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 economic and democratic inequalities and rolled back genuine social mobility. Any account of modern populism must recognize social democracy’s loss of soul.
It is a powerful argument with challenging consequences. Rethinking the purpose of progressive politics requires moving beyond acknowledging economic grievance and enduring inequality. It requires a very different conversation, one that addresses moral and cultural questions regarding the lives we wish to live, and how the current disparity between that ideal and reality can find painful, often angry political expression driven by resentment and humiliation. Sandel locates in a global context the juxtaposition, or paradox, of personal hope and practical despair that Bloodworth identified regarding the work we wish for compared to what we perform.
Sandel suggests the left requires a new telos, a new public philosophy, in order to respond to this epic challenge. To help this reformation, he identifies four themes for progressive politics to confront, linked to questions of work, human labour and the creation of community.
First is the need for economic strategy to engineer inclusive growth, one that confronts the escalating inequality which feeds today’s authoritarian impulses. Such redesign must rethink wealth creation and distribution, including that created by and apportioned to human labour.
His second suggestion involves the language used by today’s liberal progressives, emphasizing opportunity and the removal of barriers to success. Meritocracy, a term initially
