"Freedom From or Freedom in Work? Post-Work Proposals and Hannah Arendt’s Conception of Political Freedom" - Thijs Keulen (University of Edinburgh)

Forthcoming, Contellations

By Thijs Keulen

In 2020, COVID-19 forced governments across the world to swiftly respond to the threat citizens faced to their income as a result of state-imposed lockdowns. In many cases, this took the form of an emergency cash transfer, of which the US administration’s no-strings-attached cheque of $1200 in March 2020 was one of the most remarkable. This experience put the idea of a Universal Basic Income (henceforth UBI) in the spotlights - that is, an unconditional, non-means-tested, regular cash transfer from the state to individual citizens that would meet their basic needs. While by no means a new idea, COVID-19 accelerated the acceptance of the policy as a simple and effective measure to counter crises and raised discussion about its adoption as a non-temporary policy. And although the prospect of a UBI in the UK (where the author is writing from) is currently dim, the idea has gained further relevance since the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and its threat to swathes of jobs.

This proposal for a UBI sits, together with a form of collective working-time reduction such as the 4-day workweek, at the centre of a debate amongst authors on the left in what can be called ‘post-work’ writing. Some of the most prominent voices in this genre include Kathi Weeks, Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams, Helen Hester, Aaron Bastani, Kyle Lewis and Will Stronge. According to these authors, a basic income and maximal reduction of collective working-time would radically transform social relations to enhance autonomy in and out of work, provide security from poverty and precarity, decenter employment as the lynchpin of social belonging, and maximize self-determination for the pursuit of chosen projects and activities.

To be sure, while these authors all appeal to socio-economic trends towards underemployment driven by technological advances, most of them invoke the term ‘post-work’ not as a literal prediction of a society completely without work. Rather, ‘post-work’ refers to an ideal of society in which dependency on the wage relation – working for an income – no longer so thoroughly structures the form and quality of life available to most people. In short, a world in which workers cease to be so relentlessly disciplined by their dependency on the ebbs and flows of the labour market and instead have the time and resources to give shape to their lives in ways untethered from the necessity to work.

If we focus on the conceptions of freedom that motivate or underpin these ideas, there are at least two that we can find. On the one hand, a ‘negative’ ideal of freedom from domination is appealed to. Through a basic income and the reduction of working time, workers would be liberated from the compulsive aspects of wage-labour and the labour market. Being less dependent on a wage would afford workers the credible option of quitting bad work, shifting the balance of power between employers and workers toward the latter.

Secondly, post-work authors also seem to be motivated by a more positive conception of freedom: as the development of human capacities and potentialities in ways less tethered to the necessity of making a living. Having more free time and the resources to not have this time be occupied by activities tied to the labour market – i.e., looking for work, turning our hobbies into side gigs to make extra money, scraping together the social and cultural capital to get a future job, etc. – would afford a freedom that goes beyond the absence of constraint or domination. It would enable people to be engaged in self-determined projects and activities that they can recognize as their own, either individually or collectively. Post-work proposals for a UBI and collective working time reduction would thus lay the basis for kinds of human flourishing beyond the necessity of work.

Both these conceptions of freedom find their meaning not in work or the latter’s transformation, but in a liberation from work – an idea with deep roots in the history of Western philosophy. It’s also an idea of freedom that finds one of its sharpest critics in the political theorist Hannah Arendt. While Arendt might be best known by the general public as the author of Eichman in Jerusalem or The Origins of Totalitarianism, she in fact articulated her own critique of a liberation from work buttressed by automation and technological advancement in her seminal The Human Condition. One that, despite being written in 1958, is still of singular relevance today.

The most concise statement of Arendt’s point of view is that ‘neither abundance of goods nor the shortening of time spent laboring are likely to result in the establishment of a common world’.[1] It’s this establishment and maintenance of a ‘common world’, or worldliness as she also calls it, that’s crucial to Arendt’s understanding of freedom. For Arendt, ‘worldliness’ is a quality of social relationships marked by the public speech and action of people with others about common issues. It’s through acting and speaking with others that people make a public and disclose themselves as a plurality of ‘distinct and unique being[s] among equals’, thus constituting a ‘world’ that lies between them.[2] Through our disclosure to others, our freedom has a specifically worldly appearance, as opposed to playing out as a psychological problem or a problem of the will. This disclosing and inter-subjective dimension of freedom is also why for Arendt the latter is best understood as political, epitomized by being a ‘participator in the government of affairs’.[3] By participating in deliberation and decision-making for common ends, people not only disclose themselves but also share power (of a relational, non-sovereign kind) in a way that’s distinct from ‘unworldly’ conceptions of freedom, characterized by being experienced independently from one’s association with others.

This political form of freedom is distinguished from what Arendt calls ‘liberation’. With which she means being freed from necessity, poverty, and oppression: ‘the more or less free range of non-political activities which a given body politic will permit and guarantee to those who constitute it’.[4] While liberation and political freedom are deeply interdependent, Arendt’s concern with conflating the two relates to the issue of rulership: the separation of those with a share in political power from those without. After all, one can be liberated and pursue one’s private projects without having access to opportunities for political participation or a share in power. Moreover, liberation by no means translates into durable spaces for the exercise of political freedom, as Arendt was at pains to argue (somewhat controversially) in her survey of the French, American and Russian revolutions. Political freedom, then, is defined by an intrinsic relationship to participation (as way of relating to plurality of others as equals, and as distinct), the exercise of power (with others, rather than over them) and the institutional conditions for this form of freedom to appear durably.

We might now better grasp Arendt’s claim that neither of the post-work proposals previously discussed would result in the establishment of a common world. To be blunt, while these proposals would liberate citizens to be freer in the use of their time outside of work, they would continue to be governed within the workplace as voiceless subjects while their social environments would also continue to be co-constituted by private powers over which they have little say. Even though liberation from work would plausibly enable citizens’ capacity to participate in politics conventionally understood, post- work proposals leave untouched those areas of economic life which are still currently out of democratic reach, such as the workplace, private ownership, and investment decisions, which remain dominated by private interests. In other words, post-work proposals secure an extensive measure of autonomous time, but this plays out within a social environment constituted by private interests over which worker-citizens have little to no say, failing to improve their political freedom within the economy.

Arendt’s scepticism about the prospect of liberation from work buttressed by automation is further illuminated when she writes that:

‘The danger of future automation is less the much deplored mechanization and artificialization of natural life than that, its artificiality notwithstanding, all human productivity would be sucked into an enormously intensified life process and would follow automatically, without pain or effort, its ever-recurrent natural cycle’.[5]

Arendt characterizes the utopian ideal of full automation as essentially hostile to worldliness because it represents an enlarged version of the metabolic process of labour and consumption, the difference being that now people are liberated to ‘consume the whole world and to reproduce daily all things it wished to consume’. However, this critique only makes sense to the extent that the relationship between production and consumption remains politically unmediated. That is, Arendt presupposes in her critique that the automation of production is not accompanied by any different or greater political form of control over this production, which is why she equates such an achievement with the ideal of a ‘consumer’s society,’ in which ‘we would no longer live in a world at all but simply driven by a process in whose ever-recurring cycles things appear and disappear, manifest themselves and vanish’.[6]

While this depiction is rather caustic, Arendt’s concern with worldliness and political freedom does direct our attention to post-work thinkers’ separation of their redistributive proposals from people’s political freedom in the economy. Such a separation presupposes what Arendt also clearly presupposes in her critique, which is that the mediation between production and consumption in capitalism is driven by impersonal processes rather than through democratic forms of decision-making, and thus remains ‘unworldly ‘. From this perspective, the question ‘is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things’ (…).[7] Whether automation would ‘serve the world and its things’ depends less on the free time it opens up or the liberation from compulsion it achieves, hinging rather on the creation of durable institutions where citizens can participate in deciding on political questions about the organization and purpose of production.

This perspective is even more relevant, I believe, than it was in the time of Fordist capitalism Arendt was writing in. Our own times are marked by what some call ‘surveillance capitalism’,[8] ‘platform capitalism’,[9] or even something beyond capitalism – ‘vectoralism’.[10] Differences aside, what these authors chart is the development of an economy based on powerful digital platforms extracting value from their rentier-like activity, the ‘free’ data produced by millions of users, and the exploitation of pools of underemployed labour across the globe. As Matthew Thompson points out, in this context UBI in particular could end up acting as a subsidy for platform corporations to extract profits by providing data producers with an income to interact online and to create content for free.[11] It’s no surprise Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are among the most vocal proponents of a UBI.

Lastly, while AI is primed to swallow up swathes of jobs in the near future, it’s argued that AI’s real threat is not just the displacement of work but its qualitative erosion and gigification: intensified routinization, codification, measurement and disciplining by algorithmic and platform technologies over increasingly interchangeable workers. While a UBI and collective working time reduction would ensure a modicum of security for workers while not at work, it seems unlikely that these proposals would be able to tackle what are essentially questions of power and voice in the economy.

These developments therefore cannot leave us indifferent to the organization of production (used loosely here to also capture the activity of these tech firms), the distribution and quality of power within firms and the forms of ownership within the economy. Yet by focusing our efforts on redistributive, post-work demands in separation from demands to transform work and economic decision-making more broadly, we risk doing exactly that. Arendt’s conception of political freedom and understanding of the worldly dimension of the economic offers a compelling case not to stake the meaning of our freedom on the liberation from work – a liberation that, moreover, would likely depend on the labour of a global proletariat. Rather, her perspective creates a presumption in favour of democratizing work and economic decision-making – in short, a form of economic democracy. Or, to paraphrase rather loosely, we should aim not only for liberation from work but also ‘the constitution of freedom’ in the economy – to ‘liberate and to build a new house where freedom can dwell’.[12]

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[1] Arendt, The Human Condition, 117 my italics.

[2] Arendt, 178.

[3] Arendt, On Revolution, 124.

[4] Arendt, 30.

[5] Arendt, The Human Condition, 132.

[6] Arendt, 134.

[7] Arendt, 151.

[8] Zuboff, ‘Big Other’.

[9] Srnicek, Platform Capitalism.

[10] Wark, Capital Is Dead.

[11] Thompson, ‘Money for Everything?’, 363.

[12] Arendt, On Revolution, 35.