“Where do you see yourself in ten years?”
A common question asked to the potential employees in the corporate world. Usually, managers ask employees to provide a work plan and possible outcomes for the coming years.
Corporations prepare inventories of material and human resources considering probable future market scenarios. Countries around the world prepare a budget every year, and develop visionary plans for many years ahead. A range of anticipated futures from the individual to the planetary level indicate forecasting is a solemn aspect for contemporary societies.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) forecasted the world of 2050 in 2017; it estimated a cumulative GDP growth of 130% between 2016 and 2050. The top three countries with the highest GDP in 2050 will be China (1st), India (2nd), and the USA (3rd).
To materialize the forecasts of long-term growth potential, the report predicted emerging economies would require to “enhance their institutions and their infrastructure significantly.” Besides, at the supranational level, the United Nations, OECD, G-8, and BRICS countries have forecasts on different fronts such as climate change, growth of economies, and other socio-economic indicators.
Crisis propensity and total mobilization
Standing on the setbacks of the Covid-19 pandemic, we come across forecasts of economic downturn and as well as possible rebounding. The International Monetary Fund predicts India will achieve 1.9% GDP growth in the current fiscal year due to the on-going pandemic. However, India might grow at 7.4% in the coming fiscal year starting from April 2021 given that India could control the coronavirus outbreak effectively and introduce rigorous stimulus into the economy.
Similarly, on June 11, our finance minister announced the national budget for the FY 2020-21. This economic budget will aim to achieve 8.2% GDP growth in the coming year, recovering from the current fiscal year’s 5.2% growth. Nonetheless, the pandemic has warranted revisions in our national plans. Economists are suggesting measures that will prevent people from going below the poverty line for now. Eventually recovering will become the first priority that will ultimately help reach the futuristic visions of working Bangladesh’s way towards becoming a “middle-income” country by 2021 and a “developed country” by 2041.
A change of priorities is a regular feature. A look back into history reveals that the concern with the global environmental crisis has overshadowed the preoccupation with the possibilities of a nuclear war. Similarly, the AIDS pandemic has diverted our attention from that of world hunger. Certainly, none of these crises is over at any measure.
Besides, the world is still recovering from the economic recession of 2008. Nonetheless, the new dimensions of crises alter future forecasts. Ernst Junger, in the book The Worker has reflected on this crisis propensity of the modern age. The modern age is deprived of stability and certainty, despite widespread claims to “freedom, mastery, and power” Junger claimed in 1932.
Ernst Junger criticized political parties in the 1920s and 1930s that aimed for national plans, which could only be achieved through a total mobilization -- where “every aspect of life becomes a function of the state.” In this process, individual lives become -- life of workers. Thereby, in Bangladesh, peasants are urged not to keep fallow any cultivable land or labour, receiving countries are requested not to deport Bangladeshi labour migrants following the pandemic, and “saving the economy” has become the global priority.
The Covid-19 pandemic leaves us in a situation to reflect on the consequences of forecasting on the people. We must try to interpret the way the future is projected, and the possible effects on the population, ie, workers, in achieving the forecasts set by the policy-makers.
The human condition in a work-state
In a work-state, generally, people are treated as workers who will help achieve the future goals set by the state or government. The extravagance of the futuristic plans crucially reverberates to what philosopher Hannah Arendt termed as the human condition.
In The Human Condition, published in 1958, Hannah Arendt suggested, active lives of humans are entangled with each other. On this premise, Arendt differentiated human labour and work. Simply, labouring refers to what we do to keep ourselves alive. Humans eat, take shelter, and procreate like all other animals, even not being lured to do so.
Contrarily, work is something that gives meaning to our existence and activities collectively. We work to produce something; we build homes, make furniture, knit clothes, manufacture vehicles, and/or write books. Our work establishes something which facilitates our living.
Work is significant, as it makes up the reality that everyone in the society shares. Human work generates lasting effects, as generations to come will inherit many of these. The archaeological histories of, for instance, the Mesopotamian, Indus, and Mayan civilizations reveal the achievements of human work. Even the mega-structures of the contemporary world are the outcomes of human work.
The meaning of work is significantly altered when humans are considered only as workers for achieving a future proclaimed by the state mostly run by a few -- capitalists or socialists alike. In the process, human work is transformed into sheer labour.
In contemporary work-states, everything is produced as a commodity to be exchanged and consumed, which ironically reduces “a shared feeling” among the people. Mainly, a profit motive drives everyone and everything. Thus, the distinction between labour and work is diluted, leading to a deterioration of the shared ground for politics -- action.
For example, during the pandemic, the garment workers were asked to manufacture products that could be sold to achieve the targeted export earnings and help reach the target of becoming a middle-income country. The formation of the work-state facilitated a business practice where western retailers and garment manufacturers are oriented towards economic forecasts and securing profit; hence, ripping off from the labouring human beings any possibilities of a shared action.
Labouring bodies become subservient to the forecasts and state visions. In a way, many are being asked to make human bodily sacrifices for the economy and the future of the state. The contemporary states are worried about harnessing the results of human labour but are not considerate about the suffering workers.
The costs of realizing forecasts
Forecasting creates an image of the future. For Bangladesh, forecasts centre on becoming a high-income country. Bangladesh heavily depends on two sectors to reach the forecasted future. The future relies on the export earnings from the garment industry and inflow of foreign remittances by the labour migrants. However, these workers envisage and experience different futures.
During my research with the garment workers and international labour migrants, I have come across perspectives towards life that are positioned far away from the forecasted national scenarios. Many people in the countryside become garment workers or international labour migrants due to economic constraints. For many, these are the only options for personal or familial economic stability. At present, the country has more than 4 million garment workers and around 10 million labour migrants. Over the years, governments have facilitated these industries.
In response to the question, “what future do you see coming?” invariably, the garment workers replied, “we want to go back to the village.” They preferred to lead life by cultivating or running a small business. Many aimed to save some money and return to the village. Mostly, these labourers do not see their future as a garment worker.
On the other hand, international labour migrants usually embark on an unknown journey. Most of the migrants are uncertain about the job they will be expected to do before starting the journey.
For garment workers, “future” is about returning to the life lived in the past, while, for migrant workers, future is an unknown territory. However, big numbers of remittance inflow, export income, or GDP growth never recognize these concerns. The different futures of the workers sometimes originate from the fact that these labourers mostly work in perilous conditions attested by the death rows and industrial accidents that make the newspaper headlines every now and then.
In 2019 alone, at least 4,000 migrant workers died in foreign lands. Many migrant workers suffer from physical and sexual abuse, inadequate food, forced work without leave, and irregular salaries from their employers. Arguably, an unfriendly workplace atmosphere plays a role in migrant workers’ premature deaths. Globally, one in six fatal workplace accidents occurs in the construction sites -- some of which are iconic structures of the megacities.
These uncertainties of life confirm Ernst Junger’s claim that national plans and total mobilization supported by the illusions of progress had become “not the basis of security, but the source of permanent production of danger and destruction.” The world is propelled by the gleam of advancement, rewards, and good fortune for all. Even though apparently it unites all, at the same time it creates stark divisions.
The World Inequality Report 2018 has revealed that since 1980, the top 1% of the population captured 27% of total growth while the bottom 50% captured only 12%. Hence, distribution of the global labour income is extremely unequal. International Labour Organization (ILO) has identified that in 2017, the top decile earned 48.9% of all labour income, whereas the poorest 50%, ie the global workers, earned just 6.4% of the world’s labour income.
With a Marxian lens, we can identify the grave alienation and immiseration of the working class in our rally towards massive forecasted progress.
The threats to forecasting
We are forecasting and planning based on a capitalist production system but the implicit foundational contradictions of it are not recognized. David Harvey has observed, “the circulation and accumulation of capital cannot abide limits.” Hence, it must find compounding exponential growth year after year.
Karl Marx in his magnum opus The Capital had argued long before that the profit motive of a capitalist system would always dig its own downfall despite the financial policies and/or state interventions based on economic modelling aiming for growth. Capitalism always suffers from a cycle of overproduction and unemployment.
There are other potential threats to forecasting. The capitalist system’s requirement of exponential growth needs a corresponding level of growth in demand. If consumers feel assuaged, or unable to purchase -- the economic system that aims continual growth will falter.
As the Covid-19 pandemic has shown, nature is more powerful than any forecasting. The pandemic also revealed, when an element of nature -- for instance any natural resource or labour -- becomes short in supply, the capitalist system falls out of its cycle.
An irony from which the work-states suffer, as David Harvey points out, the crisis tendencies are never solved, they just get moved around, espousing a form of creative destruction -- evident by the readjustment of forecasts and future plans, relocation of production sites, and identification of new markets.
The forecasts provide frameworks for particular views of a future world and appropriate ways of acting in it. The emphasis on the future provides legitimization for existential life in the present. We must address these issues of work-states and move beyond capitalism towards a different form of “social coordination” that will ensure an adequate standard of living for all.
Mohammad Tareq Hasan is an anthropologist and teaches at the University of Dhaka.
