Post-Work: why this book, why now?
Will Stronge
February 10th 2025
Helen Hester and I have written a book introducing and intervening within an area of theory and politics called ‘post-work’. The title – fittingly – is ‘Post-work: What It Is, Why It Matters and How We Get There’, and will be out this month with Bloomsbury. We’d love for you to read it and to give us feedback. Here, I want to write a short blog explaining why we wrote this book and why we think post-work theory and politics is relevant today.
Why did we write this book?
Firstly, there is a wide plurality of texts and voices within the ‘post-work’ space that have yet to be theorised coherently in one place: this book is a way of finding a thread, or post-work ‘code’, that we can therefore hold onto, and hold up against the various texts associated with the trend to see how they both conform to and/or mutate away from.
- What is often grouped together under ‘post-work’ comprises a very rich vein of ideas and histories which we felt needed a proper introduction, to draw all the strings together in one text, and which hopefully can be generative for others.
Secondly, we were aware of a lot of bad takes on post-work out there and the tern gets used in a lot of less than helpful ways:
- The term has become a (usually unexplained) foil for some who want to make their own, alternative arguments, in a manner typical of contemporary academia.
- Others have made a point of slamming post-work (usually a very select few texts are used as a placeholder – as we have pointed out before) in ways we think are disingenuous. In these cases we often find something along the lines of ‘post-work means no more work, but work is important, so this is a stupid position!’ or ‘post-workerists are convinced that automation is going to save us from our jobs and this is naive’. Needless to say, we don’t think these are particularly deep or insightful arguments, but they nonetheless pop up every now and again.
- In all of these cases, post-work is often a very thin straw man at best – and we wanted to rectify that.
Finally, we felt it was important that post-work theory and politics was made distinct from broader currents such as socialism, liberalism or anarchism (within which, it should be said post-work thinking can be accommodated in different ways). Post-work thinking and politics has its own particular flavour and lineages, in our view.
- Ideas such as a shorter working week, universal incomes or technologically-advanced abundance is nothing new within the history of socialism, anarchism, radical social democracy – or even liberalism (e.g. John Stuart Mill)! But it would therefore be a lazy theoretical interpretation to assume that post-work thinking and practice ‘is just socialism’, for instance. If you look at the last two hundred years of left-wing politics, the demand for shorter hours has always been contested – never guaranteed – and has required a radical disposition towards work which is always at risk of being sidelined. There are many examples of figures on the left, from Lenin – with his admiration of the Taylorist work grind and the admonition of Russian worker ‘laziness’ – to Unite the union’s Sharon Graham – with her recent dismissal of the 4 Day Week Campaign – who have pushed in precisely the opposite direction. Post-work thinking and politics is, as I see it, a reinjection of the idea that work needs to be questioned, de-romanticised and limited; that modern life should be abundant for all, without reference to each individual’s commitment to labour and so on. This perspective is not a given when it comes to common understandings of ‘socialism’ or ‘radical democracy’.
- To the same extent, we make the point in the book that post-work is an unashamedly utopian discourse – something that is often difficult and lacking in dark periods such as our own. Insofar as post-work is the cultivation of hope for a better world of work, I think it’s important to contrast it with many other perspectives on work that either seek small tweaks around the edges (raising the minimum wage here, making benefits slightly better there) or else find utopia in a return to a pre-neoliberal age of (male) full employment.
Why now (2025)?
The truth is, we started this book about five years ago and many things have delayed our finishing it. This has turned out to have been a blessing in disguise. In 2017/18, when we started thinking through the book in earnest, post-work themes were still a (re)emerging strand of thought and post-work demands were decidedly at the fringes: we first set out to merely write a primer for demands such as a shorter working week, a universal basic income and whatever ‘full automation’ might mean.
Since then, worldly events, public discussion, popular literature and developments in theory have made a text of that kind now defunct. Most obviously, the ‘four-day week’ has become much more common sense for vast amounts of people, with various governments, politicians and trade unions now actively championing the idea with multiple pilots underway. Equally, dozens of new basic income experiments have since been put in motion. In theory, books such as those from Holly Jean Buck on post-work and climate questions, as well as Aaron Benanav’s and Jason E. Smith’s respective books on automation have contributed greatly to our understandings of work and its future: these ‘events’ could not be ignored and had to be incorporated into a longer and more comprehensive text.
As we saw it, given these developments, we were now called to write a more in-depth exploration of post-work theory and politics, drawing on rich historical examples and adjacent fields of study (such as radical disability theory, philosophies of freedom and extended mind theory) as well as sharpening existing arguments or generating new ones. This is what we (hopefully) have done – and I’m excited to see it out in the world this month.
Will Stronge is the Chief Executive of the Autonomy Institute and co-author of Post-Work: What It Is, Why It Matters and How We Get There?
The book can be ordered here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/postwork-9781350089990/