Performing Labour’s (Non)Futures

Abstract

Public performances carried out in support of the movement for a universal basic income—such as a massive ‘currency-dump’ of Swiss francs in a public square by a group of Swiss artists and activists, a series of ‘speculative advertisements’ by US artist Josh Kline, and a ‘robot march’ through the streets of Zurich—have tended to establish spectacular equivalencies between bodies and units of currency, and between bodies and machines, to demonstrate that the future of labour is marked by both economic abundance and unprecedented labor-substitutability. Historically, the concept has emerged from points across a wide political spectrum and the movement holds together a set of divergent political ideologies, which share the belief that the future might be simplified and secured by an economic floor. The universal basic income idea is, overall, profoundly performative, in that it attempts to model the ultimate pragmatism of wider social nets of generosity, and does so by representing the embodied conditions that might be brought into being by such generosity. In this way, the utopian heuristic of an unconditional, guaranteed income is said to be, in the words of Belgian political ethicist Philippe Van Parijs, an ‘instrument of freedom’ and a ‘device for economic sanity’. The question is though, as is often the case: freedom and sanity for whom? The movement, in reality, often falls short of its ‘universal’ aim. Nonetheless, its basic aspiration points to a potential transformation in the way social and political claims are made on the global monetary system.

Notes

1 The idea of a ‘fourth industrial revolution’ refers to the book by the same name published in 2017 and written by macroeconomist Klaus Schwab, the founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum, which is held annually in Davos, Switzerland. Schwab argues that a coming age of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and robotics will have more profound and persistent implications for society, government, economics and the human condition than any previous era of technological change. He argues for the widespread adoption of moral and ethical regulations designed to harness the force of the coming revolution for humanistic and egalitarian purposes.