Artist Frans Masereel’s response to an industrialist’s opinion that ‘in order to continue to exist, the world must produce more and talk less’ (1919).
One of the questions that arises at the end of this deep history of work across time and space is whether it informs how work will be organized and undertaken henceforth. What does the historical record suggest about what needs to be done in order for us to better control our collective future? Certainly, general lines can be distinguished – in the last centuries, for example, as a result of watersheds like ‘The Great Transformation’ (the mechanization by steam power that led to the declining importance of agriculture in industrializing countries), ‘The Second Great Transformation’, in which, from around 1970, services took the lead over manufacturing while states simultaneously loosened their grip on the market and, finally, the robotic transformation that we find ourselves in now.1 If we survey the entire history of work, however, there are reasons enough to be suspicious of simplistic fault lines, based, in particular, on the experience of rich countries over the past few centuries. Yet we can conclude with four crucial elements that have become clear over the book’s trajectory.
My primary reservation about over-simplistic predictions is the fact that all the major developments described here invariably evoked unexpected reactions. Appearance does not preclude disappearance. You only have to think of how market economies functioned for a millennium in Western Europe and India between 500 BCE and 500 CE, only to suddenly disappear again for half a millennium or more. Another example is the rise, fall and rise again of unfree labour within market economies. Despite the abolition and serious prosecution of slavery in the nineteenth century, and despite the establishment of the fundamental rights of working people in the Treaty of Versailles, it was not all that long ago that major countries such as Russia, Germany, Japan and China partially retrogressed to unfree labour. The transition of the housewife into the labour market has also been interrupted several times, as have fluctuations in the extent to which the ideal of the welfare state is embraced. The stagnation of remuneration and job security in especially the rich countries in recent decades (summarized in concepts such as flexibilization and precarization) can also be counted as types of reactions.2 Or, in that context, the recent massive Keynesian state aid to companies and working people following the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic – something that prior to this seemed absolutely unthinkable.
Secondly – and previous examples already point in this direction – the nature and vehemence of these reactions are not easy to predict; at least, not as easy as, say, a strike resulting from a massive cut in wages. Take, for example, the contradiction between the emergence of the workers’ movement, which peaked one hundred years ago, and the current lack of successful collective actions to improve working conditions. And all this is taking place while the wealth gap within countries, between the richest inhabitants and the rest of the population, has been widening and deepening for decades. This increase in social inequality without apprehending the expected ‘classic’ social counter-movement seems new, unless we are convinced of an exact and thus ineliminable parallel between the emotional compensation offered by the ‘nativist’ (often referred to as populist) exclusion movements of the interwar period and those of today.
Thirdly, under the influence of digitization, there has been an unprecedented global convergence of prosperity levels and consumption patterns between countries in the past decades and a similar confluence of rewards for work. Simply put: at last, the Chinese are better off, while Europeans and Americans (and in particular the white males among them) must accept a standstill or even a step back. This is a new detail in a truly globalized world for which there are no historical parallels. Moreover, we are also seeing the re-emergence of counter-movements, as ‘offshoring’ (moving production to low-wage countries) is once more provoking a turnabout due to robotization in the North Atlantic and due to rising labour costs, especially in China: so-called reshoring. China, in turn, is not sitting still and is now seriously pursuing factory automation. This is not surprising for a country that stands on the cusp of ageing, something that has already begun in Japan and South Korea.3
Fourthly, and certainly not unimportant, for most states, globalization means an erosion of democratic decision making at the national level. Capital is withdrawing itself from the rules of play agreed within nation states. But it is also taking labour with it with the rise of the informal economy, if we define this as ‘socially legitimate [in contrast to the criminal economy] paid work that is not declared to, hidden from, or unregistered with, the authorities for tax, social security and/or labour law purposes when it should be declared’. Where capital cancels the national contract, labour reaps the bitter benefits. In the European Union, some 10 per cent of the total labour input in the private sector is in the informal sector, representing 14.3 per cent of total gross value added (GVA, varying from 25 per cent in Poland, Romania and Lithuania to 7 per cent in Germany). It is even more impressive beyond Europe, with some 60 per cent of non-agricultural workers – based on a survey of 36 developing countries – being primarily employed in the informal economy.4
Seen in this light, globalization means the termination of the national social contract in the North Atlantic, or the failure to pursue it where it has already been weak for a long time. Large companies choose countries with low production costs (including low wages) and low taxes and pay their top management and shareholders from the increased profits. Workers are deployed as flexibly as possible. One of the techniques implemented is the outsourcing of services, made possible by employment agencies. Think of the altered power balance between European trade unions and the big internationals (the American trade unions hardly play a role). Consequently, the mentality and political preference of many working people, who feel victims of this, are also changed. Among this group, there is a rising hope that protectionism and restriction of international labour migration is the best solution.
If simply tracing historical lines is not easy or perhaps not even feasible, then I propose an alternative strategy in order to gain some insight into where we now stand as working people. I will begin with a brief discussion of a number of scenarios that have been gaining ground in the recent literature. Subsequently, and also finally, I would like to consider the results of this exercise in light of the main constants that the history of human work seems to yield. Because they too exist.
Currently, there are a number of future scenarios circulating, most of which do not concern us here because they have nothing to do with, or are only very indirectly related to, labour.5 The following five, however, deserve our attention:
Firstly, the current dominant system of market economies (referred to as ‘capitalist’) is unsustainable, whether or not it is located in a democratic society.6 The most well-founded analysis of this is by the Dutch historian Bas van Bavel, who, based on historical arguments, expects the current market economy to perish irrevocably due to its internal weakness. Others think that the past century of growing free labour, which has been increasingly well rewarded, was an exceptional period, not only with regard to its history but also with respect to the future.
Secondly, the market economy is in deep trouble, as evidenced by increasing social inequality within the rich countries – which, of course, is different from the inequality between countries, which is decreasing sharply.7 As detailed in Chapter 7, the remuneration for work in rich countries, and especially the US, has dropped to such low levels that precarious working people need public assistance – and so taxpayers subsidize employers who underpay their employees.8 Piketty in particular is struck by the absence of collective action and socio-political engagement to halt the diminishing wages for labour in democratic countries, in the first place by restoring strongly progressive taxation. He and others (such as the British Professor of Development Studies Guy Standing) warn of the opportunities this political inertia from the left offers right-wing identitarian politicians and the (potential) victims it will create.9
So far, so pessimistic; but there are also optimists out there.
Thirdly, while recognizing the crisis of the current system, optimism about the renewal power of ‘capitalism’, especially through state intervention, prevails. This is the mainstream position of both policymakers and academics in democratic countries.10 There is a growing awareness of how, until now, it has flourished under state protection (also in the US), demonstrating that the market and the state deliver the strongest possible combination. This is evidenced by government efforts to eliminate or at least mitigate the mismatch between the demand of the labour market for computer-literate workers and the supply of predominantly low-educated and/or non-tech-savvy unemployed.
Fourthly, there are those diehard neoliberals who see fewer problems; indeed, they only see opportunities. Despite recent deep economic crises, such as that of 2008 and the outbreak of coronavirus in 2020, they believe in the disappearance of the wage worker and put their faith in the new human, an entrepreneur and professional with their own business, always in search of opportunities. This self-employed working hero of the future will, moreover, be extremely mobile and would go in search of new challenges all over the world.11
Fifthly, there are those – both optimists and pessimists – who share an expectation regarding the final acceleration of technology, the most important consequence of which for this book is robotization.12 Accompanying this would be an unprecedented shift in the balance between work and free time. The optimists among them herald the leisure time that this would deliver; the pessimists fear mass unemployment and an even more drastic drop in purchasing power and thus in demand. In addition, robotization would bite its own tail and the greying workforce would give a helping hand in this regard. A third variant, which is not so easy to characterize as either optimistic or pessimistic, is entirely related to the large multinationals that are the driving force behind robotization. The majority of nation states appear to be against global monopolies but, with the exception of China, they are no match for behemoths such as Amazon, Apple, IBM and Microsoft. These tech companies seem increasingly able to determine the public’s taste. The ultimate consequence of this is the reduction of the citizen, and therefore also of the working citizen, to a mere consumer of ready-made fare. The ultimate ‘Bread and Circuses’ society – Yuval Harari’s ‘Age of Shopping’ or even Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).13
Having surveyed the whole history of work, then, what can this survey tell us about what to expect of its future? While no single scenario can be clearly argued to hold (or not), we can react to a number of established, even celebrated, projections in relation to the future of work: the ‘end of capitalism’, increased inequality, the role of the ‘free’ market in distributing work and pay, and the consequences of robotization.
The inevitable end of ‘capitalism’?
Bas van Bavel’s interesting and excellently documented vision of the last thousand years convincingly shows that economic ‘capitalist’ frontrunners, the major market economies – from the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad to the United States of America – inevitably ran into trouble after a few centuries and, consequently, had to surrender the baton again. This translatio imperii is undeniably a recurring phenomenon in history. It is, however, not so much the loss of the top position that is remarkable, but perhaps more the fact that, in most cases, the ‘losers’ were not much worse off in the long run. The system was not that self-destructive. Compare, for example, the prosperity of the Dutch today, even though the country’s Golden Age was already a long time ago. The same is true for northern Italy, the southern Netherlands, the Dutch Republic, the UK, and the US losing its competition with East Asia.14 And why would that not continue with other shifts in dominance in the foreseeable future?
Van Bavel has, of course, thought of this. He does not deny that, in the past, it may have been possible for losers to recover, albeit on a more modest footing, but he believes that this is no longer possible in our heavily globalized world in which old-style empires are simply not viable. But is this convincing? Think, firstly, about China. Whatever the weaknesses of this centrally managed market economy, it is certainly not yet buckling under the weight of globalization and global capital owners. And what of the argument posited by some labour historians about the exceptional nature of free wage labour? The big question is whether the undeniable precarization of sections of the workforce in recent decades is sufficiently broad and deep to be simply extrapolated to the future.
Increasing social inequality?
And so we come to Piketty’s irrefutable assertion of the growing income disparity especially in the rich countries since the 1970s and 1980s. Prior to this, the incomes of wage workers had increased; subsequently, they stagnated, while, at the same time, the top incomes skyrocketed.
But the story does not end here. Against this stagnation of labour income stands the long-term growth of other forms of income for the ordinary man and woman, as we have seen in Chapter 7 (pp. 409–21). The pronounced disparity in income inequality in the North Atlantic, ushered in by Reagan and Thatcher’s long-prepared ideological victory march, should not close our eyes to the almost paradoxical growth of social security expenditure and transfer payments, through taxes in the form of housing benefits, tax credits, child benefit and national insurance benefits, as demonstrated for England by Peter Sloman, who calls this ‘the paradox of rising welfare spending in an age of neoliberalism’.15 This entails a substantial shift in the portion of income of working-age adults with children being paid not by employers but by or via the government; the latter being less in the form of cash benefits and increasingly in the form of social insurance, housing subsidies, good free or state education and the like. For Great Britain, around the beginning of the new millennium, this meant that ‘the increase in household earnings inequality was largely unwound by the tax and benefit system’.16 Not only was this a shift away from dependence on employers (and collective action) and towards government officials, but it also meant, in particular, the latter’s direct involvement in household finances. This type of assistance is, after all, ‘means-tested’, and this type of testing (increasingly digital) can be far-reaching and undermine autonomy within domestic relations.
We find proponents not only, predictably, among the political left (think of the Programa Bolsa Família, introduced in 2003 by Brazil’s President Lula) but also among ideologically right-wing economists and politicians, who are sometimes pro forms of redistribution via a (Universal) Basic Income. The most famous example is the intellectual champion of the free market, Milton Friedman, who had already started developing his proposal for a Negative Income Tax in the Second World War.17 For him, the difference between both approaches lies in the level of contribution, and most of all in the implementation of government control. In both cases, however, we see an undeniable increase in the gap between work and pay and a shift of employers’ responsibilities to government.
In the context of this history of work, it is perhaps no surprise that the widening wealth gap within countries appears to be a centuries-long legacy of institutionally and ideologically anchored unequal appreciation and reward for labour. This is apparently separate from the traditional self-congratulations of aggrandizers and their universal support for ideologies that demean wage labour. It also contradicts their currently widely propagated belief that high rewards stem from like efforts and innate talent.
Societies dominated in the past by slavery, explicit caste hierarchy or more modern forms of institutionalized inequality, such as racial segregation and apartheid, seem to be, as it were hereditarily, the most burdened (which is not to say that the rest of the world, including Europe, is without sin). Think of the recent extreme increase in inequality in India, despite serious attempts since independence in 1947 to promote social opportunities for disadvantaged caste members via the constitution (1950, drawn up by Ambedkar, himself born a Dalit), which, in turn, facilitated affirmative action by way of ‘reservations’18 – and also despite efforts to build a welfare state à la Beveridge, which, unfortunately, ended in a deep gulf between a protected ‘formal’ and an unprotected ‘informal’ sector.19 In the US, too, affirmative action, as pleaded for by James Baldwin, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, is a long way from delivering the desired result, as the Black Lives Matter movement does not fail to emphasize. Think, too, of post-apartheid South Africa, but also of Brazil, another example where the legacy of slavery (abolished just 130 years ago) looms large. The strongest example, of course, is the stubborn prevalence of value systems favouring inequality – despite utterances to the contrary – in the oil-rich states of the Arab world.20
Thus far, an inner circle of (especially male) citizens has shared at least a minimal number of rights to work and fair compensation. But the difference between us (adult males) and them (the others) does not stop there, certainly not in a world with great geographical mobility. In every country there is also an outer circle of working people who only partially belong and who only enjoy some, or none, of the legal benefits of inner circle members. They are, primarily, legally employed foreign workers. They always have fewer rights, even within the European Union, and sometimes far less, as is the case in the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia.21 Finally, there are the disenfranchised illegals, the sans-papiers. The most extreme version of the outer circle is a society exploiting a minority of Untermenschen without any form of remuneration. The Second World War has shown us many examples of this, and, unfortunately, we cannot say the possibility can be ruled out in the future.22
The logical follow-up question is why collective action in the face of the increasing welfare gap has become so rare, in comparison with the previous century. Arguably, there is not, in fact, a total absence (remember, for example, the fierce protests in South Korea). And we can also see the partial success of affirmative action, or at least the promise it holds, for instance in India in relation to the lower castes and, in general, for women.23
The lack of a strong, collective counter-movement can perhaps be explained by the fact that, precisely as a result of a century of collective action, on average, the underclass in the North Atlantic now enjoys a historically reasonable level of prosperity (again because of the aforementioned transfer payments). Yet pervasive inequality still prevails, and I would add that the lack of counter-movements today could precisely be a consequence of the psychological ramifications of that inequality on those worst off: that is, that energy has been diverted from the real problem – social inequality – to excluding others, as is evident in the prevalence of populist fears regarding immigrants and minorities (see p. 424).24
Will the market resolve distribution problems?
Not on its own, though this is the omnipresent neoliberal vision on the distribution of work and pay via the market (already a century old, but still going strong). It was not the case in the past, as England’s heavily protectionist and mercantilist measures, at the expense of the Dutch Republic and, later, of the US, demonstrated during the long Industrial Revolution. History is in fact replete with examples of exactly this successful limiting of market forces, which yielded the greatest possible benefits for some states. This is the rule rather than the exception. The neoliberals who are optimistic about the blessings of the market and only the ‘free’ market distribution of work and pay have misread not only their history lessons but also the contemporary scenario in which the ideal of a world dominated by small entrepreneurs is highly unlikely.
Here, the recent coronavirus crisis speaks loud and clear. The biggest victims in rich countries are undoubtedly small business owners and freelancers – notwithstanding the gigantic sums that governments in rich countries have been forced to allocate to save them from certain destruction.25 The prospects for unprotected migratory workers worldwide are equally bleak. This contrasts, in particular, with organized wage workers with a permanent contract, although their position will also be threatened in the long term in the event of a global economic crisis as a result of the pandemic.
Paradoxically, although competition at the lower end of the labour market is increasing, it is declining at the top. Outside of China and, in a certain sense, perhaps India, the food industry is globally dominated by Unilever, Bayer and Procter & Gamble, the energy sector by Philips, Siemens and General Electric and the aircraft industry by Boeing and Airbus.26 This seems to contradict the greatly reduced workforce of these large companies. In 1974, the Dutch electronics giant Philips had almost half a million employees, compared to 37,000 now, and that was not because the company was in crisis, or because its products were not in demand – and also not because the company simply split into 10 units, each with 50,000 employees.
The explanation for this kind of development is deeply rooted in the proliferation of subcontracting. And where many wage workers are still physically working together, for example in the gigantic distribution centres located alongside motorways which are rapidly replacing shops in town centres, this is happening not only as a result of endless subcontracting but also as a result of payroll constructions. The American economist David Weil offers many examples of this, including the following:
A member of a loading dock crew working in Southern California is paid by Premier Warehousing Ventures LLC (PWV) – a company providing temporary workers to other businesses – based on the total time it takes him and members of his crew to load a truck. PWV, in turn, is compensated for the number of trucks loaded by Schneider Logistics, a national logistics and trucking company that manages distribution centers for Walmart. Walmart sets the price, time requirements, and performance standards that are followed by Schneider. Schneider, in turn, structures its contracts with PWV and other labor brokers it uses to provide workers based on those prices and standards and its own profit objectives.27
Aside from the low hourly wage rate that all this leads to and, as a consequence, a lot of overtime, it also results in an extreme fragmentation of workers in the workplace. In the above example, they are still working in shifts, but, as a rule, this is not the case and we see working people employed by a temporary employment agency, paid via a payroll company, but obliged to adhere to the standards of a multinational that itself only supervises this whole process through a host of intermediaries. This is not only alienation but also isolation, about which more below.
Does robotization promise a new utopia?
As we have seen, automation is centuries old. The contemporary iterations of this, robotization and digitization, are omnipresent, but the implications for work are much harder to judge, however obvious they seem to be.28 The dramatic reduction of working hours as a result of mechanization has already been promised for a century and a half. Think, for example, of the famous British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who, in 1918, stated in Roads to Freedom that ‘with the help of science . . . the whole community could be kept in comfort by means of four hours’ work a day’. Or consider the overconfident title of the eloquent James Livingston’s 2016 book: No More Work: Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea.29
A drastic reduction of working hours has undoubtedly occurred for many, certainly in the North Atlantic World that both Russell and Livingston are targeting, but, remarkably, it has been stuck, already for more than half a century, at around 40 hours per breadwinner and 60 to 80 hours per household. The fruits of automation are being converted into increasingly sophisticated low-priced consumer articles, but not into more free time. How is that possible? The explanation can be found in the proliferation of endless intermediate layers in the occupational structure. Direct producers are decreasing in number, but before goods reach the consumer, a much larger number of intermediaries has already interfered.
There are various reasons for this. The most important is perhaps the need of consumers, consumer organizations, national governments and international partnerships (such as the World Health Organization, but also trade treaty watchdogs) for control and security in an increasingly anonymous world with long and complicated production chains. In other words, striving for a level playing field on a global scale. There is no room to systematically elaborate this further here, but we should note the sobering observation of the Californian technology columnist Farhad Manjou. Himself the son of a pharmacist, he observes that ‘most pharmacists are employed only because the law says that there has to be a pharmacist present to dispense drugs’.30 Think also of the proliferation of the legal profession (especially private law experts in the Anglo-Saxon tradition),31 or of specialists in detecting, fighting and preventing cyber-crime – the other side of the shining medallion of digitization. Without striving for completeness, think also of the flexibilization of work that requires much greater coordination, the fight against burn-out and other work stress complaints. The same applies to the demands of éducation permanente in the computer age. If everyone must constantly upskill in order to stay up to date, then many more ‘upskillers’ are necessary, including specialists in digital support.
Apparently, we need more inspectors, controllers and supervisors, more auditors of auditors of auditors and so on, ad infinitum, in the private and in the public sectors, both in the position of wage worker and in that of the hired-in freelancer. Either way, so far new jobs are being created faster than old jobs are disappearing. The ageing population in the North Atlantic, as well as in Japan, South Korea and soon in China, resulting in more paid care tasks is also mentioned frequently. This is all true, but this book suggests a more profound explanation for the unstoppable advance of this counter-intuitive phenomenon: our essential need to work.
Work: The long historical lines
Let us now take a step back and survey what our exploration of the entire history of human labour has revealed. I detect three crucial elements.
Work as meaning, especially social meaning
We relate to each other through work. This book shows, in every register, that although work is clearly driven by need (the naked homo economicus), mankind also works because it produces self-esteem and elicits esteem from others.32 This is something that endless leisure simply cannot provide. No one has articulated this better than the German American philosopher Hannah Arendt: ‘The blessing of labor is that effort and gratification follow each other as closely as producing and consuming the means of subsistence, so that happiness is a concomitant of the process itself, just as pleasure is a concomitant of a healthy body . . . There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration.’33 Her American student, Richard Sennett, creatively advanced this theory, but narrowed it down to ‘pragmatism’ by referring to William Morris and John Ruskin, meaning – rather remarkably for an academic – that you work with your hands: ‘The craft of making physical things provides insight into the techniques of experience that can shape our dealings with others. Both the difficulties and the possibilities of making things well apply to making human relationships.’34 Both observations fit nicely with the ideas of David Riesman, who wrote in The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950):‘men need to feel adequate: to hold down a job, and then to be related to life through consumership is not enough. . . . [The] burden put on leisure by the disintegration of work is too huge to be coped with: leisure itself cannot rescue work, but fails with it, and can only be meaningful for most men if work is meaningful’.35 This desire for work as such, separate from the level of remuneration, perhaps also explains the amazing adaptability of younger generations to shifting contracts, as demonstrated for the US by the sociologist Beth A. Rubin, who said that they will consider any job or assignment as long as they can work, and as long as they can participate.36
Cooperation as a basic need of men and women
Precisely because work is as much about self-esteem as it is about gaining respect from others, cooperation is essential – in a small community like a household, as well as in a workshop, an office or a factory. As we saw, the oldest, even prehuman, desire is to work together, to cooperate. To quote the primatologist Frans de Waal again: empathy ‘builds on proximity, similarity, and familiarity, which is entirely logical given that it evolved to promote in-group cooperation’. This is in contrast to ‘the trust-starved climate of modern business [which] spells trouble and has recently made many people deeply unhappy by wiping out their savings’.37 One of the causes of this lack of trust are the long lines between management and the people who actually do the work, examples of which we have already seen. In this regard, whether that person is a wage worker or a lone freelancer no longer matters.
The large experimental medical and social science laboratory that we have all been living in since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has meant that many more people, including those with better labour contracts, have experienced this deeply. Grateful for the opportunity that digital resources provide to work from home, and by turning households into workplaces again after more than a century (think of the abuses of the ‘sweating industry’), we are now becoming ‘zoombies’, according to the organizational behaviourist Gianpiero Petriglieri: ‘any professional used to working face to face is deprived of subtle cues that they have learnt to process implicitly. Their conscious mind has to strain for new cues to make up for those familiar ones’.38 That is why video calling and meeting, forced upon us by our work (whether or not occasioned by a pandemic), are so tiring, and even exhausting. In the end, physical presence is essential for working together.
A fundamental need for fairness
Since the earliest times, we have known the tendency of some individuals to eat more of the social cake than their due, at least according to the egalitarian principles that we have all shared since the beginning of human history. We have also seen that these ‘aggrandizers’ cannot do this with impunity but must compensate the community, even if it is only symbolically. There is thus a socio-psychological limit to social inequality.39 In a negative sense, this was reflected in the general moral outrage at the bonuses and other benefits of bankers during the banking crisis of 2008. A smaller but more recent example is the call in many countries to improve the pay of healthcare workers in response to the coronavirus pandemic. In other words, egalitarianism is very much in line with the recognition of individual differences, especially in terms of effort. Piketty articulates it as us needing ‘a clear vision of human equality . . . a vision that fully recognizes the many legitimate differences among individuals, especially with respect to knowledge and aspirations, and the importance of these differences in determining how social and economic resources are deployed . . . the ideal socioeconomic organization must respect the diversity of aspirations, knowledge, talent and skills that constitutes the wealth of humankind’. The lack of this vision was one of the main factors in the failure of the Soviet Union.40 People strive simultaneously for fairness and egalitarianism within their group (and this can also mean within their groups of men or women) and for the fulfilment of individual aspirations and hope.
We have encountered two socio-political solutions in this book that reconcile both of these things: redistributive theocracy and the income-levelling welfare state and its predecessors (namely, the notions of a ‘just price’, documented across Eurasia for over two millennia).41 In the various theocracies that we have met, egalitarianism is regulated from above and must channel human aspirations and hope on condition of a strong, justifying ideology. In this way, a small elite is legitimized as ruler-priests of a widely shared cosmic global and societal vision. Think of classical Egypt and the pre-Columbian civilizations, but also of an ‘ideal state’ like the Soviet Union, or even of caste systems.42 As long as they could ensure sufficient redistribution – whatever we think of it now – this can be sustained for centuries or even millennia.43
The welfare state is an explicitly egalitarian-inspired attempt to structure our society in such a way as to create the most favourable mix of livelihood security for many and a toleration of a limited number of aggrandizers.44 History, and even our most recent history, teaches us that, thus far, this mix has a shelf life of only a number of decades, as it is also easily threatened.45 Although cautious about feasibility, recent proposals for profound internationally coordinated fiscal reforms point in the same direction.
We must add a historical caveat here. This striving for fairness, as we have seen, almost inevitably leads to ‘us and them’ thinking: fairness for our kind of people, but when it comes to others we are quick to make an exception, not only in terms of access to work but also in terms of working conditions and remuneration. Here, others can range from slaves or lower castes to ‘foreigners’ of all shades. This applies both to formal inequality regimes, based on legally regulated slavery and serfdom, as they existed until a century and a half ago (think of the US, Brazil and the Arab states, as well as Russia) and to apartheid and the exclusion of large sections of the working population (South Africa before Mandela, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia), as well as to democracies.
Regarding the latter, in particular, as fairness for ‘us’ disappears, the tendency to exclude ‘others’ increases. What is called the ‘social-nativist trap’, a retreat into defending national, ethnic and religious identities with countless victims as a consequence, has been particularly apparent since 2000.46 But, ultimately, so has the opposite: the more fairness in the reward for ‘our’ work, the greater the willingness to let others share in this in a democratic way. This underscores the importance of fairness all the more.
In addition to old propositions, new proposals for a more just and sustainable society have flourished in recent years, reinforced by an increased awareness of our global dependencies under the influence of the coronavirus pandemic. They emerge from the bottom up, in the form of platform co-operatives and other ‘commons’-like ways of organizing work, and, from above, in the form of cost calculations in which the social and environmental effects of production are passed on in full and also in the form of much more progressive taxation.
Any choice for the future organization of society is, of course, shaped by the experiences of millions of working women and men who have passed before us in the preceding pages. For by far the longest period of human history (98 per cent or more), they were organized in small bands of hunter-gatherers. From about 10,000 years ago, they increasingly developed into peasant households. Collaboration between these households resulted in labour specialization in cities, later city-states and, ultimately, in territorial states. Later still, they were based on theocratic tributary redistributions, soon to be replaced by markets from about 2,500 years ago. It should be reiterated here that markets for goods, as well as for labour and services, are not a recent phenomenon. Since 1500, they have become dominant, and for decades they have been the only way of structuring the economics (outside the household) we know today.47
In this phase of history, the idea is growing that we have a new opportunity to decide on a continental or even a global scale what our working lives will look like. Our long past as humankind suggests strongly that when making such choices, we must not lose sight of the three principles – meaning, cooperation, fairness – that can be derived from this story of work.