Those earnest promoters of the work ethic, Dominic Raab and Priti Patel, must be a bit worried. Are we actually enjoying lockdown? Are we enjoying doing less? Are we enjoying being masters of our own time? Maybe we won’t want to go back to work.

The government was expecting an outcry from the people when it extended lockdown. Please, open the factory gates and let me get back in there! Let me rise early again, and scrape the ice from the windscreen! Let me plod through the rain with my enormous jug of coffee and let me buy meal deals at lunchtime! Let me spend my hard-earned cash on after-work drinks with colleagues I hate! Let me never see my children and let me spend long hours standing on buses and trains!

Tories have long pushed the Puritan ideal of hard work for other people. Raab and Patel were among the five authors of a dismal Gradgrindian manifesto in 2012, pompously entitled Britannia Unchained:

The British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.

Football and pop music indeed! Around this time, some bright spark in the Tory party came up with the depressing notion of “hard-working families”, enthusiastically taken up by David Cameron, who, as has been noted many times, singularly fails to distinguish himself in that respect in his own daily life.

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Lockdown is just a holiday from modernity

By Niall Gooch

Then there is former MP for Grantham, Nick Boles. Boles, like many MPs, studied PPE at Oxford, training ground for utilitarians. He is an enthusiastic opponent of the universal basic income, believing that if left alone, Brits will vegetate, or, worse, write poetry:

The main objection to the idea of a universal basic income is not practical but moral.

Its enthusiasts suggest that when intelligent machines make most of us redundant, we will all dispense with the idea of earning a living and find true fulfilment in writing poetry, playing music and nurturing plants. That is dangerous nonsense.

Mankind is hard-wired to work. We gain satisfaction from it.

This sort of thing, as Jeremy Bentham might have said, is nonsense on stilts. If mankind were hard-wired to work, then we would not be enjoying the autonomy of lockdown. Most people don’t gain satisfaction from work, they gain money from it. That’s why they do it.

In fact mankind is hard-wired to write poetry, play music and nurture plants — which is exactly what we have been doing in lockdown. The other day I found myself writing a short poem about the folk singer Sam Lee and his love for nightingales. And I sowed some seeds in a pot. That’s the sort of thing that happens when you have a bit more time.

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Coronavirus will change nothing

By Ben Gummer

At the Idler we’ve seen take-up of our online courses quintupling over the past few weeks. When left alone, it appears, people do not do nothing. They take exercise, they read and they listen to learned lectures on Jane Austen and Plato.

PC Plod famously ticked off sunbathers that lockdown was not a holiday. But in some senses, it is a holiday. And the distinguishing characteristic of holidays is not that you do nothing. It is that you are in control of your own time. Holidays can be quite busy. So it is with lockdown. To a far greater extent than normal, we call the shots. We are not slaves. We take responsibility.

At this point the middle-class communists will pipe up: it’s all very well for you, with your 19^th-century novels and volumes of Keats’s letters. What about the key workers? Are they enjoying lockdown?

No one is saying that being a nurse is not a difficult and important job — now and at all times. And I am more grateful than ever that the dustmen come and take away our rubbish. But we cannot ignore the people for whom the crisis has led to a questioning of what a good life is all about. And a little less work all round would be good for key workers too.

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What do post-liberals really want?

By Peter Franklin

It is instructive as to the mutable nature of morality, that a few weeks ago, being very busy was considered morally good, and now we are being told to indulge in its precise opposite. Do nothing, save lives. This shows you that Nietzsche was right: morality, so-called, is merely a tool of control.

The truth is, as Chesterton said about lying in bed, there is nothing morally good about hard work, or bad about being lazy.

Instead of being regarded, as it ought to be, as a matter of personal convenience and adjustment, it has come to be regarded by many as if it were a part of essential morals to get up early in the morning.
It is upon the whole part of practical wisdom; but there is nothing good about it or bad about its opposite.

After all, what could be more harmless than lying in bed? When lying in bed you are doing nothing to harm the planet. You are consuming nothing. You are bothering no one. And you are doing yourself a lot of good by giving yourself a rest.

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Why Schitt's Creek is a parable for the good life

By Libby Emmons

For many, many people, lockdown will beat working. My neighbour is using his furloughed time and the lovely weather to paint the outside of his house and spend some time in the garden. He says he is not particularly relishing the prospect of going back to work.

And on my daily bicycle rides around west London, an alien observer would be forgiven for thinking he’d landed in some sort of William Morrisesque utopia. There are no cars, the air is clean, birds sing, and smiling family groups cycle along the river.

The main issue here is the people actually enjoy the freedom. The right-wing view is that, left to our own devices, we’d just sit around in our underpants watching daytime TV, and I’m sure there are a few who do that.

But in fact, when people are left to their own devices, and have more free time, they get creative. They help each other. They form community groups. They do things not just for profit. We are seeing the anarchist principles of mutual aid in action, and we are disproving the old proverb, “the devil finds work for idle hands to do”. In fact, idle hands get on with a lot of fun stuff — it’s just not working for the boss.

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And maybe we won’t want to go back to work. Maybe the leisure society dreamed of by people like William Morris and later Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes will start to materialise. Morris believed in what he called “useful work” versus “useless toil”. Russell said that a civilised society would gradually reduce the hours of work, leaving time for poetry, nurturing plants and studying philosophy. And Keynes of course reckoned that technology would usher in a 15-hour working week.

I called my pal Professor Brendan Burchell of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He has been studying working habits for over 30 years.

“I think lots of people are enjoying lockdown though they are afraid to say it for fear of being seen as lacking compassion,” he said.

He reckons that some people will undoubtedly want to work less when the crisis passes. “Whether that’s 1% or 10% or 30%, we don’t know.”

He also predicts that the crisis will lead people to question that other great pillar of contemporary society: consumerism.

“Empty nesters who are used to spending money are realising that they can be perfectly happy without expensive holidays and consumer objects. And if consumerism weakens its hold, so will the work ethic, because people cite ‘money’ as the main reason for working.”

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It’s not that Professor Burchell is against work. “Work is good — in small doses,” he says.

The work ethic is a relative recent invention. It has its roots in the Protestant Reformation — the Tudor authorities were, like Raab, hostile to idlers. Monks were considered to be lazy. It gathered force in the Industrial Revolution when the mill owners required a docile and punctual workforce to toil in the dark satanic mills. That’s when punctuality became a matter of essential morals. And most recently Silicon Valley has invented its own version: unless your side hustle has a side hustle, then you are going to fail in life.

Earlier societies, though, were not so work-oriented. The ancient Greek philosophers insisted on the ideal of “schole” or cultivated leisure, for a happy life, and even the brutal Romans believed that civilised people should enjoy a decent portion of otium. Life was not all about business: they called that negotium.

In the Middle Ages, the great creative projects of the cathedrals were carried out voluntarily in people’s spare time. Guilds were against overwork as it might give you an unfair advantage over your brother in the guild. And there were multiple holy days and feast days when working was prohibited.

Some are born idle, some achieve idleness and right now, a lot of people are having idleness thrust upon them. And many of them rather like it.

Scylla was a absolute horror who lived on one side of the Strait of Messina. With six heads, each on a long neck, she’d reach down and pluck unfortunate sailors from passing ships. Charybdis lived on the other side of strait, but underwater. She really sucked — generating a whirlpool to capsize entire vessels.

The gruesome twosome feature in the Odyssey. Homer’s hero, Odysseus, has to navigate the strait — twice — and only just survives.

Like all myths, the story works on a number of levels. There’s the story itself, of course — and monsters are always good for a ripping yarn. Then there’s the super-naturalisation of things in the real world; in this case, the two fiends personify the shipping hazards of razor-sharp rocks and treacherous currents. Most important, though, is the deeper meaning — the moral of the tale.

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Scylla and Charybdis — ‘the devil and the deep blue sea’ — symbolise the complexities and dilemmas of risk. In life, there’s often more than one danger to watch out for. Veering away from the first can take you too close to the second.

An added level of mythic meaning is that the two monsters are not mirror images of each other. The danger posed by Scylla perched high upon her rock is much more obvious than that posed by Charybdis submerged beneath the waves. This too is of contemporary significance.

Take, for instance, the extremes of Left and Right in modern politics. There are many asymmetries between the communist and fascist systems. Both are essentially totalitarian, with a blood-soaked history, but some of the evils of one can appear to have no parallel in the other. This is a reason why those repelled by the most characteristic features of communism have sometimes veered too close to fascism — and vice versa.

*

Politics is full of bad ideas that come in pairs — to navigate our way between them we need to be aware of both. An increasingly important example is that of workism versus a tendency which I’m going to call anti-workism (though you could see it as a kind of consumerism).

In a brilliant essay for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson provides the following definition of workism:

“…the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.”

Examples of the workist policy framework include the push to get people off welfare and into the labour market, the raising of the retirement age, state subsidies and tax breaks for childcare to get parents (especially mothers) of young children back into paid employment ASAP, and the expansion of the workforce through large-scale immigration.

Even policies that, in the short-term, shrink the size of the workforce, such as the expansion of higher education, ultimately serve a workist purpose — i.e. supplying the so-called knowledge economy with a steady stream of suitably qualified new recruits. Of course, there’s plenty of talk of education for its own sake, but the cost of tuition and the accompanying burden of student debt is sold on the basis of the ‘graduate premium‘ — a thoroughly workist proposition.

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Workism may go hand-in-glove with hyper capitalism, but it cuts across political lines. Left-leaning Millennials and Post-millennials flock to global cities because that’s where the best employment opportunities are. For some, opportunity equals money. But for many others ‘meaning‘ is equally, if not more, important; which is why employers, especially in the creative industries, can get away with unpaid internships and other forms of exploitation. Alternatively some industries, such as management consultancy and corporate law, will pay top whack for the brightest new talent, but will use that money to own their employees’ lives, insisting on long hours in the office plus the electronic leash of the smartphone.

Of course, technology can be used to exploit low paid workers too — digital platforms serving to control a workforce without the responsibility of formally employing it.

*

I don’t want to overdo the dystopianism here. Workism works out for a lot of people and not only those at the top of the tree. It’s certainly preferable to mass unemployment. Nevertheless, our economy, society, culture and politics have become so centred around workist ideas that it’s not surprising that we see a reaction in the form of anti-workism.

This has several strands. There’s the obvious-because-it’s-true argument that there’s more to life than work. If family and community life are being sacrificed to the demands of the labour market — or even basic needs like sleep — then clearly that’s not good.

Then there’s the Marxist critique — which views wage labour in a capitalist society as exploitation. More recent intellectual developments on the Left, such as accelerationism, anticipate and advocate a post-work society in which machines replace workers and a benevolent state meets our material needs — leaving us to occupy our days with macramé or something.

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This fever-dream isn’t exclusive to the Left. Ideas such as a universal basic income paid by the state to every citizen are finding favour among centrists too and even a few conservatives.

The problem with the idea of a post-work society is that despite all the automation, globalisation and immigration we’ve already experienced, most western countries (excepting the victims of the Eurozone) are at, or close to, full employment. Some, like the UK, are experiencing record levels of job creation.

Therefore, a more mainstream form of anti-workism forgets the science fiction and concentrates on present-day issues such as stagnant wages, low pay and poor working conditions. One might think that the obvious solution to these problems is a programme to boost wages and opportunities in the workplace. For instance, through investment in productivity-improving factors like skills and infrastructure.

But instead of emphasising work, the contemporary Left in Britain and America emphasises consumption. Labour’s 2019 manifesto was a case in point — with its high profile offers of state-provided free stuff, like free broadband. (Significantly, the most notable work-related policy was for a transition to a four-day work week, the priority being placed on less work not better work.)

The Right has its own version of enhanced consumption as compensation for rubbish jobs. Unlike the Left, however, the Right’s consumerist offer relies on the market to (literally) deliver the goods. It’s all about cheap stuff, if not free stuff, and nothing must stand its way: domestic markets are left unprotected; offshoring is encouraged; infrastructure spending subsidises global supply chains; the embedded carbon in imports is left unaccounted for; and the tax avoidance of the tech giants is ignored while they disrupt the economy. As long as we get our smiley cardboard boxes, everything’s fine. So shut up about that pay rise, peasant, and enjoy your flatscreen telly.

*

So there you have it: workism and anti-workism — the Scylla and Charybdis of the 21st century economy. Because they present conflicting narratives — work-is-everything versus work-is-for-robots — it is easy to recoil from one and fall into the grip of the other.

How then do we navigate between them?

Firstly, we need to move beyond the idea of work-life balance as if work and life are entirely separate things. They ought not to be. Yes, the potential exists for work to crowd-out the other parts of life but it can enrich them, too — and not just materially. For instance, places of work have a vital role to play as generators of social capital. They ought to be, and often are, community institutions — which is why the damage done by the collapse of industries isn’t only economic.

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Secondly, we should reject the compromise position that divides society between people who ‘live to work’ (and therefore might benefit from workism) and people who ‘work to live’ (and therefore need anti-workism). With very few exceptions everyone needs a life outside work and work in their lives. We must not allow work to become a positional good — a blessing only to a lucky few.

Thirdly, we need to be aware that while workism and anti-workism appear to be opposites, they actually feed off one another. Tech lords such Mark Zuckerberg may flirt with the idea of Universal Basic Income, but until that distant day comes they need us in jobs earning money so we can buy their stuff. It doesn’t matter if you’re not in the knowledge class and thus supposedly about to be replaced by a robot, you must work to consume.

If, however, you are in the knowledge class, then it’s the other way round: you must consume to work. That’s because you can’t devote every waking hour to your job without buying support services that free up your time (e.g. taxis, restaurants, childcare, cleaning and laundry services, to-the-door deliveries and all rest of it). To maximise this capacity, service workers need to be cheap and plentiful, which in turn requires the state to provide enough free stuff to make their low-paid, unsatisfying jobs bearable — and their lives in overpriced global cities feasible.

*

Scylla and Charybdis always were partners in crime. But somewhere, beyond their reach, there is the prospect of a very different society.

Whether it would be richer, in aggregate, I don’t know. But it might be happier.

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It’s written from the perspective of a decaying civilisation awaiting the invader. A fatalistic ruling class is resigned to its fate and mounts no defence of their city – except for a display of finery, which they hope will impress their new overlords.

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Their behaviour is both pompous and cowardly; and one hopes they get what they deserve (which in the poem they do, but more on that later).

‘Waiting for the barbarians’ has been interpreted as a satire on authoritarian paranoia – and its deep psychological need for a mortal enemy. But this is a misinterpretation. The poem satirises decadence, not paranoia.

The protagonists don’t so much fear invasion as long for it – seeking exaltation in subjugation. Indeed, there’s a special egotism in seeing oneself as the last in a long line – the culmination of an old order and therefore entitled to give it up without a fight.

Real world examples include the 20th century liberals who saw the triumph of socialism as inevitable. Or the appeasers who would have had us submit to Hitler. Or the post-war declinists who gave up on Britain and begat the euro-submissive establishment.

Today, we can see the same impulse in those who wait not for barbarians, but robots.

There’s a whole industry of experts predicting the obsolescence of the human workforce, displaced by the irresistibility productivity of AI-powered automation. It’s a disturbing, but also beguiling, prospect – a promise of leisure and luxury without limit. I’m half-attracted to it myself.

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But is it inevitable? Writing for Bloomberg, Noah Smith sounds a sceptical note:

“The truth is, nobody knows how many jobs will be replaced by automation, or how automation will affect wages and inequality. There’s the possibility that AI, rather than replacing workers, will mostly just allow them to do their jobs more easily. And even as some jobs are eliminated, new ones will pop up, possibly at higher wages. That may involve painful, stressful transitions for people who have to switch jobs, but it doesn’t represent a robot apocalypse…”

It’s not that the relevant technologies aren’t already making advances. But whether they’re destroying jobs or not is an open question:

“…some countries that use more industrial robots, such as South Korea, Germany and Japan, have unemployment rates as low as or lower than that of the U.S.”

Exhibit A in the case that robots are replacing us is what happened to manufacturing employment in the 2000s. In America, a third of all factory jobs – nearly 6 million – were lost. As noted by Gwynn Guilford in an article for Quartz last year, there is no precedent for this rate of attrition, not even the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In seeking to attach blame, technology is an obvious suspect; but there is a plausible alternative – competition from, and offshoring to, low cost manufacturing economies (especially China). So how do we decide between them?

The standard view is that despite the job losses, there was a substantial rise in US manufacturing output in the 2000s – showing that America automated its jobs away (as opposed to exporting them to China). But as Guilford explains, the output statistics are misleading. That’s because they’re adjusted for the exceptionally rapid rate of product improvement in the computers subsector (Moore’s Law and all that):

“…the method statisticians use to account for these advances can make it seem like US firms are producing and selling more computers than they actually are. And when the computers data are aggregated with the other subsectors, the adjustment makes it seem like the whole of American manufacturing is churning out more goods than it actually is.”

Strip out this adjustment and the “apparently robust growth in manufacturing productivity is mostly a mirage”, which means we’re not looking at a productivity miracle:

“To be clear, automation did happen in manufacturing. However, throughout the 2000s, the industry was automating at about the same pace as in the rest of the private sector. And if booming robot-led productivity growth wasn’t displacing factory workers, then the sweeping scale of job losses in manufacturing necessarily stemmed from something else entirely.”

So that brings us back to China and some hard questions about the terms of trade and globalisation. This is Trump territory, but only because the ground has been vacated by more moderate politicians.

It’s all too convenient for those who do well out of globalisation to conclude that those who don’t are the victims of unstoppable technological change (as opposed to factors governments can do something about). Indeed, in the long-term, we needn’t worry about the world of work at all, if we assume there won’t be one. We can just theorise about things like ‘post-work’ and universal basic income instead. But what happens when it becomes clear that machines won’t be replacing us after all?

Sod the singularity, we must assume that the future of work will remain in our hands. When it comes, and if we’re still in charge, we’ll look very stupid if we have no idea what to do with it.

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At the end of ‘Waiting for the barbarians’, some terrible news reaches the city from the frontier: there are no barbarians. The confused citizens return to their home, wondering what to do now the invaders aren’t coming:

“They were, those people, a kind of solution.”

But don’t be fooled, this is really important stuff – and not just because the two sides constitute the most intellectually interesting bits of the British Labour Party. They are also representative of the much wider struggle between the working class politics of the old left and the bourgeois identity politics of the new left.

Ultimately, this goes beyond the left altogether, indeed beyond left and right – and towards the great dividing lines of the future, which will be about the nature of humanity in a world where technology poses a fundamental challenge to age-old understandings of who we are.

For the moment, let’s get back to the political geekery – and the beef between Blue Labour and the Accelerationists.

This is a divide I’ve peered into before, but this time I’m going to unpack a piece for the New Statesman by Jon Cruddas, a leading Blue Labourite. He begins by introducing the other side:

“Undiagnosed by the mainstream media and much of the academic community, a major intellectual renewal is underway across the left. It is energetic and tech-savvy… embraces bold ideas, and is well-organised and networked.

“It is fast becoming a new political movement; best captured in influential articles and books discussing ‘accelerationism’, ‘postcapitalism’ and even ‘fully automated luxury communism’.”

The animating idea of this movement is that, thanks to automation etc, there’ll soon be so much wealth available for redistribution that we’ll all be able to live on the welfare state – and not have to work unless we want to. How soon is soon is unclear, but the immediate task for the left is to accelerate progress towards the hi-tech socialist paradise.

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Cruddas places Accelerationism within a wider transformation in the nature of left-wing politics:

“The historic concerns of the left – nurturing citizenship and building the ‘common good’ – [has been] lost through a descent into relativism and a politics of the self…

“The character of the left has shifted. It has become obsessed with the belief that politics is an authentic search for the self, rather than a sacrificial contribution to the commons, with its trade-offs and compromises.”

Traditional socialism, of which Blue Labour is a part, emphasises working class solidarity allied to a sense of shared, though non-jingoistic, patriotism. It therefore stands at odds with the values of the new (or post-modern) left:

“This politics assumes that generalisation is not possible given our assorted personal histories and experiences of privilege, inequality and exploitation. Left politics has turned inward, preoccupied by questions of personal identity and with a new language of fluidity, hybridity and intersectionality. This dovetails with our modern narcissistic, individualised culture and Facebook echo chambers, in contrast to historic forms of collective agency and physical solidarities informed by traditional – often ancient – models of justice.”

Accelerationism is at the leading-edge of the post-modern left – because it purports to show how we can achieve a post-work economy and a borderless world. It is a vision of the future in which the things that Blue Labour stands for aren’t just seen as oppressive, but also obsolete.

No wonder Jon Cruddas doesn’t approve. His ideological opponents seek to detatch people from group identities and loyalties once held dear on the left. The post-modern approach is about individualised safe spaces, not common ground.

And yet, while some critics accuse the new left of pandering to the self-obsession of the ‘snowflake’ generation, others accuse them of making blanket generalisations – especially when ascribing ‘privilege’ or victimhood to individuals on the basis of ethnicity, gender or sexuality, while paying scant regard to personal circumstances, experiences or actions.

So is the new left a rabble of narcissistic individualists or a cabal of crude collectivists? Logically both accusations could be false, but they can’t both be true.

Except that they can. To understand why, let’s begin with the recent Twitter spat between the comedian Robert Webb and the journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer. As part of an online debate about exclusivity of journalism, the latter made her position clear:

“I didn’t go to Oxford because I was privileged. I went to Oxford because I was clever.”

In response, Webb tweeted the following:

“I didn’t go to Cambridge because I was clever. I went because I was a white male from a stable family who encouraged me to work hard at an excellent state school. That’s all privilege. All of it…”

It all got a bit unnecessary after that, and Webb ended up apologising, but let’s focus on the core of his argument i.e. “That’s all privilege. All of it.”

There couldn’t be a pithier summation of what the post-modern left is all about. If it’s all privilege (all of it) – then there can be no merit (none of it). No merit in work and no merit in citizenship. This legitimates the twin goals of a post-work society and a borderless world – and, therefore, the ‘liberation’ of the individual from the responsibilities and loyalties of the past.

Crude collectivism and narcissistic individualism are thus far from contradictory. Indeed, the former is how you get to the latter.

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Writing for the Guardian, Andy Beckett explores the ideas of the ‘post-work’ movement:

“…a loose, transatlantic network of thinkers who advocate a profoundly different future for western economies and societies, and also for poorer countries, where the crises of work and the threat to it from robots and climate change are, they argue, even greater…”

“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.”

But isn’t work an integral part of life? If it seems so, it’s because we’ve been conditioned, say the post-workists:

“One of post-work’s best arguments is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the work ideology is neither natural nor very old. ‘Work as we know it is a recent construct,’ says [Jeremy] Hunnicutt. Like most historians, he identifies the main building blocks of our work culture as 16th-century Protestantism, which saw effortful labour as leading to a good afterlife; 19th-century industrial capitalism, which required disciplined workers and driven entrepreneurs; and the 20th-century desires for consumer goods and self-fulfillment.

“The emergence of the modern work ethic from this chain of phenomena was ‘an accident of history,’ Hunnicutt says. Before then, ‘All cultures thought of work as a means to an end, not an end in itself.’”

I think this misrepresents both the present and the past. It may come as a surprise to the cognitive elite, but even today most people work to live, not live to work (though this isn’t the same thing as seeing no value in work). As for the notion of a Protestant/capitalist work ethic, the idea that labour has moral content precedes both Protestantism and capitalism by centuries, even millennia.

Consider the Benedictine motto ora et labora (pray and work), or the alternative version laborare est orare (to work is to pray). Going back yet further there’s plenty in the Old Testament about the necessity and dignity of work, for instance the following passage from the book of Proverbs:

“Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest. How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep: So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man.”

Thinking about the ant and her having no “guide, overseer, or ruler”, I wonder if what the post-workists truly object to is work itself or its regimentation in modern times?

Industrialisation can be seen as a process in which humanity has been mechanised to serve the literal and organisational machines of the capitalist era. From the smoke-belching factories of the 19th century to the high tech production lines of the 21st, it’s easy to draw an equivalence between capitalism and the dehumanisation of work.

Yet, there’s another story to tell about capitalism, which is the liberation of humanity from work. Marian L Tupy sets out the facts in an article for Reason:

“Between 1870 and 1987, working hours in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States declined from roughly 3,000 hours per year to roughly 1,600 hours per year. That’s a reduction of 47 percent. In Japan, an outlier, they declined by 33 percent.”

Do improvements in health and longevity mean that we’re making up these shorter hours over our longer working lifetimes? Quite the opposite, in fact:

“…in 1856 a British male worked 149,700 hours over the course of his lifetime. By 1981 that number dropped to 88,000 hours. That’s a decline of 41 percent.”

And, of course, those shorter working hours come with a massive increase in living standards. Despite the stagnation of wages in the last couple of decades, it’s important not to lose sight of the long view.

Counting hours is not the only way of looking at the progress we’ve made. Think of all the facets of the human experience that we’ve freed from work:

• The end of child labour
• Increasingly long retirements, supported by pensions
• The expansion of higher and further education (not to mention the ‘gap year’)
• The two-day weekend
• Shorter working days and longer holidays

(The entry of women into the paid workforce might seem like a move in the other direction, but it’s beeen enabled by their substantial, if incomplete, liberation from unpaid labour in the home.)

For millions of people, especially the young and the old, the post-work society is already here. For those still in the labour force, work is generally safer and less physically demanding than it was for most people in previous generations.

All of this has been made possible by three things. First, improvements in economic productivity; secondly, the fact that the fruits of this productivity have been widely shared; and, thirdly, people being able to enjoy their additional free time.

Will we be able to sustain these conditions in coming decades?

I’d say we have our work cut out.