After Labor

Abstract

W age work, it is said, is disappearing in the “new” age of capital, to rising alarm across the world. Yet there is little agreement about why, where, or in what measure. Or what might take its place in the foreseeable future. We—scholars, politicians, pundits, people at large—seem unable to think beyond a universe founded on mass employment. Why not? After all, capital has always striven to free itself as far as possible from a dependency on labor, with considerable success over the long run. This despite the fact that historical anthropologies have tended to focus on the “unmaking of particular working classes” primarily in recent decades. Or the fact that there have been times in the global north during which organized labor has managed to exercise its political and economic muscle—although, as is now widely recognized, more people have always been wageless than waged. But if mass employment has always been threatened by erasure, always more aspiration than actuality, why does it remain so central to both popular and theoretical understandings of economy and society under capitalism, alike left and right? Why does it “dominate and pervade everyday life . . . more completely than at any time in recent history”? Howmight this relate to anxieties about its imminent