Book review symposium: Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Unbearable Lightness of Money: Universal Basic Income, the State and the Coloniality of the Left
Political Quarterly, Special Issue POSTCAPITALISM: THE POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY OF A CHANGING WORLD OF WORK
In this intervention, I take on board Stronge and Hester’s suggestion (in this Special Issue), to build ‘more robust critical approaches to post work’. In previous work, I have offered a critique of what one article termed ‘the post work prospectus’ (PWP). As Stronge and Hester suggest, that article limited its account to the critique of ‘just one or two texts at the expense of a far wider – and richer – body of relevant material’. Not without hesitation, the article deployed the term PWP to point to significant problems clearly expressed in the texts included, knowing that indeed, as Stronge and Hester assert, ‘there is no single “PWP” for the PWP involves ‘a wide range of projects looking at the changing circumstances surrounding labour via a range of different lenses (from automation, to the work ethic, to the inequitable distribution of specific forms of remunerated and unremunerated work)’. At the risk of sounding reductionist, the article put forward a very focused theoretical critique and a political provocation, but the aim was in no way to ignore the contribution and the variety of issues and approaches of this important area of work offers. Having said that, and after reflecting on the comradely criticism pointing to the shortcomings of that article, I do believe that full reference to this other work, including that of Kathi Weeks, would have enriched the article immensely, but it would not have affected the essence of our critique for the latter is directed to the general principle of demanding the implementation of the Universal Basic Income (UBI) by the capitalist state for a project of the left. The question stands all the same: What does it mean politically to demand the distribution of money via UBI to sustain the social reproduction of labour as a transitional demand for an hegemonic project of the Left, when money is the most abstract expression of capitalist property, and therefore the real problem that needs to be addressed if we were to fight for dignified forms of life? The focus of this piece, which contains a partial (and individual) response to Stronge and Hester’s critique, but is not limited to it, is twofold. First, I point to the notorious absence of a discussion of money in the debate about work, social reproduction and post-work utopias. Inextricably connected to this is my second aim: to discuss in what ways the overestimation of the UBI as a key element of a hegemonic project of the Left makes the PWP’s advocates neglect or diminish present serious attempts to create what can be broadly defined as alternatives forms of social reproduction at the grassroots and world-wide or, what Srnicek and Williams call ‘folk politics’.
Postcapitalism, Basic Income and the End of Work: A Critique and Alternative
Bath Papers in International Development and Wellbeing, 2017
This paper critiques popular academic understandings of development towards a post-capitalist, post-work society based around the automation of production and the provision of a basic income to those displaced by its effects. By focusing on work and its escape as the central issue at stake in the transition to a postcapitalist society, these accounts miss how, at one end, capitalist work is preconditioned by a historically-specific set of antagonistic social relations of constrained social reproduction, and, at the other, by the specific social forms assumed by the results of that work in commodity exchange and the constituted form of the nation-state. Retaining money, commodities and the rule of value under the auspices of a national state, postcapitalist and post-work vistas represent abstract ‘bad utopias’ that break insufficiently with the present, and in some ways make it worse, replacing a wage over which workers can lawfully struggle with a state administered monetary payment that creates a direct relationship of power between citizen and state. This is highlighted in the potential adoption of basic income as part of authoritarian nationalist policy platforms including that of Nerendra Modi in India. Suggesting that struggles over the contradictory forms assumed by social reproduction in capitalist society are themselves labour struggles and not external to them, we pose a ‘concrete utopian’ alternative that creates the capacity to reshape the relationship between individuals, society and the rule of money, value and the state rather than reinforce it. To illustrate this we examine the Unemployed Workers Organisations instituted in Argentina. This poses one potential means of devolving monetary and non monetary resources and power rather than centralising them in the hands of an all-powerful ‘postcapitalist’ state that would carry all the scars of the society it sets out to surpass. Such a 'concrete utopia' would create space for, and not liquidate or falsely resolve, class struggle in, against and beyond capitalist development.
2009
This article introduces a special section concerned with precariousness and cultural work. Its aim is to bring into dialogue three bodies of ideas-the work of the autonomous Marxist 'Italian laboratory'; activist writings about precariousness and precarity; and the emerging empirical scholarship concerned with the distinctive features of cultural work, at a moment when artists, designers and (new) media workers have taken centre stage as a supposed 'creative class' of model entrepreneurs. The article is divided into three sections. It starts by introducing the ideas of the autonomous Marxist tradition, highlighting arguments about the autonomy of labour, informational capitalism and the 'factory without walls', as well as key concepts such as multitude and immaterial labour. The impact of these ideas and of Operaismo politics more generally on the precarity movement is then considered in the second section, discussing some of the issues that have animated debate both within and outside this movement, which has often treated cultural workers as exemplifying the experiences of a new 'precariat'. In the third and final section we turn to the empirical literature about cultural work, pointing to its main features before bringing it into debate with the ideas already discussed. Several points of overlap and critique are elaborated-focusing in particular on issues of affect, temporality, subjectivity and solidarity.
Journal of Labor and Society, 2018
This article contests the suggestion that the automation of production and the provision of a basic income potentiate the transition from a post-work to a postcapitalist society. This vista-mainly represented by the work of Paul Mason and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams misses how capitalist work is both preconditioned by a historically-specific set of antagonistic social relations of constrained social reproduction, and, determined by the specific social forms its results assume in commodity exchange and the constituted form of the nation-state. We argue that the transitional demands of automation and a basic income may serve to stem postcapitalist transformation, stopping short at a post-work society characterized by the continuation of capitalist social relations and forms. Retaining money under the rule of the nation-state, the proposed transition between post-work and postcapitalist society breaks insufficiently with the present, in some ways making it worse by replacing a wage over which workers can lawfully bargain with a state-administered monetary payment that creates a direct relationship of power between citizen and state, liquidating labor struggles. We show how the Unemployed Workers Organizations in Argentina offer a 'concrete utopian' alternative that creates the capacity to reshape the relationship between individuals, society and the rule of money, value and the capitalist state rather than reinforce it.