#demandthefuture

Guest demand by the Institute for Precarious Consciousness

There is a current, widespreadpattern of regulation, surveillance, micro-management, and control extendingacross a range of social spheres. In the workplace, these include measures suchas surveillance, quality benchmarks and performance goals (often unachievable), and vulnerability to easy firing. In public spaces, they include things like CCTV, threatening posters connected to crackdowns, the presence of police and wardens, and the criminalisation of a range of deviant uses of space (begging, loitering, etc). Other manifestations of the same pattern include benefit sanctions and requirements, Internet and phone surveillance, the proliferation of broad and vague laws, anti-protest tactics such as kettling, and the spread of biometric technologies and ID systems.

 The psychological and social effect of this process is a mass production of anxiety and related psychological problems (including trauma, fatigue, depression, and impotent rage). Unable to let our guard down in any space for fear of violating a minor prohibition or falling behind the required performance level, most people have become hypervigilant and excessively stressed. We are increasingly unable to listen to our own bodies, to relate compassionately to one another, or to marshal the courage and willpower to resist.

 This issue is bigger than one or another tactic or mechanism of management or surveillance. It is built into the fabric of neoliberal social organisation and its way of responding to social problems – the assumption that more or better top-down regulation is a (cost-free) cure-all, and that security and efficiency provide sufficient justifications for intrusive measures which destroy the openness of spaces and the autonomy of individuals and groups. We need to expose the psychological costs of a hyper-regulated society, combat the managerialisation and securitisation of space, and create spaces which refuse these kinds of logics, so as to reconstruct our abilities to relax, concentrate, empathise, communicate, formulate autonomous desires, and struggle against dominant institutions. Let's create localised economies and subsistence mechanisms to reduce vulnerability to the system, and slow-pace 'listening' spaces to slow down the pace of life. Let's create new forms of consciousness-raising to learn about the psychological impact of the present system and theorise its mechanisms. Let's demand on a psychological level the same right not to be destroyed, enslaved or tortured by the system that we demand on a physical and material level. Let's create a world of unmanageable subjects, and forms of life through which such subjects can be reproduced. Let's rediscover our inner core of creativity and autonomy, and recreate a world where we can live through joy, not fear.

Guest demand by Planka Nu

Fare-free public transportation is a reality in cities around the world. Tallinn in Estonia was the first European capital to introduce this in January 2013. The result was more trips by public transport and less car traffic. The poorer Russian-speaking parts of the city in particular gained more freedom to travel.

 So, the positive effects include redistributing wealth from rich to poor (and from car-drivers to people usingpublic transport), mitigating climate change and bringing more freedom intocities (and less ticket-barriers, ticket-inspectors and surveillance).

 In the broader perspective, fare-freetransportation also changes the role of commuters from being primarilycustomers into being citizens, or even just humans. When you can get rid of thelogic of selling and buying travel the possibilities to think differently about cities really open up.

 The traffic hierarchy puts the car as the supreme ruler of our cities. This needs to be challenged by all other commuters together. Abolishing fares is one of the ways to do it, but we need a lot of ideas. We also need to question automobility - the idea that you are more free if you travel more - and acknowledge that forced travel, like commuting to work, is a source of anxiety. We need to embrace spontaneous travel adventures!

 To reach our goals, we need tools. In Stockholm and Gothenburg, we have an ongoing fare-strike. In Brazil, the Movimento Passe Livre do it their way. The methods might differ, but together we can challenge the traffic hierarchy globally.

 About Planka Nu: In Stockholm, Gothenburg, Ostergotland and Helsinki commuters are taking the initiative on public transportation and just travelling for free. Freeriding insurance is a cooperation between people in similar situations. You pay a small monthly amount to the fund and when you get caught freeriding your fine is paid. So if you can’t afford the high ticket prices, you will still be able to use the collective means of transportation throughout Stockholm. This works well, but we have a greater goal than just helping each other to freeride. We also campaign for free public transportation, owned by us together and controlled by the workers in it.

 For more information, visit: https://planka.nu/

The demand for a Universal Basic Income – a guaranteed income for all citizens (at least) that's not contingent on employment - is a demand that seems to be gaining traction and catching lots of people's imagination.  The Green Party want to do it, variousliberals including Paul Krugman have advocated it, and a vote is due sometime this year in Switzerland to implement a version of the idea.  Autonomist theorists including Kathi Weeks, who writes about the demand in her excellent The Problem with Work, and groups including Plan C’s very own Thames Valley are also advocating the idea. Its supporters envision a world of falling employment with recipients of UBI being able to properly devote time to the unpaid work they're currently doing - care work or childcare for example - as well as picking up new skills and hobbies, creating art, deepening their social networks (partying), organising for the revolution, finally getting around to volunteering - or just happily lazing around.

Like historical demands for Wages for Housework , or the tongue in cheek demand for Wages for Facebook, the demand for a universal basic income is a political statement about the nature of work and a way of making visible the unpaid (and gendered, classed and raced) work we already do to reproduce society and capital. It is also a demand which seems to be suited to the current phase of production, in which increasing automation has, in part, led to the replacement of mass employment (at least in the Global North) with fewer, more precarious jobs. For radicals, UBI offers the potential to begin de-linking, practically and intellectually, our access to social wealth from the necessity to engage in waged work, as well as attempting to solve the underlying structural reasons for the crisis. For more arguments for UBI check out this article. Meanwhile, liberals support the idea of a UBI to attempt to redirect the large pools of capital currently finding profitable investment in things such as property speculation into stimulating consumer demand to get the economy moving again and alleviate the current crisis of underpaid and scarce waged work. There is the potential for quite an unusual alliance between radicals, progressives and the more liberal wing of the capitalists around the demand of UBI.

Obviously the idea has critics. On the one hand, there are those who point out that UBI doesn’t actually abolish capitalism and may even give it a renewed burst of life. Yet the abolition of the global set of social relations that is capitalist-hetero-patriarchy-white-supremacy (not to mention the state, the nation, ecological destruction and all other forms of domination currently fucking up the world) will be a complicated process. Large scale social change operates over long time periods and at different tempos and, whilst purists might not like it, we will certainly have to get our hands dirty in the process, doing things that we reckon will increase our ability to win other battles, whilst relieving suffering. Other concerns which need to be taken seriously however include the potential for this to lead to tighter border controls - further fuelling global inequality - or for it to facilitate the privatisation of the entire social safety net, as ‘supported consumers’ get to ‘choose’ how to spend the individualized personal budget (for more on that, members of Plan C MCR wrote a short article here). It's important that UBI is both generous enough to enable real autonomy from employment, and complemented by other elements of the social wage. The social movements needed to win this demand (it won't just be given to us in the form we want it) need to be alert to the dangers of a reactionary implementation of the demand.

Unlike calls for a wage increase or the creation of more jobs (trade unions take a bow) the demand for UBI is a directional demand, even the struggle for UBI helps to make the current nature of work within capitalism, both waged and unwaged, more visible. A victory for UBI would help to disentangle our access to social wealth from the wage, and provide us with more time, money and headspace to continue abolishing the system of domination we are currently entwined in.

Members of Plan C MCR