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

by Kathi Weeks

employment-after all, even the best job is a problem when it monopolizes so much of life.

That individuals should work is fundamental to the basic social contract; indeed, working is part of what is supposed to transform subjects into the independent individuals of the liberal imaginary, and for that reason, is treated as a basic obligation of citizenship. (The fact that the economy's health is dependent on a permanent margin of unemployment is only one of the more notorious problems with this convention.)

The autonomous Marxist tradition is thus useful in this instance insofar as it simultaneously centers its analytical apparatus on work and disavows its traditional ethics. Central to that tradition is not only the analytical primacy accorded to the imposition of work as 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).

That all work is good work, that all work is equally desirable and inherently useful is, as William Morris once noted, "a convenient belief to those who live on the labour of others" (1999, 128).

"force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one" (1976, 916),

As one White House report from the 198os put it, the family, as the "seedbed of economic skills, money, habits, attitudes towards work, and the art of financial independence," plays a key role in the transmission of work skills and ethics; "neither the modern family nor the free enterprise system would long survive without the other" (quoted in Abramovitz 1988, 350-51).

It is not obedience that is prized, but commitment; employees are more often expected to adopt the perspectives of managers rather than simply yield to their authority (Bunting 2004, iio).

With so much at stake, weighed down with so many expectations, it is no wonder that the ethical discourse of work is becoming ever more abstracted from the realities of many jobs. Within the two-tiered labor market, we find new modes of "over-valorized work" at one end of the labor hierarchy and "devalorized work" at the other (Peterson 2003, 76). Making labor flexible results in an increase of part-time, temporary, casual, and precarious forms of work. At one end, as Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio note, "the quality and the quantity of paid labor no longer justify-if they ever did-the underlying claim derived from religious sources that has become the basis of contemporary social theory and social policy: the view that paid work should be the core of personal identity" (1994, 302). At the other end of the labor hierarchy, work is expected to be the whole of life, colonizing and eclipsing what remains of the social. At the same time, the work ethic is more insistently-and perhaps desperately-defended. "Never," Andre Gorz observes, "has the `irreplaceable,' `indispensable' function of labour as the source of `social ties,' `social cohesion, `integration,' `socialization, `personalization,' 'personal identity and meaning been invoked so obsessively as it has since the day it became unable any longer to fulfill any of these functions" (1999) 57).

If hard work were really such a great thing, the rich would have kept it all to themselves. UNION ACTIVIST

For example, in a text from 1918 consistent with this paradigm's theory of revolution, Lenin distinguished between two phases after the overthrow of capitalism: the first, socialist phase, in which "factory discipline" is extended over the whole of society; and the final phase of true communism. The socialist stage-a lengthy period of transition between capitalism and communism whose precise duration is unknown-requires from workers "self-sacrifice," "perseverance," and a commitment to "the proper path of steady and disciplined labour" (Lenin 1989, 223, 226).

An alternative to capitalist society would require that we move beyond both abstract labor under capitalism and the modes of concrete labor that are also shaped by it. As another autonomist theorist, Harry Cleaver, reads Marx, "to speak of postcapitalist `useful labour' is as problematic as to speak of the postcapitalist state" (2000, 129).1

In 1933 the Senate even passed Senator Hugo Black's Depression-era bill limiting the work week to thirty hours, which was shortly thereafter abandoned in favor of the Roosevelt administration's preference for creating jobs instead of reducing work.

Finally the utopian form can also provide moments of disidentification and desubjectivization: depictions of the inhabitants of other worlds that can serve as figurations of future models of being might present us with the means to make ourselves strange as well. In this respect, as Vincent Geoghegan argues, the utopia's "unabashed and flagrant otherness gives it a power which is lacking in other analytical devices" (1987, 2), an otherness that not even the genealogist's use of the historical past can often match. Beyond providing opportunities for dereification and disinvestment that can encourage openness to possibilities of new and different futures, this first broadly deconstructive function of the utopia also serves to incite and enhance our more specifically critical capacities. By estranging us from the engrossing familiarity of the everyday, the utopian form can provide us with a standpoint in the new from which to assess the present critically.24 In some instances, for example, one might be able to see the presence of social problems and the extent of their impact more clearly by imagining their absence.