As alluded to in my first blog post, drawing a definitive line around a set of ‘distinct’ ‘post-work’ texts is difficult, leading to all sorts of leakages and partial truths. In our book, Helen and I therefore instead refer to post-work as a ‘family of resemblances’: a world of books, essays and manifestos that all make some kind of sense when bundled together – but often are quite dissimilar in other respects. This porosity makes post-work a very interesting and fertile terrain, but also a bit of a headache for critics and advocates alike.

Here, I’ve had a go at writing up an annotated bibliography of many of the texts that we see as relevant vehicles for post-work themes or arguments in the forthcoming book. A working definition I’ve used to make this list says that a post-work text is one that involved a critique of the existing nature or organisation of modern work, and, ideally, included a proposal or demand for its radical reduction. Another way of phrasing this would be to say that post-work thinking is both a critique of work, as well as a vision of a world which is no longer work-centered.

Now, some texts do the first part and much less of the second, and other texts focus solely things such as a basic income which are only indirectly linked to a reduction of work, but are part of fuller visions of post-work society, for reasons we go into in the book (mainly that modern welfare is by now very much the other side of the coin to work, and thus must be engaged with in some way). We consider all of these ‘overlap’ cases to be post-work ‘adjacent’ in one way or another, and thus are included in this list as part of the melting pot. I will keep updating this list, with some added annotations when I find the time.