The international conference made a contribution to current academic debates on the important and diverse transformations that work has undergone in recent decades. In order to contextualize and historicize these debates, the conference returned to past discussions on the futures of work. Building on a workshop of October 2021 that also dealt with the theme, the conference further explored it through a dialogue between international scholars and cases of “past futures of work” from around the globe as well as concrete utopias.
In his keynote lecture, MICHEL LALLEMENT (Paris) defined labor communities as concrete utopias based on collective experiments located in circumscribed areas with certain moral values. In his comparison of intentional communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – mainly in the United States but with particular reference to the Longo Maï Community in France – the thrust of his research was the question as to how past concrete utopias influence our way of looking at the future of work today. After adducing statistics for the intentional communities in the US, Lallement asserted that there were two repertoires of the community actions – political-economic as in the case of the Oneida Community (1848-1881) and psycho-social as with the Twin Oaks Community (since 1967). Based on Ernst Bloch’s idea of concrete utopia, these communities aimed to change society by rejecting the dominant social order and in promoting moral values and a feminist understanding of equality. In such intentional communities, members work and live together, and labor becomes significant in securing their economic existence. For Twin Oaks, work is even defined as a religion. Oneida was one of the first examples of an intentional community and in its early stages was governed in an authoritarian manner by its founder John Humphrey Noyes. By contrast, Twin Oaks is a more interactive and democratic entity that functions without a charismatic leader. In comparing past intentional communities with those of today, Lallement also introduced the notion that hackerspaces can be viewed as a new repertoire of community action. They are open communities organized to share knowledge and technological facilities, yet their political aim is to change society via hacker ethics.
The conference’s first panel addressed the “past futures of work” on a theoretical level. CHRISTIAN KREMSER (Frankfurt am Main) an account of the utopian content of the past futures of work. In debates on the future of work we can observe, on the one hand, pessimistic perspectives underlying new and precarious forms of work and calls for a rescue of work, while on the other hand there exist more optimistic views that focus on technological advancements. Kremser also described how others have predicted an end to work, such as Oscar Wilde, Paul Lafargue and Bertrand Russell, who all made optimistic predictions based on economic utopias. Wilde believed that individual freedom could unfold in socialism through its abolition of private property; yet work itself could only be ended through technical progress. Lafargue also believed in technological progress but criticized the dogma of work by praising laziness. And Russell felt that the economy was organized in a way to rationalize jobs instead of reducing working time. All three may seem similar at first glance, but while Lafargue and Russell spoke of a social and ethical utopia, Wilde favored a technological utopia. But trust, according to Wilde, in technological progress is insufficien. He believed that the focus should be on social and ethical change for the future of work. He also argued that the technological utopia is hardly universal: one man’s utopia is another’s dystopia.
After Kremser, CELINE MARTY (Besançon) spoke on the French philosopher André Gorz, who was the intellectual heir to Jean-Paul Sartre and Karl Marx. Gorz dedicated his life to the philosophy of work and a critique of the wage-based economy. In his emancipatory project he introduced three perspectives that referred to three stages of work which did not replace but included one another. The first project was entitled “Autogestion: Workers’ Control from the 1960s to the 1970s.” Autogestion means taking control of the organization and conditions of work. In this stage the workers were engaged more with the trade unions than with political parties. The second perspective was dedicated to a massive reduction of working time from the 1980s to the 1990s. Reduction of working hours was possible due to greater productivity and a limitation of the social production solely to the community’s basic needs. The third stage of the emancipation project dealt with basic income. This project was articulated between 1995 and 2007. Gorz saw this period with the failures of the waged society by creating useless jobs and poverty. As the importance of culture and the knowledge economy increased in this period, Gorz suggested “reclaiming the work.” Marty emphasized that Gorz might have been blinded to burgeoning ecological issues due to the massive automation and digitalization at the time. While Groz failed to address the question as to whether we should decarbonize the economy, he did uphold “de-growth” as an alternative. But Groz’s thoughts on any kind of real socialistic society remained ambiguous.
The last panel speaker, HARALD MIEG (Berlin), presented empirical research findings on expert systems. After a brief history, Mieg further discussed the vision of expert systems by explaining their work design. The first prototypes of expert systems, Mycin and Eliza, were based on a set of rules and data. Mieg argued that after using these systems in hospitals and pharmaceutical laboratories, there were findings that proved such expert systems to be of flawed design due to questions of autonomy and responsibility. Moreover there remained ill-defined problems within the design itself. Mieg concluded that greater discretion should be observed in the design of any expert system, instead of employing purely logical reasoning. In fact, Mieg believes that the professionals should take greater responsibility in decision making and using the expert systems does not solely relieve them from their accountability. Furthermore, the expert systems could only be used in a decision-supporting manner as opposed to use as an autonomous design. In general, Mieg asserted the need for very clear claims and precisely defined problems in the use of technology.
The second day of the conference started with a panel on work utopias in light of social practice. Based on the informal economies of India and South Africa, this panel focused on perspectives from the Global South. SRUJANA BODDU (Chennai) explored the condition of informal female workers in modern services within the changing cityscape of Hyderabad, India. Based on extensive field research at two slum sites in Hyderabad, Boddu investigated the changes in modern workplaces and in her talk she argued that the emergence of app-based platform work creates a façade of formalization vis-à-vis any flexible workforce; however, these are actually the same old jobs in new forms but without job security, social security and other benefits.
The panel continued with a presentation by SONAL SHARMA (Baltimore). Sharma focused on the meaning of trade unions from the perspective of informal workers’ organizations in India and South Africa. By telling the story of domestic workers’ struggles to organize as based on a combination of ethnographic, qualitative and archival research, his aim was to understand the different trajectories of workers’ movements in two similar contexts. The centrality of status is the fundamental organizing principle in two different contexts – race in South Africa and caste in India. In both countries the domestic-workers organizations are not official trade unions but NGOs and trusts, as in the case of the Izwi Domestic Workers Alliance in South Africa and the National Domestic Workers Movement in India. In the end, Sharma argued that these organizations function like trade unions in empowering domestic workers by incorporating their experiences, and he invited us to rethink the relationship between NGOs and trade unions.
The second day’s keynote speaker was BLANCHE SEGRESTIN (Paris). Segrestin focused on industrial justice through a close rereading of Philip Selznick’s neglected study Law, Society and Industrial Justice (1969) in which the author sought a basis for the legitimacy of managerial power and a limit being placed on arbitrariness. Selznick argued that managerial power is institutionalized but not grounded in law, so he called for further legal developments. Segrestin inquired into the conceptual resources in law, the foundations in management, and contractual obligations in labor law for a future law of association. She discussed the contemporary challenges of industrial justice, particularly the problematic rule of corporations. Finally, Segrestin sought new foundations for industrial justice in purpose-driven corporations and a new legal framework with new dynamic categories that go beyond classic ones so as to understand the emerging forms of collective action.
The last panel was dedicated to the future of (past) models of work. HANNAH LANDECKER (Los Angeles / Berlin) concentrated on the shift worker as a model organism in the scientific conceptualization of modern life in industrialized society. Landecker labeled our epoch as ironic because more shift workers are needed, which seems like a dystopia. Using photographs, paintings and drawings based on the social science of biology, Landecker presented a detailed history of shift workers since the late nineteenth century. With the outbreak of World War I, shift workers’ health was formalized as a distinctive health concern and object of research. Since “idle machinery is wasted capital” and the workweek of capital was very different from labor, growing trends toward shift work were accelerated during the interwar period and the Second World War. Large-scale studies of epidemiology during the 1960s and 1970s revealed various metabolic disorders due to night-shift work. Landecker concluded her presentation by saying that in today’s society “we are all shift workers.”
The last speaker was MADELEINE SALLUSTIO (Paris/Brussels). She presented her recently completed research on the denial of work and the value of proactivity within neo-peasant collectives in France. As an anthropologist, Sallustio conducted extensive fieldwork in ten communities which were chosen as working and living communities that involved agricultural production at self-managed sites. Neo-peasant communities share a nostalgia for the traditional peasantry, seek autonomy in their communities and self-determination outside the market economy. Rather than the word “work,” they prefer to use the term “activities” because of the unity they see as existing in their work and life. They also utilize the rhetoric of “right to laziness” in opposition to the conventional work ethic. Whereas ZAD (zone à défendre) communities are politically motivated in their defiance of capitalism, this is not necessarily the case when it comes to neo-peasant communities which have a romantic image of the traditional peasantry as symbols of resistance. Nevertheless, there do exist certain fragilities and contradictions in these neo-peasant communities, such as divergent skill levels, almost no time to oneself, self-alienation and male domination.
The conference ruminated on the past futures of work through particular examples, case-studies and concrete utopias from a comparative perspective. The historical roots of the future-of-work debates were examined with reference to scholarly and literary works and clearly proved that the debate on the future of work has much to learn from the past.
Conference Overview:
Keynote
Michel Lallement (Paris): Work and Utopia: Two Repertoires of Community Action
Panel I: Past Utopias of Work
Christian Kremser (Frankfurt am Main): The Utopian Content of Past Futures of Work Exemplarily discussed on Oscar Wilde’s, Paul Lafargue’s, and Bertrand Russel’s Predictions of an End of Work
Céline Marty (Besançon): André Gorz’s Futures of Work
Harald Mieg (Berlin): The revised future of the expert systems of the 1970s/80s and what we can learn from them about responsibility in professional work
Panel II: Work Utopias in the Light of Social Practice
Srujana Boddu (Chennai): Formalization sans decent work: Future of Informal Work amidst Changing Cityscapes
Sonal Sharma (Baltimore): The meaning of labor unions for informal sector workers: an ethnographic perspective from the global south
Keynote
Blanche Segrestin (Paris): Industrial justice for the future of work: Selznick's call to rethink labor law in the 1960s
Panel III: The Future of (Past) Models of Work
Hannah Landecker (Los Angeles / Berlin): The Shift Worker as Model Organism: Factory Work, Biomedical Research, and the Future of Industrial Time
Madeleine Sallustio (Paris): Denial of work? On the value of proactivity within neo-peasant collectives in France