In her really good Vice interview with Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, authors of the new manifesto, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, Arielle Pardes perfectly sums up a particular strain of potential techno-utopianism: “It’s basically Marxism dressed up with robotics.”

It’s probably not going to be so neat, the future resistant to being any one thing, but it seems likely the foundations of education and Labor will be radically remade. How do we reimagine economies that have been largely free-market ones if a full-employment society is no longer a reality?

Important to Srnicek and Williams isn’t just basic income but also the end of the fetishization of the work ethic. The opening:

Vice:

Can you explain what you mean by a “high-tech future free from work”?’

Alex Williams:

The idea of the book is to argue for a different kind of left-wing politics to the kind we may be used to in America and in the UK, where traditionally, the role of the Democratic Party or, in the UK, the Labour Party, is one where we’re going to help poorer people by giving them jobs. For a variety of reasons, which we go into in the book, we view that as no longer possible, and possibly no longer desirable in the same way. This is all related, in part, to the increasing role of automation—this new wave of automation that a quiet wide variety of economists, technologists, and sociologists have begun thinking about.

Vice:

Right—the idea that “robots are stealing our jobs.”

Alex Williams:

Right. Our kind of perspective on this is, well, is it possible that robots stealing jobs might be a good thing? What would it require to make it a good thing?

Nick Srnicek:

We have all this amazing technology around us. It seems like we’re in a rapidly changing world and we’ve got new potential sprouting out everywhere. But at the same time, our everyday lives are crushed by debt and work and all of these obsolete social relations. It seems that we could be doing much better with the technologies that we have. Our argument has to do with capitalism. This isn’t fundamentally different from what Marx was saying 150 years ago, but it is a matter of capitalism constraining the potentials available within technology and within humanity.•