ABSTRACT
Regular wage labor is neither the present nor the future for a growing proportion of the population of industrialized countries. Almost perversely, this realization has coincided with a loss of a radical, progressive vision of the Good Society. Instead, the fear is that we are witnessing the creation of a disjointed society made up, in Marx’s words (describing preproletarian workers), “by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, such as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.” In the past decade or so, we have seen the limit of Gramsci’s brilliant insight, Fordism, which no longer seems the predominant form of the labor process (if it ever was). However, most of us are still searching for an alternative paradigm of the present and an alternative avenue to utopia. Without some vision, however modest, we might as well stay in our gardens or backyards. And perhaps that is a clue, for access to a garden is not just a residue of Thomas More’s Utopia, but a part of many modern visions, encapsulating the possibility of combining different forms of paid and own account work. In the reality of Europe today, we live in disturbing times, when inequalities are worsening and when the Galbraithian strictures on American society of the 1960s are being writ large in European cities such as Rome, London, and Amsterdam, with extraordinary private affluence (of a few) coexisting with public squalor (of many). That is one context in which to approach the issue of alternative paths for the 1990s.
