jacobinmag | As William Gibson famously remarked, “the future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.”
But what if resources and energy are simply too scarce to allow
everyone to enjoy the material standard of living of today’s rich? What
if we arrive in a future that no longer requires the mass proletariat’s
labor in production, but is unable to provide everyone with an
arbitrarily high standard of consumption? If we arrive in that world as
an egalitarian society, than the answer is the socialist regime of
shared conservation described in the previous section. But if, instead,
we remain a society polarized between a privileged elite and a
downtrodden mass, then the most plausible trajectory leads to something
much darker; I will call it by the term that E. P. Thompson used to
describe a different dystopia, during the peak of the cold war: exterminism.
The great danger posed by the automation of production, in the
context of a world of hierarchy and scarce resources, is that it makes
the great mass of people superfluous from the standpoint of the ruling
elite. This is in contrast to capitalism, where the antagonism between
capital and labor was characterized by both a clash of interests and a
relationship of mutual dependence: the workers depend on capitalists as
long as they don’t control the means of production themselves, while the
capitalists need workers to run their factories and shops. It is as the
lyrics of “Solidarity Forever” had it: “They have taken untold millions
that they never toiled to earn/But without our brain and muscle not a
single wheel can turn.” With the rise of the robots, the second line
ceases to hold.
The existence of an impoverished, economically superfluous rabble
poses a great danger to the ruling class, which will naturally fear
imminent expropriation; confronted with this threat, several courses of
action present themselves. The masses can be bought off with some degree
of redistribution of resources, as the rich share out their wealth in
the form of social welfare programs, at least if resource constraints
aren’t too binding. But in addition to potentially reintroducing
scarcity into the lives of the rich, this solution is liable to lead to
an ever-rising tide of demands on the part of the masses, thus raising
the specter of expropriation once again. This is essentially what
happened at the high tide of the welfare state, when bosses began to
fear that both profits and control over the workplace were slipping out
of their hands.
If buying off the angry mob isn’t a sustainable strategy, another
option is simply to run away and hide from them. This is the trajectory
of what the sociologist Bryan Turner calls “enclave society”,
an order in which “governments and other agencies seek to regulate
spaces and, where necessary, to immobilize flows of people, goods and
services” by means of “enclosure, bureaucratic barriers, legal
exclusions and registrations.” Gated communities, private islands,
ghettos, prisons, terrorism paranoia, biological quarantines; together,
these amount to an inverted global gulag, where the rich live in tiny
islands of wealth strewn around an ocean of misery. In Tropic of Chaos,
Christian Parenti makes the case that we are already constructing this
new order, as climate change brings about what he calls the
“catastrophic convergence” of ecological disruption, economic
inequality, and state failure. The legacy of colonialism and
neoliberalism is that the rich countries, along with the elites of the
poorer ones, have facilitated a disintegration into anarchic violence,
as various tribal and political factions fight over the diminishing
bounty of damaged ecosystems. Faced with this bleak reality, many of the
rich — which, in global terms, includes many workers in the rich
countries as well — have resigned themselves to barricading themselves
into their fortresses, to be protected by unmanned drones and private
military contractors. Guard labor, which we encountered in the rentist
society, reappears in an even more malevolent form, as a lucky few are
employed as enforcers and protectors for the rich.
But this too, is an unstable equilibrium, for the same basic reason
that buying off the masses is. So long as the immiserated hordes exist,
there is the danger that it may one day become impossible to hold them
at bay. Once mass labor has been rendered superfluous, a final solution
lurks: the genocidal war of the rich against the poor. Many have called
the recent Justin Timberlake vehicle, In Time, a Marxist film,
but it is more precisely a parable of the road to exterminism. In the
movie, a tiny ruling class literally lives forever in their gated
enclaves due to genetic technology, while everyone else is programmed to
die at 25 unless they can beg, borrow or steal more time. The only
thing saving the workers is that the rich still have some need for their
labor; when that need expires, so presumably will the working class
itself.
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