Abstract
I focus on the internal and external conditions of a post-work leisure-based society. These conditions both constraining and enabling genuine leisure. Specifically, I try to envision how economy, politics, and social obligations—traditional spheres of the necessities—can be organized in a leisure-based society. My solutions involve pluralist hybridity, in which genuine leisure is prioritized.
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Notes
- 1.
That is why I prefer my term “leisure-based society ” to the term “leisure society” (e.g., Archambault & Theodore, 2005; Seabrook, 1989), which is often defined as “a society which is at least culturally, and probably economically, focused on leisure, the equivalent of industrial society or agrarian society” (Veal, 2009, p. 2). In contrast to industrial society and agrarian society that reached their totality, I argue that leisure-based society will always remain a hybrid between its (shrinking) industrial and (increasing) leisure aspects, which will be both cultural and economic.
- 2.
The actual average number of lifetime working hours per person was 122,400 in 1995 (Fogel, 2000).
- 3.
Karl Marx’s famous formula of the communist economy , “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” proclaimed in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, eliminates the possibility of economic coercion under communism.
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- 5.
For the purpose of this chapter, I lump the notions of equality (i.e., equal treatment) and equity (i.e., creating conditions for the equal result) together.
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Including negative ones like slavery, sweatshops, black market, human trafficking, and so on.
- 9.
Actually, historically, emergent capitalism dramatically diminished free time that people could spend on leisure but then again the amount of free time has become increased under capitalism (de Grazia, 1962).
- 10.
- 11.
One of the biggest concerns about universal basic income is a massive inflation that weeps out this income. This fear makes sense because if everyone’s income increases, why not to increase prices on the goods. However, there are counter-arguments based on accelerating technological progress and on studies of limited universal basic income in Alaska, Mexico, and Finland (e.g., Cunha, De Giorgi, & Jayachandran, 2018).
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- 13.
“An unconditional income transfer of less than the poverty line is sometimes referred to as a partial basic income” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income.
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- 19.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36454060. In my view, the major problem of immigration is not economic or demographic but political and cultural. Liberalism has its limits of tolerating minority illiberalism . Crossing these limits, liberalism can collapse. However, although borders may be justifiable now to protect national liberal democracy, national borders violate the fundamental human right of human free movement and living choice. I expect a leisure-based society to be borderless (Bregman, 2016).
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Poetically paraphrased by punk-rock musician Eugene Hutz in his song “We are raised again” (Gogol Bordello, http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/gogolbordello/weriseagain.html).
- 24.
Elsewhere, I argue that Bakhtin changed his view on this issue for several times (Matusov, 2020, in press).
- 25.
German organizational sociologist Robert Michels called it “militaristic politics” (Michels, 1999).
- 26.
Livable compromises are negotiated compromises that people can live by without having much pains and are achieved without manipulation, violence, and/or exploitation of ignorance. People may agree or disagree with these compromises. but they do not want to block them as they do not feel that a compromise would undermine ontological being and deep values of them and people whom they deeply care of. My notion of livable compromise is akin but not completely identical to the notion of compromise-based consensus developed by Quakers, feminists, and anarchists (see, Graeber, 2013).
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Matusov, E. (2020). Necessities in a Leisure-Based Society: Economy, Politics, and Social Obligations. In: Envisioning Education in a Post-Work Leisure-Based Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46373-1_6
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