In two recent New Left Review articles Aaron Benanav has laid out what he sees as the road from necessity to freedom — a revolutionary journey once described by Marx and embraced by most of us who call ourselves socialists. In this, Benanav rejects the currently dominant “automation discourse” of techno- futurists such as Martin Ford, Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, and many others, with its bleak jobless future of dependent drones subsisting on some version of universal basic income — the opposite of freedom. This is a stance I wholly agree with. The question remains, however, who has the power to make the transition from today’s ever worsening realm of necessity to that of freedom.

Benanav’s articles were written before the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, which turned a preexisting downward trend into an economic free fall across the world. Despite the optimistic predictions of imminent recovery from voices ranging from the Trump administration to Keynesians such as Larry Summers and Paul Krugman, others, Marxists and mainstreamers alike predict an even deeper depression that will reorder the world economy and with it the structure of employment far beyond what Benanav, or anyone else, could have foreseen in 2019. The implications of this will be discussed toward the end of this essay, but first I will critically examine Benanav’s thesis in its own terms.

In the second of the two articles we are presented only with a working class (the traditional agent of transition from necessity to freedom) that is “atomized” by underemployment, and labor movements that have been “thoroughly defeated,” on the one hand, and unspecified “social movements” that lack “permanent formations” and, therefore much power, on the other hand. This “pessimism of the intellect” concerning agency flows from Benanav’s analysis of the changes in the structure of working-class employment he sees as being a dominant and unique characteristic of contemporary global capitalism. What, then, according to Beananav, is this new characteristic form of employment and how did we arrive at this point of powerlessness?