety of a stable career. To Change the World [I7] [e8] is the politics — or the political unconscious perhaps — of such precarity. It is a way of convincing yourself, rightly or wrongly, that you are doing something valuable and that your life has meaning. The protestant sects that Weber wrote about worked much in the same way.[iii]

And this industrious condition is becoming ever more common. Indeed, something similar has always been part of the modern experience for ordinary people. Even in the organized societies of industrial modernity, many operated outside of regulated labour markets or secure careers. Think of the family restaurants and small boarding houses that proliferated in European working working-class neighbourhoods up until quite recently; food carts on the streets of Singapore or Mumbai; the magliari from Naples who travelled quite undisturbed between Paris and Berlin peddling knock-off textiles in the middle of World War II, and of course the informal economy offering sometimes illicit goods and services. In the conclusion to his magnum opus on the history of capitalism in the West, Fernand Braudel marvelled at the fact that despite almost half a millennium of increasingly sophisticated capitalist institutions, there remained ‘a sort of lower layer of the economy’, a competitive economy different from what he considered ‘true capitalism’. This industrious economy — small-scale, flexible and semi-formal — has remained more prevalent in some places, like India or Southern Italy, but it was never entirely eradicated even in the highly organized societies of northern Europe or the US. Now such small-scale, labour-intensive enterprise is becoming an option for a wider range of actors.[iv]

The disappearance of stable industrial jobs in the west West (and increasingly also in Asia as factories automate), ) and the transformation of the countryside in Africa and South America due to land grabbing and climate change, is pushing a generation of people out of traditional life forms. Many of them migrate, often not simply out of necessity but also because they feel that they deserve a better life for themselves and their families. Indeed, the dream of a better life has probably never been as widespread and tangible as it is now, as the features of a life lived with the latest iPhone in hand are visible on the cheap screens that have become ubiquitous even in the poorest of households. They try their luck in booming Megacities megacities that are unable to absorb them within an official labour market that is itself contracting. They attempt to make the hazardous journey into Europe, the US or some other part of the ‘homeland’ of industrial modernity. For most, an entrepreneurial solution remains the only viable alternative to slave-like labour conditions in textile sweat-shops or in the tomato fields of Southern Italy, or risky careers at the entry level of the criminal economy. For most, the aspiration is to set up your own business, to be your own man (or woman), to create a life that is a little better, a little more dignified and a little more meaningful.

The real novelty is that such popular industrious entrepreneurs are now increasingly joined by middle middle-class university graduates, who historically used to prefer stable employment to the vagaries of entrepreneurship. Such knowledge worker entrepreneurship is often a necessity. But it is also often a choice. To many, the bullshit nature of a corporate job becomes obvious after a few years and the aspiration is to do something else that is more fulfilling, creative of or simply freer. To many, the ethical and existential imperative to change the worlds finds its expression in business and entrepreneurship. These tendencies will probably become even more pronounced in the future as automation and economic contraction combine to make corporate careers, whether middle middle-class or proletarian, even rarer to come by.

Capitalist restructuring has moved the industrious economy from the margins into the centre. Ever more the production of goods and services and, increasingly, innovation — at least of the adaptive, piecemeal variety — is relegated to small-scale labour-intensive companies. Already in the 1980s the automobile and electrics[I9] [e10] industry started to outsource component manufacturing to small labor labour-intensive factories, mostly located in what used to be the ‘periphery’ of the world economy. Corporate services followed suit. Today, the platform economy is creating new transport and delivery services organized in the form of a multitude of formally autonomous enterprises, often one-man operations, and the innovation needed to adapt digital technologies to new market niches is outsourced to thousands of start-ups.

However, the affirmation of the industrious sector is also due to the new commons that have resulted from the digitalization and globalization of capitalist production and culture, along with the affirmation of a number of alternatives like Free/Open Source Software or Peer Production communities. These new commons make it easier and cheaper to organize complex business operations. Start –-ups can be created on the cheap, cheap electronics can be imported and distributed on European and African popular markets though the complex coordination of a multitude of small small-scale producers and intermediaries. Like the commons that supported the ‘petty commodity producers’ that built and emerging market society in the European Middle Ages, the new digital commons have substantially empowered contemporary industrious entrepreneurship. The industrious economy is not equipped to engage in genuinely disruptive innovation; it is not the place where nuclear fusion or quantum computing will come from. It is, however, very good, often better than the corporate giants that remain from the industrial age, to adapt existing technological solutions to popular needs and new market niches. It is perhaps possible that new commonly available technologies like blockchains and similar distributed ledgers, or plug and -and-play software for data mining will render this small-scale industrious economy even more innovative in this sense. At the horizon we might see dodgy back back-alley entrepreneurs churning out genetically modified tomato seeds fit to survive in the altered conditions of the Anthropocene.

The return of industrious relations of production; , of petty commodity production albeit in a high high-tech version, has been driven by capitalist restructuring. But it is also driving such restructuring. And it is already driving a substantial transformation in the nature of digital capitalism. Platform capitalism, the dominance of consumer-oriented platforms like Uber, Facebook or Amazon along with platform labour markets can be understood as a strategy that aims at containing and controlling a multitude of small-scale enterprises by owning the markets that they operate on and taxing the transactions that they engage in. Indeed, since the 1980s, the institutional structure of today’s platforms have evolved as a way of controlling extended corporate supply chains. Current plans for the industrial internet, or Industry 4.0, aim at extending such control by centralizing data gathered from a vast multitude of acts of production and consumption across national economies. We might see an extension of this platform paradigm into a model of capitalism that combines mass entrepreneurship at the bottom, with top top-down despotic control exercised via algorithms and big data.

However, industrious modernity also points beyond capitalism in important respects. Like the ‘civic economy’ of 14th fourteenth-century Franciscans, today’s petty producers imagine a decentralized market economy market marked by transparency, and relative equality. A world where economic action remains embedded in moral and civic responsibility; where ‘value sovereignty’ allows you to stay on the market while being true to your ethical aspirations. Whether and in what form such an industrious economy might survive remains an open question. It is, however, quite certain that the onset of the Anthropocene will accelerate the current crisis of industrial capitalism, just like the ecological crisis of the 14th fourteenth century broke the backbone of feudalism. The accumulation of dysfunctionalities that will most likely mark the future of capitalism will open up new spaces for a decentralized industrious economy to affirm itself and grow more attractive as it addresses a large range of popular needs and provides the new forms of innovation needed, much like the crisis of feudalism in the 14th fourteenth century provided a space in which the guilds and the commons-based market economy that they supported could grow. Maybe such a decentralized industrious economy might become capable of deploying state power in its own interest, maybe inventing radically new political forms along the way. Perhaps it will take the form of an informally regulated global bazaar economy operating out of the back alleys of the global planet of slums, building new life in the ruins. The latter might be the most likely scenario (and it seems the one towards which the intellectual pessimism of contemporary social theorists is converging).[v]

The return of industrious relations of production in a digitally empowered version is the possibly the most important contradiction that marks contemporary capitalism, and it will be a crucial source of that system’s future evolution or, perhaps, transformation.

(This text is a redacted extract form my book Changemakers. The Industrious Future of the Digital Economy, forthcoming with Polity Press in the fall.)

[i] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zero Books, 2009.

[ii] Although he stays away form from explicit ‘value judgements’, the last part of the essay on The Protestant Ethic suggests that Weber did not think that the Protestants would have liked it in the iron cage of industrial modernity that they contributed to build; see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Capitalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011 [1904–5]. On the many-headed hydra, see Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000. The origins of notions of civil society in the ‘commercial revolution’ of medieval Europe will be discussed in further detail in chapter 5.

[iii] See David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018. On the puritan sects as an answer to precarity, see Michael Waltzer, The Revolution of the Saints, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965, pp. 308–16.

[iv] Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. Vol III. The Perspective of the World, New York: Harper & Row, 1984, p. 630.

[v] For examples of such neo-apocalyptic social thought, see Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015; and Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.