The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)

The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)

Kathi Weeks

Language: English

Pages: 287

ISBN: 0822351129

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks boldly challenges the presupposition that work, or waged labor, is inherently a social and political good. While progressive political movements, including the Marxist and feminist movements, have fought for equal pay, better work conditions, and the recognition of unpaid work as a valued form of labor, even they have tended to accept work as a naturalized or inevitable activity. Weeks argues that in taking work as a given, we have “depoliticized” it, or removed it from the realm of political critique. Employment is now largely privatized, and work-based activism in the United States has atrophied. We have accepted waged work as the primary mechanism for income distribution, as an ethical obligation, and as a means of defining ourselves and others as social and political subjects. Taking up Marxist and feminist critiques, Weeks proposes a postwork society that would allow people to be productive and creative rather than relentlessly bound to the employment relation. Work, she contends, is a legitimate, even crucial, subject for political theory.

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Fundamental to the capitalist mode of production, but also the political priority of the refusal of work—a priority recorded in the call not for a liberation of work but a liberation from work (see Virno and Hardt 1996, 263). The refusal of work is at once a model of resistance, both to the modes of work that are currently imposed on us and to their ethical defense, and a struggle for a di√erent relationship to work born from the collective autonomy that a postwork ethics and more nonwork time.

That focuses on the prescriptive and reconstructive aspects of the project. Whereas ‘‘refusal’’ is the animating category of the first part, ‘‘demand’’ anchors the analysis in the second part. The argument thus proceeds from the refusal of the present terms of the work society to demands for remedies and for the imagining of alternative futures. As noted above, the work ethic is at the center of the political theory of and against work that I want to begin to elaborate. A critique of work that.

Acts. This involves the cultivation of habits, the internalization of routines, the incitement of desires, and the adjustment of hopes, all to guarantee a subject’s adequacy to the lifetime demands of work.∞∂ So on the one hand, work is conceived in this discourse as a field of individuation and independence. On the other hand, of course, the wage 54 chapter one relation is a hierarchical one, which requires individuals to submit to command and control. This antinomy—that work and its ethical.

Consumption; indeed, that is part of the attraction of professionalized work, one of the ways that this ideology of the professional promotes consent to and identification with work. Linking professional status and identity to the practices of consumption taps into the many ways that style and dress can serve as statements of individuality, markers of status, objects of pleasure, and sites of aspiration. The professional look, and the time and resources necessary to achieve it, tie us not only.

The argument sets, for both authors and readers, by relying so centrally on the trope of the family in the current context. For example, while it is true that ‘‘one need not compare’’ the childhoods of those whose parents work long hours ‘‘to a perfect childhood in a mythical past to conclude that our society needs to face up to an important 160 chapter four problem,’’ one would also expect that it might be tempting to try (248). For some, this strategy might make the demand for shorter hours.

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