EDITORIAL: Work, autonomy, and community.

AuthorSutcliffe-Braithwaite, Florence

Since we took on the co-editorship Renewal at the start of 2016, we have deliberately focused our efforts on filling in the conceptual gaps between academic analysis and specific policy proposals. The contributions we have sought--on Europe, inequality, community wealth, localism, democratisation and the social composition of the electorate--have been aimed at both raising the ambitions of Labour's politics and ensuring their relevance to an age of multiple crises. With the left in a strengthened position and the Labour party enjoying something of an internal truce, this issue takes the opportunity to investigate the normative foundations for a twenty-first century social democracy. Beyond the reversal of the damage caused by state austerity and corporate excess, beyond even the construction of new institutions to guarantee economic justice and ecological stability, what kinds of emancipation, what forms of life, should the left promote? Our contributors, in various ways, explore the ultimate purposes of social democracy, alongside the tensions and choices that confront us on the way. Together, they raise fundamental questions about the meaning of 'work', the value of place and community, and the realisation of social justice in the fabric of everyday life.

Communists and 'worker-ists'

Debating ideals across the famously 'broad church' of Labour and the left inevitably exposes potential divisions. One of the most fundamental of these is over the place of wage labour in a radically changed society. The conflict between the desire to improve and humanise work and to eliminate it entirely is one of the oldest fault-lines within the left, dividing socialists and social democrats along multiple axes. The coincidence of the automation revolution with the long tail of the global financial crisis has produced a situation where the nature and limits of work and wages seem like far less abstract questions than they did a decade ago. Summarising the findings of the independent Future of Work Commission he convened last year, Tom Watson MP signals scepticism of popular narratives suggesting that automation and artificial intelligence will render work as we have known it superfluous. Indeed, he defends a traditional labourist conception of work as a uniquely constructive and empowering human activity:

Work isn't something people do to fill their time in between leisure activities, family life, and sleep, or just to pay the bills. Good work is part of...

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