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After a BIG announcement (!!!), your hosts David and Ellie get into the economic and psychological features of the state no one wants to be stuck in: unemployment. How does capitalism structurally construct “wageless life” while nonetheless treating it as a personal failure or unhappy accident? What’s the connection between unemployment and reactionary politics? And is AI going to put us all out of a job? Correcting misconceptions about automation, UBI, and more, your hosts take you through some significant arguments about the impacts of unemployment and reflect on why this socially-constructed position can make us feel so worthless even when we know that we’re not the problem. In the Substack bonus segment, Ellie and David reflect on the end of Overthink and share some reasons for it.
Works Discussed:
Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work
Aaron Benanav, “Is the AI Bubble About to Burst?”
Eloundou et al., “GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models”
Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machines and Manufactures
Michael Denning, “Wageless Life”
Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism
Regina Bateson, “Perceptions of pandemic resume gaps: Survey experimental evidence from the United States”
Highlight: Rethinking “unemployment”
Michael Denning argues that the idea of unemployment is historically specific to the American and European context and can be limited in describing the experiences of other groups.
In many colonial or postcolonial contexts, wageless life isn’t an accident to be insured against or a macroeconomic failure, but rather the main mode of existence, which is why unemployment hasn’t been the main concept used for governance in most of the Global South — instead, the dominant term for wageless life is in this context is informality, such as the concept of the informal economy to describe various kinds of self-employment and part-time or temporary work that fall outside the norm of wage labor.
So, “unemployment” and “informality” are geographically specific and thus limited in describing wageless life. To synthesize a new, more broadly encapsulating term to describe wageless life, Denning turns to Marx’s concept of the “virtual pauper.” For Marx, the fundamental condition of workers under capitalism isn’t employment. Workers are defined by the possibility of being absorbed into wage labor, but always with the possibility of being abandoned again once their labor is no longer needed. In essence, as workers under capitalism, we are always contending with fears of becoming disposable, expendable, and losing employment.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Overthink! Leave your thoughts in the comments!
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