(Audio) After Work, by Hester and Srnicek

Saturday October 19, 2024

Here's a feminist post-scarcity book pointing out that abolishing paid work won't automatically eliminate unpaid work. There's quite a bit of unpaid work, and people may or may not want to do it. Interesting history and ideas on what to do about it.

Did you know there was a Wages for Housework movement in the 70s?

“As we know, domestic realism was not ultimately overthrown by the communalism of the separatists or the hippies. While some communities are still operational, Drop City and the vast majority of initiatives like it proved to be relatively ephemeral experiments, failing to outlive their moment of sociosexual upheaval. This may well have been because, as sites of exodus, they were not always effective at ensuring their own scalability. They were often intended as prefigurative spaces, aiming to offer a taste of post-suburban utopia in the here and now (or at least, a utopia for the young, the healthy, the able bodied, and the middle class with minimal caring responsibilities – that specific and limited range of people who might be best able to thrive in a space like Drop City). As such, they consciously operated as enclaves within the society from which they sought to withdraw – bastions of alternative values which were yet to flourish elsewhere – and the interventions they staged were in certain respects hyperlocal to the point of being site-specific. The ‘simple positing and practising of a new world is insufficient to overcome’ the structural forces preventing its generalisation.129 Or, as Mike Davis puts it, ‘demonstration projects in … rich countries will not save the world’.” (page 114)