Beyond the Neoliberal Impasse

In the 1960s, when the notion of ‘post-industrial society’ was emerging in comparatively rich capitalist countries, it engendered anxiety about what the mass of people would do in the future with their increased leisure time. The automation brought in by ‘post-industrialism’, it was assumed, would release a great many people from tediously repetitive tasks, especially in manufacturing, that could be mechanised and done by robots. Public anxiety during a period of ‘full employment’ was not so much about the peril of poverty-stricken unemployment but, instead, about the impending boredom of affluence with nothing to do. How naive, you might say, since automation today, facilitated by various applications of digital computing to ‘services’ and not only factories, is evidently all about reducing labour power in order to save money on wages. The aim is not some public-spirited policy of freeing people for comfortably-off leisure activity. Instead, automation is more often than not about substituting machines for human beings so as to reduce costs and boost profitability. The consequent abandonment of redundant workers to lives of penury and despair while also denying job opportunities to the young is a matter of indifference to most employers.