Read the following passage carefully:

Before capitalism, there was work. Before markets, before even money, there was work. Our remotest ancestors, hunting and gathering, almost certainly did not see work as a separate, compartmentalized part of life in the way we do today. But we have always had to work to live.

Even in the 21st century, we strive through work for the means to live, hence the campaign for a “living wage”.

As a species, we like to define ourselves through our thoughts and wisdom, as Homo sapiens. But we could as easily do so through the way we consciously apply effort towards certain goals, by our work – as Homo laborans. It nonetheless took two revolutions, one agricultural, one industrial, to turn “work” into its own category.

Industrial capitalism sliced and diced human time into clearly demarcated chunks, of “work” and “leisure”. Work was then bundled and packaged into one of the most important inventions of the modern era: a job. From this point on, the workers’ fight was for a job that delivered maximum benefits, especially in terms of wages, in return for minimum costs imposed on the worker, especially in terms of time.

For Karl Marx, the whole capitalist system was ineluctably rigged against workers. Whatever the short-run victories of the trade unions, the capitalist retained the power; the ultimate control, over workers’ time. And the worker would remain forever alienated from their work. The goal was to assert sovereignty over our own time, free of the temporal control of the capitalist, able “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner”.

The problem of alienation is far from solved. Only one in three American workers say they feel “engaged” with their work. But in terms of material conditions of life, across the broad sweep of economic history, capitalism has delivered pretty well for most workers. Wages rose, hours fell, life (mostly) got better. Global poverty halved.

There are many variants of capitalism, of course, from welfarist Scandinavia through Anglo-Saxon laissez-faire to Chinese market statism. But the trend seemed pretty clear. Capitalism works. And it works, most importantly, for workers.

But now? Over the last decade, the logic of markets and the workings of capitalism have been intensely questioned and challenged, both from the populist right and the socialist left.

Whatever material gains workers managed to achieve came at the price of a profound loss of sovereignty. In her book Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It), philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argues that CEOs are the new totalitarians, who “think of themselves as libertarian individualists”, while acting in practice as “dictators of little communist governments”. We imagine ourselves free but effectively barter our freedom away in exchange for pay, effectively handing over our passports as we 
punch in.

What most people want is a job that pays a decent wage and offers both some satisfaction and security. The harsher critics of the system, like Anderson, believe that these goals are incompatible at a deep level with capitalist dynamics.

Attempt the following questions based on the passage: