The Long Read - Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs Flashcards
An obsession with employability runs through education.
“Hard-working families” are idealised by politicians.
Workers commute further, strike less, retire later. Digital technology lets work invade leisure.
A gig economy is an environment in which temporary positions are common and organizations contract with independent workers for short-term engagements.
Unsurprisingly, work is increasingly regarded as bad for your health: “Stress, an overwhelming ‘to-do’ list and long hours sitting at a desk,” are beginning to be seen by medical authorities as akin to smoking.
Away from our unpredictable, all-consuming workplaces, vital human activities are increasingly neglected.
Our culture of work strains to cover its flaws by claiming to be unavoidable and natural. It is an argument most of us have long internalised.
In 1845, Karl Marx wrote that in a communist society workers would be freed from the monotony of a single draining job to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner”.
Post-work may be a rather grey and academic-sounding phrase, but it offers enormous, alluring promises: that life with much less work, or no work at all, would be calmer, more equal, more communal, more pleasurable, more thoughtful, more politically engaged, more fulfilled – in short, that much of human experience would be transformed.
The work ideology is neither natural nor very old. The main building blocks of our work culture are:
1/ 16th-century Protestantism, which saw effortful labour as leading to a good afterlife (Max Weber - The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 1905)
2/ 19th-century industrial capitalism, which required disciplined workers and driven entrepreneurs
3/ 20th-century desires for consumer goods and self-fulfillment.
By the end of the 70s, it was possible to believe that the relatively recent supremacy of work might be coming to an end in the more comfortable parts of the west.
Labour-saving computer technologies were becoming widely available for the first time. Frequent strikes provided highly public examples of work routines being interrupted and challenged. And crucially, wages were high enough, for most people, to make working less a practical possibility.
Instead, the work ideology was reimposed. During the 80s, the aggressively pro-business governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan strengthened the power of employers, and used welfare cuts and moralistic rhetoric to create a much harsher environment for people without jobs.
David Graeber, who is an anarchist as well as an anthropologist, argues that these policies were motivated by a desire for social control. After the political turbulence of the 60s and 70s, he says, “Conservatives freaked out at the prospect of everyone becoming hippies and abandoning work. They thought: ‘What will become of the social order?’”
“I do think there is a fear of freedom – a fear among the powerful that people might find something better to do than create profits for capitalism.”
The work culture has many more critics now. In the US, recent books have challenged the dictatorial powers and assumptions of modern employers; and also the deeply embedded American notion that the solution to any problem is working harder.
Defenders of the work culture such as business leaders and mainstream politicians habitually question whether pent-up modern workers have the ability to enjoy, or even survive, the open vistas of time and freedom that post-work thinkers envisage for them.
In 1989, two University of Chicago psychologists, Judith LeFevre and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, conducted a famous experiment which found that people reported “many more positive feelings at work than in leisure”.
At work, they were regularly in a state the psychologists called “flow” – “enjoying the moment” by using their knowledge and abilities to the full, while also “learning new skills and increasing self-esteem”.
Away from work, “flow” rarely occurred. The employees mainly chose “to watch TV, try to sleep, and in general vegetate, even though they did not enjoy doing these things”.
US workers, the psychologists concluded, had an “inability to organise their psychic energy in unstructured free time”.
To the post-workists, such findings are simply a sign of how unhealthy the work culture has become. Our ability to do anything else, only exercised in short bursts, is like a muscle that has atrophied. Leisure is a capacity.
But for those who think work will just carry on as it is, there is a warning from history. On 1 May 1979, one of the greatest champions of the modern work culture, Margaret Thatcher, made her final campaign speech before being elected prime minister. She reflected on the nature of change in politics and society. “The heresies of one period,” she said, always become “the orthodoxies of the next”. The end of work as we know it will seem unthinkable – until it has happened.
