After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time review

After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time

Author: Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek

ISBN-13: 9781786633071

Publisher: Verso

Guideline Price: £ 16.99

Despite a push to return to “normal”, the shift in thinking around who and what we value in capitalist societies, as well as how those societies are organised, has still not fully dissipated since the end of the pandemic. To this end, the authors of this treatise on reclaiming our free time in a post-work society also urge a re-evaluation of the role of the single family home, along with the privatised family, as part of a postcapitalist future.

In doing so, the writers take broad aim at a model that remains valorised and yet underinterrogated in advanced capitalist countries, arguing that, far from being natural and immutable, the conventional nuclear family structure is an inefficient and unequal construct that has adapted to serve capitalism, to the detriment of us all, but most evidently women and minorities.

This has not substantially changed despite the large numbers of women in the paid workforce or the development of “labour-saving” domestic appliances. The family home remains a gendered space of invisible unwaged labour, while vacuum cleaners, dishwashers and washing machines have for the most part merely ratcheted up expectations for cleanliness and hygiene, thus neutralising any real time and energy-saving potential.

[ Barely one-third of adults under 40 in Ireland own a home, report finds ]

[ Cliff Taylor: The slow squeeze which has locked younger people out of the Irish housing market ]

Meanwhile, the isolated family dwelling is resource-intensive, individualised and commodified. It keeps homeowners, in particular, so busy in their “free time” with maintenance and repairs that they have no time to fight for free time. Fascinatingly, as the writers demonstrate through their exploration of co-operative living experiments in 1900s New York and 1920s Vienna, past forms of different spatial and relational domestic arrangements did not necessarily fail because they were unworkable, but also due to external obstructions and vested interests, namely the hotel industry in America, and the rise of fascism in Austria.

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But how to do our domestic sphere differently? A state-funded model of “communal care” would take the pressure off the single container of the nuclear family. A “public luxury” of revived common spaces and the collectivisation of some domestic work would also offer time and space. However, without the “temporal sovereignty” of a life outside of capitalism’s strictures, we can never truly be free. “We need,” write Hester and Srnicek, “the freedom to determine the necessary.”