of modern work in places often patronized as ‘left behind’.6 It is a compelling account of life and employment revealed through personal experiences working in a warehouse, at a call centre, as a care worker and as an uber driver. He finds insecurity, ruthless discipline, surveillance, atomization, underpayment and underemployment.
Hired is uplifting in the way it gives voice to the experiences of these workers, yet unsettling when it reveals the collapsing personal esteem associated with the jobs people are hired to do. The book also captures a deeper story. It subtly exposes the changing character of contemporary capitalism by inspecting how employers, unscrupulous agencies and landlords compete to drain dignity from the lives of our fellow citizens. Bloodworth reminds us that work is a contested, deeply political subject. But why should we need reminding of such an obvious point?
The simple answer is that work has been decoupled from politics. Much literature on work sidesteps political questions regarding the deployment of labour.7 Over recent years the type of the work we do and why we do it have come to be understood as personal choices, a trade-off between work and leisure, rather than political ones. We will discuss below how and why work has been stripped of its political significance and been replaced by a largely ahistorical technical discussion of labour market statistical outcomes. This process speaks to the dominance of liberal economics and the defeat and intellectual weakness of the left with its withdrawal from theoretical and political interrogation of the character of work within modern capitalism.
Recent renewed interest in the organization of work and automation on the left has sought to correct this and once again politicize work. The danger is that this analysis misdiagnoses the problem and in doing so offers misguided remedies. We will argue that those on today’s radical left who celebrate the ‘end of work’ and demand full automation help ensure that what was once a contested political terrain is vacated. There is even a tendency to identify this as a sign of political maturity and creativity rather than reflecting political defeat and neglect, indeed abandonment, of those the left historically sought to represent. At the sharp end, people can sense this betrayal; it helps account for fracturing political alliances and our electoral decline.
Bloodworth lives amongst those he observes. He provides not just a corrective to how we understand work, but also practical political voice to these workers. He has managed to capture a modern, often ignored, sense of grievance and humiliation conditioned by the changing work people do and the lives they live, compared to the ones they aspire to, indeed were promised, by generations of politicians. Such insights help us understand the political world we inhabit.
Hired explores how challenging employment and living conditions shape people’s perceptions of their personal relationships as well as their bodies, diets and other people – chief amongst them politicians and immigrants. This coheres into a quiet anguish that resides within parts of the country. It is here that Bloodworth speaks to a deepening sense of national decay; one expressed in day-to-day frustrations with conventional politics. How we have got to this place goes beyond intellectual oversight; it reflects a wider failure to appreciate and understand the feelings experienced by our fellow citizens – a loss of empathy.
The feelings that Bloodworth explores are not simply derived from work itself, as meaningful work can offer a sense of status, solidarity and identity. The problem he pinpoints is the modern degradation of work and how this violates questions of human dignity. Yet we crowd these realities out of politics and policy and substitute concern with labour market aggregates. Consequently, the changing character of modern work remains under-researched and the deployment of labour considered beyond ethical and political contest.8
This was not always the case. Historically, the forms by which labour was understood as an economic and political category, together with how it was deployed, regulated and represented, underpinned alternative approaches to how society should itself be organized – competing theories of justice – and dominated politics. In the past the study of labour was fundamental to both political philosophy and the day-to-day practice of politics. Yet in recent years, especially on the left, we have withdrawn from these political traditions. It is a withdrawal that has come at great cost, for it has truncated our moral critique of capitalism and hedged our anger at the degraded work our fellow citizens are forced to perform. It has diminished the left and helps account for our insignificance.
These shifting intellectual loyalties tell a story whereby modern politics overturned the priorities of much radical thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its concern for human dignity. Today we suffer the collateral intellectual, cultural and political damage; we are losing our capacity to diagnose and resist the modern exploitation of our human capacity to work. We have neglected the significant role this capacity plays both in our personal lives and for capitalism more generally. This insight has been critical in the history of political economy and should once again inform our understanding of the world of work and capitalism. We will attempt to rehabilitate alternative approaches to human labour within the history of the left which have been lost. Those that pay the heaviest price for this intellectual neglect are those most degraded by modern work, vividly exposed by the effects of a small Covid-19 virus. The task is to re-establish a political method for the contemporary left to think once more about human labour.
Today capitalism appears unable to secure the material wellbeing of a critical mass of its citizens; it barely sustains itself. Even before a global pandemic triggered an economic earthquake, it was leading to what Pankaj Mishra described as ‘mass disillusion, anger and disorientation caused by an increasingly unequal and unstable economy’.9 This failure to deliver has implications for the ordering of society and how we thrive and live together; it is undermining the resilience of liberal democracy. We will argue the moral significance of work is critical in understanding these changes.
Authoritarian Populism
Democracy is endangered. Most obviously in countries like Russia, Turkey, Brazil, Poland and Hungary, but also in places with more resilient historical traditions, such as Italy and the United States. Here in the UK it is being severely tested. Having analysed global datasets covering 4 million people in 3,500 surveys across 154 countries, researchers recently concluded that dissatisfaction with democracy amongst the developed countries is at its highest levels for almost 25 years, and suggested the rise of populism was not so much a cause but symptom of this dissatisfaction. In the UK in 2019 dissatisfaction levels were the highest ever recorded. Another recent study of long-term shifts in public attitudes suggested growing UK disenchantment, declining confidence in parliamentary traditions and a willingness to embrace authoritarian ideas that ‘challenge core tenets of our democracy’.10 History has not ended, it has been upended. Modern liberal democracy, the political philosophy that told us competition was the guiding principle of human activity and the guarantor of true liberty, has incubated sinister new forms of populism.
Harvard professor Michael Sandel has argued that the rise of authoritarian populism is best understood as the fault of the progressive left.11 He suggests an ‘economy of outrage’ when reacting to the collection of right-wing populists gaining ground across the West, so that energy is channelled into creative intellectual and political responses. These would move beyond understandable protest and resistance, and address, dissect and remedy the fundamental failure of progressive politics, primarily its ethical detachment.
The hallmark of post-war social democracy was a moral desire to confront capital through the creation of the welfare state and wider strategies to contain and regulate the market. Yet the project became stale. Its concerns contracted towards the technocratic, often ineffective, administration of growth. The ethical energy of social democracy evaporated and was, by the late 1970s, effectively challenged by a resurgent New Right. The centre left politicians that succeeded Thatcher and Reagan, such as Blair, Clinton and Schröder, left unchallenged the essential market orthodoxies that preceded them. In office Obama succumbed to the same forces in contrast to the early moral clarity he expressed when running as insurgent candidate. Today’s populist uprisings reflect a backlash against this soulless managerialism and offer an ‘angry verdict’ on a long-term liberal compact with capital; one that has entrenched