The Graun is celebrating/chroniclingthe return of the Stone Roses. The current sharp observation, repeated by everybody, is the Roses represented an age that looked forward to the future. There’s also an interesting piece by Owen Hatherley today about work. There was a time when everyone, from socialists to reformers to technocrats agreed in the future people would work less. OK the socialists, especially the earlier ones, such as Lafargue and Wilde, would have said this prediction was based upon the establishment of socialism.
The fact is this vision is no more. The future has failed. Automation has led to people today working longer, harder and proportionally (if not actually) less than their parents. It is one of the ironies (call it dialectics if you like) that Marx focussed upon in his critique of political economy: the past dominates the present.
Workers slave away making the technology that renders them obsolete. In areas of the economy where working people used to team together in vast numbers, now they are sparse and interstitial. In seeming contradiction to this the refinement of roles means there are more wage workers now than ever. They still produce the same volume of commodities and services, if not more, which gives them and even greater latent power, but this power is only hinted at in episodes like the recent bus strike in London – a few thousand workers holding their own against British capitalism.
The relative marginalisation of workers is part of the crisis for capitalists too. Past labour is only cost. Only present, living labour adds value. This is the tendency of therate of profit to decline.
The last observation: what does this mean for the muscular reformism being debated by the European left? There may be left wing parties arising, occupying the space between the old socialist/communist parties and the revolutionary left (though clearly not in Britain). Given the poor prospects for life under 21st century capitalism, what chance is there for new reforming movements to actually succeed without a bit of revolution thrown in somewhere?