CAPITALISM IS THE ONLY EFFECTIVE FORM OF MARXISM:

What is work? "Paid activity" is a standard but inadequate definition, since the unpaid labors of the mother and schoolchild are undoubtedly still work. "Effortful activity" is not much better: An enthusiastic tennis player can spend any amount of effort without working. Work implies necessity as well as effort; it is doing what you have to do, as opposed to doing what you want. This necessity needn't be economic. It might be moral, as in the case of the devoted charity worker. But clearly, for an activity to be work, there must be a sense in which you are not free not to do it.

Edward Skidelsky is a lecturer in philosophy at Exeter University. He is the author, with Robert Skidelsky, of How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life.

If work is doing what you have to, as opposed to doing what you want, it looks like something we should strive to eliminate. That was the view of Oscar Wilde and John Maynard Keynes--and of Karl Marx too, though he talked of "alienated work" rather than work as such. The difference is largely terminological, though. All three writers looked forward to a day when machine technology would relieve us of the necessity of working for a living, freeing up time for the spontaneous exercise of our creative powers.

This day may be closer than we think. Working hours declined steadily over the last century, especially when we factor in the expansion of education, retirement time, and (sadly) unemployment. And if work is defined not just as paid but as necessary activity, its part in our lives looks smaller still. Many jobs in the affluent world are no longer "livings" in the old sense so much as sources of satisfaction and pleasure in their own right. They have nothing in common bar the name with the wearisome toil that made up "work" for most people in the past.

Work, then, is disappearing slowly but inexorably from our lives. Why are we so reluctant to acknowledge this fact?

Tweet   @brothersjudd