Here Comes Everybody: Basic Income, the Precariat and beyond

Last month, when releasing a report showing that 100,000 children went hungry in Britain in 2014 because their parents’ benefits were stopped or cut, Niall Cooper, chief executive of pressure group Church Action on Poverty, made a simple yet devastating analogy.

“If you commit a crime, no court is allowed to make you go hungry as a punishment. But if you’re late for an appointment at the Job Centre they can remove all your income and leave you unable to feed you or your family for weeks,” he said.

In fact, there is evidence of people stealing in order to be sent to prison and guaranteed three meals a day.

This is the most urgent justification of a basic income. More than 900,000 people in Britain used the food banks of just one provider, the Trussell Trust, in 2013-14 and the most common reasons were benefit sanctions or benefit delays. Always cruel, many of the reasons are arbitrary and absurd. So there is a critical need, you could even call it a demand, for an unconditional income floor – an income that cannot be whisked away at a moment’s notice, at the whim of a bureaucrat with a target to meet. Everyone has their basic subsistence covered. Period.

That seems to be the rationale behind the UK Green Party’s “long term aspiration” for a basic income of £3,700 a year. And while the Greens are mulling it over, 19 well-known economists, including Guy Standing, have called on the European Central Bank to introduce an unconditional income of €175 a month (€2,100 a year), as an alternative to alleged economic stimulus of quantitative easing. Similarly, the Spanish anti-austerity party, Podemos, wants an unconditional income for the unemployed, though like the UK Greens, Podemos is committed, in principle, to a basic income.

Obviously, no-one can live on €2,100 a year, or £3,700 for that matter. These are policies for unconditional income support, rather than a liveable basic income. But they are edging their way towards a minimum income for everyone. For argument’s sake, let’s put the level at £7,000 pa. As one American supporter of basic income writes. “Without an income floor set at the poverty level as a bare minimum, I believe poverty and inequality will continue to grow, the middle classes will continue to shrink, and the livelihoods of all but the top fifth of society will continue to slip away.”

This is one kind of basic income. An income floor for the increasingly numerous precariat. 13.5 million people in Britain live on incomes at or below 60% of the median, which is about £21,000.

But there is another kind of basic income and it has far more ambitious horizons. The Swiss 

Generation Basic Income group who will spearhead a referendum campaign for the introduction of a basic income in Switzerland in 2016, want it to be much more than a subsistence fall-back. They are calling for it to be set at 2,500 Swiss francs a month, the equivalent of £20,000 or US$ 30,000. Another advocate of an unconditional income, the Australian trade union organiser, Godfrey Moase, sets the bar at AUD$30,000 (about £15,000). A universal basic income is not just for the precariat, says Generation Basic Income’s Enno Schmidt, it is for everyone. It is not a product of class struggle, he insists, it does not exclude the rich.

Each kind of basic income obviates the problems thrown up by the other kind, though in turn generates new issues.

To take the first sort of income floor basic income. Though few can doubt its necessity, the intrinsic problem with this kind of unconditional income it that it is only relevant for the bottom 30 or 40% of society – people who can’t get enough hours to support themselves or their dependants, the working poor or unemployed, adults in education or simply those who would gladly trade a stressful job for substantially less money but the freedom to choose the life they want.

The dilemma this variant of basic income provokes is that you can easily imagine it inculcating a reverse politics of envy. The excluded two-thirds or 60% of society will feel they are financially carrying the lucky minority who have the freedom not to work, or work less, and devote themselves to freely chosen pursuits. Astonishingly, this inverted politics of envy is already being avidly stoked in Britain by the Conservatives and their ‘strivers v shirkers’ rhetoric. A basic income would probably elevate this sentiment to astronomical proportions. Once introduced, it is conceivable that a basic income would engender an exodus of people from the world of work to the Saturday morning world of unconditional income. But that would still leave a resentful 50% with the perception of an even greater burden and the pressure from the other side to raise the basic income. Although you can foresee a new social dispensation taking shape, there would be immense social strife in the meantime.

The other, more ambitious, kind of basic income avoids stirring up envious feelings. Set at a much higher level, it is overtly an unconditional income for everybody. “Basic income doesn’t exclude,” says Enno Schmidt. “It’s about humans.” It is clear that the social problems that have prompted an interest in an unconditional income are not restricted to the precariat. Anxiety and depression are rampant across social classes and a sense of powerlessness and control by outside forces affects people with full-time, well paid jobs as much as those on the fringes. “Who, experiencing for years the daily toll of intense corporate pressure, could truly escape severe anxiety?” wrote Alan Lightman in his 2001 novel, The Diagnosis.

Beyond the issue of how to pay for this kind of unconditional income (which I will come to in part 3), two questions arise. One is why pay a basic income to rich people, or people with moderate but secure incomes for that matter, and secondly, what exactly would they do with it if they received such an income? The frequent justification for a basic income that it represents a new attitude to work and would act as a balm for feelings of stress, burn-out and anxiety. “We’re facing a shift of the paradigm of what work means to us, and it is this generation who is ready to express this shift”, said Marilola Wili of Generation Basic Income in 2013.

The fact that a basic income would be paid to all adults, not households, means that, set at a generous level, it would certainly enable those that wished to, to swap their jobs for less demanding ones, or pack in work altogether. But for those that didn’t choose those options, a basic income would just mean the amassing of a lot of additional money. Maybe the possibility of escape represented by the mere existence of a basic income, would engender a seismic change in the culture of work. That could be one effect, but it’s also possible that the repercussions of introducing a basic income would be much more modest than its advocates envisage.

Pilot studies in basic income undertaken in the US and Canada in the 1970s indicate that participants responded by only slightly reducing their working hours.  Such findings have been used to assuage fears that, with the introduction of a basic income, industrial civilisation would grind to a halt and everyone would sit around, doing nothing. But another conclusion is also possible – why go to all the trouble of introducing a basic income if the results are so meagre?

Because in the real world society we inhabit, it is a neo-classical fiction that, even with a basic income to fall back on, people in employment would have the choice to reduce their working hours. They could leave their jobs, certainly, or maybe switch to a less demanding job, or become self-employed. Within households, one partner may leave their job while the better-paid one stays on. But it is my hunch that many would people make the decision to stay in their jobs, working similar hours, and so the only palpable effect of a basic income for many would be to supply a large extra income. You could argue this would reduce inequality but it also has the potential to be funnelled into buying property, stoking an even bigger housing bubble than the one we have now.

I think here we can see the limitations of what a basic income can do. Basic income is not the same thing as Bertrand Russell's 'organised diminution of work'. It can immeasurably strengthen the hand of the individual as they negotiate with the world of the work. That feature should not be underestimated. But in choosing to leave what goes on in that world untouched, basic income reveals itself as impotent in dealing with the ‘daily toll of intense corporate pressure’. Many institutions, in pursuing targets or profits or simply impact of some kind, are now intensely oblivious to the welfare of the people that populate them. And, ironically, I can sense in basic income the same reluctance to challenge the behaviour of large institutions and the distribution of property and profits that used to be exhibited by welfare state leftism – the very movement whose demise is giving such momentum to the movement for a basic income. On its own, a basic income is not enough to really change society.

In part 3, I want to look at the ways in which a basic income might be funded, and whether that can be done in an equitable, not acrimonious, way.

Here is the first part

And part three 

In praise of idleness, part 3. Democracy and the question of time

In July a college lecturers’ union in Britain released a survey of so-called ‘NEETS’- young people, aged 16 to 24 who are not in employment, education or training. There are estimated to be 900,000 NEETS in the UK. One third of the 1,000-strong sample said they had suffered from depression, 37% said they rarely left their home and 39% were beset by stress. One jobless 23 year old told the BBC: “I rarely go out and feel so down about myself. I’ve tried so hard to find a job but I feel no-one wants me.”

According to David Stuckler, co-author of The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, Britain is “one of the clearest expressions of how austerity kills”. Suicides were falling before the recession, Stuckler relates in an interview. Then they spiked in 2008 and 2009 as unemployment shot up, only to fall again when jobless levels declined.

Unemployment, it is clear, is terrible for your mental health; provoking feelings of isolation, unwantedness and a corrosive sense of not contributing to society. But unemployment – and underemployment - is a perennial blight in virtually all advanced capitalist countries. With onset of the ‘Global Financial Crisis’, the blight of joblessness has become chronic, reaching an eye-watering rate of 27% in Spain and Greece.

Sinister consensus

So a consensus has formed, in Britain, as elsewhere, that sees joblessness as the enemy and employment as salvation. Trade unions in the UK want stable and rewarding jobs, the British Labour party now brands itself as “the party of work” while the ruling Conservative party, in a move of cynical callousness, justifies the withdrawal of state benefits from the disabled on the grounds of offering “tough love” to people stranded at home, doing nothing, in order to “help them into work”.

There is something inherently wrong, indeed sinister, with this myopic consensus, as I hope parts one and two made apparent. Yet it derives its potency from a pervasive and genuine fear, that of the destructive effects of non-activity. This fear becomes all-consuming so that it is immaterial what work is for or what it entails, only that it exists. Zero-hour contracts – where an employee does not know how many hours they will be contracted to work in a given week – are mushrooming in Britain, while close to 80% of new jobs pay below £7.95 an hour (the minimum wage rate is £6.19). The overwhelming need is to be wanted by an employer, to avoid the predations of unemployment, to not be excluded from mainstream society. This consensus is both conservative and desperate.

Alternatives to exhaustion

There are innumerable advantages to the “organised diminution of work”, that Bertrand Russell advocated in In Praise of Idleness. Genuine choices would arise if your life was not dominated by the need to serve the interests of another. More time to spend on caring, child-rearing, studying or artistic endeavours, for example. It is not hard to compile such a list. A healthier, more relaxed and more interesting society would result. Russell himself estimated that at least one percent of the population – if not distracted by the requirement to spend most of their useful hours on activities designated by an employer – would produce works of public importance and “since”, he argued, “they will not depend on these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered”. It is, I feel, partly to block the emergence of such original thinking, a bubbling and multi-pronged challenge to mainstream explanations in economics and politics, that the boot remains firmly planted on the neck, as far as working hours are concerned.

But there is one activity which is both enabled by a radical reduction in working hours and also has the potential to substitute for the cohesive side effects of paid employment. I am speaking of democratic self-management. The English economist, Harry Shutt, has said that “in the absence of productive work opportunities … potentially the human race could rediscover the opportunity to practise direct democracy somewhat in the manner of the ancient Athenians – but without their need to depend on slaves to do all the menial work.”

Time for democracy

There are many modern forms of direct democracy – participatory budgeting, worker self-directed enterprises, citizen assemblies, random selection. They are all based on the idea that ordinary citizens have the competence to run their own affairs and that an outsourcing of power to representatives is not necessary for good governance. But what they require to thrive is an abundance of time. Genuine democracy is not possible in a time-pressed, hurried society. Democracy, to work, has to be learnt by experience, by practising it.

A famous ancient Athenian, Aristotle, remarked that excellence was a habit, not an act. You become good at something, he said, by doing it repeatedly. Democracy, in its classical sense, is not a habit for people in modern societies. When it does appear, sporadically, its practices have to be learnt all over again and fitted in with all the other demands of life. Work, by contrast, is a habit and one we are loath to shake off. Management is a habit, careers are a habit, consumption is a habit. The modern capitalist economy has been described as a “gigantic school” doting on and encouraging some skills and allowing others to atrophy.

Contrasting the practices of Athenian democracy with modern notions of politics, the social ecologist Murray Bookchin, wrote: “The ‘political process’, to use a modern cliché, was not strictly institutional and administrative; it was intensely processual in the sense that politics was an inexhaustible, everyday ‘curriculum’ for intellectual, ethical and personal growth – paidea that fostered the ability of citizens to creatively participate in public affairs.”

The promise of idleness

Some people may find the word “curriculum” vaguely threatening but I think it is very apt. If work is to fade in significance, as it is doing and will surely continue to do, then its associated blessings – a sense of belonging, validation and of making a contribution to society – will have to be replaced by something. The fear of a void of non-activity needs to be assuaged. We need a society attuned to post-scarcity, in contrast to this one which is in flagrant denial. John Maynard Keynes, writing in 1930, said the abiding problem for people once the economic problem had been solved, would be what to do with their freedom, how exactly to occupy their abundant leisure. Keynes, who was irredeemably elitist, could not answer his own question.

We, however, can. Democratic self-management, in my opinion, is both enabled by a post-scarcity society and vital to such a future society’s inner strength. The UK government, backed by the opposition Labour party, wants to create a “nation of entrepreneurs”. A genuine Left movement should have the opposite endeavour, to create a “nation of self-managers”, even if the phrase sounds horribly clunky. Once that commitment is made, through forms such as participating budgeting, citizen assemblies, participatory commissioning or worker co-ops, then the process, as Bookchin recognised, becomes as important as the end point. Skills such as public speaking, formulating positions, dissensus, disagreeing with the opinions of others whilst respecting them, need to be learnt and, as objectively as possible, taught. What passes for the Left nowadays seems only to know what it is against and cannot encapsulate what it is for. Economic stagnation and austerity has only further exposed this deficiency. The promise of idleness should be recognised as an opportunity to fill the vacuum.

In Praise of Idleness, part two. The vanishing point of work

“Manual work is the ideal which is held before the young and is the basis of all ethical teaching,” so said Bertrand Russell in his essay, In Praise of Idleness.

Russell was writing about Stalin’s Russia of the 1930s but delete ‘manual’ and you have an uncannily accurate description of the mores of contemporary Britain, a country that, in the opinion of the author Mark Fisher, has embraced “market Stalinism.” 20% of young people are unemployed but work, paid or unpaid, is exalted as both an ethical and practical ideal. “Arbeit Macht Frei” in the words of one Daily Mail columnist. Yes really.

“What will happen” Russell went on to ask, “when the point has been reached where everybody could be comfortable without working long hours?” We now know what will happen – an intensification of the idealisation of work, a joyless embrace of the tyranny of immediate self-interest. A kind of tunnel vision that refuses to allow questions about the ultimate purpose of work to intrude.

It is tempting to wonder about the curious capacity of ideology to become more intransigent and boastful at precisely the moment when the objective justification for it dissipates. But there is also a stubborn nugget of truth at work here, albeit one fanned mercilessly by the Right. A human being, says Russell in his essay, inevitably consumes a certain amount of the products of human labour in his or her lifetime. Work is, to a greater or lesser extent, disagreeable. It is, therefore, unjust that a person should consume more than s/he produces.

“To this extent, and to this extent only” says Russell, “there is a ‘duty’ to work”. Or, in the unforgiving words of St Paul, “if any would not work, neither should he eat”.

The latter threat is at the heart of the Conservative assault on social security benefit claimants in Britain; an offensive, emboldened by opinion polls, that has resulted in many people in the seventh richest economy in the world having no food. Not insufficient food. No food. The strivers versus shirkers rhetoric (however divorced from reality) is founded on stoking a resentment that, while you have to go through the disagreeable experience of working every day, others do nothing. That it thrives by inflaming resentment, rather than resting on economic logic, is demonstrated by the fact that the work obligation destroys paid employment.

Heaven knows I’m miserable now

One way to assuage this sense of resentment could be, of course, to make work more agreeable. But that doesn’t chime at all with the priorities of the age of austerity where everything should get worse. It’s ironic that, whereas in the 1980s the Thatcherite Right taunted the Left by saying it wanted to ‘level down’, now the reverse is true. The UK welfare benefit freeze – all benefits will, including tax credits, will rise by an under-inflation 1% -  is justified by the fact that employees are experiencing real term pay cuts. Cuts to public sector pensions are presented as reasonable because these state pensions are more generous than their private sector equivalents, where final salary schemes are becoming extinct. It is proposed to shorten school holidays in order to compete with China. Level down. Make life more miserable.

But there is still a dilemma here for a genuinely radical Left that isn’t in thrall to the work obsession, and is prepared to confront the question, “what is the point of work?” Without many of the basic commodities of modern society, life would be more a slog than it already is. Consumption, in a sense, makes life meaningful. “The problem with full supermarket shelves is that they’re not enough — not that they’re unwelcome or trivial,” writes Seth Ackerman in an illuminating essay, The Red and the Black.

“The citizens of Communist societies,” he goes on, “experienced the paucity, shoddiness and uniformity of their goods not merely as inconveniences; they experienced them as violations of their basic rights.” Many simple conveniences – lights that work, TVs that function, bath plugs that fit – instantly loom very large in importance when they malfunction. The second biggest cause of fires in Moscow in the 1980s, says the economist Ha-Joon Chang, was exploding TV sets. Despite the implications of 3D printing, and the inescapable fact that material production requires fewer and fewer people, useful commodities do not as yet make or repair themselves. Not everything can be performed by robots.

Can I do the mindless, repetitive unpleasant, dirty, smelly jobs please?

It is not mindlessly repeating conservative tautologies to point out that someone has to bake the bread, make the laptops, distribute the food, repair the washing machines, care for the elderly and clean the offices. To do, in other words, the disagreeable activities that few people would freely volunteer to do. At the same time you have to be living in a galaxy far, far away not to appreciate that many contemporary jobs are “socially useless” – hedge fund manager, sales director, lawyer, public relations executive, many types of manager etc etc. These jobs solely exist to further the interests of the organisations that create them. The question for a post-capitalist Left is how do you get useful, necessary and disagreeable activities done, while excluding activities that are either superfluous or harmful?

One answer to the first half of that equation is a market of worker, not capitalist, controlled firms. The ability of firms to freely enter a market is, says Ackerman in the above essay, the way to avoid the scarcity of useful goods that characterised the Soviet bloc. But markets, worker-controlled or otherwise, also have it in their DNA to exploit opportunities to sell, go way beyond actual needs and try to out-muscle the competition. They are socially useless as well as socially useful.

Bertrand Russell’s answer to this dilemma was what he termed a “sensible” organisation of production. “Owing to the absence of any central control (my italics) over production,” he wrote in In Praise of Idleness, “we produce hosts of things that are not wanted.” The presence of “central control”, he implied, would prevent any employee from being compelled to work more than four hours a day. There would be no unemployment and enough for everybody. Russell was more of an anarchist than a Communist but his embrace of “central control” still implies the kind of state central planning, whose pathologies we are far more attuned to now than when Russell was writing in 1932. One post-capitalist writer, David Schweickart, has specifically ruled out any “central authority”. The residual question that Russell’s “sensible organisation” solution doesn’t address is who decides what is and is not wanted and how?

It is possible for the government to legislate that no-one can work more than four hours a day, in much the same way that the French government instituted a 35 hour week in 2000. But over and above the difficulty that the direction of travel is resolutely in the opposite direction (we must all work harder we are told by politicians), the intrinsic problem with this solution is that the government imposes sensible limits on an unreconstructed capitalist productive system that is full to the brim with socially useless activities, and will work tirelessly to nullify the work-limiting legislation. The “workers’ control” solution to overwork would entail the employees of particular firms insisting on a more civilised work-life balance, and/or rotation of work tasks, because they are in charge of the enterprise and they want it that way. But, externally, markets don’t produce “sensible organisation”. The firms within a market have to react to competition and the need to make a profit. A third solution can be seen in the popular assemblies that have sprung up in Europe in response to economic collapse and dysfunctional “democratic” political institutions. They have begun to set up cooperatives to provide for needs that are not satisfied by a failing economic system. A decade or so ago, the assemblies in Argentina in response to an analogous situation, created enterprises such as community bakeries. The relevance to this argument is that the assembly controls the enterprise and can insist upon humane working hours. But the scope of these assembly-controlled enterprises is, as yet, limited and way short of what any meaningful economy would comprise.

I can’t highlight the solution. But the disconnect between, on the one side, the declining demand for paid labour and the vanishing objective need for work, and on the other, the social purpose of production and the desire for a meaningful and spacious life, will bring immense pressure to bear to find a solution.

But to crystallise the case for radically reduced working hours I believe we should concentrate on its opposite. What, in other words, is the point of not working, and that isn’t a non sequitur. It is this question of non-work that I want to examine in the final part of this post.

You can read Part One here by the way

And here is the final part

In praise of idleness and other scandalous ideas. Part One

In 1932, the philosopher Bertrand Russell argued that the priorities of modern industrial society needed a thorough reappraisal.

“I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous,” he wrote in the essay, In Praise of Idleness. “The road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work.”

This is Bertrand Russell being interviewed:

Now, 81 years later, Russell’s words appear as scandalous as when they were first uttered. Perhaps even more so.

To question work now, its moral necessity and the virtue-inspiring discipline it inculcates, is to place yourself beyond the pale of sensible discussion. The one activity the ruling Conservative party in Britain is determined to eradicate, with seemingly widespread public support it should be said, is the possibility of doing nothing. Of not working. Unless, of course, you are very wealthy.

In pursuit of idleness

After the courts ruled the government’s workfare programme (temporarily) unlawful in February, government minister Iain Duncan Smith, responded that the days of doing nothing for benefit were “over”.

When justifying the suffering caused by the Conservative/Lib Dem work capability tests for the disabled, then employment minister Chris Grayling lamented the thousands of people left stranded at home on benefit. Doing nothing.

If doing nothing is a now a capital offence, that doesn’t let those in paid employment off the hook. "The only way we can pull out of this [the economic crisis] is by everybody working harder,” opined foreign secretary William Hague last May. 

Work is such an unimpeachably good thing, it retains its allure even when making it mandatory destroys paid employment. There is ample evidence that the UK government’s work programme, which compels young people to work for corporations for free at public expense, has enabled participating companies, such as Asda and Superdrug, to withdraw paid over-time for their regular workforce, or not hire seasonal staff. But the work programme has retained absolute government backing and public support.

Never mind that Asda and Superdrug get something for nothing, courtesy of the taxpayer. Never mind that their paid or potential employees lose out. As long as the unemployed work.

The Old Left and the work obligation

It has to be said that this veneration of work contains a slither of old Left thinking. The old Left, in an attitude stretching back to the nineteenth century, was very insistent that everyone should be obliged to work. No-one, said the old Left, in a taunt aimed at top-hatted, cane wielding capitalists, should live in luxury on the labour of others. But this expectation of universal labour was predicated on first abolishing exploitation. Now there is an expectation of universal work, regardless of the existence of exploitation. In fact, the expectation of work has become more emphatic as exploitation has intensified (this might be related to the fact that exploitation has virtually expired as a concept).

“At all levels there is a denial of exploitation, oppression, imbalance of any kind,” says Eliane Glaser in her book, Get Real.

In America in the 1890s, Glazer points out, the poorest in society worked longer hours than the richest. By the 1990s the richest 10% were working longer hours than the poorest.

Work has now achieved the status, described by Mark Fisher in his book, Capitalist Realism, of “post-ideological”. Like recycling, its benefits are assumed unthinkingly. But this is, Fisher says, “precisely where ideology does its work”. 

The virtue of work is an assumption even of a significant strand of anti-capitalist thinking – the school of “economic democracy”, or workers’ control.

“Without the pride and self-discipline that good work instills, the human spirit shrivels,” says David Schweickart in After Capitalism.

The fact that the virtue of work is so fervently believed in by utterly diverse elements of the political spectrum perhaps indicates a widespread desire not contemplate something, to blot out an uncomfortable thought.

What is work for?

What that taboo is, I would suggest, is the ultimate purpose of work, as opposed to the qualities it inculcates in the worker. This is the subject of Russell’s essay; the disconnect between the ascetic belief in the virtue of work and what he terms “the social purpose of production”.

Considering post-revolutionary Soviet Russia, Russell remarked: “industry, sobriety, willingness to work for long hours for distant advantages, all these reappear”.

What will happen in Russia, he asked, “when the point has been reached where everybody could be comfortable without working long hours?”

This is a question that we in contemporary advanced capitalist countries really need to ask of our own societies. Because we have reached a condition of “post-scarcity” – a state of affairs that could not be ascribed to Bertrand Russell’s 1930s’ England. “Post-scarcity” was a term coined by the social ecologist Murray Bookchin to describe the US of the late 1960s. It meant that society had advanced so far technologically that it was quite feasible to produce the goods that were needed with a fraction of the labour that used to be required in the heyday of heavy industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Productivity has increased exponentially since the sixties (though the rate of growth has been slower in the neoliberal era than its social democratic predecessor). General Motors is now making almost double the amount of vehicles it was in 1955 with a third of the workforce. The archetypal postmodern corporation, Apple, employs only 60,000 people globally.

At a time in history when, as Dan Hind says, “the machinery of material production no longer needs more than a handful of us,” it is naively stupid to expect that merely exhalting work will shift this fundamental historical situation. Making paid employment more crucial to survival than it already is – 500,000 people in the UK are ‘employed’ because they work 6 hours a week – will not create the sustainable jobs that people, or a capitalism that craves effective demand, need.

There is another reason why idolising work is fundamentally out of time. Compared to Russell’s day, there are urgent and mounting environmental problems. To take just one example, arctic sea ice is melting more rapidly than virtually anymore anticipated. More work – “altering,” in Russell’s phrase, “the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface” – is not part of the solution, it’s a major part of the problem. Ecologically, we, as a society, need less work to be done. We need to de-grow.

All this amounts to asking an elemental question, “one that Marx and Keynes asked repeatedly,” says Glaser, “but which seems to have mislaid amongst the papers on our desks – what is the point of work?"

Here is part two 

And the final part