Читать книгу The Dignity of Labour - Jon Cruddas - Страница 19

The following pages weave together these theoretical and practical topics by rethinking work. We will rehabilitate certain intellectual and political traditions in the understanding of human labour and the regulation of employment and in so doing criticize a lot of fashionable thinking. The book is divided into two parts. The first discusses the economics of labour and demarcates post-war politics in terms of competing narratives regarding employment regulation; the second looks at labour from an ethical orientation referenced through competing theories of justice.

We begin in chapter 2 with the post-war industrial relations diagnosis of the so-called ‘British disease’, the rise of the corporatist state and pluralist attempts to embed the organized working class into a regulated polity and economy. Such an approach echoed earlier concerns with the division of labour and the distribution of just rewards contained within nineteenth-century Classical Political Economy.

In chapter 3 we look at the emergence of the British New Right and the Thatcherite supply-side revolution, which its advocates asserted had achieved by the early 1990s a UK productivity ‘miracle’. We study the way the right sought to politically operationalize Neo-Classical Economics. We discuss how assumptions of predetermined human labour and the rational personal trade-off between work and leisure succeeded in decoupling work and politics.

Chapter 4 looks at labour regulation under New Labour, the effects of the 2008 economic crash and our bewildering modern productivity ‘puzzle’. We inspect how competing approaches to labour regulation sought influence after 1997 and how Blair eventually succumbed to a form of technological determinism that continues to blight the modern left.

We complete Part I by engaging with modern-day arguments regarding postcapitalism and utopian assumptions of a workless future. This in-vogue literature inherits a deterministic reading of value theory and misunderstands Marx’s approach to human labour under capitalism with damaging political consequences for the left today, at times cruelly exposed in ‘Corbynism’.

This journey through post-war history suggests we urgently need to develop new ways of thinking about human labour. In Part II we attempt to provide such an alternative by discussing justice and human labour. We begin in chapter 6 by inspecting the nature of work and its history. We use this to develop our understanding of the dignity of labour. Chapter 7 is concerned with our personal feelings regarding the labour we perform. We review what we know about what work can offer in terms of personal status, security and identity. Finally, we inspect what we know and what we don’t about the future of work and competing assumptions regarding the future demand for labour.

In chapter 8 we attempt to rehabilitate an approach to human labour excluded from modern social democratic and socialist thinking. We contrast this approach to justice, excised from today’s progressive conversation, with more popular deterministic and utilitarian thinking on the left. The concluding chapter 9 returns to the crises of liberal democracy and the rise of authoritarian populism. We discuss modern politics and post-pandemic labour regulation and end with an inspection of UBI and some practical suggestions for the organization and regulation of labour.

The basic argument is a simple one: the dignity of labour should inform how we order society and contribute to the renewal of a social democratic vision of justice.