Work and freedom after capitalism

Together, the global environmental crisis and the declining dynamism of the capitalist economy pose an existential problem for the future of waged work. Today, capitalism seems unable to generate sufficient and well-paying jobs or to do so without intensifying the degradation of nature. As a recent wave of post-work literature suggests, it becomes increasingly urgent to rethink the possibility of a world without work; a world where individuals do not have to over-labour for a wage just to survive. This article reconstructs the critique of work drawing on a long tradition of anti-work thinking to sketch out the contours of a plausible post-work mode of living. A post-work and post-capitalist mode of socialisation emancipates people not only from the threat of indigence that underlies the functioning of the labour market, but also from the use of direct coercion to compel work. Instead, social reproduction comes to rely on the principles of free association and voluntary activity. The critique of work I propose is simultaneously a critique of two of the fundamental institutions of capitalist modernity: the market and the state.