Working It Out

Leftist intellectual arguments these days often present readers with so many caveats that we must keep pausing and asking what remains. Dotted with more hedges than a prosperous Anglo-American suburb, these propositions use words controversially and titillatingly, but not straightforwardly. “Family abolition” refers more to a reinvention or expansion of the family than to that institution’s elimination; similarly, language of police and prison “abolition” becomes inflammatory drag for the reformist slog of moving money around municipal budgets, from the right hand of the state to its left. The latter may also evoke a horizon for a less stressful future in which there won’t be as many people acting out in dangerous or antisocial ways. None of it means that the left wants you to die alone and unloved at the hands of knife-wielding assailants (phew).

This intellectual landscape contains enticing and, to some, alarming provocations. They get our attention, to be sure, but we must then deflate them in order to find the ideas hidden within the hyperbole. These can turn out to be both visionary and practical. Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek write in this vein, and accordingly, their book, After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time, takes time to get going, with abundant “to be sures” along the way.

Most of these caveats stem from the concept of “post-work,” an intellectual tradition with which the authors identify. They assure us that a post-work approach to the home does not mean that we will die alone and unloved, cared for by robots, nor will our babies. It also, sensibly and perhaps disappointingly, doesn’t mean that we won’t work anymore. Though it takes many pages to become clear, “post-work,” to Hester and Srnicek, means less work, under more liberated conditions, and more free time.

Hester and Srnicek contend that “post” or “anti” work theorists haven’t grappled much with the work of social reproduction, also known as care work. They seek to remedy that. As the authors state within their many caveats, some care work is necessary (people require care, and much of it has to be done by humans), while some is pleasurable (hanging out with elderly relatives or neighbors, playing games with children). After all these qualifications, what remains of Hester and Srnicek’s imaginary is surprisingly inspiring.

They argue, rightly, that the single-family home and the nuclear family itself are some of the least efficient ways that humans could possibly organize the labor of cooking, childcare, cleaning, laundry, and other life-maintaining work. After all, these institutions result in millions of us working all by ourselves at the exact same tasks, using a ridiculous amount of natural resources to provide care for a small number of people. They draw on a wide range of other thinkers who have reimagined this work, like Bolshevik theoretician Alexandra Kollontai, who envisioned public laundries and canteens, where people could socialize freely with neighbors outside their immediate families, and armies of well-compensated public servants who would come around and clean everyone’s homes.

Engagingly, After Work focuses not only on how our ideas, culture, and politics might need to evolve to create more free time for caregivers, but also what kind of design and architecture support such changes. Such ideas can help us design the future, and their concreteness also reassures the reader that radical change is possible by pushing past one of the biggest cultural barriers to rethinking any aspect of daily life, namely our struggle to imagine it. They discuss design that balances shared caregiving with privacy, drawing from Dolores Hayden’s classic article “What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like?,” in which she imagines cooperative apartments with day care centers, laundromats, kitchens with take-out meals, communal gardens in which food could be grown, and a home help office providing caregivers for the elderly and for children—all in addition to private dwellings with private outdoor space. They also point out that the technology for minimizing the worst drudgery of the home has long been imagined and never fully realized. Feminist inventor Frances Gabe, for example, designed, built, patented, and inhabited a self-cleaning home in the 1980s. A button activated a sprinkler in the ceiling; runoff passed through drains in subtly sloped floors; floors were coated in the same kind of varnish that is used on boats.

The authors also look at the communal kitchens that have enabled shared meals
in communes, whether in early twentieth-century Russia or New York City in the same period, and examine the balance of shared and private space in the social housing first built in the Red Vienna era, the time between the First and Second World Wars when the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria controlled Vienna and parts of the rest of the country. Many of those buildings have survived and remain a model for the world; socialist politicians from New York City have visited the Viennese housing, for example, and are now campaigning for a similar approach to social housing here. Public canteens existed not only in Soviet Russia, but in Britain during World War II, when Churchill insisted they be called “British restaurants” so they wouldn’t sound too communist.

In addition to this rich array of tidbits from history, the authors do some productive imagining: Our modern-day social housing could allow us to share tools and technology, rather than each household having its own expensive and energy-consuming version of everything. I particularly loved their idea of communal guest rooms: We all want a guest room sometimes, but in many mid-to-large-sized suburban homes, it goes unused most of the time. Sharing resources like this would cut down on the amount of space and objects in the home that need to be cleaned and cared for and collectivize the work of maintaining them. The authors’ excitement about how we could live better, more liberated lives is contagious, and we need more of this historically informed future-imagining in leftist writing.

At times, however, Hester and Srnicek struggle to describe the world that we currently live in. They minimize actually existing public goods, unintentionally making their goals seem less attainable than they are. For example, they acknowledge the public swimming pools built during the New Deal, but then claim that these didn’t survive desegregation. The reality is much more complicated: While it’s true that some of the New Deal public pools shut down after desegregation, others long outlasted Jim Crow and only fell apart during the austerity of the 1980s and ’90s. More importantly, others survive to this day and are beloved, well-maintained, and enthusiastically used. Universal school lunch, too, is mentioned as a misty ideal, yet hardly belongs in the realm of speculative fiction. It’s a reality in countries like Finland, Sweden, and Estonia. Even in the United States, school lunch is free to all students in New York City as well as in nine states, and the policy is under consideration in many more. These omissions make the book feel out of touch with real-time progress; more information about how some of the reforms Hester and Srnicek desire are already underway, even in our current fallen world, would have made their arguments for going even further more convincing.

Still, the authors’ lack of dogmatism—giving shout outs to ways that communism, social democracy, communitarianism, hippie counterculture, and even capitalism have all at times sought to minimize the tedious aspects of labor in the home—is expansive and inviting and accurately reflects the broad and nonsectarian appeal of free time as a social agenda. Even more admirably, Hester and Srnicek have the political maturity to recognize that for humans of the near future, other social goals may at times take priority over the ones in this book; in one particularly honest passage toward the end of After Work, they note how labor-saving innovation can be at odds with a lower-carbon society. Agriculture provides a good example: Urban, on-site farming might be better for the planet, and for our health, than continuing to depend on industrial agriculture, yet shifting to the former would almost certainly be more work.

It’s not easy theorizing the future, but it’s necessary. Hester and Srnicek have done so imaginatively and flexibly, in a way that demonstrates a deep valuing of women and our time. By the time we get to the end of their book, we’ve grown used to all the caveats and maybe even come to appreciate them as part of the nuance of their thinking.