“Work means everything to us,” James Livingston writes in the introduction to his recent book, No More Work: Why Full Employment Is A Bad Idea. The meaning of work, what Livingston calls the work ethic, is our problem. “And we've believed that, even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives—at any rate, we're pretty sure that it gets us out of bed, pays the bills, makes us feel responsible, and keeps us away from daytime TV.” The time for this mode of thinking, we learn, has passed. “These beliefs are no longer plausible,” Livingston says. “In fact, they've become ridiculous, because there's not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won't pay the bills.”Footnote ²

This sums up much of what, in the decade since the 2008 Recession, has come to be known as “post-work” criticism. Adherents to this line of thought argue that freedom is not a good job, but instead a condition that exists beyond work. For most people, this argument goes, both waged and unpaid work under contemporary capitalism constitutes a species of servitude. Regardless of the formal political freedoms one might enjoy as a citizen of a modern democracy, the better part of the average working person's day takes place within vertiginous hierarchies. In the words of Kathi Weeks in The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, perhaps the most learned and insightful of the post-work critics, the workplace “is the site of many of the most palpable and persistent relations of domination and subordination that people confront, even if these are not conventionally perceived as potentially alterable enough to be regarded as properly political matters.”Footnote ³ We are not free at work, and we work too much. Calls for “full employment,” therefore, fail to address the problem of true liberation and the achievement of a democracy worthy of the name.

To that end, most post-work critics make the same basic demands: shorter hours and a universal basic income. In other words, freedom from work. In many ways, post-work is a return to a more militant vision of workplace politics. It recalls some of the most utopian and imaginative aspects of the labor movement. In its call for shorter hours, it picks up a demand that at one time motivated millions but which has not been taken up seriously in the United States since the end of the Second World War, where economic good governance has become indistinguishable from full employment, mass production, and mass consumption. In advocating for a guaranteed annual income, post-work brings to mind similar demands made by many different thinkers since the end of the nineteenth century, from Autonomist Marxists to Milton Friedman, Paul Lafargue to Bertrand Russell.Footnote ⁴ For all these reasons, the post-work analysis is a welcome expansion of the current political imagination, often going so far as to invoke the utility of a frankly utopian political project, as Rutger Bregman does in the title of his recent book, Utopia For Realists: How We Can Build The Ideal World. Bregman's approach is, in many ways, typical of recent post-work literature. It is polemical but scholarly, and it takes the form of an appeal to industrialized nations that they enact laws providing a universal basic income, shorter working hours, and open national borders.Footnote ⁵

These positive policy recommendations, however, coexist in the literature with a worrying tendency stemming from the definition of the word “work,” and the analytical division made by many post-work critics between “work” and something else called “the work ethic,” or—borrowing from Max Weber—the “Protestant ethic.”Footnote ⁶ These categories, themselves products of the development of industrial capitalism, are presumed by post-work critics to exist as agents of historical change that we might track through time. Post-work critics ask the old question, why do the oppressed not rebel against their oppressors?Footnote ⁷ They answer that the oppressed suffer from an inappropriate set of beliefs; working people have invested “work” with the wrong meaning. Ideology—the work ethic—becomes, in this analysis, a ghost that although incorporeal remains an agent of historical change. Weeks calls this set of beliefs “a haunting,” an “ascetic ethos of work” that “lives on in the spirit of capitalism.”Footnote ⁸ James Livingston refers to it as “slave morality,” and a “disease.”Footnote ⁹ Rutger Bregman reaches back in time for the classic articulation of this idea, naming the problem as, simply, “false consciousness.”Footnote ¹⁰

At its heart the post-work analysis subscribes to an essentialist definition of the word “work,” relying on a conceptual division between false necessity and true necessity, ideological and material, work ethic and work, mind and body, humanity and nature. It presumes the existence of a fundamental bedrock of human social activity that is immutable. Upon contact with this bedrock, ideology, politics, and contingency end. The authors presume that “work” has a fundamental, transhistorical meaning, which is best summed up as the activity of maintaining survival, a state of existence one can call bare life. Freedom and true human life begin, this argument runs, only once one has escaped bare life, mere nature. The argument comes down to the claim that our “work ethic,” the social meaning we give to the activity of meeting necessity, no longer matches the reality of “work,” which requires less human effort to meet the obligations of maintaining human existence.

In fact, there is no useful historical distinction to be made between work and the work ethic. They are one and the same. C. Wright Mills was right when he argued that work has no intrinsic meaning. Even something as seemingly immutable as the activity of meeting biological necessity is contingent, open to political and cultural negotiation, and thoroughly qualitative. The meaning of work, the contest over the definition of what is truly necessary activity, goes all the way to the bottom.Footnote ¹¹ It is a pointless task to try to divide necessity from meaning, to say when one is merely achieving necessity, and when one is dealing with social surplus. What might seem like a means to meeting an incontestable necessity is also a social bond and a negotiation within the collective.Footnote ¹² The definition of necessity, even what might appear as biological necessity, is political. It is historical; it changes over time. Rather than divide “true” necessity from false, historians would do better to see the contest over its definition as one of the central grounds of political contest, and therefore, historical change. Rather than rely on the “work”/“work ethic” split to explain history, history must explain this conceptual division.Footnote ¹³

This review will consider several recent additions to the post-work discussion to show examples of thinkers who both subscribe to and avoid an analytical division between work and work ethic. While these authors do not make a single uniform argument, I have decided to look at them together in order to discuss certain general tendencies that run through the literature.

Livingston's No More Work is something between a scholarly analysis and a political manifesto, and in seeking to articulate the post-work thesis as clearly and powerfully as possible, he also most clearly lays bear some of the argument's central historical problems. He begins by providing a material basis for demanding the end of work. “We have lost our race with the machine,” he writes, “but in doing so we won our freedom from the iron grip of economic necessity.”Footnote ¹⁴ In other words, the global industrial apparatus produces enough to provide for all people and produces it more or less automatically (or, hypothetically, could do so). Livingston is arguing that the survival of the species and the production of society can currently be accomplished without the participation of the vast majority of people, and—should society broadly distribute the fruits of industrial production—this eventuality would constitute liberation. Once we embrace the automatic achievement of “economic necessity,” he concludes, not only will people count themselves free from exploitation, but they will no longer need to take action to maintain their own biological survival.

Here, two different ideas of liberation collapse into one another. The first is liberation from exploitation by other human beings; the second is a kind of freedom from the demands of embodied, biological existence. The presumption is that, like capitalist exploitation, the labor of both the reproduction of society and biological survival are also activities of the unfree. This becomes evident in how Livingston collapses two definitions of “work” into one another. Calling on Karl Marx's first volume of Capital, he tells us that “Marx was right” to claim, in Livingston's words, that “the labor process, the metabolic exchange with Nature we call work, was transhistorical.” Still using Marx, Livingston then speaks of the importance of a somewhat more contingent species of work, “purposeful, social labor,” which one may consider the reproduction of society, culture, civilization—in other words, the contingent part of human social life, the political part, the aspect described through the discipline of history.Footnote ¹⁵ When Livingston calls for “no more work,” one assumes he does not in fact want to abolish humanity’s “metabolic exchange with Nature.” But because he does not distinguish between these two conceptions of “work,” technically, that is precisely what he ends up calling for.

Explicit in Livingston's argument is that a politics of liberation is now possible because the industrial mode of production has finally freed people from the necessity to maintain their own survival. In other words, while in theory the urgency of biological necessity has been reduced, the definition of social necessity lags behind because of the ideological mystification of the work ethic.

Frédéric Lordon's Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx On Desire Footnote ¹⁶ is especially helpful in understanding why some workers identify with jobs in which they are exploited. Rather than rely on the “work ethic,” or false consciousness as an explanation, Lordon uses the philosophy of Spinoza to argue that the “desire” workers feel is not mere confusion but a real feeling that originates in the immediate circumstances of both the workplace and capitalist society. Although he considers the possibility of freedom from all necessity,Footnote ¹⁷ he prefers to focus on the creation of social conditions that would avoid the possibility that a person's desire could be captured by another, and so exploited. For Lordon, the problem is not necessity; the problem is exploitation. The solution is “radical democracy,” an organizing principle he calls “recommune.” The principle of radical democracy, he writes, “applies universally to any enterprise conceived as the co-existence and convergence of powers, hence independently of its purpose. Specifically, there are no grounds for exempting the industrial production of goods from this constitutional form.” All participants would be “full partners.” Thus, Lordon says, “the very simple recommunist principle is that what affects everyone should be everyone's thing.”Footnote ¹⁸

Lordon offers a very useful summary of the “bare life” criticism of the commodification of labor.Footnote ¹⁹ “Bare life,” the idea of an absolute minimum of human biological existence, is itself the product of the development of capitalism. Its origins lie in the commodification of labor. A classic description of this process is the account of the transmutation of peasants tied to the land, with their eviction from the means of survival through the enclosure of the commons, into wage earners. Although a modern-day wage worker may be materially far wealthier than a medieval serf, still through their insuperable connection to the means of production—the land—that serf's social world was in a certain respect much more secure. While the community as a whole might live far closer to the edge of subsistence, individuals were not subjected to the daily precariousness of the possibility of suddenly suffering eviction from the source of life, what today we call unemployment. Likewise, although the social horizon of the serf was in theory dramatically more circumscribed than the freewheeling wage-worker navigating the labor market in search of a living, nor did the serf live with the daily possibility that they could suddenly fall out of society the way an unemployed wage worker in the early twenty-first century might. Lordon puts it well, calling “bare life” the “original truth about the employment relation: that it is a relation of dependence, a relation between agents in which one holds the conditions for the material reproduction of the other, and that this is the permanent backdrop and the immoveable foundation for anything that unfolds on top of it.”Footnote ²⁰

Industrialization, the apparatus that produces such magnificent plenty, required for its development the imposition of a daily threat of individual scarcity. It is not the same kind of scarcity that supposedly, according to Bregman, has oppressed the human species for all of history, until now. “For roughly 99% of the world's history,” he writes, “99% of humanity was poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly.”Footnote ²¹ Here, humanity's real enemy is and always has been, evidently, the natural world. Our embodied existence would seem to be the cause of all our woes. “Bare life” becomes the fundamental meaning of work under conditions of capitalism where the vast majority of people have no guaranteed access to life. Liberation would indeed mean escape from this state of constant fear. But scarcity itself is not the result of our embodied being, nor of the existence of any kind of social necessity. It is a quality of capitalism that reduces all questions of necessity from quality to mere quantity. In other words, the meaning of “scarcity” is not a constant over time. Feudal scarcity and industrial scarcity are qualitatively distinct.

A presumption of the fundamental “bare life” definition of work usually presents itself as a discussion of abundance and scarcity. We find this framing in Peter Frase's Four Futures: Life After Capitalism.Footnote ²² (It must be said, Frase performs a service in this book by framing the future as undecided, presenting the possibilities of both utopia and dystopia. He shows the reader the utility of post-work thought in its invitation to see the future as yet still unresolved and, possibly, bringing with it a better world.)

The future faces two challenges, he claims. The first is “automation,” the problem of abundance, or “too much.” The other is global climate change, the problem of scarcity, “too little.”Footnote ²³ He writes of potential futures where necessary activity has been “fully automated”Footnote ²⁴ or “automated away.”Footnote ²⁵ Frase argues cogently that depending on who owns the machines, automation may either liberate the majority of humanity or, potentially, lead the rich, once free of the need for human workers, to simply abandon the poor. He also imagines the possibility of a more ideal outcome where “automation” has liberated human beings from Frase's second definition of work, activity “necessary for the continued existence of our society,”Footnote ²⁶ liberation that would come in the form of “free time for all.”Footnote ²⁷

In Frase's language, automation achieves the completion of activity necessary for “the continued existence of society”—something that is different from activity that is “inherently meaningful.” “It's important to keep the lights on,” he writes, summarizing with approval Marx's classic definition of freedom in the third volume of Capital as freedom from the realm of necessity, “and sometimes that takes work—but keeping the lights on is not what makes us human. It is merely a necessity that we can and must transcend if we are to be truly free. Freedom begins where work ends—the realm of freedom is after hours, on the weekend, on vacation, and not at work. And that remains true whether you work for a capitalist boss or a worker-owned cooperative. The space of work is still the realm of necessity and not of freedom.”Footnote ²⁸ “Keeping the lights on” alone might not make us human, but Frase's categorical dismissal of the activity of meeting necessity as a non-human practice would seem to reaffirm the humanity/nature division that rules out any pressing biological need as sub-human or animal.

In this argument, the activity of answering economic necessity and the demands that come with embodied existence are essentially fit only for slaves. Any defense of “work” only reveals one's unfortunate dedication to the mistaken “Protestant ethic.” But it would seem, from this narrative, that until the most recent of industrial innovations it was impossible for everyone even to hope to enjoy real, human freedom because the demands of biology had made slaves out of the vast majority of all people (incidentally this is not too different from the substance of Aristotle's notorious defense of “natural slavery” in Politics). Freedom, in this analysis, is contingent on a certain kind of wealth, a glut of survival. Precisely how much food this is, how much medicine, how much shelter and from what, how much clothing, how much sleep, how much exercise—we are not told. But clearly it is objective and quantifiable; there can be “too much” or “too little.”

If freedom for some requires the slavery of others, luckily for post-work critics they have theoretical recourse to a new race of natural slaves—automation. “Automation” is a crucial element in the post-work criticism of Livingston, Frase, and Bregman. These authors address the mechanical abolition of human labor with different degrees of nuance. Livingston claims that we have “lost our race with the machine;”Footnote ²⁹ Bregman, more or less, agrees.Footnote ³⁰ Frase pays more attention to the struggle for the control of capital, depicting the character of “automation” as open to political negotiation. But even he chooses to assume in his futurist speculations “that technical change tends toward perfect automation.”Footnote ³¹ “Automation” might seem to have an obvious definition—the replacement of human effort with machine action—but since the word was coined by managers of the Ford Motor Company in the immediate postwar period, its precise meaning has bedeviled engineers and critics alike. None of these post-work writers is too specific about what machines specifically account for automation, although computers and robots figure prominently. What technocrats have called “automation,” workers have often called “speed up”—the elimination of jobs by speeding up human workers through mechanical means. As one autoworker put it in 1960, “whatever Automation means to management, labor bureaucrat, or engineer, for the production worker it means a return to sweatshop conditions, increased speedup and gearing the man to the machine, instead of the machine to the man.”Footnote ³² The reports of mid twentieth-century autoworkers would seem to complicate Livingston's claim that in the postwar period “Automation was particularly effective in autos and steel.”Footnote ³³

Bregman is closer to the mark when he argues that what people call “automation” today places workers in industrialized nations in competition “with billions of working people across the world,” as well as “machines themselves.”Footnote ³⁴ Even in industrialized economies, changes to the labor process under the name of “automation” often make human labor invisible, rather than eliminating it, depriving it of value rather than substance. For example, “automated” check-out counters in stores still rely on human effort to function: in this case, the effort of the customer. “Automated” telephone switchboards still require human labor to navigate phone directories: the labor belonging to the caller. In both cases, human effort that once was recognized through the form of employment and remuneration now, from the company's perspective, no longer exists because it no longer appears on their accounts.

Frase's assumption that all technical change tends towards “perfect automation” reveals an analytical shortcoming of the work/work-ethic divide. This conception of automation only makes sense if one either believes that social necessity is a more-or-less set category, or that it is possible that every new social necessity as it arises will instantly be met by machine action. If one were instead to think of the activity of meeting social necessity as an aspect of politics under constant renegotiation—that is, as an aspect of history—the notion of forever banishing it from political consideration by relegating it to automatic machinery would reveal itself as a patent absurdity.Footnote ³⁵ The historical contest over the meaning of necessity and the best way to meet it are essentially political. They are the same contest.

In the past, others have called for the same reforms as Livingston, Frase, Bregman, and Weeks. Generally, the demand came out of the labor movement, and it occurred as a renegotiation of the meaning of work that was, simultaneously, a fight over the control of the material labor process. For example, beginning in the nineteenth century the shorter hours movement in the United States was not a work-abolition movement, but one aspect of a larger demand for workers’ control of their workplaces. In the interwar period, workers fought for shorter hours while also demanding higher wages, regular shifts, union recognition, the end of speed ups, and the eviction of Taylorism from the shop. It is hard to tell the story of the American labor movement without mentioning the fight for shorter hours—from the mid-nineteenth century textile mills of New England to the Haymarket demonstrations to the Uprising of the twenty thousand in 1909, workers organized around the promise of less work. The goal of the shorter hours movement, however, was not to degrade the meaning of work. Just the opposite, it was to make it more valuable. Workers wanted less work-time to fetch higher wages; they wanted to have a say over their working conditions—when, where, and what they did, and how they did it.Footnote ³⁶

Considering the demands workers like these made of their employers, one might conclude that, generally, they wanted to decrease their alienation from work, rather than perfect it. “Making it more valuable,” constituted a re-valorization, a redefinition of what the work meant, and this meaning included a negotiation over the material character of the labor process. Calling this the result of a mistaken ideology, a “slave morality,” confuses more than it clarifies.

To demonstrate this point, let us turn to a pivotal, historical moment for Livingston (and Bregman) and see how the work/work-ethic division explains its causality. Livingston points to the Nixon administration's seemingly unexpected support of the Family Assistance Program, or FAP, a welfare reform that would have replaced the existing system with something very similar to a guaranteed annual income for poor families with children—that is, the guaranteed annual income that most post-work critics call for. Livingston explains that Nixon came to support a guaranteed annual income because, somehow, he had escaped the power of the work ethic. “That's the big difference between then and now,” Livingston writes. Politicians today, “unlike the advocates of Nixon's FAP,” believe in full employment. “More important,” he says, “they believe that work is self-evidently good for us.” Why do modern politicians fail where Nixon—of all people—succeeded? According to Livingston: “The short answer is the great romance of work.”Footnote ³⁷ But this actually explains very little. Why did the work ethic lose its power over politicians and then regain it? Nor would it explain why in promoting a guaranteed income as a welfare reform in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many women who were mothers and welfare recipients framed their demand in terms of what one might call the “work ethic,” as Johnnie Tillman—an organizer, welfare recipient, and mother—said: “for doing the work we are already doing—child raising and housekeeping.” Or as another organizer put it, “A guaranteed adequate income will recognize work that is not now paid for by society.” If the “Protestant ethic” is the historical causal factor in this story, then we need to explain how the same “bad” idea could somehow manage to cause some people to fight against the principle of a guaranteed income, and others to fight for it.Footnote ³⁸

Weeks' The Problem With Work is at its strongest when discussing unpaid work. Grounding her discussion in the theoretical contributions of thinkers such as Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici, she explores the nuances of feminist demands for both the recognition of unpaid work and also the reformation of the character of those activities. Discussing the Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s, Weeks shows how a demand for a revalorization of socially necessary activity can become a means of changing its qualities.

Weeks is not entirely consistent in her definitions of work and work ethic. Still, her study is theoretically nuanced, and she comes to the conclusion that the meaning of work itself, what earlier she seems to call the work ethic, is in fact the problem under discussion. “While the term ‘work’ succeeds in registering the social dimensions of certain practices and thereby rendering them subject to political debate,” she writes, “what counts as work—particularly with regard to unwaged caring practices like parenting—would need to be continually reevaluated.”Footnote ³⁹ Rather than simple escape, she calls for meaningful and collective negotiation. This continuous reevaluation of the character of social necessity, rather than its calcification in a machine called “automation,” or a demand for the outright abolition of a fixed entity, allows for a definition of freedom that is not mutually exclusive from the possibility of a certain amount of socially necessary activity. And in theory, as Weeks recognizes, if people truly had a meaningful say over what constituted social necessity, they would most likely limit it in both time and space; they would put a frame around it; they would give themselves enough time to be independent of social necessity; they would grant one another a true right to life; and they would make social necessity meaningful on their own terms.

Perhaps the earliest use of the term “post-work” appeared twenty years ago in “The Post-Work Manifesto,” written by Stanley Aronowitz, Dawn Esposito, William DiFazio, and Margaret Yard.Footnote ⁴⁰ Unlike several of the more recent post-work critics, the authors of this document, like Weeks, did not call for the abolition of social necessity but its democratization, hoping to limit it in space and time—that is, redefine it. “We favor a universal public service in which all tasks are shared including those that are most unpleasant,” they wrote. If the activity of social necessity were shared, they argued, people would make sure it was not too onerous. Its demands would diminish. Many hands make light work and perhaps machines would make the work even lighter. “These are the requirements of public service in a world of participatory democracy and in which the individual has been liberated from work in a post-work world.”Footnote ⁴¹

While Livingston claims that the time of the labor movement is over, that its advocates are “all unlikely prisoners—or is it guardians—of the Protestant work ethic,”Footnote ⁴² these earlier advocates of post-work called for an alliance with labor and other social movements. Similar to the shorter hours movement of the turn of the twentieth century, “the struggle,” they said, “will have to be conducted on the shop floor, in local communities, and in legislatures at all levels.”Footnote ⁴³ This was a demand for seizing control and sharing both the power and the responsibility. It offered a clear program of cause and effect. It was grounded in history.