FREEDOM AND MORALITY IN DESIGNING EMANCIPATORY FUTURES
Posted on December 17, 2018In the pursuit of “innovative”, socially conscious design, much of the rhetoric relies on heavily assumptive ideas about labor, interconnectedness, and a universal “common good”. In their essay, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, Srnicek and Williams claim that “Neoliberalism has failed, social democracy is impossible, and [that] only an alternative vision can bring about universal prosperity and emancipation. Articulating and achieving this better world is the fundamental task of the left today” (1). I have a few problems with their proposition here. First, I will argue that this mustn’t be the task of the left alone, unless we are ready to accept emancipatory futures that are also totalitarian. Another fallacy that I identify in their proposed future is the idea of a universally prosperous and emancipatory future, and that this future may be universally “moral”. Given the power structures at play (in the economy, in politics, in education, and in opportunity), and the value of labor within our current moral structure, there is no way to propose any one future that is beneficial for everyone. To claim that there is one, is to ignore the power imbalances so fundamental to the structure of our society for the sake of neoliberal peace of mind. The last problem I will explore is the idea that “defense politics” are inherently limiting. While the existence of this kind of “folk-politic” can certainly be limiting in some ways, it is necessary in others.
IMAGINING AND DESIGNING EMANCIPATORY FUTURES IS A JOB FOR “THE LEFT”?
If we ignore the ultra-partisan nature of society today, we are missing a big piece of the puzzle here. The “left” is more politically active in advocating for the futures that are emancipatory for the political/cultural left. The issues that the political right are advocating for, while horrifyingly oppressive and violent in the mind’s eye of someone of my political leaning, are likely seen to be equally “emancipatory” for those advocating for those issues. When we begin to promote one idea of freedom, and claim that it is the responsibility of the left alone to carve our path of action towards it, our rhetoric is limited by several driving assumptions : that the left is the only party driven by an idea of “morality”, and that what is emancipatory for one group will be emancipatory for all. I will propose that perhaps choosing a future that is “more” emancipatory for one group is not necessarily a bad thing, depending on whether the group being “emancipated” has historically been oppressed.
WHAT IS A UNIVERSALLY EMANCIPATORY FUTURE, AND WHO GETS TO DECIDE?
Reading about designing emancipatory futures reminded me of Franz Kafka’s story, In the Penal Colony, where he imagines a world in which one authoritarian moral code exists, and The Condemned Man is brought to his drawn-out and torturous death by a machine that inscribes the moral code that he has broken into his flesh (only then does he become aware of his wrongdoing). His story draws upon the dilemma of morality in society, specifically as it pertains to power and punishment. Part of a general human tendency to seek order and reason is the desire to ascribe to some objective morality that transcends time and social divisions. The discontent of The Officer, fiercely loyal to his killing machine, is exemplary of the tendency of Western society to anchor itself to one declaration of moral limits and of the desire of the human mind to have finite rules for what is right or wrong. It doesn’t take more than a quick glance at the U.S. constitution and justice system to see that adhering to one outdated model of ‘moral being’ doesn’t work. If humans are constantly in search of a concrete morality and order in a world where that does not exist, we will choose an objective morality, but the way that we interpret that morality changes as we change.
In thinking about the kind of world that Kafka imagines, I begin to question this idea of an objective moral code. In a society where the “moral code” was written in a time where not only was slavery legal, but the writers of the document themselves participated in and benefited from it, what role does labor play in our superficially collective understanding of morality? And moreover, can we achieve a “post-capitalist” emancipatory future under the moral code (the U.S. constitution) as it stands? If the constitution was written in a context in which a value was assigned to the bodies of (some) its people according to their physical output, we will not be able to achieve a collaborative emancipatory post-capitalist future while this document is our guiding moral compass.
FOLK-POLITICS—UNPRODUCTIVE DEFENSE POLITICS OR SOLIDARITY AS SURVIVAL?
Finally, in the rejection of “folk-politics”, we are asking the group that is most negatively affected by the oppressive forces of today’s socio-political reality to do the heavy lifting in formulating and carrying out this emancipation. This just further upholds the paradigm of shifting the burden of — fighting for freedom, educating the well-intentioned but ignorant, all the while patiently/quietly/passively tolerating a certain level of overt oppression—to the most disenfranchised. Srnicek and Williams describe the toils of neoliberalism has having “involved the fetishization of local spaces, immediate actions, transient gestures, and particularism of all kinds. Rather than undertake the difficult labour of expanding and consolidating gains, this form of politics has focused on building bunkers to resist the encroachments of global neoliberalism. In so doing, it has become a politics of defense, incapable of articulating or building a new world.” What they fail to acknowledge is that forming smaller kinship groups based on race, ethnicity, religion, class, and political affiliation has been an crucial survival technique for generations. Until the great revolution that they are hoping for comes, people need to survive in the day-to-day. To see a successful but unobtrusive break in the enclaves of the left, as they propose, I would add the caveat that the allies of the left that belong to the white middle-class assume more of the burden in doing this work. A problem then arises, though, when the left rallies around figures that are not intersectional in their idea of the emancipation of the left, in which case the different enclaves, working together, must maintain a system of checks and balances. To move towards a future that is emancipatory for the most people possible, we must stop trying to ignore the socio-cultural divisions that exist in our society, and begin to question our own biases of morality, and brace ourselves for a more foundational change in the structures that our society was built on.
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Kafka, Franz, and Joachim Neugroschel. The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.
Verkamp, Anya. “Srnicek, Nick; Williams, Alex: Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work.” Basic Income Studies 12, no. 1 (2017). doi:10.1515/bis-2017-0012.