Paper Short Abstract:

This paper surfaces and interrogates underlying and often unspoken assumptions around commodified work in order to propose new conceptual and theoretical frameworks for anthropologically reimagining the future of work in a time of rapid technological transformation.

Paper Abstract:

This paper aims to surface and then interrogate underlying and often unspoken assumptions around work – and more specifically, around commodified human activity -- in order to propose new conceptual and theoretical frameworks for anthropologically rethinking the future of work in a time of rapid technological transformation. It begins with ongoing debates around the problem(s) with work, moving beyond a focus on exploitation and working conditions, to argue for an emphasis on distributive justice, care, ecological crises and racial capitalism in order to denaturalise and decentre the role of commodified work in human society. It demonstrates the long history as well as the current urgency of these critiques. The paper then draws on my own empirical research in South Africa as well as broader scholarship to analyse widely-held attachments to work, even in the face of such critiques. In particular it demonstrates the way morality and deservingness; distribution and meritocracy; and meaning-making and sociality have intertwined with commodified work into a nostalgically productivist moral economy of capitalism. The paper argues that this moral economy acts as a block to a fundamental rethinking or transformation of the future of commodified work. Building on this, the paper looks beyond techno-optimists’ and techno-pessimists’ narrow focus on the implications of AI for work futures, using case studies from 19th-century movements for shorter working hours to advocacy for universal basic income (UBI) to argue that future transformations of work are not inevitable (nor technologically determined), but rather outcomes of agentive collective struggles.