The Problem with Work by Kathi Weeks

I don’t recall how this book got on my reading list, but I picked it up a month or two ago and finally got around to reading it. I was really excited to read it because work and labor are topics I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. I often dream about giving up my lucrative software engineering life and doing something simpler, with fewer hours. Or dreaming about life after work. When can I retire? What would I do if I was independently wealthy? Why do so many people stress out about work?

I was mildly disappointed with this book. I did not realize it was a very academic book written by an associate professor in very academic language. It was dense and convoluted. I struggled to read and understand it. Having just finished On Writing Well by William Zinsser, which stresses the need for simplicity and clarity in nonfiction writing, this was the antithesis of that philosophy. I’m used to nonfiction books that try to engage the reader and reach a broader audience, like the work of Rutger Bregman. This was not that.

I persisted, trying to get as much out of it as I could. The subtitle of the book is “feminism, Marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork imaginaries.” I expected more “antiwork politics” and “postwork imaginaries” in it.

There are only five chapters. The first discussions the Protestant work ethic and why it’s bullshit and how we can and should overcome it and value life over work. The second chapter deals with Marxist views of labor and productivism. The third and fourth chapters are the meat of the book, dealing with universal basic income and a reduced work week. Chapter five discusses the types of utopias and how they are beneficial. And there’s a short epilogue.

In chapter five, during all this discussion about utopia I was waiting for the description or utopian demand to be presented. It turns out the utopian demands were universal basic income and a 30-hour work week (chapters three and four, respectively). While a real universal basic income (not Andrew Yang’s watered-down Freedom Dividend) is utopian in today’s society, I feel like a 30-hour work week is not utopian enough. Maybe that’s the influence from Bregman’s Utopia for Realists, where he talks about a fifteen-hour work week as a real possibility based on increases in productivity. I didn’t realize while reading that chapters three and four were the postwork imaginaries of the subtitle. I kept waiting for some insight into what a postwork world looks like, and I never really got it.

In the final chapter, Weeks talks about the different forms of utopian writing: literary, critical, manifesto, and the demand. When I started reading this book I guess I was expecting more of a utopian manifesto, not a thesis paper for other academics. As you’ll see in the highlights below, the book has some good content and analysis, it’s just not what I was hoping for.

Highlights

In general, it is not the police or the threat of violence that force us to work, but rather a social system that ensures that working is the only way that most of us can meet our basic needs.

Dreams of individual accomplishment and desires to contribute to the common good become firmly attached to waged work, where they can be hijacked to rather different ends: to produce neither individual riches nor social wealth, but privately appropriated surplus value.

The struggle against work is a matter of securing not only better work, but also the time and money necessary to have a life outside work.

To focus narrowly on outcomes rather than processes, and on inequality and not also on un-freedom, is to impoverish the critique of capitalism.

Though freedom is, by this account, a relational practice, it is not a zero-sum game in which the more one has, the less another can enjoy. Freedom considered as a matter of individual self-determination or self-sovereignty is reduced to a solipsistic phenomenon. Rather, as a world-building practice, freedom is a social—and hence necessarily political—endeavor.

when we have no memory or little imagination of an alternative to a life centered on work, there are few incentives to reflect on why we work as we do and what we might wish to do instead.

In the Fordist period of industrial capitalism, with efforts to sustain a level of mass consumption adequate to the exigencies of mass production, a new relationship between production and acquisition was forged. Consumption, rather than savings alone, emerged as an essential economic practice; as opposed to mere idleness, nonwork time was recognized as an economically relevant time, time to create new reasons to work more.

The threat of job loss attributed to the pressures of global competition puts workers on the defensive, while the contraction of social welfare provisions further enforces individuals' dependence on the wage relation.

The professional look, and the time and resources necessary to achieve it, tie us not only economically and socially but also aesthetically and affectively to work.

The power of social production "arises from co-operation itself, Marx claims in Capital: "When the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species."

The crucial point and the essential link to the refusal of work is that work— not private property, the market, the factory, or the alienation of our creative capacities—is understood to be the primary basis of capitalist relations, the glue that holds the system together. Hence, any meaningful transformation of capitalism requires substantial change in the organization and social value of work.

It is not a renunciation of labor tout court, but rather a refusal of the ideology of work as highest calling and moral duty, a refusal of work as the necessary center of social life and means of access to the rights and claims of citizenship, and a refusal of the necessity of capitalist control of production. It is a refusal, finally, of the asceticism of those—even those on the Left—who privilege work over all other pursuits, including "carefree consumption." Its immediate goals are presented as a reduction of work, in terms of both hours and social importance, and a replacement of capitalist forms of organization by new forms of cooperation.

"The problem is not," Jean-Marie Vincent argues, "simply to liberate production, but also for humanity to liberate itself from production by ceasing to treat it as the centre of gravity of all social activities and individual action" [...] the vision of postcapitalism privileged in the autonomist tradition is not a vision of the work society perfected, with its labors rationally organized, equally required, and justly distributed. Rather, it is a vision of the work society overcome—that is, of a society in which work is certainly not eliminated but comes to play a different role in the economies of social production and political obligation.

[...] often programs presented under the rubric of work enrichment are also methods of work intensification.

Refusing work—in this case, refusing domestic work—does not necessarily mean abandoning the house and denying care; rather, it mandates an interrogations of the basic structures and ethics that govern this work and the struggle for ways to make it, as it were, unproductive.

[...] milestones in the history of capitalist development should be understood as political attempts to reestablish capital's power in response to workers' insubordination.

If the income were merely a small addition to wages, it would risk supporting precarious employment and rationalizing the present wage system.

[...] the demand for basic income's proposal to break the link between work and income highlights the arbitrariness of which practices are waged and which are not.

[...] the demand for basic income registers the refusal of an ethics that enforces dependency either on marriage or the wage relation; indeed, the demand calls into question the adequacy of any ideal of social reciprocity that is reduced to a series of individual contracts.

Therefore, we might demand a basic income not so that we can have, do, or be what we already want, do, or are, but because it might allow us to consider and experiment with different kinds of lives, with wanting, doing, and being otherwise.

The point is that any account of working time must include an account of socially necessary unwaged labor, and any movement for reduced working time must include a challenge to its present organization and distribution.

Lehr poses two basic approaches to securing the resources that can enable choice: either expand the state's welfare provisions and, with it, the state's potential to shape and control our lives, or, as she prefers, attempt to formulate demands that have the potential to allow greater autonomy from the structures and institutions, including the state, that now presume to dictate so many of our choices. [...] the demand for shorter hours is "intended not to bring the state into people's lives, but to use state power to enable citizens to have the resources that they need to make real choices."

As with the other two strategies, flextime and part-time, hiring domestic workers constitutes a partial solution to a general problem, a private strategy for the relatively privileged to deal with what is and will remain a collective predicament.

The pressures of getting by in hard times tend not, as Robin Kelley notes, to be generative of the political imagination; instead, "we are constantly putting out fires, responding to emergencies, finding temporary refuge, all of which make it difficult to see anything other than the present.”

Can we want, and are we willing to creates a new world that would no longer be "our" world, a social form that would not produce subjects like us? "Loving and perishing," Nietzsche notes, "have gone together from eternity" not only as a consequence of the sacrifices that we might make out of love but also in the changes that inevitably occur in the affective relationship to the outside. To affirm oneself as an agent—or, as Nietzsche would have it, to love as a creator—is to be willing to perish too, as the other side of creation is destruction.

Utopia is conceived more as an ongoing process than a solution, more a project than an outcome.