The Relation Between Production, Labor Regimes and Leisure Forms: From slavery to digital capitalism

Abstract

article uses the notions of stages of capitalism, labor regimes and production regimes to explore the relationship between the way people work and their leisure. It starts with a clarification of what is meant by the capitalist modes of production, proceeds to define labor and work regimes, and analyzes the specific demands made by various labor regimes and production regimes on the leisure time of workers, which it illustrates by examples taken from the history of leisure in the US. The advent of digital capitalism, rooted in the US, has profoundly transformed the work and leisure environments of a growing number of people all over the world, and in many ways blurred the frontier between these two human activities, so that a reappraisal of the relationship between work and leisure is in order, especially from the angle of prosumer capitalism, which is the subject of the last part.