The future is not a friendly place. Predicting how inhospitable earth will have in recent years has usually had a flaw: y were not pessimistic enough and had to be corrected from next forecast upward. We live in apocalyptic times – at least we are suggesting a permanent crisis discourse. The catastrophe reaches everyday life of most people in central Europe, however, only in homeopathic doses. Again a small temperature record. Anor crazy tweet with atomic bomb. Again, a little nasty message that rich are absolutely richer and poor have become relatively poorer. All this does not change fact that you will get up again tomorrow, turn on your equipment and throw yourself into wear and tear battle that is called everyday.
In this situation, average-saturated central European is actually only a concrete dream: that at least daily drudgery could stop once. Besides money, work is likely to be resource of world that is worst distributed. You eir have too much of it or too little, or it's too poorly paid. A life without or with much less work appears as last great utopia that a progressive person can still believe in.
Dialectical thinking, which has come a little out of fashion, has always set itself goal of working out inner contradictions of present historical situation. Here would be one: self-realization in work and balance in life, se two imperatives are to be combined in our emotional capitalism. That this is possible, in fact, can only believe, who is eir with little satisfaction or already so blunted, that he no longer needs a compensation. Terms such as "work-life-balance" or "reconciliation of family and work" could only make a career, as what y call less and fewer people succeeded.
So why not abolish work as a whole? It is striking that large and small proposals for a system-changing policy since financial crisis have focused on term and conditions of work. Unconditional basic income, pension points for care work, right to a dignified minimum wage or, as has just been decided in a remarkable round of tariffs by IG Metall, a reduction in working time if one wishes to maintain or people.
Work is no longer worthwhileAll se are small terrain gains for a world in which we work less or more dignified. To se small steps re is a larger, more fundamental, utopian movement: post-work or postoperaism. It enters a world without wage labor, and it sees itself as great programmatic design that has been absent from left-wing parties for so long. Its origins have been radical criticism of work in Italian Operaismo (of Operaio, workers) of sixties and seventies, when an anarchic-autonomous wing departed from Stalinist communists and opposed factory work in industrial cities Norrn Italy agitated. Bologna was center of Autonomia movement, which produced thinkers such as Toni Negri or Franco Berardi. Through strikes and wild actions, wage increases of up to 18 percent were enforced at that time.
The capital city of current post-work movement is London. A world without work is not a practice here – re should be no city in Europe where it is more difficult to survive without work – but a group of philosophers, economists and political scientists have decided to design it in ory. "We are living through a global labor crisis," says Will Stronge, who organized meeting after work: life, labour and automation at University of West London at end of January. "Real wages are historically low, number of working poor, people who are poor in spite of work, historically high, and those who cannot or will not participate in working life are socially marginalized. We must keep that in mind when we hear of high employment figures. Wage labor no longer fulfils its purpose. "
Date Of Update: 14 February 2018, 12:03
