The Supposed End of Work, and the Drivel Spoken About It

A few years back, when the hype about automation anticipated more than glorified autocompletes, fashionable "thinkers" proclaimed the imminence of radical changes in day-to-day living. Completely misunderstanding the 2013 Frey-Osborne study of automation they thought we were looking at "the end of work" within a few years.

Thus did we have a little, mostly unserious, talk about how society could adapt to half of the work force being put out of a job, like what the relation of work to income would be.

Amid it all, of course, were those who assured everyone that work would still be part of people's lives, with these usually seeming to mean alienated labor done in the market for an employer for wages, the psychological and "spiritual" value of which presumably eternal arrangement they insisted were salutary, claims the media generally treated with the utmost respect.

Of course, few had anything to say about the fact that the media was usually quoting elite commentators whose ideas about what "work" is were remote from the lives of 99 percent of the public, whose experience and thoughts were, as usual, of no account. Many of these, for many of whom "work" has never ceased to mean the hell on Earth that we see in Emile Zola's Germinal, or Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, or Takiji Kobayashi's Kanikosen--and many more for whom work means far, far less but still considerable suffering--would disagree with those "tech" company vice-presidents who think that their sipping a cappuccino on the G6 as they fly home from Davos is "hard work" about whether work is the uplifting and necessary thing they say we cannot do without, instead hopefully looking ahead to the possibility of a different world.