Whatever happened to the 'Leisure Society'?

 

When I was kid at school in the early 1960s, the teachers would talk about something called the 'Leisure Society'. They seemed to think that technology and automation would remove the need for people to work, or at least, reduce the number of hours that they spent working, and we could devote most of our time to leisure.

This never really materialised even though there has been much talk of introducing an unconditional "Citizens Basic Income" which is not linked to work. I suppose it was a naive utilitarian view that saw production has being organized and run in the interests of its greatest number. But if the means of production is privately owned, then it's run in the interests of its owners and shareholders and not in the interest of its workers.

The workers are often wary of technology and automation because it can lead to displacement, loss of jobs and unemployment. This is because they don't control the technology nor do we have 'workers control' of society. If society was organised in a way that seeks to improve the lives of people, it would be possible to use technology for the betterment of mankind. Working hours could be reduced and there could be more autonomy and collaborative co-operation.

In his book 'Homage to Catolonia', George Orwell described how land and factories had been collectivised by the Spanish anarchists of the CNT in much of Catalonia during the Spanish civil war (1936-39). These collectives were run and controlled by Spanish workers. Orwell wrote that this anarchist experiment in worker’s self-management was the first time, "the working-class was in the saddle." He said of revolutionary Spain, "Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists...Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised..." Orwell said that even the Ritz Hotel in Barcelona had been collectivised and turned into a workers' canteen.

During the Spanish civil war, many of these collectives were attacked by communists like Enrique Lister. The Spanish socialist used to jokingly say, "Vote Communist and Spare Spain from Marxism."

Societies whether they're Capitalist or State Communist, are run on the basis of profit, exploitation, and people pursuing their own personal greed, or they're run in the interest of a privileged political clique. You can't really separate the economic from the political. We might have political equality in the sense that most of us get a vote in a democratic society, but we don't have economic equality. There's not much democracy in the British workplace and there's a mutually beneficent symbiosis between politics and wealth. In a country like Britain or the U.S., whichever political party we vote for, the capitalist always gets in. Government is essentially about managing the capitalist system.

The American political scientist Harold D. Laswell, defined politics as "Who gets what, when and how." Economics is not a science and that's why it was once called political economy. How the wealth of any society is redistributed is very much down to the political decisions that governments take or as in the case of revolutionary Spain, it's run in the interests of those who produce that wealth.