Badiou’s “four objections” to the idea of a post-work future
(the following is a precis of a section of Alain Badiou’s response to Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, for the benefit of those who’d like to know what he said but can’t be bothered to sit through a long video to find out)
Badiou notes that the positive programme of Inventing the Future is organised around three points — full automation, universal basic income, and a “post-work” society — and that the first two of these points are really dependent on the third (automation as the means, UBI as the necessary consequence). He therefore addresses his critique to this nexus of ideas:
1) It’s not a “real possibility”. It is like something out of 19th-century utopian communism. “Work” — beyond the wage relation — “is finally the global relationship of humanity with nature”: a fight for survival, without which we are “poor animals”. This struggle cannot be “suppressed” by automation, which in any case creates new forms of work.
2) Subjectively, the end of work is not “good news for millions of people” today. The major concern of the “surplus population” globally is to find work: what we all hope for is *more* work. A future without work is in “strong contradiction” with the present. Today, the idea of the future as a world without work belongs to the “Western world”; the wanderings of refugees seeking work are not reflected by this promise.
3) We should instead examine the idea of a drastic reduction of the working week. The political idea is that work should be transformed by automation, and drastically reduced — to around 20h a week or less (applause).
4) The idea of a disappearance of work is not clearly in opposition with capitalism. Post-capitalism must be defined not by the end of work, but by the end of private property. It is suspicious that the latter is not addressed. The idea of private property can be extended to all forms of automation: all innovations in this area have been quickly appropriate by “monstrous” forms of capitalism. The appropriation of all forms of technology by the system of private property is at the heart of the matter. Capitalism would prefer a *world war* to the end of private property. There is an idea abroad that we are on the verge of post-capitalism, that capitalism is currently corrupt, weak, pathological; but this cannot be destroyed without major conflict.
“The point is your relationship with the present…what must be done, exactly?”. Badiou agrees with the necessity of holding a strategic idea, but does not think this can be reduced to a vision of the future — this comes down to the old distinction between scientific communism and utopian communism. A strategic idea is a modification of the dominant relationship between what is possible and what is impossible, a transformation of the limit between the two. The idea must include a judgement concerning the present, at the level of what is possible now, and not only in the direction of “the future as such”. Movements are thus a necessity, because they are a way of saying that something considered impossible in the dominant discourse is in fact possible — they announce this possibility in their own existence (prefiguratively, as it were). The purpose of a strategic idea is to transform this momentary affirmation into something with a longue duree. A strategic idea is not a programme, not a future that we can realise, but the development of a capacity to make judgements, to re-evaluate the line between the possible and the impossible, in the light of what is announced in such transformative moments (this is the old event/truth procedure schema essentially).
