Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The left’s political defeat after 1989 was so complete that, as the philosopher Fredric Jameson wrote, it became easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.3 Put more brutally, it had become impossible to imagine this working class – disorganized, in thrall to consumerism and individualism – overthrowing capitalism. The old sequence – mass strikes, barricades, soviets and working-class government – looks utopian in a world where the key ingredient, solidarity in the workplace, has gone AWOL.

Meanwhile, in the developed world, though a core of trade union activists clings to the old methods and culture, a rising class of young, precarious workers finds – as in Athens in December 2008 – it is easier to squat buildings and riot than to join a union.

The rapid increase in productivity brought about by computers and automation, Gorz argued, has turned the sphere beyond work into the primary battleground.