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

Does it ever feel like you have no free time? You come home after work and instead of finding a space of rest and relaxation, you're confronted by a pile of new tasks to complete - cooking, cleaning, looking after the kids, and so on. In this ground-breaking book, Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek lay out how unpaid work in our homes has come to take up an ever-increasing portion of our lives - how the vacuum of free time has been taken up by vacuuming. Examining the history of the home over the past century - from running water to white goods to smart homes - they show how repeated efforts to reduce the burden of this work have faced a variety of barriers, challenges, and reversals. Charting the trajectory of our domestic spaces over the past century, Hester and Srnicek consider new possibilities for the future, uncovering the abandoned ideas of anti-housework visionaries and sketching out a path towards real free time for all, where everyone is at liberty to pursue their passions, or do nothing at all. It will require rethinking our living arrangements, our expectations and our cities.

About the Author :
Helen Hester is Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, social reproduction, and theories of work, and she's a member of the international working group Laboria Cuboniks. Her books include Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014), Xenofeminism (Polity, 2018), and Post-Work (Bloomsbury, forthcoming, with Will Stronge). Nick Srnicek is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Economy at King's College London. He is the author of Platform Capitalism (Polity, 2016) and Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Verso, 2015 with Alex Williams).

Review :
We are taught to think that there's no alternative to the sad model of social reproduction centered on the single-family home and privatized family. Here's is a practical and creative guide to how we might begin to move beyond that paradigm. Why do breakthroughs of technology so rarely lift the burden of drudgery? And how can we harness these breakthroughs to move beyond the capitalist conditions that they service today? Following their pioneering theory (Xenofeminism and Inventing the Future) Helen Hester and Nick Srinicek's new book After Work tackles this problem, and provides a new vision of a future that moves us past toil. This book advances the case for "the struggle against work - in all its forms", addressing a broad range of concerns from the rise of platform capitalism to the burdens of care that persistent in private households. Neither understating the scale of the social transformation needed for the planet to survive capitalism, nor lapsing into despair over the thorny trail ahead, After Work is indispensable reading for anyone committed to extending the realm of freedom. This is an incisive critique of the status quo and an earnest appeal to rethink why people work and how they spend their time. Anyone seeking cosy thoughts about the joys of spring cleaning should look elsewhere ... clear and concise, with a lot of learning worn lightly After Work takes an important look at the implications for the domestic sphere if work is reduced A meticulously researched and agilely argued plea for the reduction of domestic labor from feminist scholar Helen Hester and Marxist economist Nick Srnicek. As a building block for change this splendidly written book makes a most powerful case for the opposition. After Work will get people talking about their interminable to-do lists. Anyone under 30 who wants to know what their life is going to look like should read it. A dazzling work of applied utopianism After Work fuses visions for a post-work world with calls to recognise and tackle the crisis in care. Interesting and thought-provoking ... If even existing capitalist technologies can give a glimpse of the benefits of a different way of organising society, imagine what would be possible if we had full democratic working-class control of the means of production and a democratic planned economy. Engagingly, After Work focuses not only on how our ideas, culture, and politics might need to evolve to create more free time for caregivers, but also what kind of design and architecture support such changes.