A vital and timely manifestol for a feminist post-work politics

Does it ever feel like you have no free time? You come home after work and instead of finding a space of rest and relaxation, you're confronted by a pile of new tasks to complete - cooking, cleaning, looking after the kids, and so on.

In this ground-breaking book, Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek lay out how unpaid work in our homes has come to take up an ever-increasing portion of our lives - how the vacuum of free time has been taken up by vacuuming. Examining the history of the home over the past century - from running water to white goods to smart homes - they show how repeated efforts to reduce the burden of this work have faced a variety of barriers, challenges, and reversals.

Charting the trajectory of our domestic spaces over the past century, Hester and Srnicek consider new possibilities for the future, uncovering the abandoned ideas of anti-housework visionaries and sketching out a path towards real free time for all, where everyone is at liberty to pursue their passions, or do nothing at all. It will require rethinking our living arrangements, our expectations and our cities.

"This is an incisive critique of the status quo and an earnest appeal to rethink why people work and how they spend their time." - Publishers Weekly

"Anyone seeking cosy thoughts about the joys of spring cleaning should look elsewhere ... clear and concise, with a lot of learning worn lightly" - Guardian

"After Work takes an important look at the implications for the domestic sphere if work is reduced" - Financial Times

"A meticulously researched and agilely argued plea for the reduction of domestic labor from feminist scholar Helen Hester and Marxist economist Nick Srnicek." - Washington Post

"As a building block for change this splendidly written book makes a most powerful case for the opposition." - Philosophy Football

"After Work will get people talking about their interminable to-do lists. Anyone under 30 who wants to know what their life is going to look like should read it." - Sunday Times

"A dazzling work of applied utopianism" - The Quietus

"After Work fuses visions for a post-work world with calls to recognise and tackle the crisis in care." - Inside Story

"Interesting and thought-provoking ... If even existing capitalist technologies can give a glimpse of the benefits of a different way of organising society, imagine what would be possible if we had full democratic working-class control of the means of production and a democratic planned economy." - Socialism Today