Worldwide societies are re-evaluating many of the fundamentals that were taken as factual truisms. The covid pandemic got a lot of people re-evaluating their lifestyle choices. Is the concept of work the next aspect of human behaviour to be challenged? Could labor ever be an affirmation of self-worth, and a personal choice rather than a means of survival in a cold and hostile world? Or is this just another deluded utopian dream?
Gender is now in many countries a matter of choice and self-determination, rather than of biology, a change in cultural consciousness that until recently would be considered weird and threatening. Our preconceptions of who we are and what we do are evolving exponentially in parallel with technology.
The Institute of Labor thinks people being paid by corporate governments not to work but consume is an idea whose time has come.
Ever since Sir Thomas Moore (in 1516) wrote of Utopia, a fictional world, where money is outlawed and working conditions are always perfect, people have devised utopias in fiction and in film, streaming into your house. At the core of any utopia worth its salt is the necessity to work. Without people getting things done, nothing gets done. The unmade bed does not make itself nor does the kitchen But society’s approach to employment appears to many as outdated, dysfunctional and dystopian, needing a reboot with a new operating system.
Can a utopia really exist or is the conception of a perfect world fatally flawed by our human nature? A good idea that cannot survive contact with reality. The origin of the word is ambiguous. U meaning no in classical Greek. Topia meaning place. A non place, unreal.
The original Utopia was written as a counterbalance to the corrupt world of Henry the Eighth, the spoiled brat king of England, and Thomas Moore lost his head on the chopping block at Tower Hill for his insolence.
The utopia of Thomas Moore was a bigoted place, allowing for slavery and elitism, but it had one thing going for it: the work and division of labour was equal and the rewards shared equally. There have been countless attempts over the years to create a perfect society with perfect working conditions and where the division of labor and money is just and fair.
Karl Marx’s Das Capital is a utopia, a vision of a fair society based on European Enlightenment, a dream of a better world where money is shared equally, but when communism was confronted with dogma and ideology, and hi-jacked by Len, Stalin, Chairman Mao, and Pol Pot, the dream crashed and burned. Utopias do not handle ideology and dogma well.
In Italy, post the Second World War, The Olivetti typewriter company created a utopian socialist society in the town of Ivrea where workers were valued for their contribution to society and rewarded with generous pension schemes and comfortable living conditions, even days off to cultivate family farm plots. This utopia did not survive when the circus moved to cheaper production countries. The Olivetti factories closed down and it was sunset on that vision of work as a pleasant enterprise. Utopian societies cannot compete with cheap labor overseas. They struggle to accommodate the ruthless logic of capitalism.
Early tech companies were influenced by a neo-utopian theory of a dynamic and innovative work place, with ping pong tables, play rooms and chill out spaces. The creative dream is now over, with tech workers being laid off in record numbers, ejected from their highly paid tech utopias into a dystopian society of homelessness, and the cold headwinds of economic reality.
A new labor utopia movement envisages people paid to stay at home and consume goods manufactured by robots. The New Labor Utopia theory is that technology gains in productivity and the consequent decline in manufacturing employment will inevitably result in better wealth distribution, including payments to most of the adult population for doing nothing. It will ensure that higher education is free, and no student debt.
The theory argues that holders of capital – wealthy individuals, institutions, banks and governments- can not pauperise their population otherwise they will not be able to afford to buy their robot produced products. So they will pay people to consume, a process essentially not too different from writing money and giving this venture capitalists – but this time giving it to the end users. You scratch my back and I scratch yours. Capitalism and the consumer economy will be mutually supportive, while still acknowledging the profit principle that oils the wheels.
The glaring hole in this is why should someone choose to work when they could stay at home and still get paid? Nobody will need any more to prostitute their body and soul when they are paid to live the good life. Why should someone change bedpans in a hospital when they don’t need the money? Who needs a shit job? And this is where the shifting paradigms of work and tech kick in.
We will, the theory goes, work for enjoyment. The heavy lifting and repetitive work will be done by robots and human intervention becomes superfluous, leaving individuals to find an employment in a field they enjoy and in which they find self-affirmation. If you want to meditate all day long, so be it. If you want to care for the sick who need a human touch, there will be a need for that. The type of work you do will harmonise with your pyscho-dynamics. Work becomes an affirmation of self worth, and not a soul crushing drudge through the week. People still need to be entertained with books and forms of art as forms of self expression. The future workers will be free to travel and live their lives on their terms. All they have to do is consume what is on offer.
Long gone are the Monday morning blues and a sense of a wasted and unlived life. This may be pie in the sky , as unachievable as in Thomas More’s Utopia, the impossible dream. But even as rational an institution such as the World Bank acknowledges that the current work model which has led to the deterioration of the quality of work and the degradation of wages in favour of the top one per cent is unsustainable. Nobody at an international level is prepared to admit it openly but the current economical model of winner takes all is in a death spiral. No sane society can tolerate a situation where nurses spend their working hours looking after the sick and then go to food banks. Or where doctors work do second jobs in the supermarket checkout because they can’t make ends meet. Eventually people will just run out of money to buy anything. And what happens to your portfolio of stocks and shares then?
The paradigm that manual labor has imposed on us as a species is based on the linear nature of work. This means a direct and identifiable between cause and effect. This paradigm can be offloaded onto AI and the robotisation of work to do the heavy lifting. This opens a person’s experiences in life to a wide vista of opportunities.
when linearity beaks down. everything becomes unpredictable and immensely complex. Robert Temple. A New Science of Heaven
The utopians propose that the wealth of the giants – Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Monsanto etc who have accumulated trillions of dollars the last 20 years – should be transferred to the public economy. Student debts paid, housing subsidised, food for all in a wave of social privatisation.
The only way you will persuade Jeff Bezos and billionaire brethren to go along with this radical shift in wealth management is to convince him to move his assets from volatile stocks and shares into public assets, which are firmly rooted in reality, rather a dysfunctional utopia
A dystopia is a fictional or hypothetical society in which the conditions of life are characterized by misery, poverty, oppression, and often a totalitarian government that exercises complete control over the population. A dystopian society is often the opposite of a utopian society, which is a perfect, idealized society.
Dystopian societies often feature a lack of individual freedoms, restricted access to resources, and a general sense of hopelessness and despair among the population. The government in a dystopian society often uses force to maintain control, and may also employ propaganda, censorship, and surveillance to suppress dissent and maintain a sense of order.
Dystopian societies are often portrayed in works of science fiction and speculative fiction, but they can also serve as a commentary on real-world social, political, and economic issues. Examples of dystopian societies in literature include George Orwell’s “1984,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
The concept of a dystopia is often used as a warning against the dangers of totalitarianism, oppression, and the erosion of individual freedoms, and serves as a reminder of the importance of protecting and promoting democracy, human rights, and social justice.
The philosophy of dynamic change maintains that the current belief system that working to survive is an inevitable fact of life will eventually reach its sunset moment A tidal change will sweep the world like a tsunami. Finally, Utopia may be achievable. If Elon Musk can reach for Mars fifty million miles away so can the workers of the world dream of the bright sunny uplands within their grasp.
Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash
