Lost in Work - Review
Lost in Work
Escaping Capitalism
Amelia Horgan
Pluto Press
review by Harriet Barton
There’s certainly been no shortage of work-related discourse over the past year: changing work conditions, furlough schemes, record levels of unemployment, the ‘key’ and the non-‘key’ workers, the ‘essential’ and the ‘non-essential’ relentlessly filled the mainstream news. The Covid-19 pandemic has re-shaped and, in many cases, underwritten previously long-held beliefs about our relationship to work and how work affects society at large. This is where Amelia Horgan begins Lost in Work: her introduction rightly identifies Covid-19’s disparate effects on those in lower-paid jobs, alongside the pandemic’s call for a value judgement on certain kinds of work and their level of risk. Hogan writes that ‘Covid-19 called into question the soothing idea of progressively improving work and it revealed the prevalence of bad new work,’ that being the gig economy, zero-hours contracts, and bogus self-employment. It’s not that this rhetoric has never been questioned, but that such criticism has now creeped onto the public stage. Life in the pandemic is more or less synonymous now with work in the pandemic, so encompassing is the latter. Horgan asks, and answers, particularly timely questions about 21st-century work. Not questions that are just floating around in theorist and academic circles, but questions everyone who works (and those who don’t) need to be considering in order to re-shuffle this certain state of drudgery. Themes of control, identity, growth and collectivism are centralised in Lost in Work by a writer who manages to take capitalist work to task in under 200 pages.
In nine digestible and informative chapters, Horgan manages to address every area of society that the tendrils of capitalist work loop around. It is clear that the writer is all too aware of how myopic singular analyses of work are – we cannot examine desk jobs without deconstructing hierarchy, economic inequality without racial injustice, ‘womens’’ work without the history and present of gendered work divisions, capitalist production without its irrevocable effects of the environment. This interlinkage allows Lost in Work to take an inclusive, and ofttimes rallying, approach to its critique. We’re all at the mercy of capitalism’s snaking hands, and despite frustrations often feeling atomised, they can in fact propagate meaningful, collective action.
In “Work, Capitalism, and Capitalist Work”, Horgan warms up her book with some basic gripes. She takes issue with a generalised, ‘flat’ understanding of capitalism, due in large part to mainstream media. It isn’t enough, she argues, to just align oneself with the general ‘millennial malaise’. This alignment, albeit one which is contrarian, fails to enact real change. A vague awareness of the fact that Capitalism is Bad is like giving millions of people important words but no understanding of the language. It quickly becomes clear that Horgan is earnest in her hope that her book can be a thorough and accessible guide into an optimistic future for many, as well as a conscientious work of theory to be read in an academic context. To me, Lost in Work is a handbook for the disillusioned and discouraged youth. In Chapter 1, she discusses garment production – what I saw to be an accessible and recognisable touchstone for an ASOS-shopping youth demographic, and where most exploitative working practices are localised in today’s workspace. She lays out clearly that ‘despite the centrality of ‘free’ contract-bound work to capitalism, there are more people in slavery today than at any other point in history,’ and they make the clothes on our backs.
Over the course of the book, Horgan lays out the reasons why the old, neoliberal tenets of continuous improvement and achievement are no longer working. We haven’t reached some state where the hardest workers are rewarded with the most money, the most rights, or the most opportunities. Though bleak, this is strangely comforting to those who follow the rhetoric and ‘work hard’ and still see no American Dream-type fulfilment or financial success: the system itself is broken. Horgan tackles the location of unpaid work, the supposed merging of work and leisure, the loss of a private self, the cult of continuous improvement, the monetisation of private interests, and unionisation. Her words on unionisation are particularly weighty after a year of isolation, with many only seeing co-workers through soulless Zoom windows under the omniscient gaze of a manager or recorded message exchanges. The book is interested at its core in control and freedom, both which are offered in the abstract fantasy of the modern workplace but are actually far from realisable without community, understanding and urgent change. Control and freedom are things more often associated with a non-work life, but as this non-work life bleeds more and more into the working (through what Horgan explains as ‘jobification’ and C. Wright Mills’s ‘personality market), basic freedoms slip quietly away.
We need to denaturalise work, Lost in Work says. And Horgan makes this seem possible. Her prose is realistic and clear, but optimistic. Nothing is sugar-coated, but nothing is depicted as too big or insurmountable, either. By chipping away at these systemic problems, cutting off the heads of capitalist work one by one, together, we can take back control of our time on earth. Celebrating small victories isn’t enough anymore, she asserts: ‘Addressing the problem of work must involve raising the floor rather than making it easier for a tiny number to puncture the ceiling.’ The urgency of stagnating jobs alongside the climate crisis makes reform not only possible, but necessary. Lost in Work is a concise book that convincingly challenges assumptions about working many would have considered unshakeable. Horgan says that work does not work, but there’s a way out of the labyrinth together.
words by
Harriet Barton
Lost in Work out now on Pluto Press
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Horgan, Amelia, Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 2021. 176 pp. £9.99 (paperback). ISBN: 978-0745340913.