A World Without Work

Can you imagine not working?

I mean, can you imagine not working for money?

And I also mean, can you imagine a world where working for money wasn't the status quo? Where no one worked for money?

And further, I mean, can you imagine a world where the concept of work didn't define your activity?

I don't mean imagining a world in which the activities that you find meaningful, useful, or enjoyable are somehow suddenly off-limits. But can you imagine a world where those activities characterize life rather than work?

And I don't mean imagining a world in which people are no longer the subjects of exploitative labor relations. But instead, can you imagine a world where no social relation is construed through the experience of work (e.g., "working on my marriage," parenting as work, etc.)?

I am deep in some big questions about class, the moral value of different types of work, the concept of purpose, and the ways in which we reproduce the systems we mean to disrupt. But each time I dig into some aspect of these questions, I encounter another thinker reminding me that waged work has become so naturalized that we don't stop to question it as a fundamental organizing principle of society. We don't question the way work defines our identities—even if we're sufficiently evolved enough to question the way a particular job might define our identity. We don't question how the idea of work mediates our experience of the world.

I'm going to keep things short, so I can get back to research and analysis. But before I go, I want to share some of the passages that help to crystallize "the problem with work" for me.

"...when we criticise work, we often come up against fear and confusion. This fear is not merely the product of a work ethic promulgated by elites. Given that, under capitalism, work becomes the only avenue for self-development, respect and fulfillment, this is a genuine fear of a loss of self."

— Amelia Horgan, Lost in Work

"To furnish a barren room is one thing. To continue to crowd in furniture until the foundation buckles is quite another. To have failed to solve the problem of producing goods would have been to continue man in his oldest and most grievous misfortune. But to fail to see that we have solved it, and to fail to proceed thence to the next tasks, would be fully as tragic."

— John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

"Underneath virtually all experience of work today, there is a fatalistic feeling that work per se is unpleasant. One type of work, or one particular job, is contrasted with another type, experienced or imagined, within the present world of work; judgments are rarely made about the world of work as presently organized as against some other way of organizing it; so also, satisfaction from work is felt in comparison with the satisfactions of other jobs."

— C. Wright Mills, White Collar

"Yet the puzzle of our motivation [to work] would seem to be of little practical concern; when we have no memory or little imagination of an alternative to a life centered on work, there are few incentives to re?ect on why we work as we do and what we might wish to do instead."

— Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work

"The residues of the traditional ethics of work also appear, I would argue, in the ways that the language of creativity is in some instances deployed as a synonym for labor, at least when it has the effect of not only selectively expanding what counts as labor but also elevating its status as a worthy human practice. Thus, for example, by describing postcapitalist society in terms of a liberation of creative activity, even nonwork can be imagined as a disciplined practice directed toward a laudable goal, and distanced from something that risks association with the sin of sloth."

— Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work

I'd love to know: have you thought about a world without work?

Or does that idea make you recoil? And if so, what precisely are you recoiling at?