After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time is a thought-provoking book. Helen Hester and Rick Srnicek are British academics: she is a scholar of technofeminism and sexuality studies at the London School of Film, Media and Design, and he a senior lecturer in digital economy at King's College London. Both are proponents of ideas about postcapitalism, postwork, and postscarcity economies and societies. They live together, with their three young children, and are the sorts of people who put their minds to thinking about their daily lives with respect to the theoretical questions they grapple with in their work. For them, the personal is both political and historical. They speak to us not only from academic perches but also from “deep in the woods of nappy changing and sleepless nights—when the oldest is sick, the youngest won't settle, and the middle child is having a tantrum” (155). They describe the family as “a system of privatized care overburdened by the demands placed upon it” (159). Their thesis is that ideas about postcapitalism, postwork, and postscarcity—what they call “the post-work project”—contribute to “our understanding of how we might better organize the labour of reproduction,” and that the project “can only be fully realized when it takes into account this immense sphere of activity” (9).The authors acknowledge that some people may take pleasure in some kinds of housework and care work and may regard it as a source of creative satisfaction. Their mission, however, is stimulating the “post-work imaginary,” which “should be as excited by the prospect of high-quality canteens as it is about labour-intensive home-cooked meals” (51). Much of After Work, therefore, is devoted to introducing readers to an assortment of thinkers, builders, and dreamers who interrogated housework and care work in the past. The book urges readers to ponder hippie counterculture communities of the 1960s and 1970s, early twentieth-century Russian communes, the Frankfurt Kitchen (designed for efficient use of time and motion and installed in thousands of housing units during the late 1920s), and many other experiments and ideas.To subject outsourced housework and unwaged labor to serious analysis is to do a kind of intellectual work that flourished in the early days of what is now called second-wave feminism but was not sustained. In addition to experimental ideas, Hester and Srnicek ask us to consider the transfer of health-care tasks from trained nurses to unpaid caregivers, as hospital stays get shorter and hospital devices are adapted for home care. They urge us to analyze smart houses, and how developments in information technology have impacted—or not impacted—people in their lives at home. They want us to think about ATMs and self-serve gasoline and self-checkout. They ask us to contemplate Uber Eats and DoorDash. If their wide-ranging thinking does not consistently convince, it does provoke and inspire, and by shining their spotlight on these kinds of questions, this book brings attention to important topics still too often ignored in serious debate.After Work is thus worth the consideration of many people who will find much to argue with in its pages. Traditional Marxists may question what seems to be a fundamental assumption of the postwork thinkers that work is necessarily alienated, as opposed to the activity that defines humans in their interactions with each other and the natural world. Analysts of contemporary society may want evidence for assertions that a postwork society is sufficiently visible on the horizon before considering descriptions of how it might be to live in it. Historians of daily life may argue that ideas the authors assert to be generally accepted are better understood as contributions to historiographical debates.Reviews of After Work in the general press complained about academic prose and noted a substantial bibliography and numerous endnotes. But for scholars, who demand the citations and can live with jargon, the book may not be academic enough. It makes assertions about the past without offering the kind of evidence that rigorous historians expect. The ideas of theorists are discussed with quotations from and citations to secondary sources, but not to their own books. The authors build paragraphs and arguments on arrays of sources that they treat as equivalent—whether recent scholarship or works generally considered outdated, whether primary or secondary, whether from one country or another, whether referring to one time period or another. Intent on honoring and learning from activists and innovators who have considered issues of housework and care work in the past, Hester and Srnicek introduce individuals, experiments, and movements whose importance they sometimes overstate. They play fast and loose with dates and with multicultural juxtapositions, with too little regard for context or historical specificity.Still, the personal really is political and historical, and this book offers an amalgam of useful perspectives, serious consideration of issues and movements too often ignored, and possibilities for imagining arrangements worth proposing and fighting for. As the authors point out, the work of social reproduction—the work that sustains individual workers and gets them back to work on Monday, but also the work that feeds and supports children and dependent adults—is important to the economy, as money is increasingly spent both on new technologies and on waged household and caretaking labor.Postcapitalism, postwork, and postscarcity are heady ideas, and for a reviewer who has not been converted to them, After Work seems sometimes to be preaching to a choir of dreamers. But by tying their concerns about life at home to their ideas about how society should be organized in the near and far future, Hester and Srnicek have written a book with the potential not only to provoke discussion among futurists about childcare, elder care, and the gender dimensions of dishwashing and cooking but also to inspire those who already think about housework and care work to imagine better social arrangements. At a time when so much public conversation tends toward hell-in-a-handbasket discourse, the authors’ provocation and the example of their exercise of imagination are welcome.
Susan Strasser (Sun,) studied this question.