This chapter examines the concept of the ‘future of work’ by exploring the different futures that scholars have imagined for the development of Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies and their impact on labour. The 4IR discourse, as the next or current technological disruption, has captured the attention of most disciplines in the social sciences, sparking the imagination and fear of scholars who are trying to envision or predict the future through different scenarios. This chapter expands on Steinhoff’s (in this volume) classification of four groups of people with different views on technology – techno-optimists, techno-utopians, techno-pessimists and techno-dismissives – to explore political and economic theories that underlie differing views.
In doing so, the chapter addresses the (mis)conception that capitalism's primary goal is to grow the economy, including the production of ‘goods’. Instead, the chapter argues that capitalism’s primary goal is to generate profit, interest, and rent. This distinction is important because it helps explain why labour productivity does not always rise, why capitalism (and not techno-feudalism) is alive and well, why contemporary repurposing technologies might not be realistic or even adequate, and why we can never witness uninterrupted growth, uninterrupted full automation, uninterrupted workers' suppression, or uninterrupted profit recovery in capitalism. This chapter employs two categories to explain why labour productivity may stagnate or even decline if capitalists are able to extract more surplus value from workers through technological innovation, as well as why capitalists might be reluctant to invest in new technologies. These are: labour-to-capital antagonism and capital-to-capital antagonism. Most literature tends to focus either on one or the other, neglecting the interplay between the two, which is essential for understanding the complex dynamics of capitalism and the future of work.
Indeed, this chapter takes a different approach from the existing revisionist Marxist literature on the future of work, which is currently divided between opposing perspectives. Post-operaismo, influenced by Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’ in the Grundrisse, overemphasises the role of technology, seeing it as a liberatory device that can overthrow capitalism. Revisionist value theory, on the other hand, rejects a traditional Marxist labour theory of labour determined by a variety of factors including technological change. This perspective disables an analysis of automation and technological disruptions in relation to surplus value, rates of profit and intra-capitalist competition, viewing these as overly deterministic. Providing an alternative to both of these tendencies, this chapter contends that the clash between workers and capitalists, as well as the competition between capitalists, generates inherent contradictions in capitalism that prevent the future of work from unfolding as has been predicted and in some instances feared.
Citation
Papagiannaki, E. (2025). The political economy of labour and technological disruptions in capitalism. In J. MacLeavy, & F. H. Pitts (Eds.), The Handbook for the Future of Work (57-68). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003327561-8
