From post-work to post-capitalism? Discussing the basic income and struggles for alternative forms of social reproduction

Abstract

This article contests the suggestion that the automation of production and the provision of a basic income potentiate the transition from a post-work to a postcapitalist society. This vista—mainly represented by the work of Paul Mason and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams misses how capitalist work is both preconditioned by a historically-specific set of antagonistic social relations of constrained social reproduction, and determined by the specific social forms its results assume in commodity exchange and the constituted form of the nation-state. We argue that the transitional demands of automation and a basic income may serve to stem postcapitalist transformation, stopping short at a post-work society characterized by the continuation of capitalist social relations and forms. Retaining money under the rule of the nation-state, the proposed transition between post-work and postcapitalist society breaks insufficiently with the present, in some ways making it worse by replacing a wage over which workers can lawfully bargain with a state-administered monetary payment that creates a direct relationship of power between citizen and state, liquidating labor struggles. We show how the Unemployed Workers Organizations (UWOs) in Argentina offer a “concrete utopian” alternative that creates the capacity to reshape the relationship between individuals, society and the rule of money, value and the capitalist state rather than reinforce it.