The Last Revolution?

For the past two centuries, almost every major political and economic argument has taken place inside the same hidden framework: labour matters. Left and right have disagreed about ownership, markets, planning, wages, exploitation, freedom and redistribution, but they have shared one enormous assumption. Human beings are needed because their labour is needed.

Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are normally treated as representatives of radically different traditions. In many ways, they are. Smith gives us specialisation and markets, Marx gives us labour exploitation and class struggle, Keynes gives us demand and employment, Hayek gives us dispersed knowledge and the price system, Friedman gives us monetarism and market liberalism. Yet seen from far enough away, they all belong to the same age. They are thinkers of the capitalist-industrial world, in which production depends on human labour and capital matters largely because it organises, directs, equips, disciplines or replaces parts of that labour.

Continue reading “The End of the Age of Labour”

For a while, it seemed as if history had ended. Not in the banal sense that nothing would happen any more. Events would continue, politicians would embarrass themselves, wars would break out, markets would wobble, technological wonders would appear and human beings would still find ways to queue badly. But the great ideological argument appeared to have been settled. Communism had failed. Liberal capitalism had won. The market had not merely proved more efficient; it had acquired a moral aura.

This last step matters. It is one thing to conclude that the Soviet Union was authoritarian, stagnant and doomed. It is quite another to conclude that capitalism, in the form developing in the West in the 1990s, was therefore morally vindicated. Yet that is largely what happened. The collapse of communism did not simply remove a geopolitical rival. It removed the restraint that had forced Western capitalism to behave itself.
Continue reading “The Resumption of History”

There are moments when the future arrives not as a prophecy, nor as a cinematic catastrophe, but as an executive classification scheme. Builders build. Sellers sell. Measurers measure. The formula is neat, memorable and slightly terrifying, which is often how history chooses to introduce a new social order. Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, recently explained why his company had laid off more than a fifth of its workforce despite strong growth and healthy revenues. It was not, he argued, because Cloudflare was failing. It was because artificial intelligence had changed the shape of the company itself. Some people were still needed to create products. Some were still needed to sell them. But the large category of people who measured, coordinated, checked, reported, audited, managed and interpreted the organisation to itself could now, in many cases, be replaced or compressed by AI systems.
Continue reading “The Pope, Prince and Golgafrincham”