A book by the economist and sociologist Jeremy Rifkin published in the U.S. in 1995 and immediately translated into many languages became a bestseller and gave rise to discussions and controversies that crossed territorial and disciplinary borders. The book had an eloquent and categorical title, The End of Work, which in the end overshadowed the subtitle, more resonant of the substantial investigation developed throughout its 400 pages: The Decline of the Global Labour Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. The criticisms of the book were extreme: on the one hand, it was accused of quackery; on the other, it was highly praised, to the point that people believed that it heralded – as a collection and analysis of a wealth of information regarding the changes to the work society throughout the 20th century – ‘the most colossal anthropological and sociological convulsion that humanity has ever known. Only the Neolithic revolution can compare in terms of importance.’ We find this hyperbolic statement in the afterword of the French edition of Rifkin’s book, written by the sociologist Alain Caillé.

Rifkin’s thesis is very simple and, as we will see, does not bring anything new, even though it has different formulations: a total and widespread automation of work is underway, which the informatisation of society, initiated in the 1960s, accelerated. The new technologies of information and telecommunications, as well as the general development of ‘artificial intelligence’ (a concept created in the summer of 1956, in Dartmouth, during a gathering of researchers in this area) have gradually disseminated robots and all kinds of intelligent machines throughout various productive sectors. As a result, we are moving closer to a world without workers and to a reduction in human work so drastic that by 2050 – according to Rifkin’s predictions – only 5% of the adult population will be needed to secure the operation of the industrial sector. Considering the speed at which automation and ‘smartification’ are advancing (we should include the global system of networks called the internet in the infrastructure of the automatic society), Rifkin felt confident to announce the imminent end of the work society and the effective collapse of the model of economic rationality that corresponds to it.

Stripped down to its basic premises, Rifkin’s thesis does not sound particularly ground-breaking. Long before him, the sociologists of the Frankfurt School had already created the concept of technological unemployment. But his book had the effect of cruelly destroying all the illusions that might still have existed, even after automation and its effects had become visible. In reality, a denial mechanism has been set up and everything is still done politically to preserve a society organised around the centrality of work, as if full employment were still a reachable target and the normal – and single – state of the economy. Therefore, unemployment can only be an anomaly that occurs during a crisis, as if we were not in a permanent crisis. If reality shows that this belief has become inadequate, then we must change the view of reality through words and concepts: employment and unemployment, in the time of ‘Uberisation’, precarity, intermittence and ingenious inventions to occupy the time no longer encompass the same universe.

Nor do they mean the same as they did in the era that began with the automation implemented by Taylorism, in which the physical potency of bodies and muscles was replaced by machines. Rifkin shows that, with automation, normality is on the side of unemployment and that it makes no sense, in this new order, to continue thinking that the pair of opposite categories employment-unemployment is still analytically and descriptively pertinent. An entropy has been created, which is clearly visible in the levels of ‘unemployment’ among the young, including the ones with advanced qualifications and studies. Artificial intelligence has replaced them, thus bringing down the prices of production. In October of 2014, a French TV channel broadcast a feature, quoted by Bernard Stiegler in La société automatique (2015), entitled ‘Vous serez peut-être remplacé para um robot em 2025’ [You might be replaced by a robot in 2025].

The insistence on an economic order that always pursues full employment – or, at least, feels the need to keep this appearance at all costs – makes it extremely difficult to introduce innovations, such as reducing working time and new ways of distributing the mass of work for which humans are still responsible. As a consequence, we have an increasingly dysfunctional society in terms of work. Rifkin describes it in the following way: on the one hand, an elite that has jobs but paradoxically has less and less time (not being able to use one’s time freely is what defined the proletarian condition, hence the proletarianisation of the middle classes); on the other hand, a mass of unemployed, precarious and supernumerary individuals, as well as those who, despite having a job, cannot escape poverty. André Gorz, the French sociologist who is a fundamental point of reference in the study of the transformation of work and its consequences, wrote that the ideological message of the work society and wage earners is this: ‘It does not matter what job one has, what matters is to have one.’ From the moment that securing a job turned into an achievement in itself, the message became: ‘It does not really matter how much one earns, as long as one has a job.’

The end of work due to automation, as described by Rifkin, caused great controversy, since it envisioned an apocalyptic scenario where we had earlier seen the conditions for the full emancipation of humanity and ultimately the institution of ‘free work’. Marx announced this utopia, in the famous ‘fragment on machines’ included in Grundrisse, the manuscripts of 1857–58. This is where he used the English expression ‘general intellect’ to designate the new factors of knowledge and intelligence (whose meaning resembles what we now call ‘information’) in the definition of a new ‘law of value’. According to Marx’s hypothesis, machines would become so efficient that they would replace men in the automatic tasks that comprise the production of commodities, thus freeing them from alienating work and creating the conditions for a dedication to knowledge, which increases individual and collective happiness. In this way, the ‘collective human brain’ would be the representation of an enormous new power.

The potentialities of Marx’s ‘general intellect’ acquired a completely different meaning throughout the 20th century. And the ‘end of work’ was announced before Jeremy Rifkin’s book but without the promise that we would reach a utopia. Rifkin’s theses pose the possibility of a catastrophe, which had already been foreseen by Hannah Arendt, in 1958, in The Human Condition: ‘What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of labourers without labour, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.’ A society of workers without work is one that continues to follow the economic model of the work society when work, dematerialised or not, is now performed by intelligent machines.

This disconnection is starting to become fatal. The main capitalist dogma behind the insistence on the policies of the work society might be that of ‘creative destruction’, formulated by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950). Creative destruction relates to the vital strength of capitalism to renew and reinvent itself incessantly, turning its cyclical crises into an engine that negates the old and creates other ways of organising production and work, so as to multiply profits. The idea of creative destruction also implies an ideological postulate according to which the jobs destroyed in one sector are replaced by others, in new sectors, and obsolete technologies are replaced by others that will create new jobs, only causing collateral damage, a lesser evil, which consists in leaving behind those who cannot adapt and keep themselves updated. The ideas of innovation and entrepreneurship exalted by the neoliberal regime stem from ‘creative destruction’ and serve to legitimate an order where structural unemployment is evident but the economic, political and social logic of full employment still prevails. This means that the social and political systems, as well as the machine of the state, have done almost nothing to secure the possibility of a different life, even though it is evident that the work society is about to collapse. The most aberrant manifestation of this state of things is the fact that those who have jobs find their time increasingly absorbed by them, so much so that burnout has become the defining illness of our time. It is the illness of the good, hardworking citizen who, exhausted and without time, presents the following symptoms: fatigue to the point of breakdown, anxiety, incapacity to deal with stress, depersonalisation and impotence. One of the objections to remote work (which became prevalent thanks to the current pandemic and against the great inertia that still exists in this field) is precisely that it makes the borders between work and life indistinguishable, i.e. workers are permanently mobilised or, at least, mobilisable. And instead of their managing their work schedule according to what is convenient to them, it is their whole lives that are managed remotely.

Rifkin’s book, despite its conceptual errors (the most serious might be that pointed out by Stiegler: the confusion between work and employment), provides solid data that allows us to realise the following: if in the first two phases of capitalism it was possible to confirm the validity of ‘creative destruction’, if the end of the peasantry led to the proletariat, and the proletariat led to tertiary services, now, in the era of computers, robots and intelligent machines, the whole service sector has been gradually eliminating human work. What the language of the economic cycles of capitalism calls ‘rebound’ or ‘recovery’ no longer coincides with the return to previous levels of employment. In reality, the system can only recover by pursuing its logic of job elimination. Rifkin argues that only artificially and with the use of statistics that manipulate inadequate or even fraudulent definitions of what employment and unemployment means today can we present numbers that refute structural unemployment. And those who believe that employment decreases here to re-appear there, in other places on the planet, are painfully wrong – that only happens temporarily, as Rifkin demonstrates.

An episode that clearly illustrates the difficulty in assuming this new condition and acting accordingly involves the North-American multimillionaire Nick Hanauer. Invited to a conference on inequality in May 2012 by the institution that organises the Ted Talks, Hanauer had the audacity to say that businesses do not create jobs, they are created by a ‘feedback loop’: customers – consumers – businesses. From this, he concludes that the idea that higher taxes for the rich lead to the creation of fewer jobs is false. These statements have met such violent resistance that the institution decided not to divulge the video of the conference. This was denounced as censorship by some newspapers, which amplified the entrepreneur’s speech in their reports of what happened.

Even those who hold the highest positions, where ‘value’ lies in knowledge and intelligence, are under threat. Bernard Stiegler, in La société automatique, gives this instructive example: Alan Greenspan, who served as chair of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006, when forced to justify why he had ignored the financial speculation that caused the crisis of 2008, blamed the sophisticated software that makes operations immaterial, instantaneous, obscure and without borders. Stiegler concludes: in the end, the man who was chair of one of the most powerful institutions on the planet was a simple employee and knew nothing; machines knew much more than Greenspan, who was just a proletarian, albeit a handsomely paid one, if we consider that proletarianisation is not a question of money but of knowledge and the autonomy granted by it.

To stress the idea that the end of work is not new and that the consequences of automation started being studied long before the introduction of new digital technologies and big data, we must mention the French sociologist Georges Friedmann, who in the mid-20th century published two studies whose titles clearly suggest what was already taking shape: Où va le travail humain? (1950) and Le travail en miettes (1956). Friedmann was a sociologist and philosopher interested in the problems raised by technology and the effects of increasingly sophisticated and powerful machinery in the world of work. After Friedmann, generally considered the founder of the sociology of work, we have André Gorz, Habermas, and so many others who in the last seventy years have diagnosed the end of work and the implosion of the work category. The issue has become so urgent and so clear to see that it has spread from the specialised circles of social and political sciences to the most profane and pragmatic milieus. This is why in 1995 the first State of the World Forum took place in San Francisco, where hundreds of powerful people were present to discuss what to do in the future with the 80% of the population who will be useless to the production system. Almost half a century after Friedmann, the issue of the future of work has timidly and sporadically entered the political agenda of Western powers, mostly instigated by the research in sociology. But, as we know, an effective and pragmatic response is still practically non-existent.

The end of work described by Rifkin has an apocalyptic character, of civilizational disaster. Not because this economist feels nostalgic about the old order of work and its corresponding society, but because we have not prepared (and a quarter of a century later nothing has changed) for this process. There is an increasing mismatch between the new technological reality and a social and political order incapable of integrating into its calculations this new condition of automated work performed by intelligent machines.

The opposite perspective, full of hope, is defended by the authors of the #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, Nick Srnicek (this dossier of Electra includes a text by him) and Alex Williams. In a book from 2015, entitled Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work, they develop the idea of a future post-capitalist regime, where the growing problem of the scarcity of work is overcome. It is no longer about describing an end, as Rifkin and many other authors have done, but enunciating the conditions that make it possible to glimpse a beginning. And that beginning Srnicek and Williams call ‘post-work’. Work has been left behind and the aim is to reach full unemployment: ‘The goal of the future is full unemployment’ is the quote from the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke that the heralds of post-work use as the epigraph of one of their book chapters. They point out that in the 1930s Keynes had prophesied that a century later we would only work fifteen hours a week. The prophecy has not come true. On the contrary, today we are bound to work more permanently than in Keynes’s time (a scholar of these issues, Anselm Jappe, wrote in one of his books, Adventures of the Commodity: For a New Critique of Value, that, on average, we now work more hours than in the 19th century).

Overcoming the work society and establishing ‘post-work’, not according to the old transgressive and libertarian utopias that claim the ‘right to laziness’ but by taking advantage of the logistics and tools of capitalism, is the theoretical programme developed in Inventing the Future, where it is demonstrated that the new technological conditions allow this demand and even turn it into a path to salvation. While the critique of work had always meant a critique of capitalism, the advocates of the post-work society follow a different line of thought: they state that by accelerating the gains provided by capitalism and establishing total automation we can achieve the realm of freedom that is post-work. Evidently, we cannot get there without first securing certain conditions enumerated by the authors of this book-manifesto. These include the elimination of all obstacles to complete economic automation (starting with the role of the trade unions, so attached to the models and issues of the work society); a drastic reduction in working time; the implementation of a universal basic income that allows every citizen to survive, regardless of their resources; the shift from jobs to a voluntary, non-forced regime. All of this, in its summary form, may sound like a utopian and unrealistic programme. But the argumentation of the ‘accelerationists’, so debatable in many regards, at least shows us that it is the regime of work in which we live that has been out of touch with reality for a long time. The technological achievements and advances in automation and artificial intelligence have not been carried over to the plane of social and political organisation, as was necessary and logical. And the issue of employment-unemployment continues to be seen from the perspective of the premises of the work society that prevailed until the end of the second technological revolution.

There is a technological optimism and anthropological happiness in Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s programme that is absent from Bernard Stiegler’s work. The author of La société automatique (2015) intends in that book to reflect on the future of work within a purely computational capitalism. He initiates that task by summoning, precisely, a highly representative figure: Bill Gates. Stiegler says that on 13 March 2014 Bill Gates declared in Washington that software substitution will encompass every domain, from smart cities to Mercedes factories, from self-driving cars and trucks to supermarkets without cashiers or maintenance staff. The result, according to Gates, will be ‘a drastic decrease in employment in the next twenty years, to the point that it will become the exception’. On the basis of these statements, which are not new but are important, given who has uttered them, Stiegler analyses the consequences of automation. Pessimistic, he foresees the disintegration of all aspects of social life. Not that he intends to restore old models or believes in a return to full employment. His main contention is that digital technologies, i.e. widespread automation, are a pharmakon, both the poison that kills and the medicine that cures. Absolute automation and algorithmic governmentality are not mere tools to access a realm of happiness, where humanity finds itself free of all toil, but systems and structures that have penetrated inside the brain and fostered the conditions of ‘symbolic misery’. Contrary to the ‘accelerationists’, for whom automation is seen in its purely instrumental dimension, Stiegler also sees in the automatic society the automation of spirits and the pursuit of an irrational model. Therefore, more than the gradual disappearance of jobs in the automatic society (which he sees as irreversible, supporting his ideas with abundant data predicting the rise of unemployment to extremely high levels), he is concerned with the need to establish a clear distinction between employment and work. Employment, which has become hegemonic in the automatic society, can disappear, since it is not needed. But, over the ruins of employment, work should rise – ‘real work’, not what the North-American anthropologist David Graeber, who has recently passed away, called ‘bullshit jobs’. What is ‘real work’? It is work that is not merely the blind, mechanical and automated face of a paid activity. Armed with a sophisticated theoretical arsenal, Stiegler sets out to defend the creative dimension of work, and fight the logic of employment that reveals the other side of automation: the automation of spirits. In this respect, he strives to reflect on the consequences of the ‘algorithmic society’, which is ruled by power and software logic, as well as on the traditional analyses of the sociology of work, and shows us what is usually hidden in the technological-digital narrative. His view is not pessimistic, unlike that of Rifkin, for whom the ‘end of work’ signals the beginning of a social apocalypse: rather, it resembles an in-depth analysis that reads and interprets the language of symptoms. He makes us acutely aware that the matter of work, its metamorphoses and its destiny, is a major issue of our time, fostering both dreams and nightmares.

*Translated by Ana Macedo