Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism
$15.00
Evening Standard’s best non-fiction 2021
“Horgan’s suggestions will appeal to anyone who has ever done a job they hated…” —The Guardian
by Amelia Horgan
How our jobs stole our lives and what we can do about it.
“Work hard, get paid”. It’s simple. Self-evident. But it’s also a lie – at least for most of us. For people today, the old assumptions are crumbling; hard work in school no longer guarantees a secure, well-paying job in the future. Far from a gateway to riches and fulfilment, ‘work’ means precarity, anxiety and alienation.
Amelia Horgan poses three big questions here: what is work? How does it harm us? And what can we do about it? While abolishing work altogether is not the answer, Lost in Work shows that when we are able to take control of our workplaces, we become less miserable, and can work towards the transformative goal of experimenting with ‘work’ as we know it. Chapters include:
- Work, capitalism and capitalist work
- Contesting ‘work’
- The paradox of new work
- What does work to do us as individuals
- What does work to do society
- Phantoms and slackers: Resistance and work
This book is part of the Outspoken by Pluto series.
Paperback | 176 pages | Pluto Press | 2021
