Futures Found and Lost? Revisiting Post-Work Imaginaries in an Era of 'polycrisis'

The 2010s saw increased enthusiasm for a particular vision of a post-work society, promulgated in response to the Global Financial Crisis. As a projective vision caught between utopia and manifesto it offered long-term hopes for abundance and leisure alongside short-term policy prescriptions of stronger welfare protections, state-led technological development and a cultural assault on the work ethic. Echoing figures such as Andre Gorz, Bertrand Russell and Paul Lafargue, 'post-workism' updated the notion of the leisure society for the information age but failed to grapple with limits on plausibility imposed by unfolding ecological crises. Demands for a post-work world have since ebbed to silence (again), even while the Covid-19 pandemic led to a dramatic hiatus in capitalist activity that reportedly sparked a ‘great resignation’ among those few who both glimpsed the possibilities of a life of meaningful activity outside the workplace and had the resources to pursue it.

This paper revisits the prognosis for the leisure society, exploring what remains of these visions if abundance were to be replaced with sufficiency. It identifies elements that might serve as both practical solutions and compensatory inducements to a socialism that forgoes the promise of material economic growth. Firstly, post-work ideas offer a re-evaluation of both work and leisure appropriate for futures in which much daily activity might be oriented toward local ecological restoration, mutual aid and community care in the context of multiple crises. Secondly, the emphasis on the near-zero marginal cost of digital products holds out hopes for continued gains in productivity in the information work required for building new forms of socio-economic organisation as well as the promise of the free circulation of patents, designs, entertainment and digital cultural products of all kinds. Finally, the question of whether such visions can grow beyond their roots in the global north is addressed.