Introduction

Time and again, I read the formula ‘From X to Y’, where X is the past and Y is the present: industrial to post-industrial; Fordist to post-Fordist; manufacturing economy to service economy. The newer version of this formula is more complex: from the first to the second to the third to (now) the fourth industrial revolution. The first was mechanisation, the second was mass production, the third is automation and the fourth is the digitalisation of life itself, including artificial intelligence (AI), robots and nanotechnology. For some, this fourth stage heralds the ‘end of work’, a transformation of work that means humans won’t have to do it. This kind of commentary is not to my taste. It assumes a straight line of progress, and it has a deliberately simplistic idea about what kinds of economic activity matter: the production of things. There is nothing outside of technorational capitalist production. In this chapter, I will disassemble these assumptions about work with my feminist multi-tool.

There is a refrain in this book that concepts create exclusions and that makes for absences in understanding. When work practices are forgotten, ignored, excluded, not seen or denied, then any account of the ethical and political issues in doing work is restricted. In the last chapter, I followed other sociologists in putting paid work in factories at the centre, following capitalocentric and western-dominated reasoning. Once industrialisation was positioned in relation to war, conquest, colonialism and slavery, it started to be easier to notice different kinds of work and to understand persistent geographic and racial inequalities. Even so, many, many loose threads were left dangling. Counterbalancing the obsession with productive work doesn’t mean rejecting it, of course. But by avoiding capitalocentrism and linear stories, this chapter makes visible work that is too readily and easily deleted. Without an inclusive idea about what we talk about when we talk about work, there is no hope for understanding what’s wrong with work.

Loose threads

There are some loose threads from Chapter Two around the theme of the history of industrialisation and its implicit relationship with consumption, non-production work and pre-industrial work. Industrialisation often goes hand in hand with urbanisation. Wage workers in cities have to buy food and clothes, rather than making their own. So, wage workers are consumers, and buy in the products of other work.