In my previous essay, I discussed how technological progress could become a truly liberating force once again — namely, by enabling people to spend much less of their lives working for wages and salaries. A properly ambitious “abundance” movement, supported by new social movements, can make that come true.
My sense is that many readers will be skeptical that such an outcome actually qualifies as liberation. The prospect of dramatic reductions in paid employment has received a lot of attention over the past decade or so — and it’s typically presented as a calamity in the making. Two different nightmare scenarios dominate recent discussions: call them “bang” and “whimper.” In the former, the combination of AI and robotics eliminates most jobs, triggering layoffs, dislocation, and financial hardship on a massive scale. In the latter, the financial hardship is eliminated by some kind of universal basic income, or UBI — but now, robbed of any productive purpose, people sink into idleness and anomie.
Admittedly, there are some people who uphold the UBI future as a utopian ideal. As for me, I share the worries about idleness. Given our current tendency to squander ever more time on our phones, TV, and other screens, it’s not hard to picture how turning the mass of the population into wards of the state could easily degenerate into a Brave New WALL-E World of torpor and addictive distraction.
Here, though, I want to make the case for a very different post-mass-employment future — one in which a big reduction in lifetime working hours frees up time for other productive pursuits more conducive to human flourishing. Although the idea may sound exotic, it’s pure Americana, hearkening back to the great secular saint of American history. I’m proposing that we go back to the future, creating a new, more dynamic and inclusive social order by reviving the “free labor” vision of Abraham Lincoln and fellow early Republicans.
The traditional view: Wage labor as unfreedom
Let me start by turning back the clock to a time when our present situation — a world in which most people spend most of their adult lives working as employees — was widely regarded as a nightmare scenario. This is the only economic and social reality we know, and so it’s hard for us to imagine that things were ever otherwise. Yet before the brute fact of industrialization ultimately overwhelmed all resistance, working for wages was relatively uncommon — and generally considered to be a form of unfreedom. At the time of America’s founding, wage earners were still scarce throughout much of the country, though they were becoming more common in cities. And in the status hierarchies of the time, they were relegated to the condition of dependent servitude — along with apprentices, indentured servants, and chattel slaves.
According to the classical republicanism that was so influential in shaping the thinking of the time, true freedom was rooted in independence from the arbitrary will of another. Thomas Jefferson exemplified such thinking when he celebrated yeoman farmers as the bedrock of a free society, people who “look[ed] up to heaven” and “their own soil and industry” for their subsistence and depended on no one else. Wage workers, though, were directly subject to the arbitrary will of their masters, required to follow their orders and dependent on their good will for a livelihood.
Americans saw their new country as blessed to be free of the Old World’s class divisions and savage inequalities. In their view, societies with a landed aristocracy and great masses of dependent poor offered unpromising conditions for free political institutions. Such institutions worked best in societies dominated by the middling classes, people who neither lorded it over others nor bowed and scraped before their betters. “Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example,” wrote Jefferson. “The mobs of great cities,” by contrast, “add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the human body.”
Jefferson’s thinking reflected classical republicanism’s premodern antipathy to commerce and the corrupting effects of luxury — attitudes that were rendered increasingly out of place as the United States moved into the 19th century. As the Jacksonian era’s market revolution transformed the young nation from an agrarian society into a bustling commercial powerhouse obsessed with upward mobility, a new conception of republicanism would emerge that sought to reconcile the traditional commitment to self-government in the public interest with the changed social context. This new synthesis took as its foil the very different vision of freedom and the American future taking shape in the antebellum South — a vision that regarded black slavery as the necessary foundation for white freedom. What emerged in the 1850s was the new Republican Party, campaigning under the banner of “free soil, free labor, free men.”1
The ‘free labor’ innovation: Wage labor as a steppingstone
The new Republicans celebrated the burgeoning market society as liberating, lifting people out of the narrow constraints of subsistence agriculture and into a wider world of opportunity and progress. In their view, subjection to the arbitrariness of employers was frequently far preferable to subjection to the arbitrariness of Mother Nature. Wage work, offering an alternative to life on the farm, was thus a pathway to a new form of the independence that republicanism always prized. Unlike slaves or traditional servants, wage workers were not dependent on any one employer, because unlike true dependents they had the freedom to quit and seek work elsewhere. This critical distinction, in their view, made all the difference. Abraham Lincoln’s views here were shaped by his own life experience: He never forgot an early episode in his life when he rafted men out to a steamboat and received two silver half-dollars in return. “The world seemed wider and fairer before me,” he recalled. “I was a more hopeful and confident being from that time.”
Republicans retained their commitment to a middle-class society without stark divisions between rich and poor — the antithesis of which they saw in the South, which had now come around to the view that the only freedom worth having was the aristocratic sort that rested on the unfree labor of society’s “mud-sills.” And the Republicans believed that something very close to their classless ideal could be found in their party’s electoral strongholds: the small towns of New England, the Northeast, and the rapidly growing Midwest. In the Northern states, Abraham Lincoln maintained that
a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families — wives, sons, and daughters — work for themselves on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand nor of hired laborers or slaves on the other.
Republicans did realize, though, that things were different in the Democrat-controlled big cities of the North. Wage work was surging there, especially among the poor immigrants streaming in from Ireland. Southern slavery apologists argued that the low pay, miserable working conditions, and job insecurity of Northern “wage slavery” compared unfavorably to what was occurring in their own “peculiar institution.” Republicans categorically rejected this false equivalence, but the argument still stung. Their “free labor” ideal had no place for a permanent class of downtrodden working poor, yet this blight of the Old World seemed in danger of spreading to the new.
They imagined, though, that the danger could be avoided. In their view, the role of wage work in a “free labor” economy was solely as a temporary expedient, a first steppingstone on the path of upward mobility. Here, once again, is Lincoln to explain:
The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor — the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.
And the Republicans had a plan to maintain this limited role for wage work. In the words of Horace Greeley, New York Tribune publisher and editor and one of the founders of the Republican Party: “Go West, young man!” The idea, long championed by Greeley, was to give away free land in the Western territories to homesteaders, drawing urban workers out of dependence and penury and transforming them into property-owning farmers with a measure of independence. “The public lands,” Greeley wrote, “are the great regulator of the relations of Labor and Capital, the safety valve of our industrial and social engine.” The Homestead Act of 1862 sought to put this theory into practice.
‘Free labor’ vs. industrialization
Alas, the theory failed to pan out under the conditions of the time. Loopholes in the law allowed speculators and corporate interests to gobble up most of the land given away; only about a quarter of the total acreage went to actual homesteaders. And most of the urban poor lacked the farming skills, as well as the capital for tools and equipment, needed for relocation to the challenging conditions of the unsettled West to make sense.
Meanwhile, the decades following the Homestead Act’s passage witnessed the economic and demographic transformation of the country. America became the main proving ground for the radically new mass production/mass distribution economy, while millions of immigrants poured in from Southern and Eastern Europe to fill the nation’s booming factories. The early Republicans’ worst fears were realized: America became a country marked by stark inequality, with plutocrats enjoying unprecedented wealth and a large, impoverished working class. Meanwhile, the Republican Party itself fairly quickly gave up its solicitude for the urban poor (as well as for the formerly enslaved population) and sided with the interests of business.
Small-r republican concerns about wage work’s connection to dependence and class divisions did not yet vanish, though. Instead they migrated to the nascent American labor movement. The Knights of Labor, the largest American labor organization of the 19th century, fought for incremental gains such as an eight-hour day, but remained unreconciled to the wage system. They envisioned an industrial future based on worker-owned cooperatives, and sought, in the words of their leader Terence Powderly, “to forever banish that curse of modern civilization – wage slavery.”
But the logic of large-scale industrialization swept aside all objections. Except in a few, relatively marginal circumstances, cooperatives proved unable to compete with investor-funded enterprises in organizing production for the new economic order. By the 1890s, with the “pure and simple unionism” of the American Federation of Labor, the labor movement reconciled itself to wage work and sought merely to raise pay and improve conditions.2 “I know we are living under the wage system,” declared AFL leader Samuel Gompers, “and as long as that lasts it is our purpose is to secure a continually larger share for labor.”
Against all the old antipathy to dependence-as-unfreedom, the wage system held an unanswerable trump card: Industrialization, with reliance on mass employment of wage labor as one necessary element, offered liberation from the age-old curse of poverty. In exchange for submitting to the often brutal domination of foremen and managers and enduring dangerous and physically debilitating work, masses of ordinary workers enjoyed steadily rising living standards that ultimately lifted them out of grinding want and into suburban comfort. It was a hard bargain to be sure, as the 20th century history of class conflict, world wars, and the Cold War attests, but the gain in freedom was real and ultimately carried the day.
Reviving the ‘free labor’ vision
But as material plenty has deepened and spread over recent decades, those old small-r republican concerns have become relevant once again. Rising material living standards offered a genuine increase in freedom when they were progressively erasing deficits — namely, penury and ignorance, and the accompanying suffering, shame, and degradation. Those deficits prevent people from developing and exercising their inborn capacities and enjoying the realization of human potential that we call flourishing or fulfillment. Overcoming them thus resulted in expanding freedom to flourish.
Now, however, as I argued in the previous essay, those deficits are by and large gone. Accordingly, rising living standards under contemporary postindustrial consumerism no longer offer genuine liberation; instead, their effect is limited to providing the bells and whistles of additional comforts, conveniences, and entertainment. Which is all well and good, except to the extent the pursuit of these secondary goods crowds out the effortful process of developing and exercising our capacities. And in light of the present record of mass obesity, falling raw IQ scores, deteriorating mental and emotional health, and atrophy and disintegration of vital personal relationships, it’s clear that this crowding-out process is now fairly advanced. For a lucky minority, jobs offer sufficient autonomy and intellectual or physical challenge to encourage the fulfilling realization of potential; for most of the rest of us, though, jobs require a surrender to the double whammy of domination and precarity in exchange for purely external rewards.
We’ve thus reached the point where the loss of freedom while on the clock is no longer paying off with improved opportunities for flourishing once the working day is done. As long as this situation persists, we’re trapped: the same economic growth that makes us richer is also making us more miserable. But there is a way to redirect capitalist wealth creation so that it once again serves as an engine of liberation — namely, by freeing us from our heavy dependence on the labor market. Which means that the “free labor” vision of the early Republican Party, premature in its own day, now points the way to a more hopeful future.
Along with Abraham Lincoln and his fellow partisans, we have no cause to reject capitalism and the hiring of labor. On the contrary, we should celebrate capitalism as an essential institutional foundation for the wealth we enjoy and the opportunities it provides. At the same time, though, we see that actually existing mass employment today does entail an unhealthy mass dependence. It divides society into those who give orders and those who follow them, with the bulk of the population relegated to the inferior category and forced into precarious dependence on employers and market conditions outside their control. And we see that this class division is deepening, with those on the wrong side of the chasm at a singular disadvantage in the quest to “live wisely and agreeably and well.”
Given a clear-eyed appraisal of contemporary employment as a mixed bag of positive and negative elements, and given the potential for technological progress unleashed by a suitably ambitious “abundance” movement to bring about dramatic reductions in the cost of living, we are in a position to establish as an important goal for social progress the end of lifetime mass employment and the move to a more limited role for wage and salary work in our social order. For a minority of managers, professionals, and others whose jobs offer sufficient intrinsic rewards, full-time employment throughout one’s adult years might remain widespread. But for everyone else, employment could be reduced to a temporary expedient, like schooling today — a phase of life that doesn’t last forever, but which acts as a steppingstone to other pursuits.
And what are those other pursuits? Joining with the old “free labor” Republicans, people can once again treat work for pay as a path toward independence as small-scale proprietors. In the antebellum North, those proprietors consisted of farmers, shopkeepers, and small business owners. In the 21st century future, a limited stint in the paid work force can provide the savings people need to become the independent proprietors of their own households, neighborhoods, and communities.
The details of how this vision might be implemented could vary widely, depending on people’s preferences and economic circumstances as well as the overall level of technological development. At the core of this vision, though, is the migration of productive work back into the home. From pre-industrial times until the 1980s, the trend ran in the opposite direction, as more and more people — first men, then women — went off to work in factories, shops, and offices, leaving home behind to serve primarily as the locus for consumption. With the advent of computer technology that allows people to work remotely online, the net flows have begun to reverse: rising from a nadir of around 2 percent, currently some 15 percent to 20 percent of workers are home-based, either as remote workers or self-employed business owners and independent contractors. A 21st century version of the “free labor” movement — which I have referred to elsewhere as a movement toward “economic independence” — would build on recent trends to restore the home as a major center of productive activity.
In the here and now, progress toward that goal could take the form of encouraging remote employment as well as home-based businesses (both online and IRL). Zoning restrictions currently act as a major constraint on the latter — an inviting target for an expanded YIMBY movement. Liberated from having to choose a residence near their jobs, people could then increasingly opt for co-living arrangements with family and friends — which could just take the form of houses in the same neighborhood or apartments in the same building, but which could also include common areas for shared activities. Living close to people you care about would not only go a long way toward reversing the social disintegration that characterizes our “anti-social century,” but could also make it much easier to insource the vital care work of raising small children, schooling the young, and taking care of elderly family members. You can throw in rooftop solar power and community gardens to lend these Burkean “little platoons” an additional margin of self-sufficiency — and instill in them the habit of seeking more of the same.
For what might come next, imagine a successful abundance movement that both radically reduces the cost of modern living — in particular, housing, energy, transportation, and health care — and develops new technologies for decentralized, small-scale production. Now added to the ranks of people who spend their days at home are growing numbers of early retirees, as well as people on their off time from part-time work or occasional, episodic stints in the work force. And as people move back, the range of things that they can do at home or in the community can expand dramatically. Think DIY homebuilding with 3D printing and AI/robotic assistance; vertical indoor farming for fruits and vegetables; local energy abundance through expanded solar capacity or small-scale nuclear power; AI/robotic assistance in child care, schooling, and elder care.
We can also hope that this reorientation toward the domestic will facilitate a renewed commitment to getting married, having babies, and raising kids as central projects of adulthood. Given that people typically say they want more kids than they end up having, creating lifestyles dramatically more conducive to childrearing should help matters. Certainly the burdens of childrearing are greatly reduced when everyone is at home all day, allowing for spontaneous play among neighborhood kids and lots of “it takes a village” backstopping by watchful family members, friends, and other neighbors nearby.
The residents who participated in and managed and directed all this work would truly be acting as proprietors — not of farms or businesses, necessarily (although maybe sometimes), but of their homes and communities. Participating in a high-tech revival of the domestic sector, they would constitute a 21st century updating of the old yeoman-farmer ideal — one that could play out simultaneously in urban blocks, suburban neighborhoods, and new communities built in rural areas.
The social architecture described here seems compatible with a wide variety of cultural and ideological permutations. Left-wing back-to-the-land types, artists and other creatives who repurpose abandoned city buildings, blockchain enthusiasts, DIY and “maker movement” types, social conservatives who view family life as a sacred duty — all these groups and many more can find attractions in banding together with the like-minded to create their own micro-protopias.
In this essay I’m foregrounding a possible new line of social development, but the assumption is always that capitalism would still be running in the background — not just producing the material foundation of the good life that is of central importance here, but also an ever-proliferating variety of gizmos and doodads that range from the idiotic and pernicious to the breathtakingly impressive and fun. And many people would continue to play the “getting and spending” game at full tilt throughout adulthood — especially people with the high-paying jobs that make earning challenging and fulfilling, along with the future-oriented time preference needed to enjoy capitalism’s many temptations without succumbing to them. If an economic independence movement really can get off the ground, it will emerge gradually out of this background context, with lots of blurry gray areas as people move from one lifestyle to another, often keeping a foot in both.
Combining freedom from and freedom to
Here I’ve offered a vision of a “post-job” future that looks very different from the “bang” and “whimper” scenarios I discussed at the beginning of this essay. In contrast to the “robots are coming to take our jobs!” scare stories, in this vision people aren’t being forced to drop out of the work force because they’ve been outcompeted by machines; instead, people are choosing to graduate from the 9-to-5 life because they’ve been enriched and empowered by machines. And as opposed to the mass-automation-plus-UBI scenario, most of the wealth funding life without a paycheck isn’t coming from top-down redistribution by government; rather, most of the funding comes from the bottom up in the form of personal savings.
In earlier essays, I’ve set forth in some detail why I favor an economic independence movement over the top-down UBI approach. Here let me just note the key difference between the two from the small-r republican perspective that I’ve been discussing here. If we take seriously the republican conception of dependence as unfreedom, we have a strong reason to prefer the bottom-up alternative. Some proponents have actually argued for a UBI on republican grounds, pointing out that it reduces dependence on a frequently arbitrary and undependable labor market. This analysis seems seriously incomplete, as the greater independence from the marketplace achieved by a UBI is purchased at the cost of complete dependence on the government for one’s livelihood. The vulnerability created by such dependence may seem purely theoretical if we assume an imperturbably stable democracy with rock-solid finances — but how robust is that assumption these days? Especially as technology enables ever more intrusive government surveillance of citizens, transforming the entire population into government dependents creates almost irresistible opportunities for abuse.3
Will anything resembling the future sketched here actually come to pass? Of course I have no idea. But I do believe that all of us interested in kickstarting technological dynamism in our society, and who support such dynamism in our culture, need to think very hard about how to build support in the wider public for the kind of future we want. First, as I argued in the previous essay, we need to recognize that most people don’t value technological progress as an end in itself, purely as an expression of incredible ingenuity. To get most people excited enough about a high-tech future to overcome their natural caution about uncertain and possibly disruptive change, we need to show them a future with tangible, dramatic improvements in their lives. To that end, I’ve proposed that the liberation from full-time work for pay is the next great project for social progress.
But second, I don’t think you can successfully make the case that a job-free future counts as liberation unless you can connect freedom from employment with some important and newly enabled freedom to. At this point, I don’t believe that the mere promise of more stuff and more free time is enough. We’ve created a large offsite storage industry because we already have more stuff than we know what to do with — do we really expect that more of the same will cure what currently ails us? And recently, we’ve been coming to grips with how poorly we’re making use of our free time, frittering our lives away one compulsive check of the phone at a time. Do we really think we’ll use additional leisure more wisely? A move toward economic independence addresses these doubts by marrying freedom from 9-to-5 with a vitally important “freedom to” — the freedom to flourish through active participation in family and community life.
I’ve come to the conclusion that our problems of flagging dynamism and social disintegration are inextricably linked. Which is to say, we have a much better chance of tackling the former if doing so helps us to reverse the latter. Striving for a “free labor” future — a refocused and rebalanced capitalism featuring high-tech abundance and expanded economic independence at the local level — gives us that chance. The most promising path of progress is one that leads us back to closer connection with each other.
Footnotes:
- My discussion here relies heavily on Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men as well as James McPherson’s Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution and Allen Guelzo’s Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President. ↩︎
- Those who remained unreconciled ended up as socialists or communists. Although these radicals exerted important influence over the American labor movement, their numbers were small and their radical vision never prevailed. ↩︎
- Despite my reservations about a UBI, I do see a role for other government transfer programs in a “free labor” future. Much as the old Homestead Act sought to encourage greater economic independence by giving away public lands, governments of the future can likewise lend assistance through various means — e.g., one-time “basic capital” grants, or wage subsidies for workers in lower-paying jobs. Such contingent and temporary assistance is far preferable in my view to the widespread permanent dependency a UBI would create. ↩︎