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Welcome to Antifa Book Club, the season 3 finale: the full book review of "Inventing the Future".

Srnicek and Williams kick things off with a stark observation: the future feels "cancelled," and the left is struggling to build a better world despite widespread discontent. They attribute this to what they call "folk politics". Imagine a common-sense approach on the contemporary left that prioritizes the local, the immediate, the small-scale, and personal experience over big-picture, systematic change. Think temporary protests, direct action, and a focus on building small, autonomous communities. While these efforts can foster solidarity and awareness, the authors argue they've largely been ineffective at achieving significant, lasting change against global capitalism. In contrast, they show how neoliberalism achieved its global dominance through a patient, long-term strategic approach, systematically building vast ideological infrastructure like think tanks and influencing common sense for decades.

But "Inventing the Future" doesn't stop at critique. It offers an ambitious alternative: a post-work future. The book highlights that capitalism is increasingly unable to generate enough decent jobs, leading to widespread precarity and an expanding global "surplus population". This reality, they argue, makes a world beyond wage labor not just desirable, but increasingly necessary.

To achieve this, they propose a set of "non-reformist reforms" that push the boundaries of what capitalism can tolerate. These include:

• Full automation: Aggressively automating boring, demeaning, and hazardous work to liberate humanity from drudgery.
• Reduction of the working week: Significantly shortening work hours with no cut in pay, perhaps to a three-day weekend, to redistribute work and improve well-being.
• Universal Basic Income (UBI): Providing every citizen a sufficient, unconditional income without means-testing, to free people from the coercion of wage labor.
• Diminishment of the work ethic: Challenging the deeply ingrained cultural belief that work is the sole path to self-fulfillment and that remuneration must be tied to suffering.

Achieving this grand vision isn't automatic. It requires a long-term, counter-hegemonic strategy. This means building a new "common sense" around these ideas, forging a broad populist movement by uniting diverse interests against a common antagonist, developing a diverse "organizational ecology" that combines different forms of action, and strategically identifying "points of leverage" to exert real power against global capital.

This journey is about more than just ending work; it's about reclaiming modernity, progress, and universal emancipation. It's about continually striving to overcome all constraints and keep inventing new futures. So, get ready to challenge your assumptions and imagine a different world with us, as we dive into "Inventing the Future."