Consider the following set of facts. The richest man in a society proclaims he has nothing left to buy — and so he’s going to shoot billionaires into space — while a third of its people can’t afford food, shelter and healthcare, life expectancy’s falling, the young, who have little future, are shooting themselves with guns or opioids, and retirement, a stable jobs, savings, an income, and a family are unaffordable luxuries.

Something’s very wrong with that picture, isn’t it? It tells us that the days of extreme capitalism are numbered — the age of capitalism is coming to an end. While America might cling to extreme capitalism with a kind of religious fervor, much of the rest of the world probably won’t use it as the sole mode of human organization ever again. So “after capitalism ends” in the way that we don’t use toxic medicines very often, not in the way that we discard old bread.

Why? Well, what the above set of facts really describe, if you connect the dots, is the new reality the world is going to have to adjust to: distributed a little more reasonably, sensibly, and fairly, societies are crossing the magical threshold of people being able to live well while doing less and less labour.

Already, in Scandinavia and Germany, the solution to stagnant incomes is shortening workweeks to thirty hours and below. But what happens as that trend keeps driving the future? What happens a society’s abundant social product, made possibly by technology, automation, and human ingenuity, is distributed to people in saner ways, that don’t just produce the extreme, grotesque, absurd inequality of “send them into space!!”, while an entire nation lacks decent healthcare?

Well, there are two schools of thought. One is that people will simply relax into lives of lotus-eating leisure, forevermore. The revolution, comrades! Was Marx — or at least his interpreters — right?

I think that human nature — and human history — tell us a more complex tale. I think that there will indeed be work in the future — maybe not so much industrial labour, though, except in die-hard capitalist societies like America — and the work of the future lies in three arenas.

The first arena is what I’ll call The Big Questions. Think for a moment about the questions that have preoccupied humanity since the dawn of time. Why are we here? Where did we come from? What does it all mean? What is life, and what is death? Now think of how little progress we have made towards answering them — and that is because we have spent our unruly adolesence trying to satisfy our material wants. But now we are in a position to answer the big questions — or at least devote whole societies to asking such existential, humanistic, and historical questions. And even the tiniest glimmers of answers will radically alter how much meaning, purpose, and happiness is possible for human beings forevermore, won’t it?

But I want you to see the principle at work there. We spent millennia learning to satisfy our material wants. We built tools, machines, algorithms that can finally begin to manage the job for us. And that frees us. But it doesn’t give us the absolute freedom utopians dream of.

Freed from material wants, are not free to simply recline into leisure. Why not? Not by any outer force, but by an inner one — our nature. Our nature goes something like this — material wants, social wants, existential wants. Or, as Maslow put it, needs for shelter and safety, then needs for social esteem and belonging, and then needs for meaning and happiness. So now as societies, we can move up the heirarchy of our own natural needs at last.

That means that the second arena of the work of the future is something like building societies in which every human being’s needs for belonging, esteem, and worth are respected, satisfied, and met. Curiously, that is all that capitalism takes away from us, isn’t it? It makes us feel that we are worthless, nobody, without that latest toy, brand, symbol. So this arena can also be thought of as healing the wounds of capitalism. They run deep and ugly. Whole groups have been demonized, excluded, even, as in America, enslaved — whole genders have been dehumanized and objectified — and so on, all in the name of profit. So healing these wounds means building societies whose goal is no longer “GDP”, but something more like dignity, human flourishing, and well-being.

And that brings me to the third arena of the work of tomorrow. How are we to do all this? Answer the Big Questions that have haunted humanity from the dawn of time, and build more humane, decent societies? Well, it is going to require us to go inward. To discover all in our nature that I have discussed.

You see, the way that capitalism has failed us most is that it has taught us that we are something we have never been at all. Brutish, competitive, acquisitive beings, without souls, hearts, or minds. Just calculators attached to appetites, optimizing our own near-term gain. But that has left us lonely, empty, frustrated, and desperate — again, one only has to look at America. But we are none of these things. Little babies are born with empathy and humanity and wisdom — those are the basic facts of child psychology — only it is beaten out of them, somehow.

So we are going to have go deep inside ourselves again. And rediscover the essence of us. Who we really are. Perhaps it will take great art, literature, film, music. Perhaps it will take new psychologies and therapies. Perhaps it will take new approaches to organization and new paradigms of thought, particularly in philosophy, economics, and sociology. Either way, the idea of “human nature” must and will undergo a kind of Renaissance as the age of capitalism draws to a close.

Now, I want to outline a few caveats. None of the above means that trade or commerce or business or governance will come to an end. Quite the opposite. It means that we will trade and truck in whole new fields of endeavour, domains of thought — or very old ones, perhaps. It means that “governance” and “law” and “rules” and “values” are going to have to shift to a higher level of insight and truth. What I have tried to suggest is that while “labour”, as Marx thought of it, and economists think of it today, is dwindling, work surely is not. The decline of industrial age labour, physical menial, formulaic, rote, bureaucratic, but also for those very reasons, meaningless, divisive, dehumanizing, and unfulfilling, brings with it the opportunity to do more work that matters, resonates, endures — and to build whole new organizations upon it.

We are going to have more time in the future, you and I. And our grandkids, more still. At least those that live in half-way intelligent societies. And the gift of time is that it gives us the chance to do things, think thoughts, imagine worlds, and feel emotions which genuinely matter, instead of those that don’t. More time — to earn more meaning, purpose, truth, beauty, grace, defiance, happiness, intimacy, warmth, all the things that give every instant of life richness, sweetness, and depth. And all that is the work that needs to be done as capitalism ends.

Umair

May 2018