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Ken and Paul’s view on postcapitalism. – A contribution to mέta.

The following is an excerpt from the screenplay of the film “SORRY WE MISSED YOU” written by Paul Laverty and directed by Ken Loach.

Liza Jane, aged 11, is in a delivery van with her father Ricky. It’s a Saturday and she is giving her father a hand deliver the parcels; during the week Ricky is back so late from his work he hardly sees her. Ricky considers himself to be an “owner driver franchisee”; in other words a self employed van driver, master of his own destiny. [Liza Jane is fascinated by the shiny black HAND HELD DEVICE which is used to scan every parcel. She fidgets with it as Ricky drives the van.]

LIZA JANE
It can text, phone, photograph, scan, contact the customer…
anything else?

RICKY
Bloody well bleep! I hear it in my dreams… bleeps if I am out of the
cab for more than two minutes…

LIZA JANE
So they know where you are?

RICKY
To the exact metre… and they can track each parcel… to the back
door to the garden shed…

LIZA JANE
Boing! Bouncing of a satellite… right here into this wee black box… amazing isn’t it? Spy in the cab… [She mocks speaking into it]
Hello….Liza Jane here… I like bananas! Ricky chuckles.

RICKY
Working out the exact route… the traffic… the weather… estimated
time of arrival… and cuts out if you arrive early! In case there is a preciser.

LIZA JANE
But why do they need it to the exact time?

RICKY
What the big companies do now… order it online before midnight… guarantee it the next day if they pay a bit extra… within the hour.

LIZA JANE
But it means you have to go zigzagging all over the place, out of order… do they know how late you finish?
Ricky glances at her.

RICKY
You’re full of questions darling…

LIZA JANE
But who puts it all in here?

RICKY
What do you mean

LIZA JANE
Somebody must think about it…put all the information inside…somebody must have done that…[tapping the device] I mean really put it in…

RICKY
Must be a robot, or an app, or a programme…

LIZA JANE
But somebody must feed the robot in
the first place…

RICKY
Some specky geek I suppose…

LIZA JANE
Who never goes to the toilet. [Ricky looks at her] Well, they
measure everything else…why not time for the toilet?
Ricky chuckles and shakes his head.

RICKY
Didn’t get those brains from me.
[SORRY WE MISSED YOU – SCENE 19]

……………………………………………

During lockdown I met a driver on my street in Edinburgh who was finishing off a 14 hour shift. He often worked between 12 and 14 hours a day. His eyes were sunken, and his skin was grey. He reminded me of one of the drivers I met while carrying out research for the above screenplay who told me “I feel like a tube of toothpaste… all squeezed out.” I asked him how he was; it seemed like the final blow and it looked like he was about to burst out crying. Some child’s Dad, somebody’s partner, and bogus self employed driver, key worker.

So here we are, 2021, homo sapiens, manacled to an app, delivering our hearts desire to the doorstep at break neck speed with mind boggling efficiency while the driver is pushed to collapse in a shift that would shame the Victorians, but not Amazon. The word algorithm has a long history and can be traced back to a 9th century mathematician. In those days slavery flourished. It does today too, but the shackles come dressed up to our front doors in a shiny hand held device; from the same doors that the public applauded key workers so enthusiastically but without the curiosity of a child like Liza Jane, who tried to make the connections.

Ken Loach is an English filmmaker. His socially critical directing style and socialist ideals are evident in his film treatment of social issues such as poverty (Poor Cow, 1967), homelessness (Cathy Come Home, 1966), and labour rights (Riff-Raff, 1991, and The Navigators, 2001). Loach’s film Kes (1969) was voted the seventh greatest British film of the 20th century in a poll by the British Film Institute. Two of his films, The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) and I, Daniel Blake (2016), received the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, making him one of only nine filmmakers to win the award twice. He is a member of DiEM25’s Advisory Panel.

Paul Laverty is an Irish-Scottish lawyer and scriptwriter, born in Calcutta, India, (1957). He studied Philosophy at Gregorian University, Rome, and Law at the University of Glasgow, and received the Fulbright Award in 1984. In the mid-eighties, he traveled to Nicaragua, Central America, and lived there for almost three years. He worked for a Nicaraguan human rights organization. During this time, he traveled widely in Guatemala and El Salvador which were both in a state of civil war. He has remained keenly interested in Latin American affairs ever since. After his time in Central America, Laverty made contact with the director Ken Loach and since then they have been working in constant collaboration.

Srećko’s view on postcapitalism. – A contribution to mέta.

Perhaps there is no system in human history that has been proclaimed dead so many times as capitalism.

It evolved out of the “long” 16th century which was a result of the protracted crisis of feudalism. When Black Death arrived to Europe aboard trading ships laden with goods from China and infected two-thirds of the overall population, it didn’t just kill millions of people, it killed feudalism itself.

And it was this tragic pandemic that was at the same time a harbinger of the age of capitalism, which would include the industrial revolution, imperialism and colonialism, while turning the planet – humans, other species and nature itself – into a seemingly neverending source for extraction, exploitation and expansion.

Today we are faced with the Covid-pandemic which is not the same as Black Death, but due to our contemporary historic context and the failures of late capitalism (from the privatization of health care systems to decades of austerity) already acquires a major economic and social importance in shaping not only the future of capitalism but the future of the planet itself.

It’s still, of course, easier to imagine the end of the world, as Fredric Jameson famously put it, than the end of capitalism. But what if precisely today, when the end of the world (extinction of species and the destruction of the biosphere) seems rather certain, we also have to imagine the end of capitalism?

Today, more than ever, we need speculative critical theory, a sort of critical theory that is based on speculative scenarios and imaginations, whether through philosophy or arts, but we also need a sort of speculative critical praxis in the sense of creating the postcapitalist future in the “here and now”.

“Postcapitalism” doesn’t necessarily have to be better than capitalism. Most likely, it can be far worse, it can easily turn into a sort of techno-feudalism with total surveillance and automation of human behaviour or even a sort of planetary dictatorship based on biopolitics, apartheid and genocide. Or it can turn out even much worse, our planet could turn into an uninhabitable planet with a few tribes of last survivors after the climate collapse or nuclear catastrophe.

Unfortunately, today all these dystopian scenarios seem more probable than the utopian alternatives.

But “postcapitalism” can —and must— be something much better than the system that has lead to planetary suffocation. Even if Extinction is at horizon, our contemporary historic moment can —and must— be a chance, precisely because the pandemic has been speeding up a historic transformation that would otherwise take decades or centuries. And we don’t have centuries anymore.

In order to create a future after capitalism as short or long as this future might be, “postcapitalism” —as ambiguous as it is— has to be explored by academics, artists and activists. Is there a better place for such a center than Athens?

Seize mέta!

Srećko Horvat is a philosopher from Croatia. He has been active in various movements for the past two decades. He co-founded the Subversive Festival in Zagreb and, together with Yanis Varoufakis, founded DiEM25. He published more than a dozen books translated into 15 languages, most recently Poetry from the Future, Subversion!, The Radicality of Love,  What Does Europe Want? and After the Apocalypse.

Antara’s view on postcapitalism. – A contribution to mέta. 

The Future History of Capitalism: An Abridged Story

Once upon a time, we were told a story 

It went like this: 

The bounties of the earth are endless, and we could all be rich without limit

The formula required just one, surprising, magic ingredient —

Human selfishness. 

We were told this tale by those who claimed to be Men of Science 

And, so, we believed them. 

The story started well 

In the Kingdoms of the North, peace reigned at last—and with it, came prosperity like never before 

And for the newly-freed Kingdoms of the South, or so they were told, it was just a matter of time 

It was a question of science after all: the alchemy of the art of selfishness. 

Seasons came and seasons went

Yet, the promised prosperity remained the exclusive preserve of the North 

Was it because the people of the South were simply not scientific enough? 

Then, one dark autumnal day, came a storm 

So powerful was this tornado that it ripped the golden plaster off the edifice of the Northern Empires 

And revealed what lay below as decaying and hollow. 

But, even now, the Men of Science averted their gaze; turned a blind eye

A strange sort of science, indeed; to be so immune to evidence… 

But the tempest had taken its toll 

Internecine battles broke out within the Kingdoms of the North; Northerner fought Northerner

And prosperity dwindled; for the many, even if not the few 

But faith in the God-like qualities of Man, especially Selfish Man, remained unshaken 

To cull the infinite from the finite 

To craft technology without teleology 

To do good without being good 

The might of man was never in question… 

Until the Plague that is. 

And as it froze the frame, around the world 

The perversions of the way that had been were brought sharply into focus 

And other ways of being illuminated. 

The prospect of progress is (natural) science, not speculation…

Change is possible! 

The disproof of the dominant axioms—the gospel of the so-called Men of Science—is around us, in us

In the intrinsic goodness that has propelled us this far

For Selfish Man is Man-Made, and for Man to Unmake 

By escaping the confines of an Outdated Theory 

The portal to a New Reality is a New Theory 

By reckoning with the true contours of human nature 

Something wonderful could be set in motion

For the whirring in the background…might just be that of the moral machinery clicking into action 

And the Birth of a New Protagonist:

One of reason but also emotion, science but also art 

Of joy and belonging, community and caring 

Rooted in ritual, but unshackled by the past.  

And, with a new protagonist would come the prospect of a new plot 

Not of man against man (or woman), or North against South 

But of meaning that is co-created, by Self and Other 

Beyond the dichotomies of selfishness and altruism: a narrative of (civic) friendship.

And with the start of a new story, comes the possibility…of a new civilization 

Perhaps even a happy ending?

Dr Antara Haldar holds the inaugural position in Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Cambridge, where she is a tenured University Lecturer at the Faculty of Law and teaches courses on law, economics and philosophy. She concurrently holds appointments at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Judge Business School, and is a Governing Body Fellow at Peterhouse (Cambridge’s oldest college). She is currently on a Fellowship at Stanford University and is also a Faculty Visitor at Harvard University. She convenes The Common Currency Project, an international alliance of some of the world’s leading scholars engaged in rethinking economics.

Noam’s view on postcapitalism. – A contribution to mέta.
Post-covid – Progressive International

In the early years of the industrial revolution, working people bitterly condemned the attack on their fundamental rights and dignity in the factory system. They were not just protesting the brutality of working conditions and miserable pay, but more fundamentally, the very fact that they were compelled to be subjects of an autocratic master, indeed for most of their waking lives. They were drawing from a live tradition tracing back to classical antiquity: the “servile and demeaning labor” for wages is “a contract to servitude,” Cicero held, expressing the common view. The same perceptions were quickly revived among those compelled to rent themselves to survive under the rising industrial system. The official journal of organized labor in the US, the Knights of Labor, featured articles on “Wage Slavery and Chattel Slavery,” expounding the common understanding that “wage slavery stands today as one of the greatest barriers to the progress of civilization.” Similar ideas were slogans of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party. Skilled workers warned that a day might come when wage slaves “will so far forget what is due to manhood as to glory in a system forced on them by their necessity and in opposition to their feelings of independence and self-respect” – a day they hoped would be “far distant.”

Determining the shape of the post-pandemic world will surely be a terrain of intense struggle, with many dimensions. Those who created and have greatly benefited from the particularly savage form of capitalism to which much of the world has been subjected for 40 years are working hard to ensure that it persists, in harsher form, with new tools of surveillance and control. A much better world can be achieved, and must be. A primary goal should be to remove this great barrier to the progress of civilization, to end the system of servitude by moving toward the goals of the Knights and the populist movement of farmers, and the rising left worldwide, calling for a collective commonwealth in which production and communities would be controlled democratically by participants, a vision that could take many forms, guided by the goal of an end to servitude in all aspects of life.

A new and better world is in reach. To progress towards it we must grasp the opportunities, which do exist, to overcome imminent and existential threats, literally threats to survival of organized human life, and the lives of myriad other species that we are extinguishing with abandon. One lesson that the pandemic has reinforced with stark clarity is that our choice is between genuine internationalism or virtual extinction. The current and coming pandemics have no boundaries. Nor does the destruction of the environment that sustains life. Nor do the plagues of injustice and repression. Institutions designed for pursuit of gain, not the common good, are a prescription for suicide, and not in the distant future.

The good news is that feasible solutions are at hand to problems great and small. The grim reality is that not much time remains to implement them, an incredible challenge, an inspiring opportunity.

Professor Noam Chomsky is considered the founder of modern linguistics. He has received numerous awards, including the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal and the Ben Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. Chomsky joined the UA in fall 2017, coming from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked since 1955 and was Institute Professor, later Institute Professor emeritus. He is a member of DiEM25’s Advisory Panel and of the Progressive International’s Council.

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