 Hello. Hello and welcome to everyone for those attending in the auditorium and for those attending via live stream. My name is Joelle Vallabriga. I'm curator of performances and public programs here at Modem. And we are here today for the third appointment of the public program of the exhibition, post capital art and the economics of the digital age, which brings together works of sculptures, painting, photography, video and performance that address the nature of production, consumption and wealth. Developed within a period of significant change and uncertainty, the exhibition takes as its starting point the paradox within a capitalist system that is both dependent upon and threatened by technological progress. Today forms of labor currency commodities and the nature consumption have been dramatically transformed by technologies that continue to evolve multinational information technology and e-commerce firms are amongst the highest value publicly traded companies. Information that is both abundant and infinitely reproducible has become a valuable commodity that defies traditional economic principles, whereby value is discernment by scarcity. The public program has been structured following the three sections of the exhibition production consumption and wealth and today's discussion will be focused on production. I'm extremely excited to be here today with Helen Hester and Nick Cernick. Today we will listen to them as they share their knowledge on the topic of social reproduction after capital. Quoting the speakers when we think about work, we still tend to think about workplaces. If we think about reducing work, we think about reducing working hours and spending more time at home. But the home has never been free from work. And with the continued gender division of labor, women still do the bulk of the domestic activities. Helen Hester is professor of gender technology and cultural politics at the University of West London. Her research interests include techno feminism, social reproduction and theories of work. She leads the feminist future program for the think tank autonomy and Nick Cernick is lecturer in the digital economy at King's College London. He is the author of platform capitalism inventing and inventing the future post capitalism and a world without work. Following the talk, there will be a dedicated time for questions. So for those present in the auditorium, please keep them for later. And for those attending the lecture via live stream, you can write your questions in the chat form. With no further delay, I pass on the word to Ellen and Nick. Thank you for being here and welcome. Thank you for having us. And thank you to everybody who's watching. The way this is going to be organized. So Helen and I are, we're married, we have two young children. So one of us has to look after the children while the other speaks. So I'm going to speak first, and then halfway through Helen will come in and I'll go look after the kids, you know, sort of performing the work that we are talking about today. So what we want to talk about is sort of forms the basis of our book that we're working on for the past few years now, which has to do about thinking about how to apply post work ideas to social reproduction. So that's going to be the focus of our talk tonight. And we'll talk through, you know, some of the limits some of the constraints and some of the challenges that this program faces. So I'm going to share my screen now share my PowerPoint here. Okay, so social reproduction after capital. Now, after the fall of the Soviet Union, and I would say up until about the global financial crisis of 2008 capitalism basically appeared to have won. And I think that this was a position which was held not just by the mainstream, not just by pro capitalist forces, but actually crucially by anti capitalist forces as well. It was just thought that capitalism had won in the wake of the end of the Cold War collapse the Soviet Union, and the turn as well of China towards a more and more market oriented economy. Famously as Francis Fukuyama put it the end of history had been reached. Now we know that's not true today. 2008 upset this dogma. And it was the first real sort of considered threat against the sort of capitalist realism. So suddenly the idea that capitalism was the only possible mode of production that would survive didn't seem all that convincing anymore. Now what we've seen in the past decade I would argue is a flourishing of thinking and imagining about what's an alternative future might look like. So if capitalism is not the only option, what else might be possible? What could we do? Now these projects I think range from sort of more electoral focused things. You've got things like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK here. You've got Podemos in Spain. You've got Bernie Sanders in the US. You've got sort of the revival of leftist electoral forces in Latin America as well. Again, there's a sort of idea that like actually we can think about what a different economic order might look like. We also have a revival of I think a really important strain of eco socialist projects. So taking into account climate change, the threat that it poses to humanity and to nature. Thinking about what could an eco socialist future look like. What is the sort of ways that we can build in sustainability. We can get rid of this GDP fetish that dominates so much of macroeconomic and political thinking. And also I think a rethinking of luxury as well has been a really important part of this eco socialist project. Thinking is luxury simply more and more commodities. Is it endless consumption? Or do we have alternative ideas of what luxury might mean for an eco socialist future? Now on top of that, we also have the rise of digital socialist ideas. So obviously with the emergence and expansion and increasing dominance of digital platforms in the past decade. Digital socialism has basically said, well, given the emergence of these platforms, what can we do with them in a more socialist sort of way? Now people like Evgeny Morozov and James Muldoon have been giving a lot of consideration to, you know, sort of making platforms more democratic, more accountable, moving them completely away from a profit oriented focus, which is the source of so many of their problems. And then thinking about, you know, what could they do to enable the flourishing of human freedom. Related to that is also the platform cooperativism, platform cooperativism movement, which has been the source of a lot of activism around the world. Basically workers on these platforms saying that it doesn't need to be owned by some distant Silicon Valley owner, but instead these platforms could be owned by the workers themselves. And thinking about, well, how do we reorganize these technologies, these basic infrastructures in order to make them more in line with socialist ideas. We also have work on economic planning, which has flourished again in recent years. So people like Mikhail Roswarski and Lee Phillips have written a book on this. There's also been some interesting engagements with, you know, early accounts of economic planning and thinking about, well, clearly central planning doesn't work. But what might it mean for democratic planning to be possible today, given the expansion of technologies that we have? And then I think perhaps one of the more interesting strains of the sort of post-capitalist thinking in recent years has been a sort of return to what I would call first communist principles. So basically asking what is communism for, above and beyond, you know, just a sort of generic anti-capitalist stance, but actually thinking about what is capitalism all about, sorry, what is communism all about? You know, what is its goal? Is its goal simply the end of capitalism, the end of profit? Is it about democratic planning? Is it about the flourishing of freedom? You know, all these sorts of core value questions. And I think people like Martin Hanglund, Jasper Burns, and William Clay Roberts have been doing really interesting work on exactly this sort of topic. So trying to reflect on, you know, what went wrong over the course of the 20th century. Clearly the communist project over the 20th century had numerous catastrophic failures. But I think they're trying to gain new groundings for what communism might mean in the future. So basically, you know, after 2008, I think there's been a real expansion of imagination around what might be possible. Now, crucially, post-work has been one of the key figures in this broad future-oriented turn as well. Arguably post-work has been the most popular strain of this sort of post-capitalist thinking. There's a few, you know, books here listed on the slide. You know, there's many, many more I could have added to the slide. Now, in part, I would say this post-work turn has emerged as a result of the crisis of work that we seem to find ourselves in, particularly a deficit of decent work. So the fact that there's so many people looking for jobs and so few decent jobs available, and does it mean that, you know, well, is technology taking those jobs? Are robots doing all of their work now? Or are there sort of larger economic issues at play? But in any case, there's been this crisis of work. And post-work, I think, is in large part a response to that. To say, well, if there's not sufficient work, why are we struggling to, like, force everybody to do 40-hour work weeks or longer? Instead, we could be thinking about how do we reduce the work week? How do we spread that work around more equitably? And how do we build an economic system that isn't dependent upon enforced wage labor for everybody? So post-work has been, you know, trying to take those sorts of ideas you have, you know, in my book, Inventing the Future. It's been things like a shorter working week, a universal basic income, increasing automations, actually trying to use technology to reduce the amount of drudgery that we have to do, and trying to take advantage of this, you know, the situation that we find ourselves in. So post-work has been, I think, a big strain of post-capitalist thinking in recent years. But, and this is sort of the jumping off point of Helen and I's book, these commentaries and analysis around post-work tend to actually miss the full spectrum of work. And in particular, they tend to neglect the work of social reproduction. So these are the activities that tend to nurture future workers, regenerate the current workforce, and maintain those who cannot work. So whether it be children or elderly people or people with disabilities, it's the social reproduction is a set of tasks which maintains those people and contributes to the next generation of people. So broadly speaking, it includes things like caring directly for oneself and others, maintaining physical spaces and organizing resources as part of an indirect process of care for oneself and others, so thinking about cleaning, shopping, repairing, maintenance, that sort of thing. And then there's also species reproduction is another key aspect of social reproduction. So the actual process of bearing children and then raising them. So in short, you know, social reproduction is the everyday tasks involved in staying alive and helping others stay alive, which have traditionally been performed by women for low or no wages. So the issue is that when post-work typically imagines the end of work, it usually means robots taking over factories or robots taking over warehouses or, you know, automated assistance taking over offices and things like that. Post-work typically has very little to say about hospitals, care homes, nurseries, or the work that's performed in the home. And this is, I think, a major, major oversight on the part of a post-work project. And the key reason why is that most work today happens to be reproductive work. And so to talk about post-work without discussing reproductive work is to miss out on most of the work that we actually end up doing. So let me explain that a bit more. Now I've got a few charts here. I hope people aren't too fearful of charts, but I'll try to explain what these refer to anyways. This chart here is basically the amount of expenditures on social reproduction. So, you know, various aspects of social reproduction, whether it be healthcare, long-term care, childcare, education. And this is how much money is being spent on these sectors in a selection of the advanced capitalist countries. And you can see that, you know, the lowest is Italy at 15%. Someone interestingly, America is the highest. Despite, you know, the low welfare state in the United States, they end up spending a lot more on this stuff simply because it's channeled through private means rather than through a sort of collective government spending. But there's a lot of money clearly being spent on social reproduction in all of these countries. And this has been growing over time as well. Now, in addition to the money that's being spent on social reproduction, there's also the proportion of wage labor that social reproduction jobs is taking up. So, this is a chart from 1970 to 2017. I think it's the latest figures that we can find. Again, for a selection of these advanced capitalist countries. And what you see here is social reproduction jobs have been increasing from, you know, around 15, 16, 17% in 1970. And very soon they'll be reaching 30% of the workforce. Now, that's interesting, I think, because when we talk about countries being a manufacturing powerhouse, for instance, the peak of manufacturing in a country like America was around 30% of the workforce. It was slightly higher in a country like the UK or in Germany. But broadly speaking, they were manufacturing countries when 30% of the population was doing manufacturing. If social reproduction is now reaching those same levels, I think we really need to be considering that actually these countries are not simply a sort of generic post-industrial or service or information economy. Specifically, what they're about is social reproduction. Education, health care, child care, and increasingly elder care is one of the major, major job sectors. So again, social reproduction is now taking up a huge amount of wage labor. Now crucially, these numbers only look set to grow in the future. So you can look at various governments, whether it be the US, the UK, or other governments, projections for job growth. So they're best estimates of which occupations are going to be growing. And they basically all say that reproductive jobs, social reproduction jobs are going to be growing. Home health care aids, for instance, are in some countries already the biggest occupation in terms of numbers, but are quickly becoming the top occupation in many, many other countries as well. One journalist looking at these reports said that nine of the 12 fastest growing fields are different ways of saying nurse, which again, it simply points to the fact that reproductive jobs are not simply large part already, which they are, but that they're growing more and more and more. In the UK, if you look at the government forecasts, a full 47% of all new jobs up until 2024 are set to be in social reproduction. So again, this is the main sector of the wage economy is increasingly just social reproduction. Now of course, on top of all of that, there's a vast amount of unwaged work that's performed for social reproduction. Now what we've got here is a chart which is based on some calculations we did where we estimated the amount of total wage labor done in a particular country and then also used figures to calculate the amount of unwaged labor that is done in a particular country. And what you can see is that the OECD average is around 43%, but all those countries on this chart are broadly around 40% to 50% is unwaged work. So again, it's not just that wage jobs are becoming social reproduction jobs. It's also the fact that 40% of all the work that we do tends to be unwaged work done in the home. And the vast, vast majority of that being reproductive labor as well. So to put it very simply, reproductive labor of some kind, whether it's waged or unwaged, takes up most of our collective working time today. It is, by a significant amount, the most time-consuming thing that we do in terms of the work that we perform. So we can't talk about post-work and ignore that fact. We have to talk about social reproduction if we actually want to talk about post-work. Now feminist critics have pointed out this absence before, but the issue is that often they tend to, they fail to extend post-work ideas to reproductive work as well. And there's a number of reasons why they do this. So sometimes reproductive labor is valorized as being inherently good. I would say Silvia Federici is a sort of interesting example of this. Recent Federici is, you know, it's quite supportive. It sees an inherent good in this type of labor, which is in contrast to early Federici where a lot of this work is seen as, you know, a forced imposition. It's an ideological manipulation that it's a labor of love and things like that. But recent Federici tends to see it as an inherently good thing, this sort of work. Others also see reproductive work as being a space outside of capitalist social relations, and therefore it's a space of work that should be privileged and protected as such. You know, the question for these thinkers shouldn't be how do we reduce the work, but, you know, how do we protect it from capitalism and things like that. But in any case, you end up with a situation where feminists point out the absence of social reproductive work and post-work thinking, but then still don't apply post-work thinking to reproductive labor. Now, there are a number of different challenges as well when we think about trying to combine post-work with social reproduction. You know, a very simple one is simply most of this work presently can't be automated. So how do we reduce it? The easiest way to get post-work in a factory job is simply let a robot do it. Build this massive industrial robot and get it to perform the labor, but we can't do that for caring, cooking, cleaning in most cases. And even if we could, there's a lot of moral arguments against doing that sort of thing. Should we have robots looking after children, looking after elderly parents and things like that? So the sort of easy way of trying to get post-work into a particular job just doesn't work in social reproduction. There's also the risk that post-work might mean a reduction in care if we apply it to reproductive labor. So if we're, you know, cutting working hours, for instance, does that simply mean that there's less time given to childcare, less time given to healthcare, less time given to looking after the people that we love and care about? So how do we avoid that sort of situation where post-work is simply a reduction in care? There's also a question about, you know, can we simply afford to socialize childcare, elder care, and all these other aspects? The thing that you find when you look at various markets for things like childcare or elder care is that if there isn't government support for them, they are extremely expensive. It's extremely expensive here in the UK because the government provides very little support for it. And likewise, in the United States, it's an extremely expensive thing. And basically end up with a situation where, you know, could we actually afford to socialize this stuff so we could sort of reduce the number of people performing this work by collectivizing it and socializing it? But can we afford that? We also live, and I think this is a really sort of interesting challenge because it raises a number of other issues, which is we live in a world which is oriented both materially and ideologically around the single-family household. In almost every country in the world, this sort of domestic realism about the natural unit of society, of the family, this single-family household, is just such a dominant thing, ideologically, materially, policy-wise as well. And how do we break out of that? How do we sort of escape from that domestic realism? And Helen will talk a bit more about that later on. And the last sort of challenge I want to raise is how do we, say for instance, we want to collectivize childcare? How do we avoid simply turning that into something like what David Cameron here in the UK called Big Society? And for David Cameron, the former Tory Prime Minister, his idea of the Big Society was that government would stop providing these things, these services, and instead people would voluntarily give their time to replace the socialized support systems. And of course this is just a simple means to implement austerity and cut costs and reduce, you know, government responsibility for these sorts of things. So the risk is, you know, how do we sort of collectivize this work, socialize this work without it simply becoming a means for this work to be face austerity? Lastly, we also have some political challenges when we think about social reproduction and post-work. First of all, most obviously, a number of groups benefit from the present system of social reproduction. So men benefit from the hierarchical gender relations in the home. So men in every single country in the world, even to this day, still do less unpaid work in the home than women on average. Middle-class and upper-class women and men also benefit from largely women of color doing low-wage domestic work. So the ways in which, you know, women have been able to break the glass ceiling to enter into, you know, the upper echelons of the labor market has been in large part on the backs of low-wage domestic workers coming in to clean the house, look after children, look after elderly parents and that sort of thing. So again, the current system is not a catastrophe for everybody. It does benefit certain groups and we have to think about how do we overcome the power that they have. And this raises the next sort of difficult issue which is how to exert power in social reproduction. So it's difficult to withdraw care labor. It's difficult to go on strike when we think about this stuff as it harms the care recipients. So as a parent, unfortunately, I can't just go on strike if my children are acting up or anything. You know, I need to be constantly looking after them and making sure that they're okay. So I can't withdraw my care labor and my responsibilities towards my children or towards elderly parents or anything like that. It's also difficult to organize this work in many cases. So it's largely individualized, it's performed in homes which are separate. There's not a lot of communication between un-wage workers and there's not a lot of communication between wage workers either. So those sorts of connections don't exist in the same way they might in a factory. So we end up in a situation where the dominant belief is that post-work projects don't really and can't really for all of these, because of all these challenges, can't have much to say about reproductive labor. Now the rest of the talk, which Helen is going to continue, is going to try and rectify this in the ways in which we can apply post-work principles to the fields of social reproduction. So this work can be, it can have post-work ideas applied to it, but not in a sort of cookie cutter way of just saying what we do with factories we can also do with domestic labor. Now the book and the rest of this talk, it builds on earlier exceptions. So early socialist feminists like Alexandra Calante, early Federici, not so much late Federici, Lisa Vogel, Angela Davis and others. And I'll let Helen continue and talk through the demands that we have. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. Sorry that the kind of the structure of this is a little bit bitty. As I think Nick mentioned to you, we're kind of working around childcare. And yes, given that we can't go on strike, we have to find a way of making it work. So this is it. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about what we demand in the book. What we think we should be asking for, what we should be striving for with this kind of politics. So first, we should remain open to the potential for technologies of care. Openness to automation of some types of reproductive labor is a refusal to naturalise this work, to wave it away as not really work at all, but an expression of the gendered self or some kind of personally rewarding pastime. Whilst the roboticisation of social reproduction should not be lauded in cautiously, a critical technopolitics of the home and other spaces of social reproduction could provide real benefits. So are there tasks that could be technologised without having a negative effect upon the way these spaces are experienced? Domestic technologies don't really have a great track record. Whilst few of us would want to give up our washing machines, many of the gadgets that do make their way into the home are just sort of so much commodified hype. They're shiny, they're sort of novel, but they're often highly specialised and not particularly good at reducing labour. So things like the spiraliser or the slushy machine or the bread maker or the ice cream maker and so on. These devices are not really even intended to save that much labour. However, we must also remember that we have yet to obtain the household appliances that we truly deserve. As Judy Wiseman notes, much of the technology we have within our homes came to us as an afterthought, having originally been conceived for military or industrial use. So the microwave is one example, as well as the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner and the refrigerator. So these technologies were actually grafted onto domestic arrangements from several more public arenas. As she writes, given that much domestic technology has its origins in very different spheres rather than being specifically designed to save time in the household, it is not surprising that its impact on domestic labour has been mixed. So to kind of use an appropriately a homey image then, we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The concept of the technologised home might be actively reimagined and technological design cultures which are currently trying to establish the data harvesting smart home as the kind of soul, inevitable horizon of domestic automation must be actively contested. Domestic automation might be thought of as a potential ally in the quest for temporal autonomy, although this would obviously need to be part of a much broader sort of thoroughgoing programme of progressive political change. We need to think about which technologies we wish to include beneath the umbrella of domestic automation. What about assistive technologies, for example? Would we feel different about companion care robots than we would about machines for system-assisted walking or lifting? Where do these different kinds of feelings stem from? And how much of our instinctual response might emerge from uninterrogated assumptions about the moral value of care work? A moral value that has, incidentally, been tangled up with ideas about the gendered private sphere from the beginning? Would we consider the mobile telephone as a domestic technology, or the home computer, or the bicycle, or the contraceptive pill? So what I'm trying to get at here is the idea that instead of dismissing the automation of reproductive labour in all its forms, we should be advancing a finer distinction, one which is attentive to the nuances of specific technologies, the questions of access, ownership and design, and to the ways in which gender and work become embedded within the effects we associate with technology. So in the book we point specifically to the possibilities of worker-led automation, along with the technical developments steered by the self-identified needs and wants of those in receipt of care. It is specific constituencies like surrogates, care workers, and unpaid domestic reproductive labourers who are best placed to tell us which technologies are required and also which ones might be repurposed and which ones need to be refused, resisted and abandoned. So our second goal is that we'd be critical about ever-increasing standards. So this is the notion that our unwaged work in the home has to be made subject to these sort of greater and greater expectations, sort of a cleaner house, all organic, home-made baby food, like crispy iron bedsheets and undershirts, more and more time-pursuing developmental activities with our children and so on. Some ideas associated with post-work assume that reproductive labour is a font of inexhaustible personal fulfilment where workers would really have no interest in seeing expectations reduced. Indeed, it's quite interesting to note how frequently high, which is to say extremely labour-intensive standards, are mentioned in so-called post-work theorising. The German Collective Crisis Group talks about the fact that the labour involved in the preparation of a delicious meal will never be eradicated. The anti-work leftist André Gauze talks about looking after and decorating a house, cooking good meals, entertaining guests and so on. Now, worst for preparing food and providing hospitality and other related activities can no doubt be a real source of pleasure for many people when they are conducted in a self-directed fashion. Placing these things at the centre of imagined future social arrangements kind of allows work to resurface again in an unacknowledged and sometimes uninterrogated form. For those of us who wish to dispose of our time in ways other than cooking, cleaning and caring, it may be advisable to think less about the sort of heights of domestic splendour to which we will be able to aspire as soon as we are employed for fewer hours and more about actually pushing down the baseline for socially acceptable standards around things like cleanliness. Now, one of the things that we need to include in the book is a nod to the fact that it is more difficult for some people to resist standards than others, particularly when one considers the ways in which the state can encroach into the home through people like health visitors and social workers and so on. So that's something that we're working through right now. The proof of how standards can negate the impact of labour-saving technology is to be found in the work of those who've studied how time can be spent in the home or has been spent in the home. So researchers have consistently found that new domestic technologies, far from saving us the large amount of time that is often promised in the promotional copy, have instead had virtually no impact despite this kind of industrial revolution in the home. The work of feminists like Ed and Lupton, Bruce Watts Cowan, Judy Wiseman has taught us that one reason why the time spent on housework did not go down after the rise of domestic appliances in the 20th century was that as labour-saving devices became more common standards simultaneously shot up. So cleaning was supposed to be much deeper. It was supposed to happen more frequently. The educational activities that people were supposed to engage in with their children were suddenly more frequent, more involved in this quest to kind of give kids a competitive advantage. The food that one was supposed to prepare became more complex and time-consuming. Front lawns were meant to be sort of marked with these sort of perfect uniform stripes completely weed-free and so on. As Susan Strasser puts it, for example, laundry went from being a weekly nightmare to an unending task. Now, we must ensure that any labour-saving innovations really do save labour rather than simply changing its form. It's to this end that we frame our approach to social reproduction in terms of temporal sovereignty, the ability to dispose of one's time as one will. Inflated social standards are often maintained by the advertising and promotional industries, which teach us to fear tide marks on our collars and water marks on our glassware. They absorb unnecessary quantities of labour and erode masses of amounts of time. These activities should not be eradicated for those who truly enjoy them, of course, but it's kind of difficult to ascertain whether or not pursuing these heightened levels of cleanliness really represents a personal preference, all the exercise of free choice, given that such standards tend to be upheld via perceived social pressure and anxieties about judgement, be that from Monterpeers or from state agencies. The point here is that ideas about standards need to be denaturalised and that our restrictive social expectations should not be able to petrify around reproductive labour. Our third demand is that we should rethink domestic space. So, as I think should have become clear over the course of this talk, the home has always been a workplace. For those who work there for low pay or no pay. As such, we need to clear some space within post-work politics for an engagement with the home. It's architecture, it's organisation, it's design. The domestic sphere has for too long been denuded of a sense of political opportunity. Despite a re-territage of historical experiments in domestic design and community planning, contemporary feminists in the global north have likely come to accept the spatial design of the home as an inevitable part of domestic life. So we call this tendency domestic realism after Mark Fisher's capitalist realism. The obstinacy of domestic imaginaries in the face of otherwise quite extensive visions of socio-technical overhaul. Domestic realism names the phenomenon whereby the isolated small dwelling and the concomitant individualisation of household labour become so accepted and so commonplace that it's almost impossible to imagine life being organised through any other form. Of course, there are many possible forms of domestic arrangement, both spatial and relational, aside from the atomised and de-politicised family home that we most commonly associate with the idea of the home today. Moving away from this vision of home might open up more energy-efficient ways of living and help cut the labour necessary for basic maintenance. So in the book we look at what we're calling architectures of refusal to see how post-work ideas have come to be materialised or not within experimental domestic architectures from the 1900s to today. In critically assessing these historical examples we arrive at the conclusion that we must build our new ideas around domestic space across this concept of public luxury. As George Monbia has noted there's not enough physical space or environmental space for everyone to enjoy private luxury. If everyone in London acquired a tennis court, swimming pool, a garden and a private art collection the city would cover England. Private luxury shuts down space, creating deprivation. Hence we need to centre the idea of private sufficiency and public luxury. Some space of our own in which our personal needs can be met massively augmented by a revived commons. Wonderful parks and playgrounds, public sports centres and swimming pools, galleries, allotments and public transport networks. Mike Davis offers a comparable vision of public affluence over private wealth again pointing to a roster of collective resources. He talks about things like great urban parks, free museums, libraries and infinite possibilities for human interaction as a key means of ensuring quality of life within more sustainable cities. In these proposals as with classic urban visions public luxury replaces privatised consumption through the socialisation of desire and identity within collective urban space. Whilst foregrounding the ecological advantages of this perspective on living space neither Mumbai nor Davis draw attention to its feminist or post-work implications. A perspective that privileges public affluence offers considerable resources for the emancipatory reorganisation of social reproduction. We can think of these ideas about public luxury as a call for state support for free time infrastructure. Parks, recreation facilities, the arts as under provided public goods. But in addition to the more rarefied advantages of culture and leisure pursuits a public luxury model would enable the relocation of some forms of reproductive labour beyond the single family home and the mitigation of some of the worst burdens for un and underpaid workers. This must be a basic essential element of attempts to think about emancipatory spatial futures. We want roses, yes, but bread too. It begins with the better integration of domestic residences and shared services. Communal kitchens, laundries and workshops could mitigate some of the burdens of indirectly market mediated reproductive labour. The fact that they represent resources shared by a greater number of people than in the traditional family home might mean opportunities for more substantial investments in tools and technologies as well as a move toward more sustainable living. Rethinking living space could go beyond just thinking about alleviating difficulties too. It could mean positive advances like high-spec, communally accessible libraries, studios, media suites, laboratories, kitchen gardens and self-help healthcare facilities. Detached from naturalising discourses of the private sphere and the family becomes painfully apparent just how unsatisfactory the household is as a side of work and how much domestic labourers might have to gain from resisting or agitating against it. Now, this brings us to our fourth and final demand. We propose revisiting not only the physical make-up of the household but its social make-up too. That is to say, we address not only where we live and the spatial organisation of the domestic residents and its surroundings but how we live. To whom, for how long, underpinned by what kind of division of labour? Hence, we find ourselves calling for the abolition of the family. What would it mean to structure family life differently? How might this feed into and be influenced by changes in the structure of waged work and facilitate the extension of post-work ideas to the seemingly untouchable home? In what ways might changes in this arena simultaneously affect the provision of reproduction in other environments, from care homes to schools to daycare centres? The nuclear family, like the home within which it is so often encased, encourages the proliferation of reproductive labour. Each individual family separately manages the cooking, cleaning and caring required for day-to-day getting by with little attention to the massive duplication of work that this necessarily involves. Just as the single-family home can be seen as wastefully energy-intensive, so too does the nuclear family require an obscene squandering of time and labour. What's more, this squandering is characterised by a marked gender asymmetry in terms of workload. As many of us are well aware, the Gender Division of Labour characteristic of the family under capitalism has represented a significant source of oppression. The family, as a social and economic institution shaping, shaped by and inexorably intertwined with a hegemonic ideological model, monopolises the form of reproductive labour in ways that lay a disproportionate burden upon the shoulders of a limited subset of the population. Women, particularly poor women, find their temporal autonomy eroded by the individualisation of social reproduction that the contemporary family encourages. They are thus drawn into an ongoing navigation of the dynamics of depletion and neglect. At the same time, the family, in the sense of an interpersonal network underpinned by biological kin relations, has historically been a source of great support for marginalised groups and communities. Indeed, for many, it has been the primary mechanism of social reproduction, vital in insuing ongoing survival. Even for those in less precarious circumstances, the family can be seen to meet a myriad of deeply felt needs for security, for intimacy, for effective intensity, and so on. As Michelle Barrett and Mary McIntosh put it, the family offers a range of emotional and experiential satisfactions not available elsewhere in the present organisation of social relations. This does not, however, mean that we must defend the family form. Instead, we should seek to cultivate these qualities in other non-kin-based solidarity structures. A call to abolish the family is ultimately not a proposal to immediately strip away what has been, for some, an actually existing source of comradeship, joy and love, but rather a demand for a major social transformation that would displace the family as the sole and privileged provider of moral and material support and spread these good things more widely through the community. Part of this involves finding ways of allowing alternative solidarity networks to flourish. In imagining households beyond the family, we might envisage the formation of self-selecting groups living together, a mixture of relatives, friends, comrades, lovers. These new kinds of family could be based on affinity, affection, and shared worldview, rather than something as flimsy as mere genetic coincidence. As those who have been pushed out of their biological families can attest, the allegedly unconditional love that is thought to characterize such groupings is, in fact, highly contingent, and it can be hard to find alternative sources of support when this supposedly universal safety net is torn away. Whilst many people have had to urgently identify or assemble new support networks out of necessity and very much in conditions not of their own choosing, these alternative approaches might also offer fertile ground forward visiting and refusing the conventional atomization and gender division of reproductive labour. Rather than individualizing the work of social reproduction, they identify more collaborative ways of carrying out this socially necessary labour. We not only need to learn from these examples, we argue, but to centre them within our politics and to actively search out ways to support them. So in the book, we argued that this sort of project of unpicking the particular privileges and burdens associated with the conventional nuclear family requires the judicious collectivization of some elements of social reproduction. Could we alleviate some of the burdens of domestic drudgery by fostering the active collective negotiation of its redistribution and more equitable design? Early years care, education, health and well-being support, long-term and elder care, food provision and preparation and so on all require substantial public investment as part of an expanded vision of public luxury. This would enable the removal of some reproductive work both from the market and from within the family where it's currently invisibleised, individualised and iniquitably organised. Disentangling certain kinds of work from the expectation that they will be undertaken within the family could help to foster the conditions whereby the nuclear family might be de-prioritised and in which alternative forms of intimacy might be better able to flourish. So in conclusion, the unpaid work of indirectly market-mediated reproductive labour as much as the paid work of directly market-mediated forms must be factored into post-work imaginaries that seek to radically transform contemporary cultures of work. The left must cease framing our efforts as being on behalf of hard-working families. This is precisely what we should be struggling against and instead agitate for post-work, post-gender, post-capitalism. Easy. Thank you very much. I'll just hand you over to Nick. Thank you. Thank you, Elin and Nick. I'm going to start by asking if there are any questions from the auditorium. I see a nod. I'm going to walk towards you. Hi. My name is Lucas. We're tuning in here from the Moudam in Luxembourg. I was particularly interested in the latter section of your presentation, namely the idea of how to reorder or reorganize or deconstruct the domestic space, especially with regards to the family and the structure of the family. And I was wondering, considering the heterogeneity or the large variety of family structures, not just in the West, but across the globe, how would you reconcile rethinking the family structure with all these different types of family structures around the world? And have you encountered any, let's say, family life in other parts of the world that are conducive to this sort of, to the ideas that you're putting forward, for example, in village life where different households share the burdens of each other, where mothers, especially, but parents in general take on the burden of each other's children as well. So I hope that gets across. Yeah, yeah, it's a really good question. So two sort of aspects to that question, you know, what is, how do you sort of support the heterogeneity, the multiplicity of different family forms? And then is there sort of like an ideal family form for post-work principles? So I think the first thing to say really is not necessarily, at least initially, so much amount of supporting different family forms, as it is simply breaking down all of the institutional structures in place to maintain the single family household as the dominant unit. And this is, you know, this, materially in terms of building homes around the single family, it's ideologically in terms of, you know, this is how we're often raised to believe as a sort of natural social unit. And I think perhaps maybe the easiest way to sort of change things is also the numerous ways in which governments support and enforce a particular vision of what the family is supposed to look like. And this has, you know, this has gone on since, particularly since the 1950s in the post-war era. And it's sort of weird because the single family household was, it didn't exist in the same form as it did after World War II. It was a much more prominent feature of social life after World War II. But even at that sort of peak of its, you know, ideological pull, it wasn't sociologically, you know, it wasn't even necessarily a majority at that point in time. You still had a huge variety of family forms that existed in that period, and you had governments trying to enforce people into that sort of family form. So, you know, rules around divorce, rules around cohabitation, rules around, you know, who can get a worker's pension, you know, do you have to be married in order to get a worker's pension when they pass away, things like that. There's all sorts of little government policies that have been built up over the decades that have enforced this particular vision of what the family is supposed to look like. And I think as a first step, we need to be, you know, taking down those things, deconstructing them and, you know, sort of building up ways which allow government support and ideological visions that just allow a different variety of family forms to flourish. On the sort of, is there an ideal one and have we sort of come across it? I mean, I think both Helen and I are quite hesitant to try and impose a particular family form. I think, you know, there's sort of good moral and political reasons to not want to impose a particular family form on people. I think, you know, for both of us, freedom happens to be a major value. And one of the reasons why we are so involved in post-capitalist thinking is because we see post-capitalism as an expansion of human freedom. It's crucial to that expansion. And actually, capitalism constrains us in so many different ways. So it would be sort of, you know, opposed to that project of freedom to then say, well, you can only have this particular family form. And in part, I see the post-work project is all about that as well. You know, the post-work project is not saying... Sorry, I've got a bit of a cold at the moment. The post-work project is not, for instance, saying you need to have 60 hours of free time. You need to have 60 hours spent playing video games per week or something like that. Instead, it's about you need to have as much free time to do what you then choose to do. Time for what you will and the sort of classic framing of the labor movement. And that could mean that, you know, perhaps a more labor-intensive family form is what you prefer. For a variety of reasons, whether it be, you know, sort of reasons you've been raised with or, you know, economic reasons or whatever. It may turn out that the family form preferred by a particular person or group is quite labor-intensive. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But I think we also need to be thinking about ways that we can try to alleviate some of the burdens of work, reproductive labor. You know, one simple example is with Helen and I, both of our families happen to be quite distant geographically, which means that when we rely on people for childcare, it has to be these, you know, these sort of informal social networks. We can't rely on our family networks in the same way that sort of traditionally been the case. I think building up, you know, material systems and social systems which enable that sort of, you know, non-biopham to basically flourish and have the same sort of institutional respect and legitimacy that a traditional household has. That's the sort of thing that we're more interested in, not necessarily imposing a particular family form. Other questions? Okay, so I'm going to read the... We don't hear you anymore. I just temporarily muted because I was going to cough. Okay, sorry. I'm going to read some questions from the chat forum. So first question is, how do you see technology shaping domestic space in the future? Do you have any concrete examples? Yeah, so I think two different levels to that. One is device sort of levels. You know, what populates the domestic space? What's in the domestic space? And then I think there's perhaps the more interesting question of, you know, how is that domestic space built in sort of infrastructural level? I think on the device level I'm somewhat skeptical of the potential for devices to change much in the home. You know, there's... Robert Gordon wrote a book called The Rise and Fall of American Growth which is a massive book, like 700 pages, but it's absolutely fantastic in terms of a history of like living in different periods. And one of the key points he notes is that if you were, you know, living in a home in 1870 and then you went to 1950, the home would just be completely transformed. It would be a completely alien situation to you. Whereas if you went from 1950 to 2020, the home would be basically the same. You'd have a fridge, a stove, you'd have all these other things. The only novelty really is Microwave I think came around in the 1980s. And of course the personal computer came around in 1990s, 2000s. But other than that, the home has sort of fundamentally stayed the same and the domestic devices haven't really changed. The smart home is an attempt to try and change that, but actually the smart home, in my experience and I'm sure in many other people's experience, actually means more work rather than less work. Trying to get things to, you know, interact together, function together. Trying to ensure that, you know, all the security updates are in place and everything. The smart home is, you know, it can potentially have its uses, but I don't think it's a sort of post-work technology in any meaningful way. So that's the sort of device level. And then I think there's a sort of infrastructure level of domestic spaces. And here, you know, I'm not an expert, so I don't want to claim too much. But I think, you know, reading some more speculative things about 3D printing and the various sort of, you know, material science, the developments that are going on in there, the ways in which the construction of domestic spaces could actually have the labor reduced and made much quicker. I think all of that is really fascinating and potentially quite, you know, significant in terms of its impact. But again, I want to stress I'm not an expert on that particular area. So maybe I'm just reading the hype and not necessarily the reality. Thank you. Then there's two questions addressed for Helen, but maybe you can try and see and answer them yourself. So the first one is you mentioned the arts in the context of public luxury. How can museums such as Modem contribute to these goals? Yeah, I mean, the first thing is just survive, particularly in the context of austerity and things. In many cases, it is just simply a matter of survival. But I think beyond that, you know, thinking in the sort of more optimistic register, it's a matter of... Well, it's not anything that needs to fundamentally change, I think, in terms of museums or art galleries or anything like that, you know. They perform a particular function, you know, an aesthetic function, a social function. And it's not a matter of sort of trying to tailor them towards a post-work ideal, but instead simply saying that what they do currently is something that, you know, in the future you would have much more time to engage with and enjoy and appreciate in a post-work world. I think, you know, one maybe minor thing, but I think it's quite significant here in London, at least, is the fact that a lot of galleries and museums happen to be free, free to the public. And I think that is quite significant in terms of just opening up access to these things and enabling more people to come and more people to try them out that might not necessarily have done so beforehand. So in cases where museums, you know, cost an arm and a leg to get into, and try to, you know, publicly subsidize them to enable more people to get in, I think is a really good idea. But again, beyond that, I think, you know, it's not a question of changing the function of museums and art galleries, it's a question simply of allowing them to flourish. Thanks. Other question for Heather, but you mentioned that future optimization in the domestic space should be developed in conjunction with the people concerned. I'm a rational person. How can this be realized? How do engineers get in touch with the people concerned since they are often the least wealthy and privileged families? Yeah. I mean, it happens already in a sort of terrible way. Which is, you know, when a new development goes up in a particular area, there has to be some sort of engagement with the community. And at the moment, oftentimes this entire process is obscured, so people don't have easy access to it and, you know, the sort of inputs to the process aren't allowed. And it's also oftentimes just ignored in the end. But I don't think it's a radical suggestion to say that that existing process could actually be made effective. So there are ways to think about, you know, how do we integrate new developments into a community? And then also, how do we sort of, you know, make it so that, you know, you don't get sort of suburban sprawl. You know, I'm from Canada and when I go back to Canada, one of the things I find incredibly striking and just incredibly frustrating is that you can't walk anywhere. There's not even sidewalks in many, many places, so you have to end up walking on the side of the road. So you can't walk anywhere. There's no corner stores closer than, like, half an hour walk away if you're lucky. And I think, you know, sort of, you know, putting in place rules and legislation around ensuring that, you know, necessary conveniences are in walkable distance to areas. I think all of this is entirely possible. From my knowledge, Barcelona does a very good job of this already. So it is entirely possible to do this sort of thing. And yeah, and I think, yeah, again, just engagement with community about, you know, what is this development going to do? What is it supposed to look like? What is it going to provide? All of that is entirely possible and already done, even if it's done in a sort of a terrible way at the moment. How might artists, architects and planners work to design and implement spaces that can challenge what you refer as domestic realism? Yeah. I mean, it's a really good question and I wish there was an easy answer to it. But like, it's, I think the key thing is that if people, you know, in this sort of stuff, these ideas post-work and thinking about different domestic spaces, if they find them engaging and interesting, I think taking them up in your own work is sort of the best way forward. I'm not going to sort of presume to tell an engineer or an architect what to do because I'm not an architect or an engineer and I'm not an expert in that sort of stuff in any significant way. I can point to some of the problems with existing things and I can point to some interesting experiments as Helen did in her talk. But again, I think, you know, trying to make the stuff realizable in the here and now is a project that has to be taken up by experts in other fields and I would highly encourage people to do that sort of thing. I would also say that, you know, if anybody is interested in doing that sort of thing and wants to, you know, talk with Helen and I about it, we're more than happy to engage with anybody who's working on this sort of stuff. There's also autonomy think tank based here in London has been doing some really interesting work on this. They've got, you know, architects on their team working on this sort of stuff designing, for instance, like luxurious nursing homes for elder care and things like that. So I think, you know, there are people engaged with this stuff and we're always happy to engage with them but I don't want to presume to tell people, you know, what exactly could be done in that area. On this matter, I was curious to know if you're familiar with the Kibbutz so the Israeli and because I was thinking about it and it keeps while you speak of formats, a systemized sort of work based socialist form of living, which is for me at least somehow incredibly working. So it's, we're in 2021 and it's still functioning and it seems to be quite a functional way of living but I don't know if you have an opinion on that or because I can't really think of a lot of other forms work based but living based that function. Yeah, actually I think I know of them but I've not actually looked into them sufficiently enough. A lot of our work on this has been based around sort of the, you know, as Helen was talking about the various semis experiments. We've also got a really rich history of sort of Soviet experimentation with this stuff. Particularly sort of pre-Stalin era when the revolution was new and people just thought anything is possible and we're going to completely redesign every aspect of our lives. And there's some really fascinating materials thinking about how did communal life work and how didn't it work in that period and so in the book we've got a lot of discussion of that. Yeah, Kibitz is actually a really interesting example that we haven't discussed in the book which I think we may have to go and look into a bit more but as you say, you know, it's one of the more interesting ones for simply having survived. Great, are there any other questions? No? Okay. I just have a last one. So in Helen's book, Xenofeminism, there's this quote that remains stuck in my head which I find very powerful which is technology is as social as society is technological. So I was going to ask Helen but I would ask you if you can expand on this aspect. Yeah, I mean it's I don't want to speak for Helen here but you know, it's society is obviously not just a matter of individuals speaking to each other and using language and words and ideas. There's of course all this material infrastructure ranging from the most basic elements of things like writing and printing personal that up to the fantastical digital technologies that we have nowadays. For me, I read that quote from Helen in a very Latourian way because I think one of the more interesting ways Latour engages with this stuff is to say that, you know, one of the key differences between a sort of sociality of say an ape or a primate versus a human is precisely the use of these different tools and technologies to instill a sort of structure, a more ingrained aspect to society that wouldn't necessarily exist if it was just, you know, an oral society or anything like that. So I think, you know, that for me is one way in which society is technological. It's fundamentally built around these aspects. And then of course technology is social in the way that what is invented in the first place, you know, what gets funding how are things designed is eminently social, you know, the ways in which we design particular technologies. Who are they designed for? You know, even to give an example of the kitchen, you know, the Frankfurt kitchen was based around, it was designed for one single woman. So it was, you know, a certain height for the cabinets and a certain height for the cupboards and everything and the countertops because it was built for a woman and then it was only for one person. So it was relatively cramped, relatively narrow more efficient for one person but it meant that you couldn't then socialize that sort of labor because you couldn't squeeze more than one person into that kitchen. So that's an example of, you know, this infrastructure or this technology being designed having a certain social idea embedded within it. So, you know, for me that's how I would sort of interpret the Helen's quote. Great. Thank you so much, Nick. Thank you Helen for being here with us today and I wish everyone a lovely evening. Bye. Thank you. Thank you.