The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (John Hope Franklin Center Books) - Softcover

Weeks, Kathi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822351129 ISBN 13: 9780822351122

Verlag: MNG University Presses, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

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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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kathi Weeks is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Constituting Feminist Subjects and a co-editor of The Jameson Reader.

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THE PROBLEM WITH WORK

Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork ImaginariesBy KATHI WEEKS

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5112-2

Contents

Acknowledgments........................................................................................1INTRODUCTION The Problem with Work.....................................................................37CHAPTER 1 Mapping the Work Ethic.......................................................................79CHAPTER 2 Marxism, Productivism, and the Refusal of Work...............................................113CHAPTER 3 Working Demands: From Wages for Housework to Basic Income....................................151CHAPTER 4 "Hours for What We Will": Work, Family, and the Demand for Shorter Hours.....................175CHAPTER 5 The Future Is Now: Utopian Demands and the Temporalities of Hope.............................227EPILOGUE A Life beyond Work............................................................................235Notes..................................................................................................255References.............................................................................................275

Chapter One

Mapping the Work Ethic

    Let us, then, be up and doing,
    With a heart for any fate;
    Still achieving, still pursuing,
    Learn to labor and to wait.
    HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, "A PSALM OF LIFE"

    The idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives
    like the ghost of dead religious beliefs.
    MAX WEBER, THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE
    SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM

There are two common answers to the question of why we work so long and so hard. First, and most obvious, we work because we must: while some of us may have a choice of where to work, in an economy predicated on waged work, few have the power to determine much about the specific terms of that employment, and fewer still the choice of whether or not to work at all. Whereas this first response focuses on necessity, the second emphasizes our willingness to work. According to this account, we work because we want to: work provides a variety of satisfactions—in addition to income, it can be a source of meaning, purpose, structure, social ties, and recognition. But while both explanations are undoubtedly important, they are also insufficient. Structural coercion alone cannot explain the relative dearth of conflict over the hours we are required to work or the identities we are often expected to invest there; individual consent cannot account for why work would be so much more appealing than other parts of life. No doubt our motives for devoting so much time and energy to work are multiple and shifting, typically involving a complex blend of coercion and choice, necessity and desire, habit and intention. But although the structure of the work society may make long hours of work necessary, we need a fuller accounting of how, why, and to what effect so many of us come to accept and inhabit this requirement. One of the forces that manufactures such consent is the official morality—that complex of shifting claims, ideals, and values—known as the work ethic.

This chapter develops a critical analysis of the work ethic in the United States. Max Weber's account of the Protestant work ethic will serve as an archeology of the ethic's logics and functions that will guide our brief explorations of two later—and comparably ideal typical—versions of the ethic: an industrial work ethic that dominated US society through the culmination of the Fordist period in the years following the Second World War, and a postindustrial work ethic that has accompanied the transition to post-Fordism. The analysis seeks to recognize the power of the work ethic and to identify some of its weaknesses—that is, the chapter's goal is to attend at once to the coherence and the contradictions of the ethic's elements in a way that can account for both its historical durability and its perennial instabilities. As we will see, the elements that make the discourse of the work ethic so forceful and tenacious also render it always productive of antagonism. The work ethic has proved to be a trap, but it is also sometimes a weapon for those who are subject to its strictures.

I want to advance three general claims in this chapter: first, we cannot take on the structures of work without also challenging the ethics on which their legitimacy depends; second, despite its longevity, the ethical discourse of work is nonetheless vulnerable to such a challenge; and third, a claim that I will make more explicitly toward the end of the chapter, because of its particular significance to post-Taylorist labor processes, our "insubordination to the work ethic" (Berardi 1980, 169) is now more potentially subversive than ever before. In short, I want to argue that confronting the dominant ethic of work is necessary, possible, and timely.

THE PRIMITIVE CONSTRUCTION OF SUBJECTIVITIES

Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism remains a touchstone for studies of the work ethic, including this one, for good reason. As an unintended consequence of the Reformation, the Protestant work ethic, as Weber tells the story, bestowed on work a new and powerful endorsement. This new ethic entailed an important shift in expectations about what work is or should be, and a distinctive conception of what it means to be a worker. What characterized the Protestant ethos in particular was the ethical sanction for and the psychological impetus to work; ascetic Protestantism preached the moral import of constant and methodical productive effort on the part of self-disciplined individual subjects. This was no mere practical advice: "The infraction of its rules is treated not as foolishness," Weber maintains, "but as forgetfulness of duty" (1958, 51). One should set oneself to a lifetime of "organized worldly labour" (83) as if (and not, as we will see, precisely because) one were called to it by God. Weber's brilliant study of how and to what effect we came to be haunted by the legacy of this Puritan ethic introduces the essential components, fundamental dynamics, and key purposes of the new ethic of work that developed in conjunction with capitalism in Western Europe and North America.

Weber offers an archeology of capitalist development that is in many ways comparable to the one Marx proposed in the brief account of primitive accumulation toward the end of the first volume of Capital. There Marx countered the political economists' morality tale about two kinds of people, the industrious and the lazy, with a very different kind of origins story, this one about the violent usurpation by a few of the common property of all (1976, 873–76). In equally polemical fashion, Weber takes on his own enemy, the structural teleologies of the economic determinists, and presents a sharply contrasting analysis that emphasizes the unpredictable emergence and historical force of ideas. Marx and Weber each offer an account of how two classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, came to be; but where Marx focuses on their relations to the means of production as propertied owners and propertyless workers, Weber concentrates on the development of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: MNG University Presses
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822351129
• ISBN 13: 9780822351122
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland