Loading...
Work Disguised as Leisure, Leisure Disguised as Work: The Roots and Consequences of the Bifurcated Economy
Hull, Samuel
Hull, Samuel
Collections
Abstract
This Article argues that the framework laid out in the post-Marxist scholar André Gorz’s 1989 book on the alienation inherent in a system focused on efficiency, Critique of Economic Reason, provides a valuable approach for understanding the alienation that inheres in the unequal modern economy, as well as the roots of the legal-political structure that undergirds that inequality. The Article first describes Gorz’s understanding of how the rise of quantification and economic reason left modern work patterns deeply alienating, and how incentivizing long hours of unfulfilling work through “compensatory consumption” and an “ideology of work” led to the bifurcation of society into elite and “servile” classes. The Article then updates Gorz’s model to analyze the rise of several phenomena that represent a fuller extension of this bifurcation: the gig economy, which embodies Gorz’s notion of “disguising private activities and leisure activities themselves as work and jobs”; and what this Article terms “totalizing firms,” which conversely disguise work as leisure. The Article next discusses how economic reason has reinforced its hegemony, both by undermining the potential for political solidarity and through its entrenchment in the legal apparatus. Finally, the Article turns to how reorienting the labor movement and economic policy toward a focus on free time could challenge economic reason.