Inventing the Future

Inventing the Future Plot Summary

Introduction

The contemporary crisis of work represents one of the most profound challenges facing societies worldwide. As automation technologies increasingly displace human labor across economic sectors, we confront a fundamental contradiction: capitalism simultaneously renders work obsolete while maintaining employment as the primary mechanism for distributing income and social belonging. This contradiction manifests in growing surplus populations, expanding precarity, and intensified mechanisms of social control that attempt to manage those excluded from formal employment. Yet these developments also create possibilities for moving beyond the wage-labor system toward a society where technological productivity serves human flourishing rather than capital accumulation. Moving beyond folk politics toward a strategic vision of post-work society requires reclaiming modernity and its emancipatory potential. Rather than retreating to localism or horizontalism in the face of neoliberal hegemony, we must develop a counter-hegemonic project capable of challenging capitalism at multiple scales. This means engaging with the complexities of technological change, building new organizational forms, and articulating universal demands that can unite diverse struggles. By advancing concrete proposals for full automation, reduced working time, universal basic income, and the diminishment of work ethic, we can begin constructing a future where freedom extends beyond market choice to encompass genuine self-determination and collective flourishing.

Chapter 1: The Crisis of Work: Automation and Growing Surplus Populations

The contemporary global economy faces a profound crisis of work that extends far beyond cyclical unemployment. At the core of this crisis lies a fundamental contradiction: capitalism increasingly renders human labor obsolete through automation and technological advancement, yet simultaneously depends on wage labor as its organizing principle. This contradiction manifests in the growing phenomenon of surplus populations - people who are structurally excluded from formal employment and forced into precarious existence. Unlike temporary unemployment during economic downturns, surplus populations represent a secular trend within capitalism itself. As production processes become increasingly automated, the demand for labor diminishes relative to the available workforce. This trend is exacerbated by the global integration of labor markets, which has effectively doubled the available workforce while technological advances continue to reduce the need for human input. These surplus populations take various forms across the global economy. In developed nations, they appear as the chronically unemployed, the underemployed working in part-time or temporary positions, and those who have given up seeking work entirely. The expansion of precarious employment - characterized by irregular hours, minimal benefits, and little job security - represents another dimension of this crisis. Even those fortunate enough to maintain stable employment face stagnant wages and increasing workloads. In developing economies, the crisis manifests differently but no less severely. Many nations are experiencing "premature deindustrialization," where manufacturing sectors begin to shrink before economies have fully developed. This process short-circuits the traditional path of economic development that previously absorbed surplus rural populations. Instead, millions find themselves trapped in informal economies characterized by unstable, low-paying work without legal protections or benefits. The management of surplus populations has become a central political challenge. Governments employ various strategies to contain the social disruption these populations might otherwise cause. Welfare systems provide minimal subsistence while workfare programs discipline recipients through mandatory work requirements. Immigration policies attempt to regulate the flow of surplus labor across borders. Most disturbingly, mass incarceration functions as a mechanism to warehouse and control those deemed economically superfluous, particularly racial minorities. Traditional responses to unemployment - education, training, and job creation - prove increasingly inadequate as the structural nature of the problem becomes apparent. The crisis of work cannot be resolved through conventional economic policies because it stems from the fundamental contradictions of capitalism itself. This recognition demands a more radical rethinking of the relationship between work, income, and social organization.

Chapter 2: Folk Politics vs. Strategic Hegemony: Lessons from Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism represents the most successful hegemonic project of the past fifty years. From its origins as a fringe theory, neoliberalism transformed into the dominant global ideology through a deliberate, patient, and strategic approach to building power. This success offers crucial lessons for those seeking to move beyond the limitations of folk politics toward a more effective counter-hegemonic strategy. Folk politics refers to a set of political intuitions and practices that prioritize the immediate, the local, the authentic, and the personal over more abstract, complex, and global forms of political engagement. While these approaches create powerful moments of resistance and solidarity, they ultimately fail to challenge the fundamental structures of global capitalism. Folk-political thinking privileges spatial, temporal, and conceptual immediacy - favoring the local over the global, the reactive over the strategic, and the particular over the universal. These tendencies emerged partly as a response to the overwhelming complexity of our global economic and political systems, but they fundamentally misrecognize the nature of contemporary capitalism. The neoliberal project began with the formation of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, bringing together economists, philosophers, and businessmen committed to developing a new liberalism. Unlike folk-political approaches, they operated with a global horizon, worked abstractly outside existing political possibilities, and formulated a clear strategic conception of the terrain to be occupied. They understood that changing political common sense required a long-term vision and the construction of an intellectual infrastructure capable of disseminating their ideas. This infrastructure took shape through a network of think tanks, academic departments, media outlets, and policy organizations. Neoliberals recognized that ideas alone were insufficient - they needed to be embedded in institutions and material structures. They worked systematically to place their members in government positions, influence media narratives, and reshape educational institutions. This full-spectrum approach allowed neoliberal ideas to permeate every aspect of society, from economic policy to cultural values and individual identities. The flexibility of neoliberalism was another key to its success. Rather than adhering to a rigid doctrine, neoliberalism adapted to different contexts and incorporated elements from various political traditions. It co-opted the language of freedom, modernity, and individual choice, transforming these concepts to serve market imperatives. This adaptability allowed neoliberalism to build alliances across different social groups and respond to changing conditions on the ground. The history of neoliberalism demonstrates that the greatest recent success of the right was accomplished through non-folk-political means. The neoliberals thought in long-term visions, built a counter-hegemonic project, and took a full-spectrum approach to changing hegemonic conditions. They constructed an ideological infrastructure capable of insinuating itself into every political issue and every fiber of political common sense. Any effective challenge to neoliberal capitalism must learn from this approach, developing a similarly comprehensive strategy that operates across multiple scales and domains.

Chapter 3: Reclaiming Modernity: Progress, Universalism, and Freedom

To move beyond folk politics, the left must reclaim the contested legacy of modernity and advance visions for a new future. Modernity has been almost fully ceded to the right, with "modernization" coming to signify privatization, exploitation, and inequality. However, this conflation of modernity with capitalism overlooks the alternative forms modernity can take and the ways in which anti-capitalist struggles rely upon its ideals. Modernity refers to a set of concepts that revolve around universal ideals of progress, reason, freedom, and democracy. These concepts have animated the work of abolitionists, formed the basis of trade union struggles, and continue today in campaigns for wages, land rights, health, dignity, and self-determination. The political struggles of today are struggles within the space of modernity and its ideals, not against modernity itself. A key element of modernity is its orientation toward the future. Modernity introduced a rupture between the present and the past, projecting the future as potentially different from and better than what came before. Historically, the left found its natural home in this future orientation, from early communist visions of technological progress to social democratic rhetoric about the "white heat of technology." However, with the rise of neoliberalism, the right co-opted this language of modernization and the future, leaving the left disoriented and defensive. To recover a sense of progress, the left cannot simply adopt classic images of history headed toward a singular destination. Instead, progress must be understood as hyperstitional: as a kind of fiction that aims to transform itself into truth. Hyperstitions operate by catalyzing dispersed sentiment into a historical force that brings the future into existence. Progress is not an established property of the world but a matter of political struggle, with no guarantee of success. A future-oriented left must also engage with universalism—the idea that certain values, ideas, and goals may hold across all cultures. Capitalism is an expansionary universal that weaves itself through multiple cultural fabrics. Anything less than a competing universal will be smothered by capitalist relations. However, this universalism must avoid the chauvinism of European modernity, which presented itself as embodying the universal way of life while subjugating other cultures. A left modernity must champion a substantial concept of freedom. Against the limited notion of negative freedom—freedom from interference—the left should advance synthetic freedom, which recognizes that formal rights without material capacity are worthless. Synthetic freedom emphasizes the means and capacities to act, linking freedom with power. It requires the provision of basic resources, the expansion of social knowledge, and the development of technological capacities. This vision of freedom is constructed rather than natural, a collective achievement rather than the result of simply leaving people alone.

Chapter 4: Four Demands for Post-Work Society: Automation, Time, Income, Ethics

A post-work society offers a compelling alternative to our current crisis of work. Rather than clinging to the failing institution of wage labor, we should embrace the liberating potential of moving beyond work. This vision is not about idleness, but about freeing people from the necessity of selling their time and effort to someone else in exchange for an income. To achieve this vision, we advance four key demands: full automation, the reduction of the working week, the provision of a universal basic income, and the diminishment of the work ethic. The first demand is for a fully automated economy. Using the latest technological developments, automation can liberate humanity from work while simultaneously producing increasing amounts of wealth. Rather than fearing automation as a threat to jobs, we should enthusiastically accelerate and target it as a political project. This means pushing beyond the acceptable parameters of capitalist social relations and investing in technologies that replace rather than augment workers. While full automation is presented as an ideal, in practice it is unlikely to be fully achieved. Certain tasks will continue to require human labor for technical, economic, or ethical reasons. The goal is not the immediate elimination of all work, but its progressive reduction. The second demand involves reducing the length of the working week with no cut in pay. From the beginning of capitalism, workers have struggled against the imposition of fixed working hours. The two-day weekend and the reduction of the working week from sixty hours to thirty-five hours were significant achievements of these struggles. Yet progress toward shorter working hours stalled after World War II, and work has since expanded into every aspect of our lives. Reducing the working week would bring numerous benefits: it would respond to rising automation by redistributing the remaining work, lead to significant reductions in energy consumption, improve mental health, and increase worker power by withdrawing labor hours from the market. The third demand is for a universal basic income (UBI)—giving every citizen a liveable amount of money without any means-testing. This would transform the political relationship between labor and capital by giving workers the option to choose whether to take a job or not. It would convert precarity and unemployment from states of insecurity to states of voluntary flexibility. It would necessitate a rethinking of the values attributed to different types of work, with hazardous and unattractive jobs having to pay more. And it would recognize and remunerate the unpaid labor of social reproduction that is essential to capitalism. The final demand involves overcoming the pervasive pressure to submit to the work ethic. Work has become central to our self-conception, with many people finding it impossible to imagine a meaningful life outside of employment. This ideology demands dedication to work regardless of its nature, instilling a moral imperative that drudgery should be valued. Overcoming this will require building a counter-hegemonic approach to work that challenges existing ideas about its necessity and desirability. This cultural shift is essential for making the other three demands politically viable. These four demands are mutually reinforcing. Full automation amplifies the possibility of reducing the working week and heightens the need for a universal basic income. A reduction in the working week helps produce a sustainable economy and leverage class power. A universal basic income amplifies the potential to reduce the working week and expand class power. Together, they form an integrated program for a post-work society—not a simple marginal reform, but an entirely new hegemonic formation to compete against neoliberalism.

Chapter 5: Building Counter-Hegemony: From Utopian Thinking to Political Organization

Achieving a post-work society requires transforming the present political conditions. This means building a counter-hegemonic strategy capable of overturning the dominant neoliberal common sense and rejuvenating the collective imagination. Such a strategy must be expansive, long-term, comfortable with abstraction and complexity, and aimed at overthrowing capitalist universalism. Building counter-hegemony requires working across multiple fronts. First, we must reclaim the utopian imagination. Today's world remains confined within the parameters of capitalist realism, with the future seemingly canceled. Contemporary science fiction is dominated by dystopian visions, and the left has retreated from its traditionally grand ambitions. Yet utopian thinking is essential for any process of political change. It allows us to imagine alternatives to the present, provides a perspective from which to critique existing conditions, and functions as an affective modulator that shapes our desires and feelings. Second, we must transform the intellectual terrain, particularly in economics. Economics was once a relatively pluralist discipline, but has become dominated by neoclassical approaches. Pluralizing economics education, rejuvenating leftist economic analysis, and expanding popular economic literacy are essential tasks. This means developing new textbooks, research programs, and educational initiatives that can challenge the neoliberal consensus and provide the navigational tools to chart a course out of capitalism. Third, we must repurpose technology for postcapitalist ends. Hegemony is embedded not only in ideas but also in the built environment and technologies that surround us. These objects carry politics within them, facilitating certain uses while constraining others. Rather than rejecting technology or waiting until after political change to address it, we should look at how existing technologies can be redirected and repurposed. Historical examples like Chile's Cybersyn project demonstrate how technologies can be adapted to serve democratic and socialist ends. This counter-hegemonic strategy requires active social forces to carry it out. Building a post-work world will require reconstructing the power of the left through a mass populist movement, a healthy ecosystem of organizations, and an analysis of points of leverage. This means knitting together diverse interests into a common project, developing a division of labor across different types of organizations, and identifying strategic positions from which to disrupt capitalist accumulation. No single organizational form is sufficient for performing all the tasks necessary for political change. Instead, we need a division of labor across different types of organizations: social movements that build popular support, media organizations that shape narratives, intellectual institutions that develop ideas, labor organizations that exert economic pressure, and political parties that engage with state power. This organizational ecology should be relatively decentralized and networked, but should also include hierarchical and closed groups as elements of the broader network. Identifying points of leverage—positions from which movements can disrupt the flow of capitalist accumulation and force concessions—is equally crucial. Potential new points of leverage include logistics networks, digital infrastructure, and care work. The logistics revolution has created vulnerable supply chains that can be disrupted through strategic action. Digital platforms rely on a relatively small workforce whose withdrawal of labor could have outsized effects. Care work, while historically undervalued, is increasingly recognized as essential to economic functioning.

Chapter 6: Technology and Power: Repurposing Innovation for Emancipation

Technology occupies a paradoxical position in the transition to a post-work society - simultaneously driving the crisis of employment through automation and offering potential pathways toward abundance without toil. Navigating this contradiction requires moving beyond both techno-optimism that ignores social relations and techno-pessimism that treats technology as inherently oppressive, toward a nuanced understanding of how technological systems might be redirected toward emancipatory ends. Contemporary technological development occurs primarily within capitalist parameters, prioritizing profit maximization, labor discipline, and market expansion over human flourishing or ecological sustainability. This orientation manifests in multiple ways: the automation of tasks that reduce labor costs rather than those that eliminate dangerous or degrading work; the implementation of surveillance systems that intensify workplace control; the planned obsolescence that generates unnecessary consumption; and the neglect of innovations that might address social needs but offer limited profit potential. Despite these constraints, existing technologies contain latent possibilities that exceed their current applications. Logistics networks designed to exploit global wage differentials could be repurposed to coordinate production and distribution in a democratic economy. Digital platforms currently extracting data and precarious labor could instead facilitate cooperative coordination and resource sharing. Automation technologies deployed to discipline workers could be redirected toward eliminating necessary labor entirely, creating conditions for universal leisure. Realizing these alternative possibilities requires intervention at multiple levels of technological development. At the design stage, workers and communities can demand input into which technologies are implemented and how they are configured, as exemplified by the Lucas Aerospace workers who developed alternative production plans focused on socially useful goods rather than military equipment. At the policy level, the substantial public funding that underwrites most significant innovations could be democratically directed toward solving social and ecological problems rather than subsidizing private profit. The concept of "socially useful production" offers a valuable framework for rethinking technological priorities. This approach evaluates technologies not by their profitability or efficiency in abstract terms, but by their contribution to meeting human needs, enhancing capabilities, and reducing ecological harm. It recognizes that technical questions are inherently political, involving choices about which problems deserve solving and whose interests should be prioritized. While some technologies may be inherently bound to exploitative or destructive purposes, most contain ambivalent potentials that can be directed toward different ends. The key question becomes not whether to accept or reject technology as a whole, but how to distinguish between technologies that foreclose emancipatory possibilities and those that might contribute to a post-work society. This requires developing criteria to evaluate specific technologies based on their relationship to human autonomy, ecological sustainability, and social equality. The transition to a post-work economy would fundamentally transform the context of technological development itself. When profit maximization and labor discipline no longer drive innovation, different technological trajectories become possible. Technologies that enhance human capabilities, facilitate cooperation, or eliminate necessary labor could receive priority over those that merely generate profit through artificial scarcity or planned obsolescence. The challenge lies in creating institutional arrangements that can guide technological development according to democratically determined priorities rather than market imperatives.

Summary

The crisis of work represents not merely a temporary economic disruption but a fundamental contradiction within contemporary capitalism. As automation renders human labor increasingly superfluous to production, the system's reliance on wage labor as its organizing principle becomes increasingly untenable. This contradiction manifests in growing surplus populations, expanding precarity, and intensified mechanisms of social control. Yet these very developments create possibilities for moving beyond the wage-labor system toward a society where technological productivity serves human flourishing rather than capital accumulation. Establishing a post-work society requires a multifaceted approach that combines concrete policy demands with broader cultural and political transformation. The demand for full automation challenges the artificial scarcity of necessary labor, while the reduction of working time redistributes remaining work more equitably. Universal basic income partially decommodifies labor power, altering the power relationship between workers and employers. Overcoming the work ethic creates cultural space for valuing activities beyond employment. Together, these elements form a coherent program that addresses both immediate needs and longer-term transformation. By developing counter-hegemonic strategies across intellectual, cultural, technological, and organizational domains, we can begin building the foundations for a society where freedom extends beyond market choice to encompass genuine self-determination and collective flourishing.

About Author

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Nick Srnicek

Nick Srnicek is an American writer and academic. He is currently a lecturer in Digital Economy at King's College London. Born in 1982, Srnicek took a double major in Psychology and Philosophy before completing an MA at the University of Western Ontario in 2007. He proceeded to a PhD at the London School of Economics, completing his thesis in 2013 on "Representing complexity: the material construction of world politics". He has worked as a Visiting Lecturer at City University and the University of Westminster.Srnicek is associated with the political theory of accelerationism and a post-scarcity economy.

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