Work and Leisure

Postmodern work and leisure 63‘without a minute to spare’ and ‘with no free time to enjoy themselves’patently demonstrate that they are in high demand. Conversely, the conceptof the ‘post-work society’ powerfully represents the disequilibrium betweenincreasing productivity and full employment in the cybernated economy.Automation sheds labour and, while the short-term economic benefit of thisis lower wage costs, as more and more workers compete for fewer and fewerjobs, the long-term social consequences of Brazilianization are social unrestand political tension.Aronowitz and Cutler (1998) follow Gorz (1999) and Beck (2000) in concludingthat the cybernation of work requires the rethinking of the workethic. Modern industrialism equated rights and status with paid employment.But the fecundity of technological and organisational forms created by modernindustrialism reduces the requirement for full employment and thereforecontradicts the equation of rights and status with paid employment. If thelabour market has moved into a structural position in which the individualisationof the employment contract produces the casualisation of work andintermittent experience of paid employment, the continued equation betweenpaid employment, rights and status is counter-productive.Although these writers work in very different traditions, they reveal aremarkable degree of consensus on the relationship between policy, leisureand work. They propose that the socially guaranteed income, rather thanpaid employment, should now be introduced as the a priori of leisure. Workersmust commit to civil labour – that is, the necessary social and economiclabour which guarantees the growth of economic and social capital. However,the status of this labour is distinct from paid employment since it is expendedto increase the general economic and social value of the community andsociety, rather than the conventional ends of possessive individualism. Theintroduction of the socially guaranteed wage and civil labour does not precludeindividuals from seeking paid employment. However, it does neutralisethe compulsion to engage in abstract labour as the necessary means of subsistenceand acquired status. By the term ‘abstract labour’ is meant a form oflabour that is measurable, quantifiable and alienable from the person whoprovides it. It is the ‘time-centred’ work that the historian E. P. Thompson(1967) argued replaced ‘task-centred’ work regimes during the rise of industrialcapitalism. Gorz (1999: 55–6), in particular, is scathing about the socialbonds produced under industrial capitalism, damning abstract labour for thesuperficial and weak levels of social cohesion that it accomplished.The socially guaranteed income and civil labour overturn establishedthinking on the work–leisure relationship. If paid employment ceases to bethe a priori of leisure, the sphere of leisure is divested of its connotations withpaid employment. Leisure will cease to be thought of as the reward for workor the portion of the week given over to the renewal of energies depleted bythe work process. Instead it will fully assume its potential as the sphere, parexcellence, of self-development. In picturing communist society, Marx (1977: