Is this the darkness before the techno-utopian dawn?
Life has been pretty grim for the bottom 80 per cent of society for some time. Is that about to change?
I’ve spent much of the last week writing about generative AI (think ChatGPT and Google Bard). This has felt like the freelance content provider equivalent of an employee being told they are being made redundant and must spend their last day on the job introducing their replacement to their colleagues while heaping praise on them. “The new guy/gal is happy to work for free, available 24/7, and an expert mimic. Aren’t they great!”
But I’m beginning to wonder if I’m being overly negative about what is already being hailed as the ‘Generative AI revolution’. Sure, generative AI, and a host of other looming or unfolding technological Great Leaps Forward – AR/VR; autonomous drones; advanced robotics; biometrics; brain-computer interfaces; self-driving vehicles; the metaverse; 5G/6G and the Internet of Things, 3D and 4D printing, to list only the usual suspects – might be about to put vast numbers of humans out of a job. But perhaps, a post-work future won’t turn out to be so bad after all. Perhaps, after a decades-long bumpy start, the common man is about to start truly benefitting from the third and fourth industrial revolutions.
After all, the upsides of the first Industrial Revolution took a while to filter down to the common folk. If you got in a time machine and whizzed back to the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, what probably would have caught your attention was the vast numbers of erstwhile yeoman farmers, or offspring of yeoman farmers, labouring long hours in dark, Satanic mills so a handful of mill owners could grow obscenely wealthy.
It took some time for the benefits of the first industrial revolution – medical advances, lower child mortality, longer lifespans, cheaper goods, increased literacy, railways – to, as we’d say nowadays, trickle down. It also took some time for those hunched over a hot Spinning Jenny for 18 hours a day to develop what the Marxists call class consciousness and to start demanding that the benefits of labour-saving technology be shared somewhat more equitably with the labouring class.
Why the next four decades could be very different last four decades
Like ‘Communist’ and ‘Fascist’, ‘neoliberal’ is a word now thrown around in so many different ways and contexts that it has been drained of much of its meaning.
Nonetheless, it’s difficult to label the period from 1980-2020 as anything other than the Neoliberal Era. I suppose a case could be made that the Neoliberal Era started when General Pinochet staged a coup d’état and replaced the left-leaning Salvador Allende in late 1973. But I see Pinochet as more of a John the Baptist figure preparing the way for Reagan and Thatcher. (Even after being subjected to the pro-business ministrations of the Friedmanite ‘Chicago Boys’, the Chilean economy wasn’t that significant. Even today, Chile barely makes it onto the list of the world’s top 50 economies.)
But when the leaders in charge of the US and UK economies started busting unions, selling off government enterprises, deregulating markets, slashing tariffs and venerating wealth creators, the rest of the world paid close attention. And nowhere was closer attention paid than in the Anglosphere, with prime ministers and treasurers in countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and elsewhere all having their Come to (neoliberal) Jesus moments throughout the 1980s.
It’s little mentioned these days, but Nelson Mandela was a Communist who entered prison in 1964 believing in the virtues of a state-run economy. When he was released from prison in 1990, he was perplexed to find that Communism had been hurled on the ash heap of history. He was presumably even more taken aback when it became clear that only the most minimal redistribution of wealth would take place in the post-apartheid ‘new South Africa’.
All orthodoxies are eventually supplanted
When I studied the French Revolution back in high school (in the late 1980s), I remember being bemused by the stupidity of the bottom ninety per cent of the French population. Or at least their stupidity prior to 1789. I found it hard to understand why they were so willing to endure poor, nasty, brutish and short existences so a priestly caste could lead lives of relative ease and aristocrats lead lives of shameless excess. Surely, nobody really believed that monarchs were specially chosen by God to rule over – frequently quite incompetently – their benighted subjects?
Three and a bit decades on, I find the dynamics of pre-revolutionary France much less unfamiliar. Of course, we’ve replaced the born-to-rule kings with self-made billionaires and the Catholic Church with the corporate media. But I’m hardly the first person to point out that modern-day America isn’t a million miles removed from France in 1788.
The private affluence and public squalor aren’t quite so extreme in other parts of the Anglosphere, but roughly the same social structure is in place. You’ve got maybe 5-10% of the population forming an underclass, around 70 per cent of the population aspiring to live a middle-class lifestyle (with a greater or lesser degree of success), 19 per cent of the population doing quite well for themselves and one per cent of the population making out like absolute bandits.
For a seemingly interminable time, the bottom four quintiles of the income distribution didn’t appear to have any problem with this arrangement, presumably because they believed that (a) ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ and (b) with a lot of hard work and a bit of luck they had a realistic prospect of upgrading from a dinghy to a yacht.
It seems to me that few people under 50 believe they have been benefitting from a rising economic tide and that there’s growing scepticism among all age groups that upward social mobility isn’t anywhere near as feasible as it was in the post-war decades.
I presume that’s why long-established and well-resourced mainstream centre-left and centre-right parties across the Anglosphere have been haemorrhaging support for many years. It’s presumably also why a growing proportion of younger people have been (a) flirting with political movements on the further left and further right and (b) failing to age out of their youthful radicalism.
Does that mean a ‘Trump of the Left’ who promises to more comprehensively redistribute the benefits of the third and fourth industrial revolutions can succeed politically?
Especially in countries with voluntary voting, the boomers have long been a potent political force. Most of them are pretty pleased with the status quo (i.e. societies arranged to safeguard the interests of the affluent elderly). But the oldest boomers are now nudging 80, and the luckiest generation in human history can’t delay heading off to the Great Beatles Concert in the Sky forever.
Well, not unless there’s a Great Leap Forward in life-extension technology sharpish.
Although I only shared one of your late 80s history classes, and even then not for long, I'm pleased to benefit from your lifelong pursuit of knowledge and insight!