WORK A HISTORY OF HOW WE SPEND OUR TIME
JAMES SUZMAN Bloomsbury, 444pp, £25
South African anthropologist James Suzman has lived among the Ju/’hoansi bush tribes of Namibia who are among the last peoples on earth to live by hunter-gathering. Suzman has previously written about them in Affluence without
Abundance – and here he returns to a similar theme in his overview of the history of human work. What do we mean by it? When did the modern belief that work gives ‘purpose’ and ‘meaning’ first emerge? Reviewing
Work in the Times, James Marriott nailed Suzman’s thesis: ‘It all went wrong in 900 BC when we moved from the idyllic state of the hunter gatherer into settlements.’
This is a book, observed Marriott, ‘about the damage of work, it’s anti-work’. The Ju/’hoansi, who spend just 17 hours a week hunting and another 20 collecting firewood, preparing food and fixing shelters, have got it right. ‘That’s less than half the time Americans spend in the office, commuting and doing chores.’ 10,000 years ago, the emergence of agriculture condemned humans to the treadmill of labour for surplus underpinned by a terror of scarcity – and concentrated influence in the hands of a few. Today we worry that automation will give corporate giants too much power – in ancient Rome they had the same worries about the biggest slave-owning families.
Writing in the FT, Suzman put the case for a 15-hour week, asking the question that might well be put by a Namibian bushman: ‘Why, when people were paid for their work, did they still go back the following day rather than enjoy the fruits of their labour? And why did people work so hard to acquire more wealth than they could ever possibly need or enjoy?’