Time to Rethink

Armin Medosch

At the theme evening on 21 October, it did not take long before the discussion was in full swing.

The Slovenian sociologist and former education minister Slavko Gaber, who describes himself as an “intellectual of the eighties”, presented thought-provoking theses in his introductory presentation. In Gaber’s opinion, society needs to fundamentally change its relationship to work. Referring to authors such as Jeremy Rifkin and Andre Gorz, Gaber declared that as a result of technological progress, it was now possible – and also necessary – to thoroughly rethink our work ethic. The current system, he is convinced, leads merely to the exhaustion of natural as well as human resources. We can “reappropriate” time if we distribute the achievements of scientific and technical progress better. According to Gaber, this also means that we have to differentiate between actual free time and extending work into what we call “free” time.
In this connection, Gaber’s view differs from the promises of the creative industries, in that he believes we are entitled to have time back in which to be “lazy”. Nowadays, when many discussions about “change” are assuming an apocalyptic undertone, this was a refreshing statement. But how can it be put into practice in reality? Many of the participants, both in the panel and in the audience, were in agreement with Gaber’s demands, but did not believe they were realisable.
Today, the work force is again being more intensively utilised than during the long upswing phase in the decades following World War Two. The cutback in industrial production has reduced the wage earners’ power. In many fields, employment has taken on precarious forms, whether in new low-wage sectors, which in many cases are not covered by the unions, or in cultural and knowledge professions, which are heading in the direction of one internship after another and unpaid volunteer work. While the discussion was in progress at KulturKontakt Austria, student protests for free education were getting underway at the University of Vienna. This connection between the future of education and the future of work is a highly important nexus with respect to setting a course that will determine whether we are going to build a sustainable knowledge society or merely stumble from one crisis to the next.