End of Work

Throughout human history, advancing technology has held out the promise of a dramatically reduced burden of work, leading some to suggest that work as conventionally known could be eliminated altogether. For workers in the economically more developed nations, backbreaking toil in industry and agriculture has been greatly reduced, but people in all societies continue to work hard, for long hours. The contradiction between what technology offers and what society delivers is at the heart of debates around the end of work. As processes of industrialization gathered pace during the 19th century, rapidly advancing industrial technology and production techniques demonstrated powers to reshape the natural and material world with dazzling speed and efficiency, yet work appeared ever more degraded.

Karl Marx is the best-known observer of this contradiction, writing of the tendency for industrial labor to reduce the worker to an alienated appendage of the machine. At the same time, he noted a lengthening working day and an increased pace of work. Marx argued that this was neither natural nor necessary, and that productive efficiency had reached the level where people could be free from unnecessary and degrading work, and instead lead self-directed and creative lives. Marx explained why this was not achieved with reference to the capitalist's need to extract surplus value, or profit, from human labor power.

World War II put a temporary halt to dreams of the end of work, but by the 1950s and 1960s, they had resurfaced. Research on automation and the concept of the postindustrial society focused minds on the potential for technological advance to lead to social and cultural change. Herbert Marcuse's writings from the period represent a high water mark for theories of the end of work. He followed Marx in seeing degrading work as worthy of critique, and drew on analyses of American society to show how automation should be allowed to free human beings from unnecessary work. Marcuse extended Marx's analysis of the reasons behind continued toil to encompass a critique of false needs in the consumer society.

He also posited the existence of a performance principle, a Freudian take on the concept of the work ethic. Processes of deindustrialization and economic liberalization in the 1980s saw mass unemployment return to haunt the leading economies. In the United States of the 1990s, many large employers sought to downsize and move production overseas in an effort to remain competitive. The role of technology was again the key, with computerization reaching operational maturity—the harbinger of a new era of technological unemployment. Even jobs in the service sector appeared at risk of being automated out of existence. During this period, Jeremy Rifkin published The End of Work, a reflection on many of these themes.

Technology also plays an important role in the work of André Gorz. He developed a Marxian analysis of the relationships between work, society, and technology at the end of the 20th century. Gorz proposes a reduction of work time and also a radical improvement in the quality of working life. Outlining the reasons why these propositions are unlikely to materialize, he describes a living dead capitalism that is unable to countenance these transformations, even if work as presently experienced is objectively less and less necessary. In a 21st-century twist on Marx's thought, Gorz outlines how work in capitalism is maintained by the penetration of economic rationality into ever more diverse spheres. Cash-rich, time-poor (or just time-poor) workers have food delivered and hire caregivers for their children. In this new “tertiary anti-economy,” people are working longer hours in order to hire people to do that which their long [Page 247]hours prevents them from doing. Today, dominant political discourse resists the logic of declining work time, maintaining work's status as a marker of respectability while simultaneously facilitating processes that make permanent, stable, and well-paid jobs more elusive for a growing portion of the population. Realizing a radical transformation of work—the end of work as we know it—would mean the end of capitalism as a socioeconomic system, and discussions of the end of work remain the province of critical social theory.

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