A World Beyond Work? Labour, Money and the Capitalist State Between Crisis and Utopia

Sensing a world of post-work opportunity lurking in an age of crisis, today ‘postcapitalist’ utopias proliferate that see a way out of the present through an escape from work. Using critical theory to unpick the political economy of contemporary work and its futures, this book mounts a forceful critique of fashionable thinking about the possibility of achieving a postcapitalist society through the automation of production, a universal basic income and the reduction of working hours to zero. A World Beyond Work? reveals how these transitional measures break insufficiently with key features of capitalist society: value, money, the class relation and the state. By displacing workers from the sites and relationships through which they struggle and resist as wage labour, Dinerstein and Pitts contend, these measures may even stifle the capacity for transformative social change in, against and beyond capitalism. The authors propose an alternative that navigates the contradictions of social reproduction under capitalism through the construction of ‘concrete utopias’ that shape and anticipate non-capitalist futures.