New Left Review 85, January-February 2014

William Davies

ECONOMICS OF INSOMNIA

‘Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?’ At the 2012 Conservative Party Conference, this evocative image was used by the Chancellor George Osborne to establish a political dividing line. [1] Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Verso: London 2013, £9.99, hardback 144 pp, 978 1 7816 8093 3 The worker or the sleeper: whose side are you on? At the 2013 conference, Osborne followed this with a policy requiring the unemployed to visit a Jobcentre every morning, as a condition of receiving benefits. This punitive approach only makes sense—given the shortage of vacancies—when viewed in the context of a government cracking down on slumber and restfulness. The re-moralization of unemployment that is underway in Britain casts the jobless not so much as drunken delinquents, as the Victorians depicted them, but as insufficiently alert or awake.

’My institution subscribes to NLR, why can't I access this article?’