work

[alanjjohnstone]

I found this article refreshing to read, quoting Lafargue and Fromm and Oscar Wilde, Gorz, but strangely though, William Morris is over-looked.

It is mostly a review of the arguments of Kathi Weeks’  book, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries.

 

http://jacobinmag.com/spring-2012/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/

 

The point, as Weeks puts it, is to “get a life,” as we find ways “to sustain the social worlds necessary for, among other things, production.” Something the WSM has said in it own way many times.

 

I remember Simon Wigley saying in the past something along the same lines as put in the article,  that we should be “asking workers to give up not just their chains but their identities as workers” [apologies if I am mis-representing by paraphrasing your view, Simon].

The article raises the point, however,  that “this requires some new conception of who we are and what we are to become, if we are to throw off the label of ‘worker’ …It is relatively easy to say that in the future I will be what I am now – a worker…It is something else to imagine ourselves as different kinds of people altogether.”

 

Hopefully, this article will provoke a member to read and review this Weeks book for the Socialist Standard. Thanks to Robert Stafford for bringing it to my attention.

[robbo203]

There is also of course Bob Black’s essay “The Abolition of Work” (http://www.primitivism.com/abolition.htm).  I have problems with the term “work” in this context, however. Why is it assumed to be synonymous with waged employment and, if it is, what else might we call it?

[Author]

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