Crush the Rat Race!
In my experience, what could be construed as radical calls for a reduction of the working week are not so radical at all. In being partly premised on a critique of the increasing ‘bullshitization’ of work and the negative effects on mind and body, such a position largely chimes with people’s lived experience. Many certainly understand the psychological damage done by meaningless work. Many others still resent the monopoly work holds over one’s life, crowding out hobbies, aspirations, and social life, whilst subordinating our health to the imperatives of the workplace so that all those pursuits and joys which make life worth living are relegated to the gaps not already colonised by compulsory labour. And yet in our discourse surrounding work – the language we use and the attitudes these reveal – we refuse to give air to such arguments in defense of meaningful leisure, or at least refuse to seriously entertain the possibility that things could be different. Instead we begrudgingly take this ideology of productivism to be a constant; an inescapable fact of life, shooting down those who dare to claim that this arrangement – of work as the central component of life – should be abolished, as rambling utopians.
Yet there are signs such arguments are percolating through to the collective attention. The anthropologist David Graeber’s, Bullshit Jobs, examined the absurdity of modern capitalism and became a bestseller, detailing the way in which workplaces have become suffused in pointless box-ticking exercises and superfluous administrators, whilst whole sectors – finance, insurance – are dominated by an ideology of ‘managerial feudalism’ which, by virtue of the march of financialisation, creeps insidiously into non-bullshit sectors like teaching and medicine. Adherents of the four-day working week are finding success in places ranging from New Zealand to Sweden, grabbing the attention of commentators worldwide in its ability to improve life satisfaction and productivity, whilst its economic corollary – Universal Basic Income – gains significant traction as a mechanism to decouple work from money and thus provide glimpses of a world largely free from professional drudgery.
This is an exciting development, signalling a shift in the public conception of work and broadening the horizon of what life could actually constitute, beyond the 9–5 rat race. But there’s still much work to be done. As of yet, these are nothing more than grains of possibility. Until we galvanise a break in the conditioning of industrialism, dramatic reductions of labour – what anarchist Bob Black called ‘the abolition of work’ in his essay of the same name – may remain only pipe-dreams, stifled by political and economic antagonists. For what we are truly discussing is a qualitative, irreversible shift in how modern society works; a cleavage of existing power-relations that, once gone, will almost certainly not return. To this end, we must discard the voice of continuity and conservatism, the one that sinks into the way it is, proclaiming that it is the way it always has and will always be, and reach out from these horizons of possibility.
I wonder, how many mind expanding conversations are cut short as it’s participants, who before melded into one voyage of curiosity, are abruptly dragged back down to the parochial by the perennial concern that they ‘must be up in the morning’ to catch that same cramped train, at that same nascent hour, to that same prosaic job? How many childhood visions of artistic endeavour, pursuits not so easily translated into financial prestige, were deflated by an adults stoic appeal to ‘reality’, proclaiming – with all the certainty and bitterness of a person that has ceased to dream – ‘you’ll never make any money doing that!’? And how many innovators, entrepreneurs; risk takers and explorers; altruists and creatives; lovers, theorists and flaneurs, find themselves frustrated, tethered to the stultifying necessity of waged labour, forced to play a game they did not initiate, designed precisely to be so hard to escape?
I hold with great pride that, unless we can prove above all that those shelf-stacking, box-ticking, coffee-serving, pizza-delivering, cold-calling, spreadsheet-filling and office-cleaning are devoted to such functions out of love rather than necessity and compulsion; and that such people do not instead have reveries of novel-writing, star-gazing, marble-carving, political-agitating, song-making, child-caring, socialising, or philosophising, then it is our moral duty to fight for the world in which those very reveries become our realities.
My point here is not that these operations are pointless, but that — and this is the important distinction — is it possible that the people who spend the vast majority of their waking hours performing them would be better off not doing so?
Of course, the initial objection abounds: but these roles need to be performed? If not for Miles dedicating his youthful energy to organising the toiletries aisle at Waitrose, but who in reality would like to be producing subversive sci-fi comic books, who else would ensure that customers can know exactly which aisle the avocados are in? To answer this, we return to Graeber, following through to an exploration of the emancipatory potential of technology.
Some, like the obese bureaucracies of administrators, flunkies, box-tickers, duct-tapers, goons and taskmasters – the roles that comprise Graber’s typology of bullshit jobs – are indeed pointless: utterly meaningless by-products of a superiors desire to feel even more superior, or inept corporate practise, or one-upmanship, defended by political pressure for full-employment and theological notions of the divinity of work. Indeed, if we are to believe the judgement of those that perform such roles, then the proportion of all work this takes up is around 40%. I don’t wish to reproduce Graeber’s thesis here – for that I highly recommend you must read his book for a lucid explanation of this phenomena – but for now let’s trust his (rather compelling) hypothesis.
But others, those cleaners, retail assistants and more traditional service workers, do contribute to society. Even just ring-fencing these roles, and discarding the rest, would produce a reduction in the working week that is revolutionary. But I think we should go further. All those tasks that do not, as their primary purpose, have meaningful and complex emotional interaction, should be automated. Of course, it’s one thing to say this and another to make it happen. But if we, collectively, truly had such technological liberation as our goal, I do not believe it is in any way beyond the remit of human ingenuity. And I imagine, again echoing the postulations of Graeber, if we freed scientific academia from the perverse incentives of marketisation that stifle innovation in its insistence on readily marketable discoveries, refusing to fund the type of long-term, out-there scientific endeavour that is responsible for the vast sum of human advancements, such machinery and algorithms could be produced pretty rapidly.
Indeed even without this, much has been made in recent years of the unstoppable rise of the robots. It seems the much touted ‘second machine age’ is already upon us, taking hold in transport and storage, spreading to retail, manufacturing, fulfilment, and construction, and beyond to conventional ‘white collar’ work in call centres, finance, and even journalism. There is plenty of disagreement in this arena of speculation, but the broad consensus is that it is happening.
Studies disagree in the extent of job losses in the medium-term, ranging from 10% to 30% to 47%. Some emphasise the effect technologies have in automating tasks rather than whole professions, freeing labour for more complex tasks or indeed shortening the working week. And even more focus on the immediate effects of technology on labour in surveillance, the kind of geo-tracking and time management that is a commonplace tool in the repertoire of ‘scientific managerialism’, prevalent in exhausted and abused warehouse staff and the precarious gig-economy, which is itself a new technological terrain of insecurity masked as flexibility. These concerns are important and entirely valid, speaking to the near-term damage posed by the incorporation of such technologies under a capitalist logic. They too pose the question of whether the current purposes of R&D are the most socially beneficial ones. That is, could we not, rather than constructing intrusive panopticons that torment Amazon workers for taking piss breaks and having a chat on the job, instead be developing machines with the motor-function adept enough to liberate those workers entirely?
Others still refute the premise of significant disruption to the labour market entirely (in my experience, the proponents of these arguments are those whose scepticism originates from a fear of the threat posed to traditional capitalism by such developments, as we will return to later) falling back on received wisdoms of market infallibility, always capable of generating new forms of labour to replace those lost to automation. In some ways this proposition is compelling. For these fears are not unique to our age — technology has threatened employment many before. The invention of the printing press; the industrial revolution, with steam trains and factory line machinery; the internet revolution of the late 20th century – all have deposed many skilled lines of work. And yet here we are, still toiling away, with new jobs created in the process. Isn’t this evolution of labour, this shedding of old processes to make way for new ones, just a law of economic nature? I don’t think so, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, Graeber’s thesis challenges the notion that much of the work we’re doing now is useful anyway. The expansion of the labour market to compensate for the decline in agriculture and manufacturing – the primary and secondary sectors that have fallen victim to the industrial revolutions – is largely fueled by the development of the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) which in turn has spurred a financialisation of the economy, and with it, reams of useless administrative hanger-ons and managerial nuisances. As he explains, many of these bullshit jobs could either be abolished as the role didn’t need to exist in the first place, or automated instantly with existing technologies.
To the same effect, research demonstrates that, despite the internet revolution, the vast majority of the jobs we do today still existed prior to the dotcom boom and social media addiction. Flashy, tech-oriented work like software developer, social media influencer, and digital web designers only account for a miniscule amount of the workforce. So a large amount of work done in the bloated sectors that increasingly dominate the landscape of the economy are either entirely pointless, or it is pointless they are done by humans, and the predictions of glossy new roles have been entirely overstated.
Secondly though, and I think more importantly, the contention of those with deep knowledge in the tech world – those whose lives consist of developing machine learning algorithms and tracking the tendency of AI to consistently smash the limits of ability we set them (in the 2000’s it was claimed you could never develop an AI capable of driving a vehicle, and now here we are with Tesla Autopilot) – is that this time is different. Once we enter a paradigm in which automation is not limited to mechanisation but which is defined by Artificial Intelligence in the very human sense of the word – that ability to solve complex problems that require non-repetitive cognitive energy, to create innovative schematics and plans that human brains could never have dreamt of – we have left behind the option of creating vast numbers of new work. When we possess algorithms that are smarter, more adaptive, more ingenuous than ourselves; when they can alter their own code and, in essence, give birth to algorithmic progeny, the window of what humans can do that robots can’t narrows dramatically. Perhaps, as I alluded to earlier, it is only those roles that require the psychological dance of human emotional interaction – care workers, teachers, therapists, masseuses, personal trainers, doctors, nurses, GPs, community police officers, etc – that are immune to the competition between human and machine; the dynamic of which will define the political economy of the coming centuries, and of the very existence of that ambitious animal, enamoured by fantasies of playing God, named Homo Sapien.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: the threat of superintelligence superseding humanity is a very real one, but not one which is of concern here.
In sum, It’s increasingly likely that, of the remaining 60% of non-bullshit jobs, a significant amount can be automated. Perhaps new, rather utopian professions may comprise some rather insignificant percentage of jobs. And of course you must count that the number of engineers, coders, scientists that are responsible for the evolution of automation technologies will no doubt increase (at least until they can perform that function themselves). But by and large, there will be far, far fewer professions to concern ourselves with, and those that do remain will be the rather fulfilling purview of the caring sector, likely to increase in stature and in quantity given all the newfound free time humans will find themselves possessing. Thus, the functions of baristas and check-out clerks can be filled.
In returning to the original question that began this tangent – would the people who performed these functions, and in extension, society itself, be better off if they no longer had to? I think the answer, pretty simply, is yes. Of course they would be happier, free to engage in whatever dream they had locked away and exercise whatever creative muscle had atrophied when exposed to the mechanical alienation of work. And I think, it’s safe to say, this would be a better world. For what is the point of life if not to do that which makes you fulfilled? And, in extension, what is our society for if it does not have the realisation of such contentment as it’s primary ambition?
This destination, a place in which humankind is unshackled from the collective indignity and ineffectuality of waged labour, is the very stuff of liberation. And whilst it may, from these shores, look almost vertiginous in its freedom; dizzying and imposing in its promise, it’s prospects are nothing but irresistible. Only a fool would wish not to set sail.
Yet we are told such a place cannot exist. Time and time again, the basic proposal – often voiced by the youth, not tarred by cynicism and driven by inquisition – that life should be enjoyable, is denounced as naive quixotism. In the real world, you have to work for a living. Of course, if conceived of the basic truth that you should put effort into something in life to make it worthwhile, such a response is no way counter to the point. But work in the modern context implies something that is not enjoyable and largely compulsory; jobs that, if people were truly given the choice to trace the rhythm of their heart and soul – a rhythm that must be teased out through active experimentation and cultivation – they would not choose.
This is no doubt axiomatic, which is what makes our collective failure to challenge this state of affairs so disheartening. Indeed I contest that one of the primary sources of disillusion in the young, drawing upon my own experience, originates in the soul-sapping blandness of the world which lies ahead of us. Adolescent idealism demands more of the world than office jobs, gig employment and celebrity vacuity. Just at the point in our lives when we begin to understand ourselves, recklessly snatching at the autonomy which allows our identities to impact on the world – to indent and mutate and evolve – we are confronted by the vicious tediousness of ‘reality’.
To expect a life which is fulfilling is self-entitled nonsense, we are told. Get off your high horse and get used to walking. We gradually come to understand that you must most likely work a job you either hate or sleepwalk through, in order to accumulate enough intangible digits and symbolic paper to attempt to provide yourself with a decent quality of life, treading water to put a roof over your head and food on the table. The promise of riches is dangled ahead as the recompense for clambering up through the tediousness of the job ladder. But this carrot ignores the basic asymmettry of success and freedom in capitalist existence: there are only a limited number of slots at the top of this hierarchy. There just isn’t enough room for all of us.
So we are thus left with the reality that life isn’t supposed to be enjoyable, but is bloody hard work; an endless slog of competition with millions chasing after the same handful of luxury positions. The only thing left, then, is to drop those dreams of enjoyment and get on with it, settling in the sterility of flogging insurance, or the odour of flipping burgers, or whatever unstatisfactory work environment you fell into in, much to the dismay of your adolescent self. This is the standard narrative that generations collective repulsion is met with; the cynicism of ‘the way the world works’. No wonder so many students are shocked at the monotonous struggle of ‘real life’ once leaving university. Who wouldn’t choose perpetual autonomous, sociable, and intellectual self-development over taking orders at Frankie & Bennies, or forwarding Karen emails all day in an office less lively than a funeral? At least at a wake you get a buffet.
The dismissal, the exhortations to ‘get real’, ‘take your head out of the sand’ and ‘pull your finger out your ass’ are not so much unjust condescension as an attempt to communicate the hardship of material reality. The fact they are often delivered with belittlement is a misdirection of fury, with the youth – whose wisdom of little experience, not already resigned into the way things are, reflexively challenges that status quo – then become the new custodians of the fury rightfully felt towards the futility of this arrangement. Yet by inculcating this resignation into the new generation, planting the seeds of this ‘reality’, excoriating them for daring to dream of how our social arrangements may look differently, it guarantees the continual reproduction of the mindset. “That’s not how the real world works”, our parents parents said to them. And which they said to us. Which we will then, in time, go on to say to our own children.
Indeed, it is the prevalence of this conditioning in our everyday lives which makes the eminence of emancipatory calls for a reduced work week and UBI simultaneously perplexing and exciting. Its at once a signal that such proposals harmonise with the feeling of intense dissatisfaction toward the world of work, complete with tyrannical bosses and superfluous meetings, the “assorted indignities” of discipline, in the words of Bob Black, comprised of “surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching -in and -out, etc”, and the infantilization of employees who dare to express “insubordination” in challenging the wisdom or aptitude of their superior, “just as if a worker is a naughty child”.
On top of this, though, it is the site of a deep incongruence between our own, internal attitudes toward work – the fact that, as the sociologists of work Al Gini and Terry Sullivan has detailed, “in well over a hundred studies in the last 25 years, workers have regularly depicted their jobs as physically exhausting, boring, psychologically diminishing or personally humiliating and unimportant.” – and the narrative we cling to and instill in our offspring.
As Graber traces in his book, the theology of divine creation (alas a bastardised and standardised and supervised form of creation, if one could even call it that), and Puritan self-sacrifice has percolated through our culture, embedding itself in our attitudes and lexicon, positioning ourselves to view work – however little stimulation or purpose derived from it, as innately valuable. We can see this expressed variously in the political realm through the symbiotic veneration of wealth creators and demonisation of benefit scroungers, positing a false antagonism between the ‘makers’ and the ‘takers’. Traditionally, those in the second camp – the single mums and unemployed wasters who are innately lazy, sponging off the enterprise of others – don’t actually exist. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who genuinely prefers watching Jeremy Kyle all day to actively doing something. Such is the nature of the human condition: we don’t wish to be inert.
But this inability to entertain a world where suffering and boredom wasn’t virtuous not only speaks to this moralistic workism, but also through a failure in envisioning alternative economic imaginaries. When keeping one’s head above water is utterly dependent on capturing the inequitable rewards of tedious graft, it is not a surprise youthful appeals to righteous freedom are met with such indignation.
Here through, alternative futures are beginning to gestate in the collective consciousness. The option of universal provision of necessary services, or the aforementioned UBI, or even a combination of both, funded by a transition of ownership from capital to labour (that is, from a minority, to all of us) allows the redistribution of the vast wealth that will undoubtedly flow from the abundance generated by automated efficiency. I will not explore the various political and economic forms of this transition here, but know that such mechanisms offer three central solutions.
First, we counteract the grotesque inequality which technology currently serves to feed by challenging the dynamic of ownership which is responsible for the economic pathologies of capitalism. Secondly, we therefore avoid mass destitution and the ensuing social breakdown which would arise from the splintering of society into a bizarre techno-feudalism, divided between algorithm barons, who own the automative technologies, and an underclass of superfluous vagabonds, who do not. Thirdly, this allows us to decouple labour from compensation, decommodifying our time and work, freeing society from the drudgery of wage labour and thus opening the bottle of human potential that has been clamped shut for too long. In fact, it is the threat this poses to neoliberal doctrines of ownership and anti-egalitarianism that promotes, I contend, some variations of the ‘everything will be fine, nothing will change’ response to oncoming automation.
What’s hopeful to me is that the cultural recalbiration needed to accept this central decommodification of one’s time should be relatively simple, given the historical precedents for such an anti-work ethic. Indeed, as both Graeber and Black outline, this concept of selling one’s labour is relatively new, suggesting that the unravelling of it shouldn’t be beyond the pale.
Our modern work ethic, enshrined as it was by cultist religions preaching the divinity of self-sacrifice and contrived creation, would be alien to human societies prior to our own epoch of hyper-capitalism. The relation to work for the Ancient Greeks and the Romans was one of contempt. Socrates castigated it for the monopolisation of time and effort which could be spent on more worthwhile activities (presumably accosting people in the street with inquires into the meaning of life and beauty like Socrates did, the bloody nuisance), thereby precluding the worker from blossoming into an active citizen and good friend. The dominant view of wage labour in medieval societies was that it was the dominion of the slave – a free-man would never relinquish his autonomy and marketise his time. Even this concept of time as something to be bought was totally unthinkable.
Peasants too, a class usually emblematic of the social horror’s capitalism is said to have banished, rejected works appropriation of their time, bathing their exploited souls in the ludic simplicity of holidays and feasts, which comprised around one-third of their waking lives, making our minimum entitlement of 5–6 weeks paltry in comparison. But not only did serfs have more spare time than ourselves, so too did our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Their lifestyle was not defined by rabid desperation, toiling incessantly against nature’s cruel vagaries, but a domain of slumber, leisure and consummate endeavour. What little ‘work’ they did have — 4 hours in fact, according to the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins — was fulfilling, “skilled labour which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities”, taking Black’s formulation. And in using his counter-motif of ‘play’, Black furthermore suggests that such holistic engagement of mind and body in foraging and hunting could confer a ludic quality; a joy of sparring against nature, exercising our collective ingenuity to dodge and parry her foibles of indifference in order to lay claim to her bounty.
Compare the activity of such paradisical atavism; the dignified freedom of the (free-men) of the grand civilisations of time past; the contradictory liberty of the serfs of Tsarist Russia, the ancien regime, and pre-enclosure England, with the utterly ineffectual, monotonous reality of industrialism’s offering, and we can finally recognise the perversion of the domination of work over our existence. In this context, it seems our indignant students are right to look critically at the world before them. Possessing an implicit cognisance of the range of social possibilities — that wisdom of little experience — the young’s analysis of the absurdity and repugnancy of monopoly capitalism is not, as their elder’s dismissals contends, the whining of naivety, but a capacity to inquire into the necessitacy of this state of affairs; a capacity that has been suppressed by those trapped within its totality.
And so I implore my generation: do not succumb to the Rat Race. Do not give in to the repetitive monochrome cycle of wage labour; the humdrum uniformity of the professional world. All in all, it doesn’t offer much to us. Facing declining living standards, the crystallization of insecurity, and the existential threat of climate breakdown, do not capitulate to the Rat Race. Crush the Rat Race.
To some, this may mean dropping out, taking the risk of crafting your own niche or living a life of simplicity. To others, this option may not be there. So by all means, engage with work, eke the best existence you can from the hand you’re dealt. But in the public realm, challenge the ideology of industrialism. Demand a world of liberation: meaningful work, ludic creation, and ‘permanent revelry’. Usher in technological emancipation, advocate the development of the communal space, public provision, urban arenas, and natural reserves that can become the sandbox for productive play. Demonstrate the tangibility of a world where the expression of the idosyncratic revelries of each are guaranteed for all.
But finally, in the private, do not reproduce its truisms. Do not accept and recycle what our parents told us, and their parents before them, and their parents before them, and their parents before them. In refusing to do so, we smash the continuity of resignation. Showing that, no, this is not the way the world always has been. And it certainly is not the way the world always must.
