‘Work’ in the sense of interest here is a social category. This means that the way work is socially organised is not merely some further external fact about it, but rather is something that needs to be considered in detail. This chapter will have two parts. First, I’ll try to say something about how we, nowadays in Western societies, think about the way work is organised, and then I will discuss some existing historical alternatives to this way of thinking about the organisation of work.

The previous two chapters have painted a rather grim picture of work and its place in human life, at any rate since the time when humans became sedentary and then eventually began systematically to practise agriculture in a way that made us dependent on it. It seems that the necessity for a society to produce enough for subsistence trickled down through an almost unsurveyably varied series of complex paths to a highly local form of coercion which forces me in this specific situation to exert myself strenuously at an unpleasant task that I would prefer not to do. Is the situation really as dismal as this might be taken to suggest?

‘We all need to work,’ my mother would say in that tone which, while purporting to enunciate an obvious truth that needed no support and would brook no argument, actually contained a threat.

Dissatisfaction with work is as old as work itself, and dissatisfaction with our regime of work is as old as industrialism itself. Sometimes complaints about work are very well focused, such as the complaints made by health-workers in the British National Health Service (NHS) during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 that they were not provided with appropriate protective equipment despite the fact that one of the government’s own exercises had highlighted this as an area of potential concern during a pandemic. Sometimes, however, the discontent is of a kind that cannot be addressed by a mere tweaking of current arrangements, and it expresses itself in more radical demands. In what follows I shall discuss some frequently made suggestions for making radical changes to our world of work.