The Morning Before – Rentier capitalism supreme

In both the 1930s and the 2020s the powers of financial capital were in control. The unequal and insecure societies they produced unleashed fascistic forces, as populist politicians blamed the people’s distress on aliens, foreigners, migrants and refugees. In the 2020s, the neo-liberalism that had been the dominant international ideology of the 1980s and 1990s had done its job. It had created a global system of rentier capitalism ¹.

Neoliberals still claimed to support a ‘free market’ economy, with a minimal state and ‘deregulation’, but in reality it had become the most unfree market economy ever. Rentier capitalism represented a triumph of private property rights over ‘market forces’. More and more of the income, wealth and political power flowed to the owners of property—physical (land and houses), financial and ‘intellectual’ (patents and copyright). Financial capital thrived in such circumstances; the value of financial assets rose to over five times national income in every OECD country.

Of most relevance to how we work and use our time today, the 2030s, was the irretrievable breakdown of the income distribution system, including the welfare state. Most people who relied on labour for their income and standard of living faced stagnant real incomes at best.

A majority experienced declining real incomes that were also increasingly volatile and unpredictable, as more and more people drifted into the growing mass class of the precariat  ². It was indeed the new dangerous class, since some in it (often with limited formal education and with old manual working-class backgrounds) were drawn to support far-right populists promising to bring back some mythical idea of Yesterday. Others, mostly young and relatively educated, were disillusioned with the existing state and wanted a new progressive Tomorrow. Others, such as minorities and migrants, simply felt dysfunctional, present in society but not members of it. But all three groups were united in one thing; opposition to the existing state.

By the early 2020s the precariat consisted of millions of people struggling to work, facing multiple insecurities, living a bits-and-pieces existence without a coherent narrative to give to their lives, and hovering constantly on the edge of unsustainable debt. Fear and stress were pervasive. Humiliation and anger were not far behind. They could not look to the state for reliable support, because the dominant political forces, funded by the global plutocracy, had slashed the level of state benefits and made them harder to obtain. Many were forced to rely on ‘food banks’ and become supplicants to other demeaning charities.

Surveillance and loss of rights

To make matters more threatening, the state—under the control of the plutocracy and financial elite—welcomed and implemented two complementary mechanisms, the panopticon and the banopticon  ³. The panopticon—literally ‘all seeing’—was originally a design for prisons developed by the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham at the end of the eighteenth century, in which the guards could observe the prisoners at all times but the prisoners could not see the guards. Extended by French philosopher Michel Foucault in the 1970s, the panopticon became a metaphor for a modern offshoot of neoliberalism, obtaining the passive docility of the populace through constant technological surveillance  ⁴.

By the 2020s, especially in the wake of Covid and the spread of ‘remote working’, the state, employers, landlords, credit companies, banks and bureaucrats were spying on our every activity, without our knowing exactly what or how, with potentially damaging consequences for our privacy, creditworthiness, entitlement to welfare and so on. Insecure people are easily terrified by panopticon controls.

Meanwhile, less discussed by intellectuals and artists, the banopticon apparatus was being extended—the ability and willingness of the state, again under the thrall of the plutocracy and other rentiers, to ‘ban’ individuals and groups from ordinary citizenship rights. More and more people found themselves unable to obtain or exercise what they had thought were their rights of citizenship—civil rights, social rights, economic rights, cultural rights and political rights  ⁵. That erosion went with loss of the commons, the public spaces, commonly owned resources and amenities that had historically defined society.

Chronic uncertainty

The combination of rentier capitalism with the increasingly sophisticated control apparatus was an integrated socio-economic system guaranteed to produce and intensify chronic inequality and widespread insecurity. And it was made worse by the fact that it was also an era of chronic uncertainty. Ecological extinction beckoned, with global warming out of control, the ambitious target of ‘net zero’ seemingly merely wishful thinking for ritualistic rhetoric by politicians and international bureaucrats.

The economic uncertainty reflected the rising probability of natural and socio-economic shocks and costly hazards. A shock may be defined as an unpredicted adverse event with potentially severe consequences, whereas a hazard is a normal life-cycle event, such as a marriage, childbirth or death. Shocks were becoming more frequent while the cost of hazards was rising, threatening living standards and even survival. And the old welfare state policies were unable to give people economic security.

This economic uncertainty was profoundly different from the insecurity that existed in the welfare state era, for which ex post compensation schemes provided most people with reasonable income security. By the 2020s, that notion of society had gone. Chronic uncertainty meant that the vast majority of people felt fearful, stressed and on the edge of depression, because they could not predict what would happen or insure against a loss of income or livelihood. By 2022, there had already been six major pandemics in the twenty-first century, showing that increasingly almost everybody was vulnerable. And there had been numerous financial shocks, not just the crash in 2008 ⁶.

Then there was the ugly war provoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and simmering tensions and conflict elsewhere, notably in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. All this, coupled with the devastating impact of droughts, storms and floods caused by climate change, generated mass distress migration of economic refugees, as well as disruption to energy supplies, high price inflation and widespread impoverishment.

Yet, in this terrifying combination of terrifying developments, politics was momentarily dominated by the far right, as xenophobia, populism and nationalism gained ground around the world. Thus in 2022, far-right parties came into government in Italy, joining entrenched autocrats in Hungary and Russia, and setting the political agenda in Sweden, the USA and the UK. Neo-fascism was on the march. For a while, the political Left was paralysed. Social democrats and state socialists alike were dead men walking, without ideas, without energy. And the young in the precariat knew those politicians were incapable of offering a transformational vision or strategy.

But all was not lost. New progressive thinkers and politicians emerged just in time. And they were motivated by nothing less than a new vision of work, a new politics of time.

The Morning After – basic income and economic security

In 2023, young activists began an organised response to the multiple threats. They realised that the primary challenge was to find ways of reducing economic uncertainty and the rising inequalities that contributed to it. They demanded a basic income for all, recognising that the only way to provide people with enough resilience in an era of chronic uncertainty—an era of ‘unknown unknowns’—was to provide ex ante social protection, a guaranteed floor of basic security.

To those who claimed that providing everyone with a basic income would be too expensive and wasteful, they pointed out that most people were vulnerable to shocks and needed a source of robustness and resilience to resist, cope with, and recover from them. It was not only a small identifiable minority at risk. And to give all legal usual residents a basic income, with supplements for those with special needs, was administratively easier and cheaper than trying to identify those in particular need. That always took much longer, so that help easily came too late. To satisfy those who thought it wrong to give it to the rich, taxes would be raised for high-income earners, so that they would not gain.

The big debate in the early 2020s was how to pay for a sensible basic income. Government responses to the financial crash of 2008 and the Covid pandemic in 2020-2022 had demonstrated that governments and central banks could pump extra money into the economy. But they had given most of the money to the financial community, enabling financiers to enlarge their already huge incomes and wealth.

However, the new progressives wanted to go further and establish a new income distribution system that did not rely on ad hoc policies introduced in haste after shocks had occurred. This led to a major structural transformation that was to alter the world of work, labour and leisure.

Capital funds and the commons

In the early 2020s, it was clear that governments, corporations and financial capital were not doing nearly enough to combat global warming or the rush to ecological extinction. Indeed, in response to the cost-of-living crisis unleashed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resultant speculative activity by the financial markets, governments made matters worse by introducing ‘price caps’ on energy. These required them to give fossil fuel corporations more subsidies, boosting fossil fuel production and use when the reverse was vital, and made tax cuts for the wealthy, supposedly to increase economic growth. To balance government budgets, they then cut public services and state benefits, just as many governments had done in the austerity decade of 2009-19. This was disastrous.

So the progressives looked to Norway for inspiration. They noted that not only had the country prolonged economic success, it also had less inequality than any other OECD country. Every decile in the income distribution system did better than in most of those countries, while Norway’s poorest 10% were the most prosperous poorest decile in the world⁷ .

One reason for the success was clear for all to see. Norway had set up a national fund to receive the revenue from its oil deposits in the North Sea and had built that up as a social investment vehicle to become the biggest sovereign wealth fund in the world.

Realising that such funds could be built on other assets, the progressives developed a strategy for building what came to be known as Commons Capital Funds. These were based on the view that the commons—the land, forests, seas, rivers, the seabed, the minerals under the land or seabed, inherited community amenities—all belonged to everybody equally, as commoners.⁸

But over the centuries, elites, the plutocracy, and powerful corporate and financial interests had taken and exploited the commons for private gain, without compensating the commoners. This was unjust and had been a major cause of unmerited inequalities and insecurity. Instead, the Commons Capital Fund would receive revenue from levies on private gains from exploiting the commons so as to provide everybody with a common property right, in the form of common dividends spread out as monthly payments.

How did this change how ‘work’ and time have developed in the 2030s? Progressives realised that high rates of income and consumption taxes were politically unpopular, and that the traditional social democratic route to reducing inequality was no longer politically feasible. But without redistribution of income, the precariat and others could not undertake the work they wished to do, including providing unpaid care to their families and others in their communities. So, another source of personal income was required. The Commons Capital Fund offered that prospect.

It was built from levies (taxes) on what had been commons—a land value tax, a wealth tax, a digital data levy, levies on revenue from mining as well as oil and gas exploration, and other resources on and under the land and seabed, and in the sea. A high carbon tax and other levies on polluting activities were justified on the grounds that pollution was mainly caused by corporations and the activities of the relatively wealthy, while the costs in ill-health and environmental degradation were disproportionately borne by the poor.

As the Commons Capital Fund grew, and as its independent management invested in profitable, ecologically sustainable, productive investments, so it was able to pay out rising common dividends, essentially basic incomes. By the 2030s, the individual basic income was sufficient for living modestly well.

Work, not jobs

As the basic income rose, people felt less stressed, less subject to social illnesses such as depression and anxiety, and more inclined to pursue their aspirations and interests. This opened up a lifestyle of work and creativity without the former pressure to take and stay in jobs they did only for money and because they had no real choice about how to allocate their time.

Contrary to claims by the political right that everybody (except themselves, of course) would become lazy and parasitic, having a basic income as an economic right emancipated people to work. Most actually worked harder and more productively, and also more cooperatively and less competitively, instead reserving their competition to being creative and socially caring.

Governments totally changed their position on ‘jobs’. Most political parties had campaigned on promises to create more jobs and even ‘full employment’. Now, they tended to say they wanted to reduce the number of jobs, since most were boring, alienating and time-wasting. As far as possible, they encouraged automation. The necessary jobs that remained paid high wages so there was no shortage of people prepared to do them, for a while at least or on a job-sharing basis.

Above all, the work being generated was closer to what people wanted to do. Anthropologists noted how more people were allocating their time in ways that had strong similarities to the distant past, before industrial capitalism pushed the majority into full-time labour or, in the case of many women, into full-time ‘housekeeping’. And a beauty of all this was that it led to a revival of ‘commoning’.

The revival of commoning

Commoning and the verb ‘to common’ were well-known in the English language in medieval times but the practice was attacked and marginalised as capitalism took shape and the words fell into disuse. To common meant to participate in shared work activities, done communally, not necessarily in a group at a specific time, but in natural divisions of labour and work according to physical and mental strengths, age and degree of frailty. Think of harvesting, gleaning, common workshops, places of mutual aid.

In its modern form, commoning was linked to the solidaristic ethos of allotments, community gardens. These had been social realities in most of Europe since the seventeenth century. However, in the 2030s they flourished again, as basic income gave people more freedom from dependency on wage labour, and the land value tax persuaded more large-scale landowners to sell some of their land to the community. And, of course, they had ecological benefits, enabling people to acquire local food, without long commercial ‘value chains’, and to adapt their diets and focus their energies on healthy outdoor living.

In addition, first around Nordic countries and then many others, a new form of allotment emerged that was trebly ecological and economic, namely community sea gardens, literally allotments in the sea. They were inspired by experimental schemes that took off without fanfare in Denmark in the early twenty-first century, led by the Sea Garden Association set up in 2011 that created sea garden allotments in Ebeltoft Harbour. Local residents cultivated shellfish, seaweed and fish in the old fishing port that had become commercially unviable.

By 2022, there were 15 sea allotment societies around the Danish coast, the largest being Kerteminde Maritime Haver. After technological innovations made it easier to extend around coves and fjords, and to convert more areas around ports and harbours, they were soon being replicated in Finland, Norway and Sweden (led by mussel farming across the Oresund Bridge), and later in the UK, France and elsewhere.

Another spreading form of commoning was permaculture, a movement that began in Australia in the late twentieth century. Combining ‘permanent’ and ‘culture’, the term conveyed the sense of sustainability, and its ethical principles were encapsulated in a favourite motto, Earth Care, People Care and Fair Shares. Permaculture emphasised simple ways of living, such as growing one’s own food, using organic principles and nurturing biodiversity, composting and recycling. Above all, the movement was committed to involving as many people in the community as possible.

Two other trends were firmly established by the 2030s. First, the sharing economy went from strength to strength, in spite of opposition by commercial companies. After all, most people have some ‘goods’ that they rarely use, and others used in the past but no longer needed or wanted. So local communities set up facilities for the pooling and renting of tools, clothes, sports equipment and the like. This lowered the cost of living and reduced pressure to pursue ‘economic growth’ as resource-depleting production of ever more commodities.

Second, real meaning was given to the Slow Time Movement, inspired originally by the Slow Food Movement that started in Rome in 1986. Why should life be all about maximising ‘efficiency’ and ‘productivity’? If we slow down, lingering over the activities we enjoy, taking time for contemplation and to appreciate the world around us, we gain peace of mind, greater wisdom.

Proponents of more and more economic growth, so that the profits could flow to wealthy ‘entrepreneurs’ and rentiers, were vehemently opposed to the Slow Time Movement, mocking it as ‘hippydom’ and laziness. But many people took part in anti-consumerist campaigns, daubing billboards in public spaces and posting satirical commentary on inane advertising, as well as mounting boycotts of shopping festivals such as Black Friday or Singles Day. Graffiti artists flourished, inspired by Banksy and others.

The stimulus to political participation

All of this went with the greatest return to the Past, the reinvention of what the ancient Greeks called schole. The Greeks had a rich conceptualisation of time that modern industrial society did everything it could to erase. The Greeks made a sharp distinction between ‘labour’, activity that was done by slaves and the banausoi (manual labourers and artisans) for exchange value, and ‘work’, which was what people did around their home, with relatives and friends, which had use value, as in care for those they loved. They made a further distinction between ‘recreation’, necessary for recuperation and physical and mental health, and ‘leisure’, as captured in the word schole.

Schole reflected a combination of education (school) and public participation in the life of the polis, the city, the community. For the ancient Greeks, this was the most important form of work and commoning. A true citizen was expected to devote as much time as possible to schole. But, of course, modern capitalistic economies wanted people to devote as much time as possible to labour and consumption of commodities, and thus treated schole as purely instrumental. Political participation was reduced to a residual, increasingly superficial, almost ritualistic activity.

The new world of work that emerged in the 2030s resurrected schole in the form of deliberative democracy. Everybody receiving the basic income was required to make a moral, though not legally binding, commitment to participate in the political process to the extent they could, attending at least one public meeting of political debate each year, and agreeing to vote in national and local elections.

With their basic income, people also had more control of their time and could devote more of it to political and community activity. This was the new world of work and leisure. It also represented the triumph of commoning and work over the old dictates of labour, jobs and endless consumption. And we were excited by the environmental recovery that was underway as we conserved and reproduced, rather than maximising the depletion of nature. This was Transformation.