The Story of Work, A New History of Humanity by Jan Lucasssen – a book review

In my essay ‘‘All Aspects of People at Work: Unity and Division in the Study of Labor and Labor Management,” (in Roy J. Adams and Noah Meltz, eds. Industrial Relations Theory, Its Nature, Scope and Pedagogy, IMLR Press, Rutgers University, 1993) I documented the attempt by the newly-formed Industrial Relations Research Association to assemble scholars from several disciplines in a united attempt to understand the nature of work. One of the concerted efforts of IR scholarship in the early years was to develop a framework that would guide research and provide a vehicle to assemble the disparate strands of labour research. Perhaps the most successful attempt was John Dunlop’s Industrial Relations System framework. At first, that effort bore some fruit, but in the longer run it was not successful. By the early 1990s, the field had split into a number of independent approaches to the topic. In his new book, the Dutch historian Jan Lucassen sets forth a list of “labour relations” schemes that he claims to be comprehensive. All work through time and across space may be filed under one of those systems. They are, first of all, “reciprocal labour relations” these are egalitarian in that everyone in a household or a community of several households is expected to contribute to the production of what is required to survive and, perhaps, thrive. Each member is entitled to a fair share of what is produced in total. Thus, the hunter who brings down a large animal is not the owner of that product. It is instead the property of the entire community. There is some division of labour, especially by sex and age, but it is informal and flexible compared to what is to come. This form of labour was characteristic of the hunter-gathering societies that populated the earth for 98% of the time during which modern human have existed. That form of “labour relations” continues to exist, Lucassen insightfully tells us, in the modern household. The Neolithic (or agricultural) revolution that occurred when hunter-gatherer societies began to domesticate agricultural and became more sedentary very gradually led to another form of “labour relations,” one that Lucassen refers to as “tributary-redistributive.” This system comes about when sedentary agricultural production becomes efficient enough to create a surplus. This allows for the emergence of more specialized functions to be carried out by non-agriculturalists whose needs are met by some of the surplus being contributed by those in agricultural and subsequently redistributed to specialists such as government officials, priests and skilled builders and artisans. This form of production emerged in Mesopotamia where large cities appeared from about 5000 BCE. It was also notably present in ancient Egypt and more recently in the Inca and Aztec empires of America. In these instances there was no money, little trade and no labour market. Whereas hunter-gatherer society was mostly egalitarian, tributary-redistributive societies were predominantly hierarchical with set class divisions. At the pinnacle of the hierarchy most commonly there was a deity. In the twenty-first century, this format has completely disappeared. But it would be premature, Lucassen warns, to say it is gone forever. The other “labour relations” schemes in the framework are self-employment, free wage labour, slavery and employership. Lucassen’s claim is that all the labour done everywhere in the world and as far back as the emergence of modern humans, may be fitted into one of these categories or variants of them. For example as history advanced in Mesopotamia, some of those involved in the tributary system began to offer their services on their own thus bringing into effect an early form of self-employment. In …