The New Serfdom

by Angela Eagle

  It is already clear that despite the inclusive ‘all in it together’ rhetoric, the cumulative effect of austerity policies has been to hit the poorest and the already disadvantaged hardest. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has recently published its analysis of the impact of these policies and it is an indictment of the effects of the choices this government has made about where the axe will fall. Overall, the EHRC found that the changes were regressive, with the bottom half of the income distribution losing more than the top 10 per cent. This only gets worse in the current parliament, where the effect of policy decisions already made but still to be implemented is yet to be felt. The austerity-induced changes will boost the share of the top fifth of the income distribution but at the expense of substantial reductions in the bottom half. The EHRC found that losses for black households are double those for white households, at 5 per cent of net income. The disabled have been particularly hard hit. For those households which include someone with a disability, there is a significantly worse outcome compared to those containing no one with a disability. Benefit changes will mean that cumulatively they lose £2,500 a year, and this rises to £5,000 if the family includes a disabled child. And lone parents, who are almost all women, will lose around 15 per cent of their income – around double the greatest losses of other family types. The EHRC analysis shows that women will lose more than men from the changes at every income level; £940 per year on average compared to £460 for men. No wonder the government has declined to publish an equality impact assessment of its tax and benefit measures, despite the Equality Act 2010 putting it under a legal obligation to do so. Here also lies the explanation for the huge rise in the use of food banks reported by the Trussell Trust, which is the largest provider in the country. They gave out 129,000 emergency food parcels in 2011 – a number which rose eightfold to 1,183,000 in 2016/17. The government has consistently refused to collect official statistics on the volume of emergency food parcels handed out in Britain, which, though it is slipping down the league, remains one of the richest economies in the world.

  This telling analysis does not take into account the cuts to public service provision or to local authority budgets, which have done deep damage to our social infrastructure and our communities since the government’s austerity drive first began in 2010. Excluding education, spending by local authorities in England for the financial year 2016/17 has been cut by 22 per cent since 2009/10. But this overall figure hides deep disparities between different local authorities. While local government finances can be complex, what is clear is that poorer, mainly urban local authorities that have smaller tax bases and were therefore more reliant on grants from central government have suffered far greater cuts than others. IFS figures show that on average they have had to deal with 33 per cent cuts while the richest areas have only lost 9 per cent.10 The government’s intention of abolishing the rate support grant completely by the end of the current parliament will end the redistributive capacity of local government finance. This is the exact opposite of a progressive tax system in that it condemns already poorer areas to rely solely on their own resources to meet the greater needs of their poorer local population. Hayek would have been proud of his conservative disciples.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE SECOND MACHINE AGE

  The invention and application of mechanised production powered by steam was a great technological leap forward. It transformed the landscape of this country more rapidly than any other change had previously done. Vast brick factories, belching smoke stacks and the unending clamour of machines filled our towns and cities, blackening the air and the faces of the workers who were drawn to these new temples of industry and manufacturing. Thousands upon thousands of people moved from the country to the burgeoning cities. As the revolution gathered pace, it turned Britain into the workshop of the world. Huge fortunes were made as innovation developed rapidly and productivity soared. But the Industrial Revolution had a very dark side, creating intolerable conditions for millions of people. While the owners of the new factories and manufacturing sectors accrued greater and greater wealth, a draconian factory system emerged, with the new urban proletariat living in appalling slum conditions. Child labour was commonplace. Poverty and disease accelerated in the new urban environment as workers lived cheek by jowl, crammed into cheap and nasty slum conditions which took a terrible toll on health and life expectancy.

  It was therefore no surprise that these unprecedented social conditions spawned a new political movement. Its raison d’être was to redress the huge inequality that had grown up between the owners of capital and those who laboured to create the profits. Socialism, in all its many forms, was a reaction to the unacceptable exploitation faced by the new industrial workforce enduring powerlessness and poverty in the rapidly growing urban areas. In the UK, the socialist movement agitated for reform. It wanted decent sanitation, safer conditions in the factories, limits on child labour, paid holidays and reductions in the hours that made up the working week. Reformers fought to establish rudimentary health clinics and educational opportunities for everyone. Trade unions and social reformers lobbied Parliament for change and finally organised to enter Parliament themselves to represent the working classes directly. Democratic socialist ideas were to be instrumental in creating a social welfare system in the UK after the Second World War, which included comprehensive unemployment insurance, access to free healthcare and an extended universal right to free education as well as access to affordable housing. There was an explicit promise to fight what William Beveridge had so strikingly called the five ‘Great Evils’ of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness, which stood in the way of social progress. His report, dealing with the fragmentation of the social insurance system and suggesting the introduction of an entirely new social security settlement, had become an unexpected publishing sensation in the war years. It sold an astonishing half a million copies and became the foundation of a social security settlement which was a defining cornerstone of social progress when it was implemented by Attlee’s Labour government after the Second World War. Democratic socialists, through campaigning and governing, forged a more humane and socially just society. Now, as we have seen from the earlier analysis of soaring levels of inequality and social injustice in our current system, the time is ripe to do this again – this time in our modern setting.

  We are now, in the twenty-first century, faced with changes that are likely to be even more disruptive than those which first called Labour into existence over a hundred years ago. And the pace of this transformation is likely to be exponential not linear, as it was during the First Industrial Revolution. This presents great opportunities for the development of humankind, but it also requires a robust and clear strategy from a government determined to make this transformation work for all.

  Humanity has been here before. We know from experience that some countervailing political force is needed to ensure that the change that is upon us is shaped in the interests of the whole community and that the transition from the old economy to the new is properly planned and managed. We need to evolve a new form of socialism for this second machine age, to make sure that the outcome is both socially and environmentally sustainable.

  We wish to explore ways in which a reinvigorated democratic socialism can ensure that we create an economically vibrant, socially just, environmentally sustainable future for all in the face of what is expected to be the most disruptive exponential change the human race has ever experienced.

  WHAT IS THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION?

  The First Industrial Revolution harnessed the power of steam. The Second and Third Industrial Revolutions used electricity to mechanise production and then information to automate it. Now humanity is on the cusp of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is already radically reshaping our world and the pace of change and innovation is accelerating.

  The Fourth Industrial Revolution is about the fusing together of technologies. It blurs the lines between the physical, d
igital and the biological world. The scale of change is set to be huge and it will be felt at whole system level as well as by individuals. It is being driven by innovations which include the collection of huge quantities of data and the computing capacity to analyse and deploy it in ways we cannot even yet anticipate.11 Automation is now advancing rapidly. Robot design is progressing in leaps and bounds. Many of our workplaces already have their tasks routinely ordered and distributed to the human workforce by algorithms. Angela saw this when she visited a closed supermarket warehouse where food orders placed over the internet by customers were being put together for delivery to their door. A computer was directing the people gathering the orders which aisles to go to and in what order to ensure the most efficient use of their time fulfilling the orders. This happens in telecoms too, where the computer will suggest to the engineer how faults should be identified and addressed in each case. These algorithms are capable of learning from human patterns and improving over time. They will in the end be likely to replace humans altogether in performing some of these routine tasks. The second machine age is defined by Brynjolfsson and McAfee12 as the automation of many cognitive tasks which make humans and software-driven machines substitutes not complementary. Millions of jobs currently in existence across the globe are likely therefore to be destroyed by this type of automation. The authors cite the algorithms that are even now marking the work of university students without the intervention of any human being. The advent of driverless cars will render millions of taxi and lorry drivers redundant. Despite the huge changes which are expected, we are optimistic about the outcome of this turbo-driven change. It has always been the case that change has created many new jobs as well as destroying existing ones. The transition, however, can be brutal, and sensible societies should plan to preserve their civilised values as technological innovation changes the world around us and especially as it changes the world of work.

  Medicine, too, will be transformed by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Imagine a British doctor wearing a virtual-reality headset that allows him to navigate through a 3D model of a beating human heart, his view soaring through chambers and vessels until he finds a weakness in an atrial wall, at which point he marks up what cuts and seals need to be made. The movements and data are sent through to a surgical robot 100 miles away, where the exact same movements are executed on the patient with flawless precision. Artificial intelligence helps the robot react to the beating of the heart, even dealing with a momentary flutter. Almost all of this is already possible, and its routine deployment will radically change the nature of how we organise the diagnostics and treatment of our own citizens, and even citizens in far-flung places who require the expertise of our brilliant doctors and surgeons.

  Today, similar techniques model entire production lines for manufacturing trains or cars in virtual reality. This enables any flaws in design to be pinpointed and ironed out before the line is even built, which is delivering huge increases in manufacturing efficiency. As the industrial ‘internet of things’ develops, it is likely that much more manufacture will be performed by robots in increasingly automated ‘brainy factories’ overseen by a relatively few human technicians. Production can be performed remotely to design, and very small-scale personal manufacture of bespoke items will become common. Factories are likely to become much more automated, eventually dispensing with the need for a human presence altogether, except perhaps for the occasional technician.

  Developments such as this will not just be confined to the manufacturing sector. Utilities will become more automated, too. Water pipes which alert systems engineers when they need to be repaired are currently being installed in the UK. Robotics and sensing technologies are likely to revolutionise agriculture also, and lead to significant increases in efficiencies as well as major job losses in the sector. In Japan, the company Spread has already developed a ‘Technofarm’, producing indoor, factory-farmed lettuce with a minimal human presence, using resources much more efficiently and completely avoiding the need for pesticides.

  Thanks to the plasticity of the human brain, electronic implants can allow people who are paralysed to control robotic arms by the power of their thoughts. This development has the potential to transform the economic prospects for disabled people, who may be able to enjoy or regain their independence and ability to function in a way which would once have seemed impossible to contemplate. Autonomous self-driving vehicles are being tested in Milton Keynes and robots are becoming more ubiquitous and more sophisticated. Machine learning is advancing so fast that there are now real ethical debates about how to ensure that artificial intelligence does not become completely autonomous of humans and grow into a threat to us all. And as the Pentagon’s bid for $12 billion to pursue AIcontrolled weapons systems demonstrates, warfare is going to be transformed by these processes too.

  Bioscience offers the possibility of gene editing to avoid genetically inherited illnesses. The potential is now emerging to augment human capacities too. These developments require an ethical debate about whether they should be pursued and to what end. Humanity and machines can be combined already to achieve more productive work. Super-strong ‘exoskeletons’, which are worn and controlled by human beings but can lift and move huge weights, are no longer science fiction – they are being developed to be deployed now. (As a long-time admirer of Ripley from the Alien film franchise, Angela already has one on pre-order.)

  If nanotechnologies and quantum computing can be successfully developed and deployed, this offers a potentially huge leap forwards in computing capacity, which in turn enhances the potential speed of development in every area of scientific research. Connecting all of it will enable the collection, exchange and analysis of unimaginable quantities of data. It is estimated that, by 2021, there will be 46 billion sensors animating the ‘internet of things’ (the network of physical devices connected to the internet) in the world. That is close to six for every person on the planet. In 2013, technology company Cisco noted that 13 billion devices were connected worldwide. They are estimating that this will rise to an astonishing 500 billion by 2030. There are already more electronic components that run modern computers than there are leaves on the earth’s trees.13

  The implications of these developments, both ethical and political, are worthy of intense public debate. Data collection and accrual on identifiable individuals is now commonplace. Sensors, which collect data and send it back to operators or manufacturers for their use, are included in almost everything you purchase and much else besides – in your iPhone, your Fitbit, your smart meter and your increasingly automated car. It will not be long until they are included in your washing machine, your toaster and just about everything else you bring into your house or use at work. Every time you casually click on a licence agreement, someone is getting vast amounts of data about you.

  All this is generating a ‘data boom’, the implications of which are only just beginning to be considered by the manufacturers, let alone by the customers and users of these ‘smart’ goods.

  THE SPEED OF CHANGE IS INCREASING

  Hermann Hauser has identified the emergence of what he calls ‘general purpose technologies’ (GPTs) twenty-four times in world history.14 These technologies are examples of drastic innovation which are so profound that they disrupt entire systems. The steam engine, electricity and the invention of the computer are all examples of GPTs. After their invention, literally everything changed. Hauser posits that there were only nine in the first nineteen centuries of the Common Era15 – the printing press being one of the most important of these and the effects of which most closely resemble that of the World Wide Web. There were eight new GPTs in the twentieth century, with the remaining seven arriving at an accelerating rate in the twenty-first. Hauser believes that there are six different waves of computing, the final one, based upon machine learning and the development of artificial intelligence, being the most powerful and unpredictable of all the GPTs ever invented, involving, as it might, the emergence o
f superintelligences. GPTs are defined by their capacity to be totally disruptive of the existing order, and because of this they always cause massive job losses and change on a huge scale. For example, the advent of the railway cost coachmen, stable boys and farriers their livelihoods, to say nothing of those who worked on the previously dominant transport system, the canals. In the past, however, it has taken time for these new technologies to become fully established and disseminated across the economy, since money had to be invested in appropriate infrastructure and the appropriate machinery had to be built. In contrast, the speed of the arrival of the new technologies of today, their lowcost and rapid scalability are unprecedented. This leaves little time for individual displaced workers or society to adjust to the change.