Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

COMMUNISM: EQUALITY
AND ABUNDANCE
Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, describes a society that seems,
on the surface, like a postlabor utopia, where machines have liberated
humans from toil. For Vonnegut, however, this isn’t a utopia at all. He
describes a future where production is almost entirely carried out by
machines, overseen by a small technocratic elite. Everyone else is
essentially superfluous from an economic perspective, but the society is rich
enough to provide a comfortable life for all of them.
Vonnegut refers to this condition as a “second childhood” at one point,
and he views it not as an achievement but as a horror. For him, and for the
main protagonists in the novel, the main danger of an automated society is
that it deprives life of all meaning and dignity. If most people are not
engaged directly in producing the necessities of life, he seems to think, they
will inevitably fall into torpor and despair.
There are certain ways in which the 1952 novel clearly dates itself. For
one thing, this was the era of high industrialism in both the capitalist and
communist worlds, based on the giant factory and the assembly line. And to
be sure, today’s economy is still reliant on this kind of massive scale
production, more so than many people realize. But Vonnegut doesn’t
consider the possibility that production can become less centralized—and
hence, less reliant on a managerial elite—without sliding back into less
efficient, labor-intensive forms of production. Technologies like 3-D
printing (and for that matter the personal computer) point in that direction.
And the notion that social meaning must come from “productive,”
waged work is deeply rooted in patriarchal notions of the male breadwinner
supporting a family. There is, throughout the book, a constant conflation
between work that is rewarded with social prestige—by being regarded as a
“job” and remunerated with a wage—and work that is materially necessary
in the sense that it reproduces society and secures the conditions of life. The
women in the book continue to perform the unpaid caring and emotional
labor that has always been expected of them, and Vonnegut seems not to
care whether this is important or a source of meaning for them.
The protagonist of Player Piano is Paul Proteus, a well-regarded factory
manager who becomes a disillusioned critic of the system. Late in the book,
he helps draft a manifesto that calls for rolling back automation on the
grounds that “men, by their nature, seemingly, cannot be happy unless
engaged in enterprises that make them feel useful.”1 But throughout the
novel, Paul’s wife Anita has been engaged in something apparently useful
—namely, compensating for Paul’s social ineptitude, and propping up his
self-confidence. Reacting to Paul’s failure to correctly interpret the social
cues of a superior regarding a new job assignment, Anita argues that
women “have insight into things that men don’t have.”2 Perhaps if men
could learn such insights, they too might learn to provide forms of useful
labor that cannot yet be automated. But such skills are not factored into the
notion of productive labor that Vonnegut associates with full humanity, or at
least full manhood. This gives an indication of what is really going on here,
and it is what Vonnegut has already told us: men don’t want to actually be
useful, they merely want to “feel” useful. The problem of automation turns
out to be a crisis of male feelings.
Perhaps this is why so many of Vonnegut’s apprehensions about
automation remain intractable anxieties, afflicting both our economic
conversations and our popular culture. Even when we hate our jobs,
sometimes we still lean on them as sources of identity and social worth.
Many cannot imagine a world beyond work as anything but one of
dissipation and sloth. The 2008 animated movie WALL-E, for example,
portrays a world where all humans have departed a ruined Earth and live
lives of leisure in fully automated starships. But the sympathetic protagonist
of the movie is a sentient robot, left behind on Earth to pick up trash—a
worker, in other words. The humans, by contrast, are grotesque—obese and
torpid parodies of consumerism

Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase