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Freedom and leisure for everyone at Die Zeit

Lukas Hermsmeier wrote a long, thoughtful piece about Work Won’t Love You Back alongside Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work and Eva von Redecker’s Revolution for Life. In German, but also available in English! He writes:

What makes Jaffe’s analysis so interesting is that it merges the swelling mantra of love your work with the increasing fragmentation and precariousness of the world of work. Jaffe explains that the pressure to love one’s work, to even feel realized through it, is, to the extent that it is today, a phenomenon of the post-industrial age. Even long before that, as Max Weber pointed out at the beginning of the 20th century , the capitalist world of work had been shaped by Protestant ethics; and in the Fordist economy, too, the workers had been battered and the roles were unjustly distributed according to gender. It was only neoliberalism, however, writes Jaffe, “that tried to give us not freedom from work, but through work.”

Read the whole thing at Die Zeit

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