Useful Work Versus Useless Toil Classic Reprint

Excerpt from Useful Work Versus Useless Toil I have put the hope of rest first because it is the simplest and most natural art of our fie. Whatever pleasure there is in some work, t ere is cert y some pain in all work, the beast like pain of stirring up our slumbering energies to action, the beast-like dread of change when things are pretty well with us; and the compensation for this animal pain is animal rest. We must feel while we are working that the time will come when we shall not have to work. Also the rest, when it comes, must be long enough to allow us to enjoy it; it must be longer than is merely necessary for us to recover the strength we have expended in working, and it must be animal rest also in this, that it must not be disturbed by anxiety, else we shall not be able to enjoy it. If we have this amount and kind of rest we shall, so far, be no worse ofi than the beasts. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Visionary English Socialist and pioneer of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris argued that all work should be a source of pride and satisfaction, and that everyone should be entitled to beautiful surroundings – no matter what their class. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

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"These art avengers...took on toxic debt culture—and won."—The Guardian "[They] want to blow up the whole financial system."—The New York Times Art hacks life when two filmmakers launch a project to cancel more than £1m of high-interest debt from their local community. Bank Job is a white-knuckle ride into the dark heart of our financial system, in which filmmaker and artist duo Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn risk their sanity to buy up and abolish debt by printing their own money in a disused bank in Walthamstow, London. Tired of struggling in an economic system that leaves creative people on the fringes, the duo weave a different story, both risky and empowering, of self-education and mutual action. Behind the opaque language and defunct diagrams, they find a system flawed by design but ripe for hacking. This is the inspiring story of how they listen and act upon the widespread desire to change the system to meet the needs of many and not just the few. And for those among us brave enough, they show how we can do this too in our own communities one bank job at a time.

Taxation in Utopia explores utopian political philosophy from the neglected perspective of taxation. At its core, taxation is an ethical question. It requires people to sacrifice for the benefit of others, whether or not they also benefit themselves. Donald Morris refers to this broader, nonmonetary context as constructive taxation, which includes restrictions on privacy and access to information, constraints on marriage and child-rearing, and conventions restricting the proprietorship of land. Morris examines this in the context of various utopian writings, such as More's Utopia, as well as literary treatments of these issues, such as Bellamy's Looking Backward. This interdisciplinary exploration of utopian taxation provides a novel approach to examining relations between a state's view of the general welfare and the sacrifices this view requires of its citizens.

We are told that the future of work will be increasingly automated. Algorithms, processing massive amounts of information at startling speed, will lead us to a new world of effortless labour and a post-work utopia of ever expanding leisure. But behind the gleaming surface stands millions of workers, often in the Global South, manually processing data for a pittance. Recent years have seen a boom in online crowdworking platforms like Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Clickworker, and these have become an increasingly important source of work for millions of people. And it is these badly paid tasks, not algorithms, that make our digital lives possible. Used to process data for everything from the mechanics of self-driving cars to Google image search, this is an increasingly powerful part of the new digital economy, although one hidden and rarely spoken of. But what happens to work when it makes itself obsolete. In this stimulating work that blends political economy, studies of contemporary work, and speculations on the future of capitalism, Phil Jones looks at what this often murky and hidden form of labour looks like, and what it says about the state of global capitalism.