Review of Inventing the Future

by Steven Shivaro at this link. Excerpts:

"Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams [...] pick up the tools of capitalist modernity, and detour them to liberatory ends. [...] They argue for a future-oriented left politics, 'at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology.' They suggest that we should seek, not to restrain, but rather to 'unleash latent productive forces.'"

"The authors start the book by offering a (mostly) comradely critique of the left’s recent predilection for 'horizontalist' modes of organization, for privileging local concerns over global ones, for avoiding any explicit list of demands, and for direct democracy and spontaneous direct action. [...] But Srnicek and Williams argue that these tactics 'do not scale.' They may work well enough in particular instances, but they are not of much help when it comes to building a larger and longer-enduring oppositional movement, one that could actually work towards changing our basic conditions of life. [...] Local and horizontal political tactics are incomplete in themselves; they need to be supplemented by more global, or universal, modes of action and concern."


"Srnicek and Williams turn to the positive project of spelling out an alternative. [...] They suggest, first of all, that the left needs to reclaim the mantle of modernism (the attitude) and modernity (the process) that it held for much of the twentieth century. This means, among other things, embracing and detourning new technologies, and finding a new sort of universalism that includes all the many local needs and forms of struggle, bringing them together without erasing their concrete particulars."

"Beyond this,Srnicek and Williams analyze the ways that new technologies are transforming capitalism. They focus particularly on the ways that computerization and robotics are making more and more jobs redundant – without producing new sorts of jobs to replace them, as was the case in earlier waves of automation. We are standing on the verge of a 'post-work world.' Given this situation, they suggest four basic demands around which the left can and should unite:

1. Full automation
2. The reduction of the working week
3. The provision of a basic income
4. The diminishment of the work ethic."

"The greatest strength of Inventing the Future, to my mind, is that it does indeed turn our attention towards the future, instead of the past. A big problem for the left today is that we have too long been stuck in the backward-looking, defensive project of trying to rescue whatever might be left of the mid-twentieth-century welfare state. While it is perfectly reasonable to lament our loss of the safety net that was provided by mid-twentieth-century social democracy, the restoration of those benefits is not enough to fuel a radical economic and political program."