1.INTRODUCTION

My purpose
In this introduction I pick out some of the themes that underlie the following narrative. A complete life-story is impossible, and my selection is influenced by the idea of work. My aim is not mainly didactic: I will not be telling stories to prove points, or even to research them. Stories have a logic of their own, which we only discover as we write or read: you may see what I'm getting at when I do not. Many of the arguments I outline below will re-emerge in some form as the story unfolds. I hope they may develop, rather than deflate, in the light of the narrative evidence. I enjoy writing, as I enjoy so much of the life I describe, and the thinking that runs through it. I'd like you to enjoy it too, and help me out.

Lifework definitions
Work at its simplest means moving things about, beginning with ourselves. We learn to walk and talk at about the same time, as legs and lips begin to fall in place. We approach and withdraw, chase and run away, consume, embrace. We pick things up and put things down, hold them steady and let them go, put them together and take them apart. In emotion, as the word suggests, we are moved. In our mental activity we reflect, recall and extend the movement of the world as we perceive it, our own movements in the world.
By lifework, I mean a whole range of more or less conscious, purposive activity. Whatever we have or choose to do, for ourselves, each other and the world. And I distinguish this from employment, the work we do for money or bosses.

Why I write
No special qualification, but experience, conviction and faith that others are more like me than not. If I cant ignore the elephant in the room - wage-slavery, alive and well - then you will probably have noticed it too, and begun to share my concern. Our ‘social democracy’ fails to include the main productive business of our lives. We routinely drop all claim to self-determination and mutual accountability as we enter employers’ premises. Our personal and social economy is resigned to powers and purposes beyond our control, institutions with no necessary commitment to our welfare or the common good.

What turned me against employment?
Maybe it seemed a bit too like school: at home my parents made most of the decisions, but I knew they loved me, they often asked my opinion and I was free to answer back. None of which applied at school. After school, before university and instead of military service I spent a couple of years in voluntary work-camps: unpaid and often chaotic, mostly manual work but more or less self-managed, in friendly groups with a shared commitment. The ‘proper’ jobs I did later were very different, better resourced and more systematically organised but often in ways that made it impossible to do a good job well. That went for both private enterprise and public services: NHS hospital or Reuters newsagency, local authority park or Victoria line tunnel, Vickers engineering or college of further education. At university I was very lucky. After switching courses I found a tutor willing to guide me on a modern history project of my own choice, even when I dropped the formal syllabus, or deviated into unrelated matters - suicide or plastic flowers.

Public service? Private industry?
In neither are workers and managers directly committed to themselves, community or common good. Between them and any human or environmental purpose stands an employer who dictates the terms, rather as church hierarchies once dictated the meaning of the gospel. In private enterprise, under capitalist company law, the goal of a company is not the welfare of its workers, its customers or wider society, but simply the profit of its owners and shareholders. Public services work to goals set by elected authorities, but from their down the command structure reflects that of capitalist private enterprise. Orders are passed down the line, labour is accountable to management, but not vice versa. Of course, managers and other professionals are also workers, but their yoke is lighter and their rewards greater. They are freer at work, giving more orders than they take. They are more able to determine their own actions at work, and their higher pay gives them greater choice away from work. Top pay for senior public servants follows top pay in the private sector, to their subordinates they are masters not servants and the same may go for their clients and customers among the general public. (If my strictures on employment seem over-stated, this may be because you have been nearer the top of the tree than the bottom.)

Wage slavery’s alive and well: official!
Although we have a choice of employers, the terms they offer are broadly the same: in return for wages and security, we do what we're told. Or else. Slaves once dreamed of 40 acres and a mule to secure their eventual freedom, but we still lack the independent space and resources to provide for ourselves. A modern social economy requires collective effort and combined resources. But this human and practical need for company and capital does NOT lead naturally, necessarily or inevitably to the Capitalist Company as we know it. There's no good reason for social democracy to stop short of employers' premises.

Freedom TO work, freedom AT work
We need work, for a living and as a living. We need the income and we need to be useful, to ourselves, our families and in the eyes of a wider society. In particular, we need the company and recognition of workmates and neighbours who know us by what we do, as distinct from status and appearances. Work is self-expression and self-definition, for ourselves and each other. It’s no coincidence that people have been known and named, especially here in Wales, by their trades. In our emphasis on representative ‘political’ democracy we overlook the more intimate, practical interface of economic relationships at work: who does what for whom, how and on whose say-so. Between the personal freedoms of our leisure hours and the democratic rights of electoral politics, there's a black hole: the work economy. What’s lost behind fashionable emphasis on 'community' is any recognition of direct democracy, or lack of it, among people at work: the importance of individual and collective self-determination in the business that shapes our lives and world. Despite all talk of empowerment and self-fulfilment, we settle for ‘Do what you’re told' - until we're too tired to do much else. We take it as normal to sell our prime time to employers - the term profiteers is accurate, if pejorative - while hoping somehow to lead good lives, or save the world.

Work is too important to leave to Employers
We don’t just sell our labour, we sell ourselves, the only lives we’ve got. In the process, we’re informed, transformed, deformed. In the theatre of employment, the props of status, reward and punishment divert us from more intimate and far-reaching motives and outcomes. Of course, we can never be quite sure why we do as we do or where it leads, and the consequences of our actions will always be unintended as well as intended. But employment is an obstacle to the fuller awareness essential to self-determination. Competing over income, status and appearance, even quality of workmanship, we are distracted from our own and each other's best interests, from the impact we may be having on a wider world. For all we know as we sweat or sing, we may be sawing through the branch on which we sit.

What's your game?
The question was sometimes asked, with more or less irony, by leisured gents who chose or were forced to work for a living. Meanwhile, their leisure sports of hunting and shooting, were versions of an older survival game. A privileged minority were free to enjoy what once had been necessity, a way of life now denied to the majority by game-keepers, enclosures and rising population. 'What would happen if everyone did it?' The word 'game' means both the live target and the red meat. In games, sports, the work is by choice, a pleasure and end in itself. The game is the process, and the product - goal, wicket, hole, prize or kill - a means to that end. Allegedly. Games can be hard work, as in the marathon, and hard work can become a game, even in employment if you're lucky. This is more likely to be the case as you near the top of your tree. A succesful artist, craftsman, surgeon, scientist, politician, chief executive or City trader must focus singlemindedly, whole-heartedly, on the game in hand to hold his (or her?) own. At least for its duration, the game is an end in itself. We might not wish the surgeon who operates on us to be worried in theatre by thoughts of wider human consequence. But at some point the costs and consequences must to be taken into account. The Bridge over the River Kwai, of service only to the enemy, was built with single-minded determination, and then blown up. Meanwhile, in and out of what we recognise as work, the game is an essential element in life, not just a means to an end - or 'learning experience' - but joy in itself. Caution: whatever the immediate pleasure and prize, the process is only as good as its lasting product. And vice versa, perhaps.

Human work and consciousness
Forgive them for they don’t know what they do? Fair enough, if you're the last to die, or sure of eternal life. But what if the killers are still killing, the damage still being done, and they dont want to know? In the absence of a merciful saviour or afterlife, we're stuck with the one we've got and it's up to ourselves to wake up and take stock. We're better off knowing what we do, and what's being done to us: understanding more of motives and mechanics, intended and unintended consequences. Unlike the wonderful works of birds and bees, human work is a function of human intentions, its outcome and value the product of human consciousness, or lack of it.

Ourselves and other animals
Mechanical work, evolution, plant and animal life, all have a place in the human equation, in ourselves and what we make of life. To understand our part in things, it's better not to set ourselves up as too distinct and different, above the rest. Our strength is more in what we share than what sets us apart. We may need to reconfigure our world: no 'high' or 'low' on a round planet in space, just in and out and roundabout. No higher spiritual plane, any more than physical energy and matter can be separated or set one above another. No reductive materialism either. What goes on in our heads and ‘hearts’ is part and parcel of the real world, at once material and mysterious. 'Subjective' reflection and feeling are as real and effective as more easily observable 'objective' events around us, and some of the most exciting current science concerns the connection between the two: what we think, perceive, imagine and feel, is objectively located by ECG.

Genius of capitalist employment
- as Marx remarked, it has turned the world upside down, leaving no stone unturned
- in Employment and the Market, we are mobilised against ourselves, each other and the world. Human inclinations to empathy and co-operation are subordinated to equally human greed and competition. Aspects of our nature that require integration are set at odds.
- capital is dead labour, the product of past work as preserved in cash, plant and property. Under capitalism, the dead dictates to the living as the presumed owners of this capital command our present working lives, determining our role and value in the world.
- new wants for old! In the guise of 'consumer goods,' old necessities are repackaged or replaced by more or less arbitrary wants. Bread's for the birds, bread and water prison fare. Survival needs are replaced by more or less arbitrary wants, for which we work and pay as if our lives depended on them. What we're offered is not what we need or decide upon between us. It's what the existing system can produce and profit from most easily. Market leaders, fashions, carefully cultivated competition over possession and appearancess, combine to block out other possibilities, recognition and reasoned choice. Possessions are only as good as the activities, understandings and relationships they open up. The time we spend at work, and the intoxication of products on offer distract us from what matters. Something inside that's always denied.... Money cant buy you love...Yeah, yeah!.
- Addiction over evolution. What we're fed is more of the same, or almost the same. It's easier, more profitable to keep the old lines going, add a gadget, tweak the bodiwork than to honestly, openly explore new possibilties. We're misled into repeating old patterns, deepening the ruts that blind and contain us.
- Entrenches inequality, in its own power-relations and in its distribution of earnings and profits . Depends on hierarchy, differentials, competition setting one over and against another. In our effective economy, political protestations of fairness and equality notwithstanding, we’re systematically classed, divided and ruled.

Alternatives?
- People work better, live better when they co-operate, by choice, in a common cause, when they know what they’re doing, who with and who for, when they can negotiate their differences as equals.
- We enjoy working for ourselves and each other, the self-satisfaction and mutual respect that comes with doing something useful in the world; given a proper framework for negotiation, conflicts of interest can bring us together as well as drive us apart.
- We already manage a lot for ourselves - at home, in childcare and emergencies. Who teaches our children to walk, talk and feed themselves?
- Even at work, a lot of the management is left to us, between the lines. That is why working-to-rule has been an effective weapon in industrial disputes. Employers' requirements of compliance are balanced by recognition of teamwork and initiative.
- What's needed is not less, but more ambition. If freedom and democracy, self-determination and community, are to mean anything, we must take back our working lives and reclaim the common ground. One life each, one world between us, it's up to us to help each other and ourselves.

Commonwealth: Capital, Materials, Market and Labour.
And the greatest of these is labour, aka lifework. Of course we NEED capital, but as one factor in our industry, not in command. Capital is the accumulated product of collective effort, the savings of the living and inheritance from the dead. Commonwealth, long diverted to Empire, now cries out for repatriation,to mean what it says. Capital is essential to industry, along with labour and market. Capital requires, and deserves, a return, whether in interest or a share in profits. What it does not need or deserve is overall control, dead labour over living. Workers, consumers and wider community all have a stake and right to a voice. Workers have the first call - they live their jobs - but no exclusive right. Existing Company Law reverses natural priorities, giving command to those whose lives are least involved: I may depend on interest from my savings, but they wouldn't be savings if I needed them from day to day. Investors and consumers can switch more easily than workers can find other jobs. That said, the alternative to capitalist control is neither workers' control, nor state control. Consumers, suppliers and wider community, all have a stake and need a say. And all these human stakeholders must remember there's no such thing as a raw material or finished product: whatever we find or form has an origin and outcome, a life or death, of its own that rebounds on us. If our environment, the non-human world, cannot speak for itself, it's in our interest to read its signs.

Time for a change
The prevailing political economy is illogical, unjust and anachronistic. It goes back to conquest, division of land and labour by force of arms. As feudal swords were beaten into ploughshares into cash, common land enclosed, a dispossessed majority was forced to sell...itself. Contemporary capital and labour are direct descendents of old conquest and serfdom, sweatshop and slavery. Ripe for redress.

Instead, we now have the extraordinary spectacle of Capital (Markets) terrorising elected government for debts incurred in bailing out that self-same Capital (Banks). They bite the hand that fed them yesterday. At the other end of the economic ladder, elected government pressgangs the unemployed back to work for unelected capital, welfare benefits conditional on search for work, wages depressed by state-enforced demand.

Anti-social democracy? In the days of Soviet Socialist Republics, I came to feel that we might be better off with our 'liberal' capitalist democracy: better an ammoral system that allows humanity than a moral state that punishes it. In our Social Democracies, owner-shareholders are guaranteed a democratic say among themselves as part of their license to exploit the rest of us. And they, like their executives and employees at all levels, may be moved by unselfish interests as well Profit. Now, as recession bites, I fear it's be back-to-basics: when dog eats dog, humane considerations are first to go. The days of tolerant anomaly are drawing in.