"Why We Work"

Don't let the short little nine letter title fool you, there is a lot to chew on in this piece.

From The Milken Institute Review, September 21:

A review of The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind

For those not keeping score at home, the Big History genre came of age when Bill Gates introduced the Australian historian David Christian at the TED 2011 conference, and then worked with him to inspire a global school curriculum. Along with Christian’s pathbreaking Maps of Time (2005), the prolific works of the Czech-born Canadian environmental scientist Vaclav Smil (another Gates favorite) have revitalized historical study on a grand scale. Smil made his name by centering his histories on the role of energy as the globe teeters on climate catastrophe.

Jan Lucassen, a Dutch historian, may not be quite as breathtakingly ambitious as Smil, whose most recent title is How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future. But Lucassen does have an encyclopedic knowledge of how Homo sapiens has labored in the last 700,000 years. And he has also had the good fortune to write at a time of sweeping workplace changes, brought on by pandemic. The result is a uniquely long-term perspective on a question that has perplexed employers and workers alike since March 2020: does the rise of remote work portend a radical change in the workplace?

Lucassen’s answer depends on his framework, which departs from the great majority of sweeping world histories.. One form of Big History, rarely practiced, is one-way decline — as in the Eurocentric view that Greco-Roman antiquity was a golden age of abundance, health and no strenuous work. Humanity went straight to hell thereafter and, when Covid-19 struck, was living in an Iron Age with no prospect of regaining Arcadia.

Lucassen says this rosy view doesn’t fit hunter-gatherer societies, which prevailed for most of the 700,000-year history of Homo sapiens — that is, until about 12,000 years ago. Not everybody sat around the caves at Lascaux debating what to paint next; predators, illness and violence kept them busy. But Lucassen does acknowledge the positive side of such cultures: relative equality, a commitment to mutual aid (especially in child-rearing), and shorter work hours — eight per day for men, 10 for women — than in the societies that came after.

It is easy to get lost in the rise and fall of societies that Lucassen examines. What makes his book so original is his resistance to a grand narrative. For instance, in the 19th century, narratives that sought to explain society emerged around the immiseration of workers, as population inevitably overtook resources (à la Thomas Malthus), or, conversely, the progress from forced labor of varying extremes to libertarian market society — “from status to contract” in the phrase of the Oxford professor of legal history Sir Henry Maine.

Lucassen, for his part, is neither utopian nor dystopian, nor a devotee of repeating cycles. Rather he sees the history of work as an unpredictable alternation of work arrangements dating back to Mesopotamia, from 2,000 to 1,000 BCE — a world of employers, employees, the self-employed and forced labor.

Ancient Egypt, for example, was what Lucassen calls a “tributary-redistributive society,” in which everyone in effect worked for a divine ruler. (The maverick interwar Viennese Marxist philosopher Otto Neurath thought this was the best way to run industrial societies, too.) Technological and political change can revive old work arrangements in new guises, for example, the return of slavery in Nazi and Soviet concentration camps and in convict leasing in the post-Civil War American South.

Lucassen sees the history of work as an unpredictable alternation of work arrangements dating back to Mesopotamia, from 2,000 to 1,000 BCE — a world of employers, employees, the self-employed and forced labor.>

Modern Times
The Story of Work is more than an encyclopedic view of variations on ancient themes, of steps forward and back. It is also an excellent guide to thinking about several issues the pandemic has raised.The first is the future of the division of human time between work and leisure....

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