Asad Haider
Asad Haider is a PhD student in History of Consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz working on organization and workers' politics. He is an editor of Viewpoint and author of Mistaken Identity: Anti-Racism and the Struggle Against White Supremacy (Verso, Spring 2018).
Conference abstract
Post-Work and the "Post-" Condition
In the advanced capitalist world, the theme of post-work rose to ascendancy in the 1990s and early 2000s, but it played on a contradiction that had been consistently raised since the 19th century: that the development of the productive forces and the subsequent increasing productivity of labor would make laborers superfluous. At the turn of the 21st century, however, this contradiction would be tied to a particular temporality of “posts” – the most obvious being the postmodern condition, drawing perhaps on poststructuralism, with an ambiguous relation to postcolonialism. This paper interrogates the linear temporality which determines this periodization of the “post.” What does it have to do with the “prehistory” of capital, the so-called primitive accumulation? Do contingency and hybridity actually come after some period in which teleology and essentialism held sway? What is the temporality of our present, the period in which capitalism’s universalizing drive has apparently been achieved?