Why We All Must Work

Much, if not most work has been debased since the rise of the state 5,500 years ago. Because most workers lack ownership, control, or readily access to productive wealth, they must locate owners willing to provide them with employment, those failing to do so suffer the material, social, and psychological costs of unemployment. Because owners possess control over the work process, workers can be bossed about, often to perform unpleasant and dangerous work. Yet for the first 97 percent of human history – that prior to state societies -- all had equal access to the means of production, providing them with control over their work. Anthropological research reveals that work for pre-state peoples was democratically performed and pleasurable. Biological evolution also predicts that work would have been naturally selected to be pleasurable to better motivate its performance and hence survival. Diligent work served as a source of status and self-respect, enhancing reproductive success by signaling to potential mates a capacity to provision offspring. This article claims that even had the debasement of work been necessary for eventually producing today’s abundance, it no longer is. Two reforms, both preserving capitalism’s two principal institutions of private property and markets, would transform work to provide greater human flourishing: guaranteed employment at living wages with reskilling where necessary, and measures to promote workplace democracy. These reforms would eliminate poverty, reduce inequality, prepare economies for future technological dynamism and globalization, and by better enabling social and self-respect through work and community, would reduce the pressure to do so through consumption, thereby lowering ecological devastation.