Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work Feminism, Marxism POSTWORK
Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work Feminism, Marxism POSTWORK
Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work Feminism, Marxism POSTWORK
PROBLEM
WITH
WO R K
A
John Hope Franklin Center
Book
THE
PROBLEM
WITH
WO R K
Feminism,
Marxism,
Antiwork Politics,
and Postwork
Imaginaries
Kathi Weeks
ix Acknowledgments
introduction
1 The Problem with Work
chapter 1
37 Mapping the Work Ethic
chapter 2
79 Marxism, Productivism, and the Refusal of Work
chapter 3
113 Working Demands:
From Wages for Housework to Basic Income
chapter 4
151 ‘‘Hours for What We Will’’:
Work, Family, and the Demand for Shorter Hours
chapter 5
175 The Future Is Now:
Utopian Demands and the Temporalities of Hope
epilogue
227 A Life beyond Work
235 Notes
255 References
275 Index
Acknowledgments
...............................................................
Why do we work so long and so hard? The mystery here is not that we are
required to work or that we are expected to devote so much time and
energy to its pursuit, but rather that there is not more active resistance to
this state of a√airs. The problems with work today—my focus will be on
the United States—have to do with both its quantity and its quality and
are not limited to the travails of any one group. Those problems include
the low wages in most sectors of the economy; the unemployment,
underemployment, and precarious employment su√ered by many work-
ers; and the overwork that often characterizes even the most privileged
forms of employment—after all, even the best job is a problem when it
monopolizes so much of life. To be sure, if we were only resigned to such
conditions, there would be no puzzle. What is perplexing is less the
acceptance of the present reality that one must work to live than the
willingness to live for work. By the same token, it is easy to appreciate
why work is held in such high esteem, but considerably less obvious why
it seems to be valued more than other pastimes and practices.
That these questions are rarely posed within the field of political
theory is also surprising. The lack of interest in representing the daily
grind of work routines in various forms of popular culture is perhaps
understandable,∞ as is the tendency among cultural critics to focus on the
animation and meaningfulness of commodities rather than the eclipse of
laboring activity that Marx identifies as the source of their fetishization
(Marx 1976, 164–65). The preference for a level of abstraction that tends
not to register either the qualitative dimensions or the hierarchical rela-
tions of work can also account for its relative neglect in the field of
mainstream economics. But the lack of attention to the lived experience
and political textures of work within political theory would seem to be
another matter.≤ Indeed, political theorists tend to be more interested in
our lives as citizens and noncitizens, legal subjects and bearers of rights,
consumers and spectators, religious devotees and family members, than
in our daily lives as workers.≥ And yet, to take a simple example, the
amount of time alone that the average citizen is expected to devote to
work—particularly when we include the time spent training, searching,
and preparing for work, not to mention recovering from it—would sug-
gest that the experience warrants more consideration. Work is crucial not
only to those whose lives are centered around it, but also, in a society that
expects people to work for wages, to those who are expelled or excluded
from work and marginalized in relation to it. Perhaps more significantly,
places of employment and spaces of work would seem to be supremely
relevant to the very bread and butter of political science: as sites of
decision making, they are structured by relations of power and authority;
as hierarchical organizations, they raise issues of consent and obedience;
as spaces of exclusion, they pose questions about membership and obli-
gation. Although impersonal forces may compel us into work, once we
enter the workplace we inevitably find ourselves enmeshed in the direct
and personal relations of rulers and ruled. Indeed, the work site is where
we often experience the most immediate, unambiguous, and tangible
relations of power that most of us will encounter on a daily basis. As a
2 introduction
fully political rather than a simply economic phenomenon, work would
thus seem to be an especially rich object of inquiry.
There are at least two reasons for the inattention to work within
political theory that bear mentioning. The first of these is what I will call
the privatization of work. As the pair of epigraphs above suggest, we
seem to have a hard time grasping the power relations of both work and
family systematically; we often experience and imagine the employment
relation—like the marriage relation—not as a social institution but as
a unique relationship. Certainly this can be explained in part by the
institution of private property that secures the privacy of the employ-
ment relation alongside the marriage relation. However, it should also be
noted that this mode of privatizing work is not easily maintained: work
has long occupied a somewhat vexed position in the private-public econ-
omy of liberalism. Thus, even though John Locke could establish the
private character of work through both the natural right to property and
its integration into the economy of the household, the state’s role in
defending property rights (and, since Locke’s day, increasingly regulating
and planning on property’s behalf ) threatens the status of work as a
private relationship, exposing it, by the logic of Locke’s scheme, to the
purview of properly political power.∂ Work’s place within the private-
public division becomes even more troubled with the advent of industri-
alization; as work becomes identified with waged work and separated
from the household, it could more easily seem—by comparison to that
exemplary private sphere—relatively public. But there are additional
mechanisms that secure what I am calling work’s privatization. One is its
reification: the fact that at present one must work to ‘‘earn a living’’ is
taken as part of the natural order rather than as a social convention.
Consequently, as C. Wright Mills observes (in one of the epigraphs
above), we tend to focus more on the problems with this or that job, or
on their absence, than on work as a requirement, work as a system, work
as a way of life. Like the serfs who, as John Stuart Mill claims in the other
epigraph, ‘‘did not at first complain of the power of their lords, but only
of their tyranny’’ (1988, 84), we are better at attending to the problems
with this or that boss than to the system that grants them such power.
The e√ective privatization of work is also a function of the way the labor
market individualizes work—never more so than today, with the enor-
mous variety of tasks and schedules that characterize the contemporary
4 introduction
view the analyses to come so much as to account for their inspiration and
explain the kinds of claims and assumptions they presuppose. In terms
of theoretical resources, although Max Weber, Jean Baudrillard, and
Friedrich Nietzsche will each have a critical role to play at some point in
the analysis, the project draws most heavily, albeit selectively, on the
fields of feminist theory and Marxist theory, as this introductory discus-
sion will illustrate. I should note, however, that it is not only political
theory’s disregard for the politics of work that poses obstacles for this
endeavor; as we will see, both feminism’s and Marxism’s productivist
tendencies—their sometimes explicit, sometimes tacit pro-work supposi-
tions and commitments—present problems as well. There are, nonethe-
less, a number of exceptional cases or even whole subtraditions within
each of these fields that have much to o√er antiwork critiques and post-
work imaginaries. But rather than organize this introductory discussion
around a rehearsal of the project’s more specific theoretical debts, I want
to structure it instead in relation to a selection of its key concepts. The
analysis begins with two concepts that orient the undertaking and give it
direction: the work society and the work ethic. It then proceeds to a
series of conceptual pairings—including work and labor, work and class,
and freedom and equality—through which I hope to flesh out the text’s
central themes and further clarify my concerns and intentions. Let me
start by articulating some of the reasons why I find the topic of work so
theoretically interesting and politically pressing. The concept of the work
society is my point of entry into that discussion.
The shift in perspective that I would like to see more political theorists
pursue—from state and government to political economy, from cultural
products to the sites and relations of their production, from public
spaces and marketplaces to workplaces—is reminiscent of something
Marx proposed in an oft-cited passage at the end of part two of the first
volume of Capital. As a way to describe the buying and selling of that
very ‘‘peculiar’’ commodity labor power, Marx presents the story of two
free, self-interested individuals, each an owner of property and both
equal under the law, who enter into an exchange of equivalents: one
consents to give the use of his or her labor power for a limited period of
time, and in return, the other agrees to pay the first a specific amount
of money. But to see what happens after the employment contract is
By altering the focus of the study in this way, Marx promises, ‘‘the secret
of profit-making’’ will be exposed (280). By changing the site of the
analysis from a market-based exchange to wage-based production, the
labor-process itself—that is, the activity of labor and the social relations
that shape, direct, and manage it—will be revealed as the locus of capital-
ist valorization.
So what are the benefits of this vantage point? What do we see when
we shift our angle of vision from the market sphere of exchange to the
privatized sphere of production? As the language about revealing secrets
suggests, part of what Marx seeks to accomplish by descending into this
‘‘hidden abode’’ is to publicize the world of waged work, to expose it as
neither natural precursor nor peripheral byproduct of capitalist pro-
duction, but rather as its central mechanism (the wage) and lifeblood
(work). With this shift in perspective, Marxian political economy recog-
nizes waged labor as central to the capitalist mode of production and
claims it as the standpoint from which capitalism’s mysteries can be
uncovered and its logics laid bare. This recognition of the significance of
work remains, I argue, as relevant now as it was when Marx wrote, and it
is this observation that my deployment of the category of the work
society is intended, in part, to underscore.
Waged work remains today the centerpiece of late capitalist economic
systems; it is, of course, the way most people acquire access to the neces-
sities of food, clothing, and shelter. It is not only the primary mechanism
by which income is distributed, it is also the basic means by which status
is allocated, and by which most people gain access to healthcare and
retirement. After the family, waged work is often the most important, if
not sole, source of sociality for millions. Raising children with attributes
that will secure them forms of employment that can match if not surpass
6 introduction
the class standing of their parents is the gold standard of parenting. In
addition, ‘‘making people capable of working is,’’ as Nona Glazer notes,
‘‘the central goal of schooling, a criterion of successful medical and
psychiatric treatment, and an ostensible goal of most welfare policies and
unemployment compensation programs’’ (1993, 33). Helping to make
people ‘‘work ready’’ and moving them into jobs are central objectives of
social work (Macarov 1980, 12), a common rationale for the prison sys-
tem, and an important inducement to perform military service. Indeed,
enforcing work, as the other side of defending property rights, is a key
function of the state (Seidman 1991, 315), and a particular preoccupation
of the postwelfare, neoliberal state.
But making public the foundational role of work is only part of what
Marx achieves with this change in venue. In descending from the sphere
of the market—which he satirized as ‘‘a very Eden’’ of equal rights, indi-
vidual freedom, and social harmony (1976, 280)—into the privatized
spaces of work, Marx seeks not only to publicize but also to politicize the
world of work. That is to say, the focus on the consumption of labor
seeks to expose the social role of work and, at the same time, to pose it as
a political problem. Despite Marx’s insistence that waged work for those
without other options is a system of ‘‘forced labor’’ (1964, 111), it remains
for the most part an abstract mode of domination. 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. In this way, as Moishe Postone notes, the
specific mechanism by which goods and services are distributed in a
capitalist society appears to be grounded not in social convention and
political power but in human need (1996, 161). The social role of waged
work has been so naturalized as to seem necessary and inevitable, some-
thing that might be tinkered with but never escaped. Thus Marx seeks
both to clarify the economic, social, and political functions of work
under capitalism and to problematize the specific ways in which such
world-building practices are corralled into industrial forms and capital-
ist relations of work. This e√ort to make work at once public and politi-
cal is, then, one way to counter the forces that would naturalize, privat-
ize, individualize, ontologize, and also, thereby, depoliticize it.
Work is, thus, not just an economic practice. Indeed, that every indi-
vidual is required to work, that most are expected to work for wages or
be supported by someone who does, is a social convention and disciplin-
GENDER AT WORK
Another way to get at the extra-economic role of work that the concept
of the work society is intended to evoke is through a further consider-
ation of work’s subjectification function, alluded to above. Work pro-
duces not just economic goods and services but also social and political
subjects. In other words, the wage relation generates not just income and
capital, but disciplined individuals, governable subjects, worthy citizens,
and responsible family members. Indeed, given its centrality both to
individuals’ lives and to the social imaginary, work constitutes a par-
8 introduction
ticularly important site of interpellation into a range of subjectivities. It
is, for example, a key site of becoming classed; the workplace is where, as
Marx describes it, the seller of labor power who we are invited to fol-
low into the hidden abode of production ‘‘becomes in actuality what
previously he only was potentially, namely labour-power in action, a
worker’’ (1976, 283). Class identities and relations are made and remade
as some people are excluded from and others conscripted into work, by
means of educational tracks and workplace training regimens, through
the organization of labor processes and the interactions they structure,
via the setting of wage levels, and in relation to judgments about occupa-
tional status. This process of subjectification is perhaps best understood
in terms of a model not of passive construction but of active recruitment,
often less a matter of command and obedience than one of inducement
and attraction (West and Zimmerman 1991, 27–29). Along these lines,
one can observe that some of the attractions of di√erent forms of work
are about joining a relatively advantaged class: becoming a member of
the working class rather than the underclass, a middle-class rather than a
working-class person, a salaried versus an hourly worker, a professional
with a career as opposed to a working sti√ and job holder. As a way to
build on these logics a little further, let us turn to another dimension of
this process of subject making and doing and consider work as a site of
gendering.
To say that work is organized by gender is to observe that it is a site
where, at a minimum, we can find gender enforced, performed, and re-
created. Workplaces are often structured in relation to gendered norms
and expectations. Waged work and unwaged work alike continue to be
structured by the productivity of gender-di√erentiated labor, including
the gender division of both household roles and waged occupations. But
the gendering of work is not just a matter of these institutionalized
tendencies to distinguish various forms of men’s work and women’s
work, but a consequence of the ways that workers are often expected to
do gender at work. Gender is put to work when, for example, workers
draw upon gendered codes and scripts as a way to negotiate relationships
with bosses and co-workers, to personalize impersonal interactions, or
to communicate courtesy, care, professionalism, or authority to clients,
students, patients, or customers. And this is, of course, not limited to
waged forms of work. As Sarah Fenstermaker Berk argues, unwaged do-
mestic work too should be recognized for producing not just goods and
10 introduction
2003, 20–21). Of course, it is di≈cult to predict whether various jobs will
be segregated by gender in this way, whether they will be considered
suitable men’s work or women’s work, and which particular models of
gender such workers will be expected to conform to. In the fast-food
franchise that Leidner studied, cooking was understood by managers
and workers alike as men’s work when it could have just as easily been
coded as a feminized activity. Though it is not always easy to foresee if
jobs will become gendered—or, if so, which jobs will be treated as more
or less appropriate for which specific ideal of gendered comportment—
the occupational segregation that is part and parcel of the gender divi-
sion of labor stands nonetheless as supposed empirical proof of the
necessity of gender di√erence and hierarchy. Thus, as Leidner notes, ‘‘the
considerable flexibility of notions of proper gender enactment does not
undermine the appearance of inevitability and naturalness that con-
tinues to support the division of labor by gender’’ (1993, 196). In her
study of gendered labor in the maquiladoras, Leslie Salzinger argues that
it is precisely the combination of rigid gender categories with the mal-
leability and variability of their enactments and meaning that explains
the resilience of gender as a principle of human di√erentiation (2003,
25). In this sense, ironically, the tremendous plasticity of gender rein-
forces rather than undermines its naturalization.
WORK VALUES
The category of the work society refers not just to the socially mediating
and subjectively constitutive roles of work but to the dominance of its
values. Challenging the present organization of work requires not only
that we confront its reification and depoliticization but also its nor-
mativity and moralization. Work is not just defended on grounds of
economic necessity and social duty; it is widely understood as an indi-
vidual moral practice and collective ethical obligation. Traditional work
values—those that preach the moral value and dignity of waged work
and privilege such work as an essential source of individual growth, self-
fulfillment, social recognition, and status—continue to be e√ective in
encouraging and rationalizing the long hours US workers are supposed
to dedicate to waged work and the identities they are expected to invest
there. This normalizing and moralizing ethic of work should be very
familiar to most of us; it is, after all, routinely espoused in managerial
discourse, defended in the popular media, and enshrined in public poli-
12 introduction
reconsideration and reinvention of feminist perspectives on waged work
—its ever-shifting realities and its long-standing values.
A second feminist strategy concentrates on e√orts to revalue unwaged
forms of household-based labor, from housework to caring work. Cer-
tainly making this socially necessary labor visible, valued, and equitably
distributed remains a vital feminist project as well. The problem with
both of these strategies—one focused on gaining women’s entry into all
forms of waged work and the other committed to gaining social recogni-
tion of, and men’s equal responsibility for, unwaged domestic work—is
their failure to challenge the dominant legitimating discourse of work.
On the contrary, each approach tends to draw upon the language and
sentiments of the traditional work ethic to win support for its claims
about the essential dignity and special value of women’s waged or un-
waged labor.∏ How might feminism contest the marginalization and
underestimation of unwaged forms of reproductive labor, without trad-
ing on the work ethic’s mythologies of work? Feminists, I suggest, should
focus on the demands not simply or exclusively for more work and better
work, but also for less work; we should focus not only on revaluing
feminized forms of unwaged labor but also challenge the sanctification
of such work that can accompany or be enabled by these e√orts.
The question is, then, how to struggle against both labor’s misrecog-
nition and devaluation on the one hand, and its metaphysics and moral-
ism on the other hand. The refusal of work, a concept drawn from the
autonomous Marxist tradition, will help to focus the analysis on the
question of work’s meaning and value. In contrast to some other types of
Marxism that confine their critique of capitalism to the exploitation and
alienation of work without attending to its overvaluation, this tradition
o√ers a more expansive model of critique that seeks to interrogate at
once capitalist production and capitalist (as well as socialist) productiv-
ism. From the perspective of the refusal of work, the problem with work
cannot be reduced to the extraction of surplus value or the degradation
of skill, but extends to the ways that work dominates our lives. 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. Although
there are a number of important analyses of the most exploited forms of
waged and unwaged work performed by workers both in the United
States and beyond its borders, the larger systems of labor and especially
14 introduction
value, living labor can yield both a critical standpoint from which the
alienating and exploitative conditions of modern work can be critically
interrogated and a utopian potential that can inform speculations about
the revolutionary transformation of those conditions. By this account,
the human capacity for labor may be hobbled by the organization of
waged work, but as a collective creative potential, can also exceed them.
As far as the classic Arendtian approach to the categories is con-
cerned, the distance it places between both labor and work on the one
hand, and the legitimate business of the political on the other hand,
renders it less useful for my purposes. As for the example from the
Marxist tradition, while I recognize the power of the distinction it poses,
I find it ill-suited to a critique that takes aim at both the structures of
work and its dominant values. The trouble with the category of living
labor deployed in this way as an alternative to work is, as I see it, that it is
haunted by the very same essentialized conception of work and inflated
notion of its meaning that should be called into question. To the extent
that it is imbued in this way with the productivist values I want to
problematize, it can neither provide the critical leverage necessary to
interrogate the dominant ethic of work nor generate an alternative mode
of valuation—a vision of the work society not perfected but overcome.π
Consistent in this respect with Postone’s antiproductivist Marxism, the
ensuing analysis intends not to advance a ‘‘critique of capitalism from the
standpoint of labor,’’ but to pursue a ‘‘critique of labor in capitalism’’
(1996, 5). My refusal to distinguish between work and labor is thus a
wager of sorts: by blocking access to a vision of unalienated and unex-
ploited work in the guise of living labor, one that could live up to the
work ethic’s ideals about labor’s necessity and virtues and would be
worthy of the extravagant praise the ethic bestows, I hope to concentrate
and amplify the critique of work as well as to inspire what I hope will be a
more radical imagination of postwork futures.
In place of the opposition between labor and work, I will employ a
number of other distinctions over the course of the argument to se-
cure some critical insight into particular dimensions of work and to
imagine other possibilities. These will include the distinction between
work time and non-work time, between work and life, between time
for what we are obligated to do and time for ‘‘what we will,’’ or—to
mark di√erences at yet another level of abstraction—between the cate-
gory of antiwork used to signal the deconstructive moment of this cri-
Whereas the distinction between work and labor will be suspended for
the purposes of this analysis, the relationship between work and class is a
link I want to maintain, if only obliquely. Class is, of course, a central
category of Marxist political economy, as Marx makes clear in what
follows the passage from Capital cited above. Consider the first thing
we see when we accompany the two owners of property—in one case,
money; in the other, labor power—as they descend from the Eden of
market exchange where they meet to trade equivalents into the hidden
abode of production where one party is set to work. ‘‘When we leave this
sphere of simple circulation or the exchange of commodities,’’ Marx
writes, ‘‘a certain change takes place, or so it appears, in the physiog-
nomy of our dramatis personae. He who was previously the money-
owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-
power follows as his worker’’ (1976, 280). Where we had observed two
equal individuals, each in possession of a commodity, who agree to make
an exchange for the benefit of each, now we witness the inequality that
separates the one who steps in front from the one who follows behind;
with this shift of the locus of perception from the marketplace to the
workplace, the existence of a social hierarchy based on class comes into
sharp focus.
Despite the centrality of class in traditional Marxist analysis, work
remains my privileged object of study and preferred terrain of political
struggle. So let me say something about the relationship between work
and class and what might be at stake in di√erent formulations of its
terms. There are at least two ways to approach the relationship be-
tween the categories: one draws a rather sharp distinction between them,
whereas the other finds overlapping concerns. I will start with the first.
The di√erence between the concepts is perhaps most starkly posed when
work understood as a process is compared to class conceived in terms of
an outcome—that is, as a category (whether explained by reference to
ownership, wealth, income, occupation, or forms of belonging) designed
to map patterns of economic inequality. To the extent that class is de-
fined and measured in this way, as an outcome rather than an activity,
then its utility for my purposes will be limited.
16 introduction
I am, of course, not the first to raise such concerns about this ap-
proach to the category of class. For example, the potential shortcomings
of the concept have long been debated within Marxist feminism. The
original ‘‘woman question’’ was, after all, generated by the disjuncture
between the categories of gender and class, and the question this posed
for the relationship between feminism and class struggle. But the trouble
with class for second-wave feminists was not just that it might be inade-
quate to broader, extra-economic fields of analysis; the problem was that
to the extent that class was conceived—as it typically was—as a gender-
and race-blind category, its ability to register the contours of even nar-
rowly economic hierarchies was limited as well. For some of the same
reasons that I want to foreground the category of work over that of class,
Iris Young once argued in favor of substituting the Marxist category of
division of labor for class as a primary analytic of Marxist feminism. In
this classic contribution to second-wave Marxist feminism, Young de-
scribes at least two advantages of this methodological shift. First, the
division of labor has at once a broader reach than class and allows a more
di√erentiated application. Not only can it be used to register multiple
divisions of labor by class as well as by gender, race, and nation, but it
can, as Young explains, also expose ‘‘specific cleavages and contradictions
within a class’’ (1981, 51; emphasis added)—not just along the lines of
gender, race, and nation, but also, potentially, of occupation and income.
Thus the category of the gender division of labor, for example, enables a
focus on gendered patterns of work ‘‘without assuming that all women
in general or all women in a particular society have a common and
unified situation’’ (55). Like the division of labor, the category of work
seems to me at once more capacious and more finely tuned than the
category of class. After all, work, including its absence, is both important
to and di√erently experienced within and across lines of class, gender,
race, and nation. In this sense, the politics of and against work has
the potential to expand the terrain of class struggle to include actors
well beyond that classic figure of traditional class politics, the industrial
proletariat.
Consider too the second advantage noted by Young: ‘‘The category of
division of labor can not only refer to a set of phenomena broader than
that of class, but also more concrete.’’ Unlike class, by her account, the
division of labor ‘‘refers specifically to the activity of labor itself, and the
specific social and institutional relations of that activity,’’ proceeding
18 introduction
and Engels understand it, is a matter not merely of the social construc-
tion of subjects but a matter of creative activity, of doing and making, the
ontological trajectories of which are equally synchronic and diachronic.
By focusing on laboring practices, or ‘‘living sensuous activity’’ (64),
materialism as Marx and Engels conceive it is a matter not merely of the
social construction of subjects but of creative activity, the capacity not
only to make commodities but to remake a world. In this way, the focus
on laboring practices, on the labor process and the relations of labor, can
register the workers’ power to act, in contrast, it seems to me, to their
relative disempowerment that is registered in the economic outcomes the
categories of class are often used to map and measure.Ω
So by at least one way of reckoning, class and work belong to di√erent
fields of analysis, and my project pursues the critical study of work
instead of class analysis and antiwork politics as a substitute for class
struggle. But there is another way to approach class that does not pro-
duce such a sharp contrast with the category of work and that yields a
di√erent and, I think, more compelling approach to this territory. The
distinction between the two fields of analysis becomes rather less clear
when class too is conceived in terms of a process rather than an outcome.
Process notions of class disrupt the functionalism of static mappings of
class formations by attending to the practices by and relations within
which they are secured, re-created, and challenged.∞≠ If class is figured as
a process of becoming classed, it may be that work—including struggles
over what counts as work—could be conceived as a useful lens through
which to approach class; in this way, the struggle against work could be a
terrain of class politics.
But let me add one caveat: rather than conceiving class groupings and
relations as the ground of antiwork politics, as that which provides its
fuel and organizational form, it might be better to think of them as what
might emerge from these e√orts. By this reading, class formation, or
what the autonomist tradition calls class composition, is best conceived
as an outcome of struggles rather than their cause. The particular com-
position of the working class that might emerge from this politics of
work—that is, the collectivities that might coalesce around its issues and
the divisions that might develop in the interstices of antiwork struggles
and in relation to postwork imaginaries—remains an open question. To
the extent that the concerns it raises carry the potential to cut across
traditional class divisions, a politics against work might serve to de-
Whereas my analysis ignores the di√erence between work and labor and,
in the end, defers the question of the precise relationship between work
and class, it presumes the significance of another distinction, the one
between freedom and equality. To get a sense of how this pair of concepts
is conceived for the purposes of this project, let us return yet again to
Marx’s description of what we see when we descend with the owners of
money and labor power from the realm of market exchange to the realm
of production. To recall our earlier discussion of the passage, accom-
panying the change of venue is a visible change in the physiognomy of the
dramatis personae: we see the money owner stride out in front as capital-
ist, while the possessor of labor power follows behind as worker. ‘‘The
one,’’ Marx continues, ‘‘smirks self-importantly and is intent on business;
the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own
hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but—a hiding’’ (1976,
280; translation modified). Whereas we had, as noted above, witnessed
the formal equivalence of contractors in the labor market, in the realm of
work we discover hierarchy. As the conclusion of the passage suggests,
however, it is not only inequality that is revealed, with the capitalist
striding in front and the worker following behind, but subordination,
with the former smirking and self-important and the latter timid and
holding back. In other words, the critical analysis of work reveals not only
exploitation but—as the reference to the violence of a hiding serves to
amplify—domination.∞∞
The domination and subordination experienced at work is not merely
incidental to processes of exploitation. Carole Pateman’s analysis of the
20 introduction
employment contract is illuminating on this point. By her account, the
problem with the labor contract is not just a function of the coerced entry
that is ensured by the absence of viable alternatives to waged labor, nor is
it only a matter of the inequality that is produced as the result of the
contract’s terms. To translate this into a Marxist vocabulary, the problem
can be reduced neither to forced labor nor to exploitation. Rather, we
need to pay more attention to the relationship of dominance and submis-
sion that is authorized by the waged labor contract and that shapes
labor’s exercise. Exploitation is possible, Pateman notes, because ‘‘the
employment contract creates the capitalist as master; he has the political
right to determine how the labour of the worker will be used’’ (1988, 149).
This relation of command and obedience, the right of the employer to
direct his or her employees that is granted by the contract, is not so much
a byproduct of exploitation as its very precondition.
Marx too would seem to be quite clear that the problem with work
cannot be reduced to the terms of its recompense, but rather extends
into the very heart of the wage relation and the labor process it com-
mands. That is why he insists on describing the program of raising wages
as only ‘‘better payment for the slave’’ (1964, 118). To focus narrowly on
outcomes rather than processes, and on inequality and not also on un-
freedom, is to impoverish the critique of capitalism. Marx muses about a
comparably inadequate approach in ‘‘Critique of the Gotha Program’’:
‘‘It is as if, among slaves who have at last got behind the secret of slavery
and broken out in rebellion, a slave still in thrall to obsolete notions were
to inscribe on the programme of the rebellion: Slavery must be abolished
because the feeding of slaves in the system of slavery cannot exceed a
certain low maximum!’’ (1978, 535).
I am thus interested in adding to the critique of the exploitative and
alienating dimensions of work a focus on its political relations of power
and authority, as relations of rulers and ruled. My inspiration for this, it
should be noted, is not only these readings of Marx, but certain strands
of 1970s feminism. A commitment to freedom in conjunction with or
beyond equality was what distinguished the more radical sectors of the
early second wave of US feminism from liberal feminists of the time.
Refusing to honor the ‘‘do not enter’’ sign on the door leading to the
so-called private terrains of the family, marriage, and sexuality—a sign
meant to ban political judgment of relations that were thought to be
governed only by the exigencies of nature or prerogatives of individual
22 introduction
on an Arendtian formulation, freedom requires plurality (2005, 20).
Thus Arendt provocatively declares: ‘‘If men wish to be free, it is precisely
sovereignty they must renounce’’ (1961, 165). Freedom in this sense de-
mands not the absence of power but its democratization.
Although political theorists like Brown and Zerilli are helpful in elab-
orating a notion of freedom that can serve as a central analytic and
principle of political aspiration, political theory in general, as noted
above, has not attended su≈ciently to work. Work has been relatively ne-
glected not only as a practice productive of hierarchies—a scene of gen-
dering, racialization, and becoming classed—but as an arena in which to
develop and pursue a freedom-centered politics. Yet at the same time, as
Michael Denning reminds us, ‘‘the workplace remains the fundamental
unfree association of civil society’’ (2004, 224). It is the site of many of the
most palpable and persistent relations of domination and subordination
that people confront, even if these are not conventionally perceived as
potentially alterable enough to be regarded as properly political matters.
If, as I maintain, a political theory of work should address the problem of
freedom, a political theory of freedom should also focus on work. My
interest, then, is in developing a feminist political theory of work that
could pose work itself—its structures and its ethics, its practices and
relations—not only as a machine for the generation of inequalities, but as
a political problem of freedom.∞≥ Linking the previous distinction be-
tween class and work to this conceptual pair might help to clarify my
concerns in this respect. Rather than a politics of class focused primarily
on issues of economic redistribution and economic justice—particularly
a politics that seeks to alter wage levels to redraw the map of class
categories—the politics of work I am interested in pursuing also investi-
gates questions about the command and control over the spaces and
times of life, and seeks the freedom to participate in shaping the terms of
what collectively we can do and what together we might become. If what I
am calling a ‘‘politics of class outcomes’’ lodges its central complaint
against the inequalities of capitalist society, the politics of work that I
would like to see elaborated would also levy a critique at its unfreedoms.∞∂
24 introduction
transactions between capitalist and worker (both of whom are male)
follows timidly behind, carrying groceries, baby, and diapers. (Hart-
sock 1983, 234)
26 introduction
cooperation that centered on the factory, in which the proletariat was
once imagined as the singularly revolutionary subject, to a more expan-
sive set of sites and subjects. The focal point of analysis for this expanded
political terrain might best be described as the contradiction between
capital accumulation and social reproduction.∞∫ Capital requires, for
example, time both to ‘‘consume’’ labor power and to produce (or re-
produce) it, and the time devoted to one is sometimes lost to the other.
The competing requirements of creating surplus value and sustaining
the lives and socialities upon which it depends form a potential fault line
through capitalist political economies, one that might serve to generate
critical thinking and political action. Under the conditions of Fordism,
for example, this meant that capital was dependent on a family-based
model of social reproduction, one that was in some respects functional
to its purposes but was in other ways a potential hindrance to its hege-
mony. Thus we find in a body of management literature and practice that
spans the Fordist and post-Fordist periods an expressed need to locate
and preserve some kind of balance between work and family—a relation-
ship that many feminists, on the contrary, struggled to expose as a prod-
uct of normative imposition rather than natural proclivity and a site of
flagrant contradiction rather than mere imbalance.
But just as Marxist feminism’s critical study of work was limited, at
least for the purposes of this project, by its productivist propensities, so
too the focus on locating and cultivating revolutionary possibilities in
relation to work was sometimes compromised by a susceptibility to
functionalist logics. The temptation of functionalism is, of course, not
peculiar to feminist theory. Indeed, its presence at some level reflects a
methodological and political choice: whether to concentrate on how
social systems persist over time, or to highlight the ways that they can
and do change. Foucault explains it this way: because of the instability
and unpredictability generated by the ‘‘agonism’’ of power relations on
the one hand and the ‘‘intransitivity of freedom’’ on the other hand,
there is always the option ‘‘to decipher the same events and the same
transformations either from inside the history of struggle or from the
standpoint of the power relationships’’ (1983, 223, 226)—a pair of options
between which his own work could be said to oscillate. This same meth-
odological distinction marks a long-standing division within the Marxist
tradition as well. Thus, for example, although they both o√er systematic
mappings of capitalist logics and social formations, Marx’s Grundrisse
28 introduction
moving beyond the claim that if it were to be fully recognized, ade-
quately compensated, and equally divided, then the existing model of
household-based reproduction would be rectified. A more expansive
conception of social reproduction, coupled with the refusal of work,
might be used to frame a more compelling problematic. What happens
when social reproduction is understood as the production of the forms
of social cooperation on which accumulation depends or, alternatively,
as the rest of life beyond work that capital seeks continually to harness to
its times, spaces, rhythms, purposes, and values? What I am in search of
is a conception of social reproduction—of what it is we might organize
around—that can pose the full measure of its antagonism with the ex-
igencies of capital accumulation, a biopolitical model of social reproduc-
tion less readily transformed into new forms of work and thus less easily
recuperated within the present terms of the work society.
The third aspect of the Marxist feminist tradition that I want to
acknowledge here is its commitment to thinking within a horizon of
utopian potential, that is, in relation to the possibility of fundamental
transformation (Feminist Review Collective 1986, 8). Work is not only a
site of exploitation, domination, and antagonism, but also where we
might find the power to create alternatives on the basis of subordinated
knowledges, resistant subjectivities, and emergent models of organiza-
tion. At least some of this literature focuses on both antiwork politics and
postwork imaginaries. This model of utopian politics that can ‘‘make the
creation of prefigurative forms an explicit part of our movement against
capitalism’’ and challenge the ‘‘politics of deferment’’ that would post-
pone such innovations to some distant future after ‘‘the revolution’’ is
something that I think feminist theory should embrace (Rowbotham,
Segal, and Wainwright 1979, 147, 140). The problem with these visions of
radical social change from a contemporary perspective is that they were
most often conceived of as variations on a theme named socialism, even if
some called for ‘‘a new kind of socialism’’ or a socialist revolution that
would be equally feminist and antiracist.≤≠ Today, however, it seems
unlikely that socialism can serve as a persuasive signifier of a postcapital-
ist alternative. There are at least three kinds of problems with the term. At
one level, there is the problem of the name itself: it has been some time
since the language of socialism could resonate in the United States as a
legible and generative utopian vocabulary (even though it continues to
serve occasionally as a viable dystopia for the Right). But it is not just a
CHAPTER OVERVIEWS
The questions raised and points of focus elaborated above are meant to
set the stage for the specific arguments pursued in the remaining chap-
30 introduction
ters. One way to approach the overall structure of the discussion that
follows is to separate it into two parts: a first part, encompassing chapters
1 and 2, that concentrates on the diagnostic and deconstructive dimen-
sions of the critical theory of work; and a second part, including chapters
3, 4, and 5, that focuses on the prescriptive and reconstructive aspects of
the project. Whereas ‘‘refusal’’ is the animating category of the first part,
‘‘demand’’ anchors the analysis in the second part. The argument thus
proceeds from the refusal of the present terms of the work society to
demands for remedies and for the imagining of alternative futures.
As noted above, the work ethic is at the center of the political theory
of and against work that I want to begin to elaborate. A critique of work
that seeks to challenge its dominance over our lives must take on the
ethical discourse that gives work its meaning and defends its primacy.
The first two chapters seek to develop a critical account of the work ethic
and to explore some of the theoretical resources through which it might
be interrogated. Chapter 1 concentrates on the nature and function of
the work ethic in the United States. In what may be a fitting departure for
a text so often indebted to Marxist resources, the analysis in chapter 1
draws on one of that tradition’s most famous critiques, Max Weber’s
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Tracing the continuities and
shifts in the work ethic over the course of its di√erent incarnations—first
as a Protestant ethic, and later as an industrial and then a postindustrial
ethic—the analysis seeks to map the recent history of the work ethic and
to raise questions about its future. Today when neoliberal and post-
neoliberal regimes demand that almost everyone work for wages (never
mind that there is not enough work to go around), when postindustrial
production employs workers’ minds and hearts as well as their hands,
and when post-Taylorist labor processes increasingly require the self-
management of subjectivity so that attitudes and a√ective orientations to
work will themselves produce value, the dominant ethical discourse of
work may be more indispensable than it has ever been, and the refusal of
its prescriptions even more timely. The analysis thus attempts to account
not only for the ethic’s longevity and power, but also its points of in-
stability and vulnerability.
Chapter 2 explores some theoretical tools with which we might ex-
ploit some of these openings. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s critique of
productivism, the chapter explores the limitations of two familiar para-
digms of Marxist theory, labeled here ‘‘socialist modernization’’ and
32 introduction
basic income and shorter hours for two reasons. First, like the demand
for living wages and others, they represent important remedies for some
of the problems with the existing system of wages and hours. A guaran-
teed and universal basic income would enhance the bargaining position
of all workers vis-à-vis employers and enable some people to opt out of
waged work without the stigma and precariousness of means-tested wel-
fare programs. A thirty-hour full-time work week without a decrease in
pay would help to address some of the problems of both the under-
employed and the overworked. The second reason for focusing on these
demands—which I think distinguishes them from many other demands
for economic reform, including the demand for a living wage—is their
capacity not only to improve the conditions of work but to challenge the
terms of its dominance. These demands do not a≈rm our right to work
so much as help us to secure some measure of freedom from it.≤≤ For the
purposes of this project, I am interested in demands that would not only
advance concrete reforms of work but would also raise broader ques-
tions about the place of work in our lives and spark the imagination of a
life no longer so subordinate to it—demands that would serve as vectors
rather than terminal points.≤≥
Chapter 3 begins with a rereading of the 1970s movement for wages
for housework, the most promising dimensions of which, I argue, have
been poorly understood. This instance of Marxist feminist theory and
practice is particularly relevant to this project because of its roots in the
autonomist tradition and for its commitment to, and distinctive deploy-
ment of, the refusal of work. Building on some of this literature’s unique
analyses of the gendered political economy of work, its mode of struggle
against the organization of domestic work, and its treatment of the
feminist political practice of demanding, I go on to propose a rationale
for a di√erent demand: the demand for a guaranteed basic income. I
argue that this demand can deliver on some of the potential of wages
for housework while being more consistent with conditions in a post-
Fordist political economy. Drawing on a framework gleaned from the
wages for housework literature, the demand for basic income can do
more than present a useful reform; it can serve both to open a critical
perspective on the wage system and to provoke visions of a life not so
dependent on the system’s present terms and conditions.
This particular understanding of what a demand is and what it can do
guides the analysis in chapter 4 of another demand, this one for shorter
34 introduction
and address some topics that they neglected. I begin with two points of
clarification. First, my preference for politics over ethics as the terrain of
antiwork struggle and postwork speculation raises a question about the
relationship between politics and ethics that the analysis presumes. Also
meriting discussion is a second relationship, between the project’s radi-
cal aspirations to remake a life outside of work and its comparatively
moderate demands. This seeming incongruence between ambitious ends
and modest means warrants an elaboration of the relationship between
reform and revolution that informs the project. In the final section, I
take another step back from the material to consider one way to bring
the two demands together as part of a broader political e√ort to defend
life against work, the colloquial version of which could be described as
‘‘getting a life.’’ The rubric of life against work is, I propose, both ca-
pacious and pointed enough to frame a potent antiwork politics and fuel
a postwork imagination.
In the epigraph above, C. Wright Mills laments the fact that we mea-
sure the satisfaction of jobs only against the standard of other jobs: ‘‘One
type of work, or one particular job, is contrasted with another type,
experienced or imagined, within the present world of work.’’ That is to
say, ‘‘judgments are rarely made about the world of work as presently
organized as against some other way of organizing it’’ (1951, 229). I want
to make a case for the importance of a political theory of work and
specifically, a political theory that seeks to pose work as a political prob-
lem of freedom. Beyond any particular claim or category—beyond any of
the specific arguments about the role of the work ethic in sustaining the
structures and cultures of work, the legitimacy of basic income, the need
for shorter hours, or the utility of utopian thought—the project is meant
to raise some basic questions about the organization and meaning of
work. The assumptions at the heart of the work ethic, not only about the
virtues of hard work and long hours but also about their inevitability,
are too rarely examined, let alone contested. What kinds of conceptual
frameworks and political discourses might serve to generate new ways of
thinking about the nature, value, and meaning of work relative to other
practices and in relation to the rest of life? How might we expose the fun-
damental structures and dominant values of work—including its tem-
poralities, socialities, hierarchies, and subjectivities—as pressing political
phenomena? If why we work, where we work, with whom we work, what
we do at work, and how long we work are social arrangements and hence
36 introduction
chapter 1
...................................
SPIRIT OF C APITALISM
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 impor-
tant, they are also insu≈cient. 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
e√ect so many of us come to accept and inhabit this requirement. One of
the forces that manufactures such consent is the o≈cial 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—ver-
sions 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 accom-
panied 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 contra-
dictions 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 pro-
cesses, 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.
Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism remains a touch-
stone for studies of the work ethic, including this one, for good reason.
As an unintended consequence of the Reformation, the Protestant work
38 chapter one
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 par-
ticular was the ethical sanction for and the psychological impetus to
work; ascetic Protestantism preached the moral import of constant and
methodical productive e√ort 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 e√ect
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 o√ers 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 di√erent 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 eco-
nomic determinists, and presents a sharply contrasting analysis that em-
phasizes the unpredictable emergence and historical force of ideas. Marx
and Weber each o√er 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 their consciousnesses as em-
ployers and employees. Weber explains the ideas that gave the political
economists’ parable about the ethically deserving and undeserving its
authority and insists that this story must be understood as more than an
ideological cover for the use of force; it was itself part of the arsenal of
historical change in Europe and North America, and part of the founda-
tion upon which capitalism was built. Indeed, the two analyses mirror
one another, with the role of consent and coercion reversed: in one, the
proletariat must first be forced into the wage relation before its consent
40 chapter one
historical relationship between capitalist development and religious be-
lief less as a strictly historical claim than as a genealogical device. Indeed,
what I find most compelling about Weber’s presentation is not the argu-
ment about the religious origins of capitalist economic institutions, but
the way that putting the analysis in a religious frame enables Weber to
capture and e√ectively convey both the specificity and the peculiarity of
this orientation to work. The discussion that follows will thus focus
more on the rhetorical force of the causal argument than on the details
of its empirical adequacy. As we will see, posing the historical claim
about the unholy melding of religion and capitalism in terms of a neat
causal argument—with its sharp and definitive contrasts between a ‘‘be-
fore’’ to the Protestant work ethic that Weber casts as ‘‘traditionalism’’
and an ‘‘after’’ that he assumes to be secular—serves to highlight, clarify,
and dramatize this capitalist ethos, to train our attention on and school
our responses to the phenomenon. Each of these transitions—first from
the traditionalist to the Protestant orientation to work, and then from
that religiously informed ethos to a secular one—o√ers an opportunity
to defamiliarize what was already in Weber’s day, and certainly is today,
an all too familiar formulation of the nature and value of work.
Though cast as an elegantly simple and straightforward causal argu-
ment, Weber’s account nonetheless manages to convey many of the com-
plexities of this animating ethos of capitalist development. The Protes-
tant work ethic is not a single doctrine so much as it is a set of ideas, a
mixture or composite of elements that sometimes work in conjunction
and other times in contradiction. Indeed, it is by Weber’s reckoning a
highly paradoxical phenomenon, at once powerfully e√ective and spec-
tacularly self-destructive. The paradoxical character is nowhere more
evident than in Weber’s claim that this Puritan brand of productivism
unwittingly sowed the seeds of its own destruction: the rationalization it
helped to fuel eventually undercut the religious basis of the Protestant
ethic. While the ascetic ethos of work lives on in the spirit of capitalism,
as the ‘‘ghost of dead religious beliefs’’ (Weber 1958, 182) its existence
and e√ects are now far more mysterious, a haunting that is at once
palpably present and strangely elusive. Weber’s analysis is attentive to
several points of instability on which my reflections on the ethic’s later
manifestations will build. As we trace its later iterations under the Ford-
ist and post-Fordist periods of US history, we see that some of its ele-
ments remain constant while others shift. Indeed, the history of the work
42 chapter one
qualities that Weber discerns in what we commonly take to be the most
instrumental of endeavors: disciplined, productive work.
This irrationality of our commitment to work as if it were a calling is,
however, also the element of this new cultural orientation to work that
Weber may have struggled most to bring into focus. This ‘‘peculiar idea’’
of one’s duty in a calling, ‘‘so familiar to us to-day, but in reality so little a
matter of course’’ (54), has settled into the cultural fabric, making it
di≈cult to grasp on its own terms. The value of work, along with its
centrality to our lives, is one of the most stubbornly naturalized and
apparently self-evident elements of modern and late, or postmodern,
capitalist societies. To examine its social and historical specificity and
understand its impact on our lives, this most familiar of doctrines must
first be rendered strange. Indeed, given the normalization of these work
values, perhaps the most important task and lasting achievement of
Weber’s analysis is the powerful estrangement from the reified common
sense about work that it manages to produce. In this case, the periodiz-
ing frame and story of the ethic’s religious origins serve Weber well; the
alternative historical perspectives they identify provide the reader with
the possibility of critical distance. In fact, the ethic is defamiliarized from
two directions: first by considering it from the perspective of the ‘‘tradi-
tionalist’’ orientation to work that it supplanted, and second from the
perspective of the secularized world from which the reader can then look
back.
In a genealogical move, Weber finds early in his analysis a point of
historical contrast in relation to which the work values now considered
so obvious and necessary are revealed to be the product of a specific and
indeterminate history. ‘‘Traditionalism’’ is Weber’s label for a precapital-
ist orientation to work that treats it as no more than a means to concrete
and finite ends. The ‘‘immensely stubborn resistance’’ of those who pre-
fer working less and meeting their traditional consumption needs to
working and having more (60) was, as Weber tells the story, ‘‘the most
important opponent with which the spirit of capitalism, in the sense of a
definite standard of life claiming ethical sanction, has had to struggle’’
(58). From a traditionalist perspective, the new Protestant ethic of work
—the willingness to dedicate oneself to work as an end in itself, living to
work instead of working to live—makes little sense. Once it supplants
older orientations, however, ‘‘economic acquisition is no longer subordi-
nated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This
44 chapter one
ethic is well attuned to a new cycle of capital, production not for finite
consumption but for continuous accumulation.∑
The contrast to traditionalism provides Weber’s analysis with an initial
distancing mechanism; but we gain even more critical leverage through
its estrangement from a di√erent direction, by looking back on the
Protestant ethic from the perspective of the secular world for which it
served as midwife. Weber’s text opens this angle of vision early on by
organizing the argument in accordance with the protocols and in the
language of social science, addressing us from the beginning as denizens
of the rationalized world whose origins we are to explore.∏ The irrational
element of the new dogma of work is again highlighted, but this time as
we focus our attention on the specific Protestant doctrines that fueled
it—the strangeness of which, from a modern perspective, Weber need
not belabor. Of these doctrines, Weber singles out Calvin’s view of pre-
destination, the psychological e√ect of which he insists was ‘‘extraor-
dinarily powerful’’ (1958, 128). It also stands out for the way that it
further compounds the irrational noninstrumentality of the behaviors it
prescribes. As Weber explains it, the doctrine encourages the believer to
work as if working were an end in itself, but not because by doing so one
could earn a place among the chosen; one’s fate was predetermined and
could not be altered through the performance of good works. Commit-
ment to work is prescribed rather as a way to assuage the anxiety pro-
duced by such uncertainty and to strengthen one’s confidence in being
among the worthy elect (112). This orientation to work was thus less the
result of one’s faith in the afterlife than constitutive of it; hard work and
success are not a means to salvation, but at most signs of it. To the extent
that work acquires more meaning as an act of signification than as a
production, there is something ritualistic about our adherence to its
discipline. As a means to neither concrete material nor spiritual rewards
but rather as an end in itself, the instrumentality of work discipline is
even further weakened. Not even religiously instrumental, the rationality
of the behavior appears increasingly tenuous.
If we pause for a moment to examine the development of productivist
norms since the period of Weber’s focus, we can get another perspective
on this gap between means and ends. Weber’s study explained the subjec-
tive constitution of the proletariat and bourgeoisie; the story continues
once they are successfully converted to the new values and rhythms of
industrial discipline, and later still as they adjust to the conditions of
46 chapter one
ic’s precepts appears even more di≈cult to account for in terms of a
familiar means-ends rationality. At least the Puritan could explain his or
her adherence to work discipline in relation to spiritual practices and
meanings. Once the religious rationale loses its force, the continued
devotion to work becomes more mysterious. Thus, ‘‘where the fulfill-
ment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and
cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as
economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to
justify it at all’’ (Weber 1958, 182). Haunted by the work ethic, our com-
mitments remain di≈cult to defend; attempts to explain them often
exhibit more the qualities of post hoc rationalizations than su≈cient
accounts of our motives.Ω Yet the puzzle of our motivation would seem to
be of little practical concern; when we have no memory or little imagina-
tion 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. Rather, our focus is generally confined to how, to draw on a
famous phrase from another text, ‘‘we shall set to work and meet the
‘demands of the day’ ’’ (Weber 1946, 156).
Once again, the religious framing of the narrative serves to amplify
Weber’s final indictment of the now-secularized spirit of capitalism and
the dependence on waged labor that it promotes. By the end of his analy-
sis, one can detect an unexpected nostalgia for the religiously motivated
ethic, a phenomenon that the text had prior to that point treated with a
detachment that would seem to be fueled by equal parts scientific objec-
tivity and ethical distaste. From the perspective of the Puritan worker,
there is a hollowness, a purposelessness, to our secularized ‘‘workaday
existence’’ (149). The historical trajectory along which this new subjec-
tivity of work develops lends to Weber’s final characterization, borrowed
from Goethe, a tragic dimension: ‘‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists
without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civiliza-
tion never before achieved’’ (1958, 182). Cast as a delivery from the flames
of religion to the fire of disenchantment, the secularization of the ethic is
greeted with Weber’s patented ambivalence as an ambiguous form of
progress, at once welcome, calamitous, and inescapable.
Weber’s insistence on the religious origins of secular ethics calls our at-
tention to a second antinomy through the improbable pairing of the
48 chapter one
haviors, originally by dividing their responsibility between two classes:
‘‘The treatment of labour as a calling became as characteristic of the
modern worker as the corresponding attitude toward acquisition of the
business man’’ (179). Thus, for example, in addition to encouraging
workers to accept the primacy of work over the times and spaces of
nonwork, the doctrine also taught workers to respond to wage incen-
tives, to recognize and accept a necessary connection between their con-
tribution as social producers and their corresponding rights to individ-
ual consumption. The work ethic continues to a≈rm the legitimacy of
this connection: consumption goods are the reward for and sign of one’s
contributions and status as a producer. As an antinomy rather than an
oxymoron, the ‘‘worldly asceticism’’ of the Protestant ethic functions not
despite, but because of, the pairing of terms.
The description that Weber evoked of ‘‘specialists without spirit, sen-
sualists without heart’’ stands as a revealing indictment of the ethic’s
prescriptions for dedicated production and controlled acquisition at an
early stage of capitalist development that depended on hard work for
meager rewards from one class, and the accumulation of savings by the
other. Yet, as Weber noted early on, this antinomy is at once central to the
historical significance of the Protestant work ethic and key to its demise.
This worldly brand of asceticism sowed the seeds of its own destruction
as, over time, ‘‘these Puritanical ideals tended to give way under excessive
pressure from the temptations of wealth’’ (174). But although the Puritan
relationship between pleasure and denial at the heart of the Protestant
ethic was undercut, similar dynamics serve to animate subsequent ver-
sions of the ethic. In the Fordist period of industrial capitalism, with
e√orts to sustain a level of mass consumption adequate to the exigencies
of mass production, a new relationship between production and acquisi-
tion 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 (Hunnicutt 1988, 46). Instead of one class of
producers and another of savers, under Fordism, producers were ex-
pected to do double duty as ascetically indulgent consumers. As earning
wages gave us the right to spend, working hours authorized leisure time.
Thus the producer-consumer antinomy continued to serve as an ener-
gizing force under Fordism.
The expansion of consumption and consumer-based identities in the
50 chapter one
tion and his or her reward are more di≈cult to measure; the expansion
of part-time, temporary, and insecure forms of employment renders the
relationship between employment and income more precarious; and the
decline of Fordist and Keynesian ideologies that insisted on and man-
aged the wage-consumption connection at the industry and national
levels makes the relationship between a worker’s labor and his or her
wage even more tenuous. I will explore the implications of these de-
velopments further in chapter 3. Here, I want to emphasize that the work
ethic functions, as Weber originally recognized in the Protestant case, to
stimulate consumption in some relation to production; it prescribes
both productivist and consumerist values, insisting only on their neces-
sary connection, their mutual dependence. Though a constant source of
the ethic’s instability, prescriptions for whatever may be conceived at any
particular moment as ‘‘rational acquisition’’ or ‘‘legitimate’’ consumerist
indulgence remain at the heart of, rather than beyond the purview of,
capital’s productivist ethic.
A third antinomy at the heart of the work ethic that Weber’s analysis
suggests is its promotion of work as a path to independence and the fact
that the individual is thereby subject to dependence on waged labor and
delivered to the sovereignty of employers. Although the wage relation
has come to be considered the hallmark of self-sovereignty, it nonethe-
less remains a relation of subordination, and the autonomy that work is
expected to ensure maintains an uneasy relationship to the ongoing
subjection that it also authorizes. This produces a tension that must be
carefully managed, as both the independence of the worker and his or
her submission to the wage relation fuel social production. It is this
paradoxical figure of what we might call the sovereign individual subject
of exploitation that is increasingly the source of surplus value.
Work is often understood and experienced as a field of individual
agency and as a sign of and a path to self-reliance. The Protestant work
ethic hailed the individual as a moral agent, responsible for achieving the
certainty of his or her own salvation (see Weber 1958, 115). Work was in
this sense a mechanism of spiritual independence: rather than relying
upon religious institutions and authorities, ‘‘the conscientious Puritan
continually supervised his own state of grace’’ (124). The link between
waged work and independence was solidified in the industrial period,
52 chapter one
1994, 325). Independence becomes less a matter of the types of relation-
ships one finds oneself subject to and more a quality of one’s character
(332). ‘‘Postindustrial dependency’’ thus becomes at once increasingly
illegitimate and ‘‘increasingly individualized’’ (325).
As an individualizing discourse, the work ethic serves the time-
honored ideological function of rationalizing exploitation and legitimat-
ing inequality. That all work is good work, that all work is equally desir-
able and inherently useful is, as William Morris once noted, ‘‘a conve-
nient belief to those who live on the labour of others’’ (1999, 128). The
Protestant ethic also ‘‘legalized the exploitation of this specific willing-
ness to work,’’ Weber observes, insofar as it ‘‘interpreted the employer’s
business activity as a calling’’ (1958, 178). From the perspective of the
work ethic, governments are seen to protect the welfare of citizens by
defending their right to work, while employers are not so much extract-
ing surplus value as they are meeting the concrete needs of their em-
ployees for work. Just as the Protestant ethic gave the bourgeois busi-
nessperson ‘‘the comforting assurance that the unequal distribution of
the goods of this world was a special dispensation of Divine Providence’’
(177), the work ethic o√ers in all periods a powerful rationale for eco-
nomic inequality (see Beder 2000, 48; Bauman 1998, 65). Comparable to
the way that the ‘‘unwillingness to work is symptomatic of the lack of
grace’’ (Weber 1958, 159), today the morally suspect state of poverty can
be attributed to the lack of individual e√ort and discipline. After all,
‘‘God’’—today we could add the market—‘‘helps those who help them-
selves’’ (115). As an individualizing discourse, the work ethic eschews
institutional support for what is supposed to be an individual respon-
sibility and obscures the structural processes that limit his or her field of
opportunity.∞≤
But the work ethic serves more than simply the classic ideological
function of passing o√ the values and interests of one class as the values
and interests of all. It also serves a more disciplinary function: beyond
manufacturing common meanings, it constructs docile subjects. The
work ethic thus possesses not just an epistemological force but an e√ec-
tiveness that is properly ontological. Indeed, what is essential about the
work ethic, as Weber originally described it, was what it could do: deliver
workers to their exploitation, not just by manufacturing subjects’ con-
sent to capitalist exploitation, but by constituting both exploiting and
exploitable subjects. By Weber’s account, the subjectification function of
54 chapter one
relation is a hierarchical one, which requires individuals to submit to
command and control. This antinomy—that work and its ethical dis-
course produce both independence and dependence, captured by Weber
in that strange self-discipline he struggles to account for—renders the
wage relation always potentially unstable. The ideal of independence can
always serve as a critical standard against which the organization of the
labor process and the conduct of its managers can be assessed, and a
demand around which workers can organize for reforms. In fact, the
ideal of individual independence has been invoked over the course of US
history to inform struggles against everything from wage slavery to bu-
reaucratic unionism. Even the hard-won reforms of the Fordist period—
the laws governing wages and hours, and social wage provisions that
o√ered new opportunities for many workers to advance into the middle
class and mitigate their immediate dependence on the whims of em-
ployers—were accompanied by new concerns about the state of inde-
pendence that they secured. The critique of the iconic ‘‘organization
man’’ of high Fordism and the standardized individuality of the 1950s
called into question the quality of the freedom that such progress en-
tailed. And although new forms of white-collar employment were seen
to a√ord new autonomy for some workers, by the early 1950s, critics like
C. Wright Mills were calling into question whether this new middle-class
worker—as ‘‘the servant of decision, the assistant of authority, the min-
ion of management’’—had achieved or relinquished his or her individual
independence (1951, 80). These critiques in turn helped to inform the
struggles against worker alienation of the 1960s and 1970s and the conse-
quent reorganization of work and its management under post-Fordism.
But the precariousness that the antinomy generates is not only due to
the static contradiction between the ideal of autonomy and the reality
of submission, or because of the conflicting interests of capital, which
demands dependence, and workers, who clamor for independence. A
deeper source of conflict stems from the fact that capital needs individ-
uals whose control poses ongoing problems. Even Taylorism, that sci-
ence of management with its utopia of the assembly line, recognized that
workers are more valuable as individuals. That is, the Taylorist organiza-
tion of work processes in the industrial factory was not just about ho-
mogenizing a mass workforce and standardizing its output; it was also
promoted by its early boosters as a method that attended to the specific-
ity of each job and the monitoring and measurement of each individual
56 chapter one
degree must, enable thus coexists uneasily with the subjection and de-
pendence that it nonetheless secures (see also Gorz 1999, 38–39).
Whereas The Protestant Ethic provides insight into the first three antin-
omies, the final two require that we move further beyond the historical
territory of Weber’s account. Specifically, they require special attention
to the industrial period and the dynamics of class struggle, antiracism,
and feminism that emerged in that period and continue to shape our
own. The antinomic relationship between subordination and insubor-
dination enabled by the work ethic can be demonstrated through the
example of class struggle; I will use a brief consideration of the histories
of race- and gender-based struggles in the following section to highlight
a final antinomy in the way the ethic has been deployed as a mechanism
of both exclusion and inclusion.
The particular limits of Weber’s account can be illustrated by return-
ing again briefly to the similarities between Marx’s account of primi-
tive accumulation and Weber’s story of early capitalist development. As
noted above, each author focuses on a di√erent ‘‘vanishing mediator’’ in
the transition to a capitalist society: state violence for Marx, religious
doctrine for Weber. Whereas Marx insists that ‘‘force is the midwife of
every old society which is pregnant with a new one’’ (1976, 916), Weber
claims that it was Puritanism that ‘‘stood at the cradle of the modern
economic man’’ (1958, 174). Marx’s story of primitive accumulation and
Weber’s history of the Protestant ethic also end on similar notes. Accord-
ing to Marx, once the capitalist mode of production is in place, the
‘‘bloody discipline’’ deployed to create a class of wage laborers is sup-
planted by a less direct mode of force, the ‘‘silent compulsion of eco-
nomic relations’’ (1976, 905, 899). Weber’s account concludes with the
replacement of the self-discipline of the Puritan by an economic order
capable of determining the lives of every individual with ‘‘irresistible
force’’: ‘‘the Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so’’
(1958, 181).
The problem is that each of the texts wraps up the narrative too
neatly. The story does not end with the assisted birth of economic man;
this is, rather, when the hard work begins, with the raising and cultivat-
ing of productive subjects. Although Weber recognizes that beyond just
58 chapter one
to inculcate the work ethic among laborers, its adoption proved to be
something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, managers often
succeeded in expanding the reach of the traditional ethic of work; on the
other hand, the ethic was not always adopted in the form or with the
results they sought. First, the split between means and ends introduces a
certain indeterminacy. To function as a disciplinary force, the indus-
trial work ethic is articulated—contrary in some respects to the original
Protestant ethic—in terms of earthly goals and tangible rewards. These
then serve as ideals around which workers can struggle for reforms—
demanding, for example, higher wages ensuring more social mobility,
and better, more satisfying work. Second, the process of inculcation
through which willing subjects are fashioned does not establish a mi-
metic relationship between culture and subject; the norm that is inter-
nalized is always in some ways altered or hybridized in the process. The
battles fought within the discursive frames set by these competing ver-
sions of the ethic operate to continually transform their terms.
Since the nineteenth century, the working class has developed its own
version of the work ethic, and this alternative work ethic from below has
been useful to the political projects of contesting the structural exclu-
sions and cultural marginalization of the class.∞∑ This ‘‘laborist work
ethic’’ of the industrial period, one of several dissident versions that we
will continue to discuss in the following section, draws on a variant of
the labor theory of value to celebrate the worth and dignity of waged
work and to contend that such work is entitled to respect and adequate
recompense (Tyler 1983, 200). Rather than malign the shiftless poor, for
example, this version of the ethic takes aim at the idle rich (199). The
laborist ethic was a key element of the class composition of the industrial
proletariat, both helping to construct it as a class and serving as part of
its arsenal. By highlighting and valorizing its productive role, Baudrillard
notes how this laborist work ethic helped to constitute the working class
as a class, serving to render it legible and appealing as a collective iden-
tity: ‘‘The ethic of rational labor, which is of bourgeois origin and which
served historically to define the bourgeoisie as a class, is found renewed
with fantastic amplitude at the level of the working class, also contribut-
ing to define it as a class, that is to circumscribe it in a status of historical
representability’’ (1975, 155). Defined in terms of a ‘‘productivist voca-
tion’’ to match that of the bourgeoisie, the working class could wage its
struggles from a position of dialectical opposition, a position that maxi-
60 chapter one
sal claims about the benefits and gratifications of a lifetime devoted to
work may reflect some of the experiences of one class but mystify those
of another.
The history of the work ethic in the United States reveals not only its
class inflections but also its instantiations as a racialized and gendered
discourse. The previous discussion highlighted the potential dual use of
the work ethic as an instrument of class domination and a tool of class
insubordination, a utility that has served antiracist and feminist strug-
gles as well. A brief look at the racialization of the discourse, and a longer
consideration of its gendering, can reveal another of its contradictory
dynamics: the way it has served as a mechanism of both exclusion and
inclusion. More specifically, I want to focus here on one way the ethic
came to be more inclusive—that is, how it extended its reach beyond the
bourgeois class of the industrial period and today’s professional and
managerial class by being rendered simultaneously exclusive of other
groups. This focus on both the inclusions and exclusions that the work
ethic sustains recalls Weber’s dual emphasis on the egalitarian and hier-
archical e√ects of the new work values. To some extent, the discourse was
a democratizing force that elevated all forms of waged work to the status
of an ethically worthy practice; at the same time, however, it was a
powerful source of hierarchy that played a crucial role in the legitimation
of inequality, now read as a reflection of individual character rather than
a consequence of the structure of waged employment. This last antin-
omy is a characteristic of any disciplinary norm, which, as Foucault
explains it, is simultaneously a force of homogenization and of di√eren-
tiation, at once prescribing ‘‘a conformity that must be achieved’’ and
tracing ‘‘the limit that will define di√erence in relation to all other di√er-
ences’’ (1979, 183).
Consider, for example, how the ethic came to be more inclusive in
terms of class by means of its exclusions based on race and gender. In
the early industrial period, elements of the white working class came
to identify with waged work as a mark of independence and status by
way of their racial identities. The legitimacy of and identification with
what had been resisted as ‘‘wage slavery’’ in the late eighteenth and the
early nineteenth centuries was established ‘‘in time and in comparison’’
to the institution of slavery and those constructed through its sustaining
62 chapter one
publicly unacceptable claims about racial di√erence (see Neubeck and
Cazenave 2001).
The work ethic is not only a racialized but a gendered construction;
women too have served as the excluded others of its various historical
articulations. This was enabled by the historical processes through which
work in the United States became equated with waged work, waged work
was linked to masculinity, and unwaged domestic work was reconceived
as nonproductive women’s work. This lack of recognition of feminized
domestic labor emerged with early industrialization, as unwaged house-
hold work came to stand as the (naturalized and feminized) model of
nonwork that served to contrast and thereby sustain a (now mascu-
linized) concept of work. As Jeanne Boydston explains it, the gender
division of labor thus morphed into a gendered definition of work (1990,
55). Unwaged women (and those waged women who found themselves
judged in relation to this normative model), not subject to the morally
purifying and invigorating e√ects of work discipline, were a justifiably
dependent class. The work ethic could then be embraced as a masculine
ethic while nonwork—a rather more expansive category including every-
thing from leisure practices and consumption work to unwaged agricul-
tural, household, and caring labor—was devalued by its association with
a degraded femininity. Within the industrial gender order that emerged
from these processes, blue-collar manufacturing work was defined as
men’s work, and its masculinization helped to promote acceptance of
and identification with it as work not only befitting a man (Fraser and
Gordon 1994) but as instrumental to becoming a man (see, for example,
Willis 1977, 150–51; Baron 1991, 69).
To take a slight detour from the narrative, it is important to recognize
the link between the gendering of the work ethic and the disciplinary
norm that governs another site of labor, the family ethic. Indeed, the
family ethic functioned as a supplement to the work ethic, serving to
discipline not only unwaged women in the household, but waged work-
ers as well. The family ethic as a mechanism of social regulation and
control was, as Mimi Abramovitz observes, based on the gender division
of labor, and served to articulate and rationalize its terms (1988, 37). But
it was not only applied to the field of unwaged domestic work. Through-
out the industrial period, the conformity of all workers to the traditional
model of the family—a nuclear, heterosexual, patriarchal model—was
promoted by employers, politicians, religious leaders, and reformers as a
64 chapter one
already touched upon the historical importance of the laborist ethic. The
work ethic has been a similarly powerful weapon in the arsenal of anti-
racist struggles. Demanding recognition of the history of hard work and
the commitment to productivist values, the supposed whiteness of the
work ethic has been challenged at every turn. Claims about the strength
of the work ethic have been enlisted in antiracist discourses and projects
of racial uplift from Booker T. Washington’s e√orts to educate students
who ‘‘would learn to love work for its own sake’’ (1971, 148) and Anna
Julia Cooper’s promotion of not only the economic but the social bene-
fits of black women’s unwaged household work (Logan 2002) to William
Julius Wilson’s argument that unemployed and underemployed resi-
dents of the ‘‘urban ghetto’’ are, contrary to those discourses that seek to
pathologize their ‘‘choices,’’ more likely to share than to eschew domi-
nant work values (1996, 179–81).∞π
Although these demands for inclusion have undeniably been impor-
tant historically and e√ective politically, I want to focus here on the
limitations of such e√orts to secure recognition of the moral respectabil-
ity of excluded or marginalized workers and the ethical status of their
labors. The discussion that follows will focus on feminism’s relationship
to the work ethic to illustrate some of these limits. Feminist reformula-
tions of the work ethic have abounded since the nineteenth century,
when ‘‘the work ethic brought its enormous reserves of power to the
women’s movement’’ (Rodgers 1978, 184). As noted in the introduction,
two general feminist strategies for confronting women’s marginalization
in relation to work and its dominant ethic emerged to respond to the
industrial period’s imagination and engineering of the gendered rela-
tionship between waged work and household labor. One such response
accepts the characterization of domestic work as nonwork and focuses
on integrating women into waged work. The tradition of liberal femi-
nism has long praised the virtues and rewards of waged work for women.
Thus in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft decried the enervating and corrupt-
ing indolence encouraged by the norms of middle-class femininity, in-
sisting that ‘‘trifling employments have rendered woman a trifler’’ (1996,
77). But the work ethic may have received its most unconditional sup-
port within feminism in Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, which de-
clared that a woman ‘‘can find identity only in work that is of real value
to society—work for which, usually, our society pays’’ (1963, 346). De-
luded by the feminine mystique ‘‘and the immaturity it breeds,’’ the
66 chapter one
and valued as such. Though more interested in finding in caring labor
another model of ethical work than in imposing the model of waged
work on the practices of care, some of these second-wave authors none-
theless echo aspects of the ethical discourse of waged labor in making the
case for caring labor’s significance and worth. Thus the ethic of care
could also be construed as an ethic of work. Beyond the long-standing
problem of gender essentialism that haunts the project, this and other
e√orts to expand conceptions of what counts as work also risk tapping
into and expanding the scope of the traditional work ethic.∞Ω
Feminist analyses of sex work o√er an illustrative example of the
limitations of certain e√orts to claim the title of work when that also
involves making use of the legitimacy conferred by its dominant ethic.
Introduced originally as a way to intervene in the feminist sex wars, the
label ‘‘sex work’’ sought to alter the terms of feminist debate about sexual
labor (Leigh 1997). For example, as a replacement for the label ‘‘prosti-
tution,’’ the category helps to shift the terms of discussion from the
dilemmas posed by a social problem to questions of economic practice;
rather than a character flaw that produces a moral crisis, sex work is
reconceived as an employment option that can generate income and
provide opportunity. Within the terms of the feminist debate about
prostitution, for example, the vocabulary has been particularly impor-
tant as a way to counter the aggressive sexual moralizing of some in the
prohibitionist camp, as well as their disavowal of sex workers’ agency and
insistent reliance on the language and logics of victimization. The other
side, however, has produced some comparably problematic representa-
tions of work as a site of voluntary choice and of the employment con-
tract as a model of equitable exchange and individual agency. More
relevant to our topic here, it is important to recognize how much of the
rhetorical utility of the label ‘‘sex work’’ stems from its association with
conventional work values. For those involved in sex worker advocacy, the
term can serve not only as a way to foreground the economic dimensions
of such labor practices, but as a way to insist on their essential worth,
dignity, and legitimacy, as—in the formulation of one advocacy group—
‘‘service work that should be respected and protected’’ (quoted in Jen-
ness 1993, 67). I do not mean to deny the vital importance of these e√orts,
only to point out that they often tend to echo uncritically the traditional
work-ethic discourse. Thus the prostitutes’ rights group coyote (‘‘Call
O√ Your Old Tired Ethics’’) may succeed in calling o√ one of our old
68 chapter one
to the legitimating ethic of work, whether or not the original ethic is
thereby altered, remains in this specific sense a mode of rebellion suscep-
tible to co-optation. Struggling only within, rather than also against, the
terms of the traditional discourse of work both limits the scope of the
demands that are advanced and fails to contest the basic terms of the
work society’s social contract. For all their successes, few political move-
ments have managed to confront directly what Weber calls the ‘‘social
ethic of capitalistic culture’’ (1958, 54).
70 chapter one
are more di≈cult to discern, employers focus on measuring what they
can, increasingly resorting to proximate measures. Personality testing is
thus on the rise as one kind of proxy for behavioral assessment, and in
this way, ‘‘the emphasis becomes the total behavior of the individual
rather than the specifically ‘productive’ behavior’’ (Townley 1989, 106).
Putting in long hours can also be used as an indication of commitment,
which can in turn be a signal of productivity. A worker’s devotion to
work serves as a sign of his or her capacities just as it once served as a sign
of his or her status among the elect. Strong work values are thus in-
creasingly highlighted in management discourses as a significant remedy
to the new problems of surveillance simply because they render it less
necessary. Thus, we see a growing trend in the United States and else-
where to both select and evaluate workers on the basis of their attitudes,
motivation, and behavior. This is becoming increasingly the case not just
for workers in the higher-paid reaches of the employment hierarchy but
for those in the lower-paid levels as well: these criteria are being used on
white-, pink-, and increasingly blue-collar employees, in both the indus-
trial and service sectors (92; see also Ehrenreich 2001).
72 chapter one
order and the new ways that subjectivity is put to work in white-collar
occupations. Whereas the term once suggested a certain mastery of a
field of knowledge linked to a specific skill and expertise, increasingly the
mastery that a professional is expected to achieve is over what Mills
called ‘‘the personality.’’ In other words, whereas the high-priced man of
Taylor’s narrative was required to discipline his physical e√orts, today’s
professional is supposed to gain control over his or her thoughts, imagi-
nation, relationships, and a√ects. Certainly one purpose of this is to
promote the kind of self-discipline and subjective investment long asso-
ciated with being a professional. And because, like the high-priced man,
the professional ‘‘wears a badge of prestige’’ (C. Mills 1951, 138), the
practice of hailing a wide range of workers as professionals also serves to
cash in on the term’s cachet and encourage employees to identify with
jobs further up the labor hierarchy. To recall Weber’s description of the
Protestant work ethic, according to which all waged workers were ex-
pected to approach their work industriously as if it were a calling, those
in low-waged service-sector jobs under post-Fordism are asked to ap-
proach their work professionally as if it were a ‘‘career.’’ This profession-
alization of work, the expansion of what is considered a profession and,
more important, the number of workers who are expected to ‘‘be profes-
sional’’ is one way this disciplinary subjectification is extended both up
and down the labor hierarchy in a post-Taylorist age.
Professionalization in this broader application is more about style,
a√ect, and attitude than about the content of the work. Mills notes that
white-collar workers’ ‘‘claims to prestige are expressed, as their label
implies, by their style of appearance’’ (241). In contrast to the uniforms
typically required of blue-collar workers, white-collar employees wear
their own clothes, mass-produced and standardized though they may
be, both at work and at home. This is, Mills observes, reflected in the
amount of money that white-collar workers, especially women, spend
on clothes. As the studies of two very di√erent contemporary workforces
each a≈rms, the ‘‘collar’’ metaphor has always been about clothes, and
clothes in turn are key signifiers of the professional. Carla Freeman’s
(2000) study of pink-collar o≈ce workers in the Caribbean focuses on
how the workers were encouraged to identify themselves as profession-
als, an identification that centered crucially on styles of clothing. This
was a source of many pleasures, even or particularly when there was little
else about the work that was comparably satisfying. In this case, the
74 chapter one
professional invests his or her person in the job but does not ‘‘take it
personally’’ when dealing with di≈cult co-workers, clients, patients, stu-
dents, passengers, or customers. As an ideal of worker subjectivity, this
requires not just the performance of a role, but a deeper commitment of
the self, an immersion in and identification not just with work, but with
work discipline. The popular injunction to ‘‘be professional,’’ to cultivate
a professional attitude, style, and persona, serves as one way that the
autonomy, especially of immaterial workers, can be managerially con-
stituted up and down the post-Fordist labor hierarchy.
CONCLUSION
76 chapter one
and William DiFazio note, ‘‘the quality and the quantity of paid labor no
longer justify—if they ever did—the underlying claim derived from re-
ligious 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,’’ André Gorz observes, ‘‘has the
‘irreplaceable,’ ‘indispensable’ function of labour as the source of ‘social
ties,’ ‘social cohesion,’ ‘integration,’ ‘socialization,’ ‘personalization,’ ‘per-
sonal 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). Today we hear once again about the potentially drastic conse-
quences of a weakening work ethic among yet another generation whose
members, it is feared, will fail to be successfully interpellated. Given the
work ethic’s internal instabilities, we might conclude that its advocates
and promoters have cause to be concerned. Where attitudes are produc-
tive, an insubordination to the work ethic; a skepticism about the virtues
of self-discipline for the sake of capital accumulation; an unwillingness
to cultivate, simply on principle, a good ‘‘professional’’ attitude about
work; and a refusal to subordinate all of life to work carry a new kind of
subversive potential. My claims are that, given its role, the work ethic
should be contested, and, due to its instabilities, it can be contested.
A cultural dominant the work ethic may be; seamless and incontrovert-
ible it is certainly not. The previous chapter touched on one reaction to
the exclusions enacted by the work ethic—namely, demands for inclu-
sion that draw on alternative work ethics as tools of insubordination—
and considered both the advantages and limitations of this response. But
there are other kinds of approaches: the story of the work ethic in the
United States is not only about abject subjects and their struggles for
recognition but also about various disavowals of and resistances to the
normative discourse of work. There is also a parallel history featuring
those who failed to internalize the gospel of work—a history of ‘‘bad
subjects’’ who resist and may even escape interpellation. One chapter of
this story could center on the protests of sectors of the industrial work-
ing class whose class consciousness was articulated not by way of a
laborist ethic but, as Michael Seidman describes it, ‘‘by avoiding the
space, time and demands of wage labor’’ (1991, 169). Another might
feature the perspectives of those in the rank and file who saw leisure
neither as a means to recreate labor power and ensure consumption, nor
as a way to spread the available employment and drive wages up, but as
an end in itself, as the gratifying time of nonwork (see Rodgers 1978, 159–
60). This alternate history could focus too on the segments of the black
working class whose story Robin Kelley recounts, like the zoot suiters
and hipsters who, ‘‘refusing to be good proletarians,’’ pursued a di√erent
mode of race rebellion, seeking meaning and pleasure in the times and
spaces of nonwork (1994, 163); and those second-wave feminists, includ-
ing feminists associated with the wages for housework movement, who
insisted that work—whether waged work or unwaged domestic labor—
was not something to which women should aspire but rather something
they should try to escape. This history of disidentification with the work
ethic might also include various youth subcultures, from beatniks to
hippies, punks, and slackers, all constituted in opposition to what E. P.
Thompson calls ‘‘the Puritan time-valuation’’ (1991, 401). Today the re-
bellion against the imposition of work finds expression in the agendas of
a number of activist groups and advocacy organizations, with argu-
ably some of the most vibrant examples coming out of the European
precarity movements that have responded to the increasing flexibiliza-
tion and precariousness of work with a call not for the restoration of
the stable and reliable—but also one-sided and all-consuming—Fordist
wage relation, but rather, for the ability to secure an entirely di√erent
relation between life and work.∞
The work orientations of welfare recipients in the United States are
interesting for what they reveal about how the work ethic has been both
internalized and resisted. Contrary to the often-deployed ‘‘cultural defi-
ciency’’ discourses, studies of the e√ects of the 1996 welfare reform (the
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) find
much support among recipients for the idea of reform and for the famil-
iar ethic of work in whose name it was advanced. Indeed, ‘‘poor mothers’
support for welfare reform is the single most striking indication that
welfare mothers are not the social ‘outsiders’ portrayed in the Personal
Responsibility Act,’’ reports Sharon Hays (2003, 215). But the history of
the US welfare system also reveals the many ways in which recipients
have become politicized in relation to work-ethic discourses. From the
mid 1960s through the early 1970s, the National Welfare Rights Organi-
zation explicitly refused to accept the view that waged work is the only
legitimate means of meeting consumption needs. Working the antinomy
between productivism and consumerism, these activists rejected the ne-
cessity and legitimacy of the link and fought for the individual’s right to
an income regardless of his or her participation in waged work (see
Kornbluh 1997; Nadasen 2002).≤ Thus, even those so insistently targeted
by the ethic’s judgments and often disenfranchised by means of its pre-
scriptions have mounted radical and forceful challenges to its legitimacy.
80 chapter two
My point is simply that the history of the imposition of waged labor
and its dominant ethic is incomplete without a parallel history of re-
bellions and refusals; the ethic generates not only oppositions and their
recuperations but also lines of flight. But rather than continue to recount
this history, the analysis that follows attempts to do something else: to
identify and explore some theoretical resources that might illuminate
and enrich antiwork politics and postwork imaginaries.
These theoretical tools are drawn from the Marxist tradition, admittedly
both an obvious and a curious resource for a critical, let alone feminist,
analysis of work: obvious for its focus on labor, curious because Marx-
ism is so often understood in terms of its commitment to work’s ac-
clamation, to the liberation of work from exploitation and the restora-
tion of its dignity in unalienated form. As noted in the introduction,
however, there are alternatives within the tradition, including some that
couple the critique of work’s structures and relations with a more di-
rect confrontation with its values. Autonomist Marxism is one such
approach, and a concept central to that tradition—the refusal of work—
is an inspiration for the political theory of and against work that I seek to
develop throughout this book and central to the critical analyses, politi-
cal agendas, and utopian speculations that flesh it out. To understand the
refusal of work as a Marxist concept that nonetheless takes aim at a fairly
broad swath of Marxist history, the chapter will begin with a brief genea-
logical account that will situate the refusal of work in relation to a history
of conflict within Marxism over the nature, meaning, and value of work,
a field of contestation for which the critique of productivism will serve as
our point of entry.
The critique of productivism in Marxism was put forth perhaps most
succinctly and certainly most provocatively by Jean Baudrillard in The
Mirror of Production. According to Baudrillard, ‘‘a specter haunts the
revolutionary imagination: the phantom of production. Everywhere it
sustains an unbridled romanticism of productivity’’ (1975, 17). As he sees
it, historical materialism reproduces political economy’s fetishism of
labor; the evidence of Marxism’s complicity can be found in a natu-
ralized ontology of labor and a utopian vision of a future in which this
essence is fully realized in the form of an unhindered productivity. Bau-
drillard finds within this normative ideal—this ‘‘sanctification of work’’
82 chapter two
the critical frameworks and normative visions of a variety of analyses,
both within and beyond the Marxist tradition. Their defenses of work
and reiteration of its traditional values have yet to be fully reckoned with.
SOCIALIST MODERNIZATION
84 chapter two
the same industrial mode of producing to which capitalism gave rise’’
(1996, 9). Accordingly, communism could be understood as the rational-
ization of capitalism, the taming and mastery of its processes.
SOCIALIST HUMANISM
A second example from the archive of Marxist history that sets itself
against the modernization model but that nonetheless shares its funda-
mental commitment to work gained popularity among many Anglo-
American Marxists in the 1960s. Whereas the modernization discourse
originated in the context of revolutionary movements in Europe during
the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the development
and popularization of this model of humanist Marxism coincided with
the rise of the New Left. Erich Fromm’s Marx’s Concept of Man, published
in 1961 as an accompaniment to the first US publication of Marx’s Eco-
nomic and Philosophic Manuscripts, presents a classic statement of this
reading of Marx. It is an attempt to rescue Marxism not only from its asso-
ciation with existing socialist regimes, but also from its more economistic
and determinist tendencies. Drawing on the Manuscripts (which were
first published in the 1920s and first translated into English in 1959),
Fromm reconstructs a counter-Marx: a philosophical Marx grounded in
a humanist tradition and centered on a commitment to the creative
individual as unit of analysis and motor of history. Whereas the earlier
model, Marxist modernization, gravitates toward Capital and The Com-
munist Manifesto as privileged texts, this humanist discourse traces its
lineage to Marx’s early writings, the Manuscripts and The German Ideol-
ogy. While the utopia of modernization is conceived as a response to the
critique of bourgeois property relations and the problematic of exploita-
tion, the humanist utopia grows out of the critique of alienated labor.
Whereas the former focuses on notions of social progress, social justice,
and social harmony, the latter privileges the individual as a crucial cate-
gory and fundamental value. Indeed, according to Fromm, Marx’s philos-
ophy ‘‘was aimed at the full realization of individualism’’ (1961, 3). There is
a romantic dimension to this as well, which is evident in Fromm’s descrip-
tions of Marx’s philosophy as ‘‘a movement against the dehumanization
and automatization of man inherent in the development of Western
industrialism’’ (1961, v) and a ‘‘spiritual-humanistic’’ alternative to the
‘‘mechanistic-materialistic spirit of successful industrialism’’ (72). To-
gether, the utopia of modernization and the humanist utopia present a
86 chapter two
free labor’’ (1961, 43); this is the means by which we can finally realize our
true humanity. It is interesting to note that in Fromm’s discussion of
that famous passage from the third volume of Capital, the passage that
he characterized as expressing all the essential elements of socialism,
he quotes the passage at length up through the part where Marx states
that the realm of freedom can flourish only with the realm of necessity
as its basis but omits the next and concluding sentence of the para-
graph, in which Marx adds that ‘‘the reduction of the working day is the
basic prerequisite’’ (Marx 1981, 959). Later in his book, Fromm quotes a
shorter section of the same passage, this time including the final sentence
about the need to shorten the working day. Yet his lack of interest in the
ideal of work reduction is still clear: he adds italics to emphasize every
part of the quote except the final sentence, upon which he again neglects
to comment (1961, 76). Why work less if work in its unalienated form as
socialized production is the expression of and means to self-creation?
The goal is to restore work’s dignity and worth, not to contest its status as
the pillar of social value.
Unlike the modernization model, which rejected private property
and the market while accepting and adapting the basic contours of capi-
talist discipline, the humanist paradigm incorporates a more extensive
critique of work. This critique is, however, hindered by a tendency to-
ward nostalgia for an earlier time, a romanticization of craft production
that informs its visions of an alternative. Fromm argues that alienation is
greater now than it was in the earlier stage of capitalism when handicraft
production and manufacturing prevailed (1961, 51). Concrete labor in
the production of use values is sometimes suggested in these analyses as
the alternative to the abstract labor that produces exchange values. Thus,
for example, in an essay that fits solidly within this humanist rubric,
David McLellan presents another reconstruction, drawn largely from
Marx’s early writings, of communism as an unalienated society in which
we have a direct and personal connection to the products of our labor
(McLellan 1969, 464): as objectifications of our laboring essence, the
objects we create would serve as confirmations of our being. Instead of
producing superfluous things to sell on the market in order to produce
surplus value, we would produce useful things for immediate consump-
tion. As opposed to abstract labor as both a conceptual abstraction that
reduces di√erent kinds of concrete labor to labor in general and a prac-
tical process that transforms the concrete laboring activities of individ-
88 chapter two
of the more direct and unyielding of the links between production and
consumption, the authors hold that the ideal is to consume only that
which we produce as individuals or members of a community. Accord-
ing to Mies, ‘‘only by consuming the things which we produce can we
judge whether they are useful, meaningful and wholesome, whether they
are necessary or superfluous. And only by producing what we consume
can we know how much time is really necessary for the things we want to
consume, what skills are necessary, what knowledge is necessary and
what technology is necessary’’ (219). Production for direct use and con-
sumption for clear need: each places strict limits on the other. Insisting
that we must produce in order to consume and consume only what we
produce is a prescription for worldly asceticism of the first order.
HUMANISM REVISITED
90 chapter two
native vision. Nietzsche’s pairing of noble morality and slave morality
o√ers an instructive comparison: although he makes use of the distinc-
tion by measuring one against the standards of the other, he does not
present a return to noble morality as either possible or desirable; the
category of noble morality serves as a tool by which to advance the
critique of slave morality, rather than as a vision of a better past or
future. In a similar way, Marx’s categorical distinctions do not provide a
remedy to the system he critiques. An alternative to capitalist society
would require that we move beyond both abstract labor under capital-
ism 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 post-
capitalist state’’ (2000, 129).∑ Again, the problem is that this a≈rma-
tion of labor—in this case, the useful work of particular individuals—
reinforces one of the critical supports of the system it seeks to overcome.
Indeed, as Gayatri Spivak observes, posing use value against exchange
value is ‘‘far too Luddite a binary opposition’’ to account for Marx’s
argument (2000, 2). The Marx that some other interpreters, including
autonomists, build on is the one whose description of life in a commu-
nist society—where one could ‘‘hunt in the morning, fish in the after-
noon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a
mind without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic’’
(Marx and Engels 1970, 53)—was not an a≈rmation of artisanal produc-
tion, but at once a critique of the division of labor and an ironic jab at the
kind of pastoral, pre-industrial visions advanced by the utopian social-
ists.∏ This is the same Marx who argues explicitly in favor of the virtues of
cooperation on a mass scale, a form of social labor that he distinguishes
qualitatively from handicraft production. The power of social produc-
tion ‘‘arises from co-operation itself,’’ Marx claims in Capital: ‘‘When the
worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips o√ the fetters
of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species’’ (1976,
447). Beginning with this stage of cooperation, the individual privileged
in the humanist model is no longer the proper unit of analysis; the vision
of an individual worker who produces a specific useful product is incon-
sistent with processes that come to incorporate general technical and
scientific knowledge that cannot be attributed to specific individuals.
According to Marx in the Grundrisse:
AUTONOMIST MARXISM
92 chapter two
own political situation. Rather than a simple precursor to or early draft
of Capital, the Grundrisse was written in light of a specific crisis in 1857
and is best understood as an attempt to theorize its revolutionary possi-
bilities. Thus, in this case, ‘‘there is no possibility . . . of destroying the
dynamism of this process by hypostatizing it, by rigidifying it into a
totality with its own laws of development that one might be able to
possess, or dominate, or reverse’’ (Negri 1991, 9). The autonomist theo-
rists took their lead from the revolutionary agitation of a loose coalition
of workers, students, feminists, and unemployed people that roiled Italy
in the 1960s and 1970s. ‘‘We find ourselves,’’ Negri writes in 1979, ‘‘in a
phase where the revolutionary movement is seeking new foundations,
and in a way that will not be that of a minority.’’ In this situation, he
explains, ‘‘we have nothing to do with orthodoxy’’ (1991, 17). Although
there is a fidelity to Marx in Negri’s work that might be construed to be
as orthodox as any other, what is arguably unorthodox is the willingness
to invent a Marx beyond Marx—that is, to move beyond Marx’s own
analyses in order to keep up with the changing forms of capitalist de-
velopment and the modes of rebellion generated within. The Grundrisse,
in Negri’s reading, restores Marx as a theorist of crisis rather than equi-
librium, of subjective agency rather than objective tendencies, of antago-
nism and separation rather than opposition and synthesis. Perhaps what
characterizes the autonomist tradition more than anything else is its
attempts to restore the methodological and political primacy of subjec-
tivity. In this sense, autonomist Marxism can be linked to that broader
subtradition within Marxism that seeks to theorize not from what Mi-
chael Lebowitz describes as the ‘‘one-sided’’ perspective of capital and its
reproduction, but from the perspective of the workers and their poten-
tial to subvert that power (1992).∫ This insistence on the power of active
subjects requires a dismantling of some of the analytical and organiza-
tional apparatuses within Marxist theory and practice that held these
subjective forces in check, from the metaphysics of labor, to the Leninist
party and the traditional labor union. This restoration of the primacy of
subjectivity also involves a rejection of determinism, teleology, and, as
we will see, a refusal of the recuperative logic of the dialectic.
The focus of this approach is on the collective as unit of analysis and
locus of political agency. The thesis that exemplifies this approach—
sometimes called the ‘‘leading role of the proletariat’’ or the ‘‘autonomist
hypothesis’’—concentrates on class struggle as the primary engine of
94 chapter two
beyond the factory; to the social worker of post-Fordism, a composition
that is no longer limited to waged workers but can also include those
necessary to its existence and organization, like the unemployed, domes-
tic workers, and students; and, most recently, to Hardt and Negri’s multi-
tude, a class category that, in extending across the circuits of biopolitical
social production and reproduction, realizes more fully the postworker-
ist commitments of the project as it developed over time (see, for ex-
ample, Negri 1988, 235; Dyer-Witheford 1999, 72–76; Hardt and Negri
2000). What counts as work or social productivity and who might orga-
nize politically—together or in proximity to one another—in relation to
its conditions change over time and space.
The ‘‘autonomy’’ of its namesake is multidimensional, referring to a
number of its critical, political, and utopian commitments. The label
‘‘autonomist Marxism’’ refers historically to its autonomy as part of the
Italian extraparliamentary Left in relation to other leftist parties and
unions, as both specific historical actors and organizational forms. Au-
tonomy in this sense refers to a double relation: an independent relation-
ship with outside groups, but also an internal relationship among auton-
omist groups imagined in terms of an organizational ideal of a coalition
that could encompass a plurality of participants with a variety of agen-
das. But perhaps more important, it refers to an a≈rmation of a collec-
tive capacity for autonomy vis-à-vis capital.
Three terms are critical to this last dimension of the project of auton-
omy: self-valorization, antagonism, and separation. The first of these,
self-valorization, is one way that the collective dimension of political
action has been understood within a tradition that is perhaps more
attentive than others to questions of organizational form and practice.
As an alternative to capitalist valorization—that is, to a system of values
grounded in the production of surplus value—self-valorization is, as
Cleaver describes it, not mere resistance to processes of capitalist valori-
zation but ‘‘a positive project of self-constitution’’ (1992, 129; see also
Virno and Hardt 1996, 264). Political organizations are aimed at both
deconstructive and constructive projects; they are at once agents of cri-
tique and of invention. As sites of self-valorization, political collectivi-
ties are recognized as constitutive machines rather than merely repre-
sentational vehicles. The production of autonomous self-valorization
depends on the struggle for a separation from the object of critique.
Separation is conceived as something di√erent from dialectical conflict;
The refusal of work as theory and practice emerges out of these method-
ological commitments and areas of conceptual focus. As an important
slogan in the Italian social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the refusal
of work is a fundamental ground of autonomist Marxism’s critical analy-
sis and political strategy, a critical element of the project of autonomy
characterized above. At one level a clear expression of the immediate
desire experienced by working people around the world, the refusal of
work has been developed by autonomists into a more variegated con-
cept, one that encompasses several distinct critical approaches and stra-
tegic agendas.
The concept’s force, it should be acknowledged, comes from a prior
understanding of the place of work in the critical analysis of capitalist
96 chapter two
social formations. That is, fundamental to the refusal of work as analysis
and strategy is a definition of capitalism that highlights not the institu-
tion of private property, but rather the imposition and organization of
work. After all, from a worker’s perspective, earning wages—not ac-
cumulating capital—is the primary concern. The wage system remains
the dominant mechanism by which individuals are integrated, either
directly or indirectly, into the capitalist mode of economic cooperation.
Cleaver therefore defines capital as ‘‘a social system based on the imposi-
tion of work through the commodity-form’’; it is a system built upon the
subordination of life to work (2000, 82). Diane Elson’s reading of Marx is
helpful in fleshing this out. As she explains Marx’s theory of value, it is
best understood not as a labor theory of value but as a value theory of
labor. In other words, the purpose of the analysis is not to prove the
existence of exploitation or to explain prices; the point is not to grasp the
process by which value is constituted by labor, but rather to fathom how
laboring practices are organized, shaped, and directed by the capitalist
pursuit of value. ‘‘My argument,’’ Elson writes, ‘‘is that the object of
Marx’s theory of value was labour’’ (1979, 123). Whereas socialist mod-
ernization and socialist humanism each imagine the possibility of a
postcapitalist society in terms of the realization of the constitutive power
of labor, as a matter of grasping the centrality of labor to social life or to
individual existence, in this alternative reading of Marx, ‘‘labor’s con-
stitutive centrality to social life characterizes capitalism and forms the
ultimate ground of its abstract mode of domination’’ (Postone 1996, 361).
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 capital-
ist relations, the glue that holds the system together. Hence, any mean-
ingful transformation of capitalism requires substantial change in the
organization and social value of work.
Thus, unlike the modernization model, the autonomist tradition fo-
cuses on the critique of work under capitalism, which includes but can-
not be reduced to the critique of its exploitation. In contrast to the
humanists, who also critique work, autonomous Marxists call not for a
liberation of work but for a liberation from work (Virno and Hardt 1996,
263). In their insistence on replacing one slogan of worker militancy, ‘‘the
right to work,’’ with a new one, ‘‘the refusal of work,’’ the autonomists
certainly follow in the footsteps of Marx—the Marx who, for example,
98 chapter two
language resonant of more traditional and respectable virtues, ‘‘more
time for free creative activity’’ (1978, 148).
Despite Lafargue’s provocative tribute to the merits of laziness, the
refusal of work is not in fact a rejection of activity and creativity in
general or of production in particular. 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. It is not only a matter of refusing exploited
and alienated labor, but of refusing ‘‘work itself as the principle of reality
and rationality’’ (Baudrillard 1975, 141). In this sense, ‘‘work which is
liberated is liberation from work’’ (Negri 1991, 165). Rather than conceive
the refusal of work narrowly, in terms of a specific set of actions—
including strikes or slowdowns, demands for shorter hours or expanded
opportunities for participation, and movements for improved support
for or altered conditions of reproductive work—the phrase is, I suggest,
best understood in very broad terms as designating a general political
and cultural movement—or, better yet, as a potential mode of life that
challenges the mode of life now defined by and subordinated to work.
The refusal of work can be broken down, analytically if not prac-
tically, into two processes, one that is essentially critical in its aims and
another that is more fundamentally reconstructive in its objectives. The
first of these, the negative process, is what is most readily conveyed by the
word ‘‘refusal’’ and includes the critique of and rebellion against the
present system of work and its values. If the system of waged labor is a
crucial cultural and institutional mechanism by which we are linked to
the mode of production, then the refusal of work poses a potentially
substantial challenge to this larger apparatus. But the refusal of work, as
both activism and analysis, does not simply pose itself against the present
organization of work; it should also be understood as a creative practice,
one that seeks to reappropriate and reconfigure existing forms of pro-
duction and reproduction (see Vercellone 1996, 84). This is the special
twofold nature of the refusal of work upon which Negri insists (2005,
At this point I want to exit the terrain of Marxist theory and linger for a
moment on the political agendas that we have encountered along the
way. The three theoretical paradigms we reviewed yield three di√erent
prescriptions for change: respectively, demands for more work, better
work, and less work. This project’s preference for less work over more
work is clear enough. The demand for more work may very well be
necessary in a context in which work is the only option the individual
has to secure his or her livelihood, but I am arguing that the struggle for
less work is critical as well. Perhaps, however, more should be said about
the relationship between the calls for less work and better work, and why
I focus on the former and, by comparison at least, neglect the latter.
Certainly I a≈rm the vital importance of struggles to improve the condi-
tions of work. But although in practical, if not in logical, terms none of
these demands—including the demands for less and better work—are
mutually exclusive, it is useful to recognize some of the complexities of
their relationships. A brief exploration of some recent e√orts to demand
better work can illustrate some of the di≈culties here.
Some analysts draft the work-ethic discourse into this e√ort by calling
for a new version of the ethic, one that a≈rms the necessity, centrality,
and value of work, but in the name of which the demand for better work
can also be advanced. For example, what we might think of as a human-
ist work ethic a≈rms a vision of unalienated labor and argues that the
ethical discourse of work o√ers a means by which to struggle toward its
realization.Ω Recent proponents of an ethic that could in this way renew
our support for and investments in work but also press for better work
are Al Gini and Russell Muirhead. Since, according to Gini, ‘‘work is a
fundamental part of our humanity’’ (2000, xii) and thus is rightly at the
center of our lives, our jobs should be good ones. Whereas the Protestant
work ethic had been used to mystify the conditions of exploitative and
alienating labor—the hierarchy, coercion, drudgery, boredom, and dan-
gers of work—the alternative ethic that Gini defends would insist on the
cultural valuing of all work and would serve as a way to make work
deliver on its promises of meaning, self-fulfillment, and useful outcomes.
But since work is so fundamental to what it means to be fully human,
more emphasis is placed in Gini’s discussion on praising work as noble
and ennobling than on urging its improvement, for ‘‘even with all of its
The refusal of work in its broadest sense has the potential to generate
some timely critical perspectives and practical agendas. In particular, it
o√ers a challenge to the work values that continue to secure our consent
to the current system. The problem is not, to cite Baudrillard’s formula-
tion, that the worker is ‘‘only quantitatively exploited as a productive
force by the system of capitalist political economy, but is also meta-
physically overdetermined as a producer by the code of political econ-
omy’’ (1975, 31). The glorification of work as a prototypically human
endeavor, as the key both to social belonging and individual achieve-
ment, constitutes the fundamental ideological foundation of contempo-
rary capitalism: it was built on the basis of this ethic, which continues to
serve the system’s interests and rationalize its outcomes. The contempo-
rary force of this code, with its essentialism and moralism of work,
should not be underestimated. ‘‘In the last instance,’’ as Baudrillard as-
serts and the previous chapter argued, ‘‘the system rationalizes its power
here’’ (31). My argument is that the metaphysics and moralism of work
require a more direct challenge than the critique of alienation and hu-
manist work ethics are capable of posing. The struggle to improve the
quality of work must be accompanied by e√orts to reduce its quantity.∞≥
In this context, the refusal of work, with its insistence on a more thor-
ough critique of, and a more radical break with, existing work values
o√ers a particularly valuable perspective. Where attitudes are productive,
the refusal of work—understood as a rejection of work as a necessary
center of social existence, moral duty, ontological essence, and time and
energy, and understood as a practice of ‘‘insubordination to the work
ethic’’ (Berardi 1980, 169)—can speak forcefully and incisively to our
present situation.
What this has to o√er feminism specifically will be addressed in the
next two chapters. As a preface to those discussions, I o√er two brief
observations. The first is that the challenges that the refusal of work
poses to the realities of work today are at least as relevant to feminist
concerns and agendas. Feminist calls for better work for women, as
Working Demands
From Wages for Housework to Basic Income
When authors like Dalla Costa and James maintained that the family is a
site of social production and, in a move we will discuss later, demanded
that women receive wages for the work that they do there, the point was
not to extol the virtues of domestic work. On the contrary, these authors
insisted that work is nothing to revere. Departing from those discourses
on both the Right and the Left that acclaim and moralize work, the wages
for housework movement and analysis is part of a broader tradition—
one that I think we should recover and extend—that embraces the refusal
of work as part of its project. But this refusal, one of the most provocative
and potentially promising elements of the approach, is also one of its
most poorly understood. Some readers, including Seyla Benhabib and
Drucilla Cornell, have characterized the movement as a prime example
of Marxist feminism’s commitment to a ‘‘utopia of labor,’’ a feminist
version of the orthodox Marxist celebration of productive activity (1987,
4). To grasp the specific character of the critique of work that animated
wages for housework both in theory and in practice, one must recognize
its roots in and resonances with the autonomist tradition. This is one of
those instances when historicizing the argument proves critical; other-
wise we may fail to understand one of its central analytical orientations
and political commitments.
The refusal of work, to recall the discussion of the concept in the
previous chapter, is one of the dominant themes of autonomist critical
analysis and political practice. As we noted there, it marks an important
departure from those elements within Marxism that are beholden to the
productivist valorization of work, including both orthodox Marxism’s
commitment to the model of economic modernization and humanist
Marxism’s metaphysics of labor. Against such productivist currents, au-
tonomist Marxism rejects both the utopian vision of life made produc-
As was the case with the demand for wages for housework as a perspec-
tive, the demand as a provocation had utility beyond the merely practi-
cal. What is often overlooked in assessments of the demand is its perfor-
mative dimension: as a perspective, it functioned to produce the feminist
knowledge and consciousness that it appears to presuppose; as a provo-
cation, it served also to elicit the subversive commitments, collective
formations, and political hopes that it appears only to reflect. The col-
lective practice of demanding thus has its own epistemological and onto-
logical productivity. As not only a perspective but a provocation, the
demand for wages should be understood as an attempted claim and
incitement of antagonism, collective power, and desire.∞∏
As a way to gain some purchase on the demand as a provocation, let
us first take a step back and reflect on what it means to make a demand.
There are several ways to conceive the demand for wages. One could
describe it as a proposal for reform—specifically, a policy or program
designed to rationalize the wage system by making up for some of its
deficiencies. Although this description is accurate to a degree, to get a
sense of what is missing from it, consider the di√erence between a de-
mand on the one hand and a request or plea—a first step in an e√ort to
seek compromise or accommodation—on the other hand. Neither the
policy proposal, with its aura of neutrality, nor the plea, with its solici-
tousness, manages to capture the style and tone of the demand for wages
for housework; none of them conveys the belligerence with which this
demand was routinely presented, or the antagonism it was intended
thereby to provoke. Although the demand for wages may have been, at
least in part, a serious bid for reform, there seems to have been little
e√ort on the part of its proponents to be seen as reasonable or to meet
others halfway, and little interest in working within the logic of the
existing system and playing by its rules. Consider the response by two of
As for the financial aspects of Wages for Housework, they are ‘‘highly
problematical’’ . . . only if we take the viewpoint of capital—the view-
point of the Treasury Department—which always claims poverty
when it is replying to the working class. Since we are not the Treasury
Department and have no aspiration to be, we cannot see with their
eyes, and we did not even conceive of planning for them systems of
payment, wage di√erentials, productivity deals. It is not for us to put
limits on our power, it is not for us to measure our value. It is only for
us to organize a struggle to get all of what we want, for us all, and on
our terms. For our aim is to be priceless, to price ourselves out of the
market, for housework and factory work and o≈ce work to be ‘‘un-
economic.’’ (Cox and Federici 1976, 14)
There are two points to note about this passage, one about style and
another about content. First, refusing to adjust their arguments so as to
appeal to their various interlocutors, the demand was typically delivered
insistently, without the possibility of compromise. In the words of an-
other proponent, ‘‘We want our wages, and we’re not waiting!’’ (For-
tunati 1975, 19). They were not opening an exchange of ideas so much as
they were ‘‘serving notice’’ (Campaign for Wages for Housework 2000,
258). Second, although securing wages may have been their immediate
goal, the statement makes it clear that this was not the only goal, a point
to which we will return a little later.
Still less does the demand for wages resemble an e√ort to persuade, let
alone to coax, entice, or seduce. For example, those who demanded
wages were not looking for recognition for women’s sacrifices or selfless-
ness. ‘‘Our power,’’ explain two of the demand’s advocates, ‘‘does not
come from anyone’s recognition of our place in the cycle of production,
but from our capacity to struggle against it’’ (Cox and Federici 1976, 6).
Rather than inhabit the subordinate position of housewife and try to use
it to their advantage as moral high ground and a way to evoke either
sympathy or guilt, they were more interested in announcing their power.
As James explains in regard to their relationship to other Left groups
and trade unions, ‘‘we’re neither debating with them nor moralizing at
them’’—rather, James and her colleagues will speak to them in the shared
vocabulary of material class interest (1976, 27). Instead of assuming the
It is a goal which is not only a thing but, like capital at any moment,
essentially a stage of antagonism of a social relation. Whether the
canteen or the wages we win will be a victory or a defeat depends on
the force of our struggle. On that force depends whether the goal is an
occasion for capital to more rationally command our labor or an
occasion for us to weaken their hold on that command. What form
the goal takes when we achieve it, whether it is wages or canteens or
free birth control, emerges and is in fact created in the struggle, and
registers the degree of power that we reached in that struggle. (Dalla
Costa and James 1973, 53, n. 17)
To explore the possibilities and limits of the demand for basic income, I
want to apply the conceptual scheme gleaned from our earlier examina-
tion of the demand for wages for housework and consider it in this
section as a perspective, and in the next as a provocation. To recall the
previous discussion, the demand for wages for housework was predi-
cated upon a critical perspective on the nature of both work and family
CONCLUSION
I’m just like any modern woman, trying to have it all: loving
husband, a family. It’s just I wish I had more time to seek
out the dark forces and join their hellish crusade, that’s all.
MORTICIA ADDAMS, IN THE 1993 FILM ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES
The most common rationale for shorter hours—and hence the first
argument I want to address—is that it would make more time for family.
This approach is particularly powerful because the emphasis on family
resonates comfortably with mainstream political priorities on both the
Left and the Right. After all, commentators across the ideological spec-
trum frequently assume that the family is the source of popular political
motivation and the basis for political judgment. Furthermore, tapping
into this familiar discourse frames the demand for shorter hours in
terms of the easily articulated issue of work-family balance. Yet despite
these advantages, I find this the least compelling rationale for work
reduction. There are, as we will see, significant pitfalls to organizing a
critical discourse about work and a struggle for shorter hours around the
idea of the family.
Arlie Russell Hochschild presents a particularly rich and insightful
The solution would seem to be to displace the family from the rationale
for reduced hours, and the second approach I want to consider does that,
emphasizing instead a broader and more open-ended set of justifications
for and benefits of shorter hours. An inspired example of this approach
can be found in ‘‘The Post-Work Manifesto’’ by Stanley Aronowitz et al.
(1998). Their call for a thirty-hour week of six-hour days without a
reduction in pay is part of a broader postwork vision and agenda that
the authors propose as a response to current economic conditions and
trends in the United States. Citing what they describe as an increase in
working hours—whether through more overtime, the colonization of
nonwork time by work, or piecing together multiple temporary or part-
time jobs—they argue that ‘‘it is time for a discourse that imagines
alternatives, that accounts for human dignity beyond the conditions of
work. It is time to demand and get a thirty-hour workweek’’ (64). Eco-
nomic restructuring, technological change, and work reorganization in-
creasingly erodes job security, while at the same time, ‘‘the virtues of
work are ironically and ever more insistently being glorified’’ (40). Argu-
ing that we must think critically about the work ethic and imaginatively
about possibilities for the future, the authors attempt to outline a post-
work political agenda animated by a vision of ‘‘shorter working hours,
higher wages, and best of all, our ability to control much more of our
own time’’ (33). With the decline of well-paid, secure, and full-time
work, what may in the past have been deemed an una√ordable luxury is,
they suggest, increasingly an economic necessity (64, 69).
The movement for shorter hours is linked in this formulation to a
social vision that is very di√erent from that of the family-centered ap-
proach. In contrast to the vision of nonwork time devoted to family, the
authors of ‘‘The Post-Work Manifesto’’ present a far more expansive set
of possibilities, including time for family, community, and polity (70). I
In the current political climate, the demands for basic income and shorter
hours could of course be dismissed as ‘‘merely utopian.’’ Rather than
waste time on impractical and untimely demands, so the argument goes,
feminists and others should conserve their meager energies and set their
sights on more politically feasible goals. This familiar logic makes it easy
to write such demands o√ as unrealistic, and therefore as potentially
dangerous distractions from the necessarily modest and small-scale pa-
rameters of political reform. That is, the supposed utopianism of these
demands is often considered a fatal flaw. One could perhaps contest the
claim that these demands are aptly designated utopian in this time and
place, and certainly I have tried to point out their practicality in relation
to current economic trends. But there is another way to respond to the
critique. What if the utopianism of these demands is not a liability but an
asset? What if we were to respond to the charge of utopianism not with
embarrassment or defensive denial but with recognition and a≈rma-
tion? And what might such a utopianism without apology look like?
Rather than deny the applicability of the appellation ‘‘utopian’’ to escape
its pejorative connotations, in this chapter I want to accept the label,
reconsider utopianism as a distinctive mode of thought and practice,
and explore what a utopian demand is and what it can do.
Of course, part of what is in dispute here is the status of the term. The
definition of ‘‘utopia’’ in this chapter is broadly conceived, including not
just the more traditional list of literary and philosophical blueprints of
the good society, but also, as I will describe, a variety of partial glimpses
of and incitements toward the imagination and construction of alterna-
tives. One of these more fractional forms, the ‘‘utopian demand’’—as I
use the phrase—is a political demand that takes the form not of a nar-
rowly pragmatic reform but of a more substantial transformation of the
present configuration of social relations; it is a demand that raises eye-
brows, one for which we would probably not expect immediate success.
These are demands that would be di≈cult—though not impossible—to
realize in the present institutional and ideological context; to be consid-
ered feasible, a number of shifts in the terrain of political discourse must
be e√ected. In this sense, a utopian demand prefigures—again in frag-
mentary form—a di√erent world, a world in which the program or
policy that the demand promotes would be considered as a matter of
course both practical and reasonable. It is not, however, just the status of
the program or policy that is at stake; as the proponents of wages for
housework recognized, the political practice of demanding is of crucial
importance as well.
Since my claim is that the power of these demands can be better
grasped once their utopian dimensions are more fully understood, I will
begin with a more general exploration of the territory of utopianism. In
preparation for this analysis of the utopian demand, I divide the chapter
into three sections. The first reviews the case against utopia. The analysis
in this section is historical, focusing on how utopianism came to be
marginalized in the period after the Second World War, and on what
grounds it has most often been discredited since. By drawing on a few
examples from the Right and Left, we can collect many of the most
significant obstacles and objections to utopian thinking and activism. In
response to these critiques, the second section presents a philosophical
defense drawn primarily from the work of Ernst Bloch. The discussion
centers on the ontology and epistemology of utopian speculation and
finishes with an exploration of the concept of hope and the cognitive and
UTOPIA’S CRITICS
IN DEFENSE OF UTOPIA:
ERNST BLOCH’S ONTOLOGY OF THE NOT YET
Utopian Reason
The irrationalism of utopian thinking is perhaps the easiest of the anti-
utopian charges to address. Indeed, the refusal of the narrow concept of
reason that sustains Popper’s critique of utopianism spans a rich history,
from the romantic revolt against the Enlightenment to second-wave
feminists’ critiques of the gendered binary of reason and emotion and
more-recent work on the philosophy and science of a√ect, to name just a
few of its highlights. Bloch’s contributions to this critique emerge out of
long-standing conflicts in Marxism about the scientific and revolution-
ary adequacy of the tradition’s analytical apparatuses. Along with many
other subtraditions within Marxism, Bloch stands opposed to those ob-
jectivist Marxisms that deem utopian thinking devoid of analytical via-
bility and conceive historical materialism as a scientistic project deprived
of vision. In contrast, Bloch considers his project as a reconciliation of
two tendencies within Marxism, what he calls the ‘‘cold stream,’’ with its
dedication to the demystifying powers of empirical analysis and analyti-
cal reason, and the ‘‘warm stream,’’ with its desire, imagination, and
hopefulness. In keeping with Marx’s famous eleventh thesis, knowledge
practices are evaluated as much for their potential political e√ects as for
their empirical accuracy and critical acuity. Politically e√ective knowl-
edge requires not contemplative reason, ‘‘which takes things as they are
and as they stand,’’ but participating reason, ‘‘which takes them as they
go, and therefore also as they could go better’’ (Bloch 1995, 1: 4).
More specifically, Bloch’s critique of a notion of reason that would
exclude utopian thinking turns on two maneuvers. First, he challenges
any definition that would deny the intellectual productivity of the imagi-
nation. In refusing the sharp division between analytical and creative
reason, Bloch troubles as well simple oppositions between discovery and
invention and between interpretation and creation. Second, he refuses
the opposition between cognition and a√ect that also informs the con-
ception of reason at the heart of Popper’s anti-utopianism. For Bloch,
utopian hope—a category we will explore in more detail below—not
only requires both reason and imagination, but is characterized by the
presence of two di√erent a√ects, the ‘‘warm’’ a√ect of enthusiasm and the
The Not-Yet-Become
CONCLUSION
I will begin here: why counter the power of the work ethic with a post-
work politics and not with a postwork ethic? One could, after all, imagine
the contours of a postwork ethic as something distinct from a postwork
morality—a matter, to cite Virno’s formulation, of ‘‘common practices,
usages and customs, not the dimension of the must-be’’ (2004, 49).
Deleuze marks the distinction this way: ethics are immanent to di√erent
modes of existence, whereas morals are imposed from above (1988, 23).
But despite the ways that the terrain of ethics can be helpfully distin-
guished from that of traditional morality, I am still more interested in the
possibilities of a politics than in the construction of a counterethic.
Certainly the relationship between ethics and politics is a close one, with
both modes of thinking and acting focusing on the question of how we
might live together, both operating in private and public spheres and
su√using at once structures and subjectivities. Indeed, postwork politics
and postwork ethics are mutually constitutive, each part of what pro-
duces and sustains the other. Nonetheless, because ethics remains more
closely tethered than politics to the register of individual belief and
choice, my argument prioritizes politics, understood in terms of collec-
tive action and fields of institutional change, over ethics, with its focus on
practices of the self and encounters with the other. My preference for
political rather than ethical remedies might then be understood as a
polemical defense of a certain kind of structuralist impulse, a way to keep
our focus trained on collective rather than individual action and on the
task of changing the institutions and discourses that frame individual
lives and relations.
Whereas the distinction between politics and ethics remains mean-
ingful to me for the purposes of this project, the distinction between
reform and revolution—which my a≈rmation of utopian visions to-
gether with my defense of restricted demands, would seem to confound
—is more problematic. Of course the reform-revolution division has a
long, storied history within Marxism, and the status of wage demands
has often served as one of its traditional staging grounds. The choice of
either reform or revolution continues to haunt some of the conflicts
between anticapitalist pragmatists and radicals today, even if the terms of
such debates are not posed as boldly as they were in the period of the
Second International. From one still-familiar perspective, the idea of
revolution is at best a distraction and at worst a diversion from the
struggle for change; from the other, the commitment to reform repre-
sents a capitulation to the existing terms of that struggle. Whereas one
supposedly betrays the present to a far-o√ future, the other is accused of
sacrificing the future to the exigencies of a narrowly conceived present.
The utopian demand is meant to cut through such formulas. It is not
that the utopian demand is a reformist alternative to the manifesto’s
revolutionary program, but that the demand refuses this traditional di-
chotomy. The radical potential of such relatively modest demands lies in
two qualities that we reviewed in the previous chapter: their directional-
ity and performativity. Selma James evokes the first of these in terms of
228 epilogue
the di√erence between preparing to lose the fight against capital, but
with the hope of salvaging some concessions from the wreck of that
defeat, and striving to succeed, while at the same time recognizing that
‘‘in struggling to win, plenty can be gained along the way (Dalla Costa
and James 1973, 1). The demands that emerge out of the latter strategy are
likely to be utopian demands, demands that, at their best, simultaneously
speak to and direct us beyond the confines of the present. Antonio Negri
alludes to the second quality in his claim about the potential generativity
of reforms. As he explains it, the distinction between utopian and re-
formist temporalities breaks down under the conditions of biopolitical
production: ‘‘Nowadays, each and every reform is radically transforma-
tive because we live on an ontological terrain, because our lives are
pitched immediately on an ontological level’’ (Casarino and Negri 2008,
109). As reformist projects with revolutionary aspirations, utopian de-
mands can point in the direction of broader horizons of change, open up
new avenues for critical thought and social imagination, and assist in the
construction of political subjects who may be better able to think and to
want something di√erent. Although the demands for basic income and
shorter hours may be proposals for concrete reform rather than sys-
tematic transformation, conceiving such demands in relation to their
aspirational trajectories and ontological e√ects confounds facile distinc-
tions between reformist and revolutionary change.
230 epilogue
relationship between social reproduction and capital accumulation, life
against work o√ers what is certainly an expansive, but also a potentially
potent, formulation of the terrain of conflict.
But can the category of life and the juxtaposition of life against work
present a strong enough antagonism to the existing organization of so-
cial production and reproduction? Before we continue, I want to take
note of two potential limitations of the formulation. The first o√ers a
caution about the potential for life against work to be recuperated into
the logic of commodity culture. If, for example, this life—despite my
claims about its more expansive connotations—is something whose con-
tents we would be satisfied merely to purchase in the time left to us after
work, and then enjoy in the privacy of our homes, then its use would be
limited indeed. A second possible drawback has to do with the way that
life outside of work already figures in what Peter Fleming calls the ‘‘just
be yourself ’’ managerial discourses that, in purporting to draw upon and
cash in on more of the ‘‘authentic’’ worker’s self, seek ‘‘to put some life
back into work by appropriating life itself ’’ (2009, 40). In light of such
corporate strategies, the danger is that organizing around the notion of
life could be too easily coopted by management initiatives and subordi-
nated to their purposes, in which case life would function less against
work than as a further basis for its hegemony.∞
GETTING A LIFE
Certainly these remain risks for a project that poses the antagonism
along lines that are at once very broad and also di≈cult to discern. But as
a way to explore further the possibilities of life against work, I want to
turn here to a more specific articulation of the rubric that might cast its
advantages and disadvantages in a di√erent light. The political project of
life against work can also be posed in familiar colloquial terms—in this
case, as the mandate to ‘‘get a life.’’≤ As the authors of ‘‘The Post-Work
Manifesto’’ declare, ‘‘it is time to get a life’’ (Aronowitz et al. 1998, 40),
and in the brief discussion that follows, I want to speculate about how
this popular directive might serve to frame a broad and expansive politi-
cal project.
Let me explain by touching briefly on the three terms of the injunc-
tion in reverse order, beginning with the concept of life. The first point to
emphasize is that the notion of life referenced in the slogan is not inno-
cent, and it is thus very di√erent from the one deployed in anti-abortion
232 epilogue
one cannot get something as big as a life on one’s own. And, moreover,
though it is a life that would be ours, as a life rather than a commodity, as
a web of relations and qualities of experience rather than a possession, it
is not something we can be said precisely to own or even to hold. This
kind of getting implies a fundamentally di√erent mode of appropriation.
The concept of life is not just expansive in this respect, it is also excessive.
For Weber, it is the wealth of possibilities that the work ethic diminishes;
for Nietzsche, it is what ascetic ideals disavow, but also what can poten-
tially disrupt ascetic modes of containment. A life, by this measure,
always exceeds what we have, and its getting is thus necessarily an incom-
plete process. In short, rather than burdening life with a fixed content—
that is, with too many assumptions about what might count as a life
beyond work—the possibility of the provocation to get a life lies in its
capacity to pose a political project that it does not stipulate and to open a
postwork speculative horizon that it cannot fix in advance. My claim is
that these commitments to di√erence, futurity, and excess might render
the political project of getting a life less amenable to those forces that
would reduce, contain, or appropriate it.
Perhaps more important from the point of view of my argument, the
collective e√ort to get a life can serve as a way both to contest the existing
terms of the work society and to struggle to build something new. Seen
in this light, the political project of getting a life is both deconstructive
and reconstructive, deploying at once negation and a≈rmation, simulta-
neously critical and utopian, generating estrangement from the present
and provoking a di√erent future. Or, to put it in terms of the concepts
around which the book was most broadly organized, it is a project that
refuses the existing world of work that is given to us and also demands
alternatives.
Introduction
1. Indeed, as Michael Denning notes, it is by now ‘‘a commonplace to note our
reluctance to represent work in our popular stories. A Martian who hijacked the
stock of the average video store would reasonably conclude that humans spent
far more of their time engaged in sex than in work’’ (2004, 91–92).
2. Whereas work was once a phenomenon worthy of scrutiny, ‘‘contemporary
political theory,’’ Russell Muirhead observes, ‘‘has had more to say about plural-
ism, toleration, virtue, equality of opportunity, and rights than it has about the
character of work’’ (2004, 14).
3. In a review of sociological work on the intersection of work and identity, Robin
Leidner concludes that despite the widespread interest in identity across the
social sciences and the humanities, ‘‘relatively few contemporary theorists have
put work at the center of their analyses of identity in late or post modernity’’
(2006, 424).
4. Workers could thus be represented by the figure of the servant, as in one famous
passage from The Second Treatise on Civil Government, in which Locke insists
that the labor that entitles an individual to private property includes ‘‘the turfs
my servant has cut’’ (1986, 20).
5. Cultural representations of the world of work are not only relatively rare but are
also often slow to change. Daniel Rodgers gives the example of the continuing
use of a cartoon image of a blacksmith to represent workers in the context of an
industrial economy in which very few such figures could be found (1978, 242). In
the 1960s, James Boggs made a similar point about the problem of clinging to
outdated economic imaginaries when he argued that to tell the postindustrial
unemployed ‘‘that they must work to earn their living is like telling a man in the
big city that he should hunt big game for the meat on his table’’ (1963, 52).
6. Taken together, the two strategies risk replicating the traditional choice between
either valuing work or valuing family, in relation to which various ‘‘work-family
balance’’ programs remain the most-cited—but, it seems to me, singularly in-
adequate—solution to the conflicts generated by the two spheres’ competing
claims on our loyalties.
7. Harry Cleaver o√ers a similar argument against the labor-work distinction
(2002).
8. The notion of ‘‘relations of rule’’ is adapted from Dorothy Smith’s (far richer)
category of ‘‘relations of ruling’’ (1987, 3).
9. Here, it should be noted, the concepts of living labor and work are rendered
more compatible if living labor is conceived not as an interior essence or norma-
tive standard, but as a potential for specifically political agency. In this way, the
concept serves not as a critical lens so much as ‘‘a source of the auto-valorization
of subjects and groups, as the creation of social cooperation,’’ as the potential to
construct alternatives (Negri 1996, 171). See also Jason Read’s similar approach to
the category (2003, 90–91).
10. Di√erent but compatible approaches to class as process include Joan Acker’s
revisiting of class from a feminist perspective (2000), Stanley Aronowitz’s insis-
tence on a class theory that places the emphasis on social time over social space
(2003), and William Corlett’s model of ‘‘class action’’ as a process of labor’s self-
determination (1998).
11. A relationship that might have been captured by a quantitative logic, measured
by the distance between the one in front and the one behind, is revealed as
something that must be grasped also in qualitative terms, as attitude, a√ect,
feeling, and symbolic exchange.
12. Indeed, as one radical feminist famously declared, with a combination of daring
and grandiosity not uncommon to 1970s feminism, ‘‘if there were another word
more all-embracing than revolution we would use it’’ (Firestone 1970, 3).
13. Here I obviously part company with more orthodox Arendtian—let alone Nietz-
schean—analyses that would exclude work from the proper business of the
political.
14. To be sure, to a≈rm the value of this latter agenda focused on freedom is not to
discount the ongoing importance of the former committed to equality.
15. I will generally use the label ‘‘Marxist feminism’’ to describe a wide variety of
feminisms, including my own, despite the fact that I sometimes draw on sources
more typically identified (and often even self-identified) as socialist feminist.
The distinction between Marxist feminism and socialist feminism is not always
clear. Often they are distinguished by period, with Marxist feminism preceding
the development of socialist feminism, and the latter described as a synthesis of
Marxism and radical feminism developed in the 1970s. The term ‘‘socialist’’ is
also sometimes used as a way to designate a more expansive and inclusive proj-
ect, one committed to political-economic analysis, but not necessarily to Marx-
ism per se. I prefer the term ‘‘Marxist feminism’’ for two reasons: first, because
my own work and many of its points of reference, including the domestic-labor
and wages for housework literatures, are indebted to Marxist theoretical tradi-
tions; and second, because I am skeptical about the contemporary relevance of
the term ‘‘socialist,’’ a point I will expand upon below.
3. Working Demands
1. Although the intellectual and political project of wages for housework continues
after this period, my focus is confined to this early period of its development for
reasons I will explain below.
2. For an example of this taxonomy of feminist theory, see Jaggar (1983); for an
important critique of this model, see Sandoval (2000, 41–64).
3. Here I would include my own earlier reading of wages for housework that sees
it—inadequately, I now think—as representative of a kind of Marxist feminist
theory upon which some later socialist feminisms improved (Weeks 1998).
4. This inattention to di√erence could characterize the dialectical model as well.
Where the familial model elides di√erence and denies conflict, the dialectical
model absorbs and subsumes them.
5. Robyn Wiegman observes that the ‘‘equation between subjectivity and feminist
knowledge’’ is also grounded in feminism’s historical insistence on the imbrica-
tion of the personal and the political, and with it, the methodological emphasis
on experience and the political priority of consciousness-raising (2000, 813).
6. Margaret Benston, in an essay originally published in 1969, presented what was
arguably the first installment in the domestic labor debate (1995). By the time
Maxine Molyneux published her call to move ‘‘Beyond the Domestic Labour
Debate’’ in 1979, she reports that over fifty articles had been published on the
topic (1979, 3). For some additional analyses of and highlights from the debate,
see Bubeck (1995), Vogel (2000), the introduction and essay by Malos (1995a,
1995b), and the volume she edited (1995c).
7. As Ellen Malos describes it, once ‘‘the debate shifted to the question of how to
determine the ‘value’ of work in the household in a marxist sense, a kind of
confrontational theoretical paralysis developed which dislocated the political
agenda’’ (1995b, 216).
8. The text was published as a pamphlet, the second edition of which includes four
texts: an introduction by James, dated July 1972; the title essay by Dalla Costa,
completed in December 1971, first published in Italian in 1972 as ‘‘Donne e sov-
versione sociale’’ (Women and the Subversion of the Community), and trans-
lated the same year into English by Dalla Costa and James; an essay by James,
‘‘A Woman’s Place,’’ first published in 1953; and a brief ‘‘Letter to a Group of
Women,’’ signed by Dalla Costa, James, ‘‘and many others.’’ My discussion is
confined to the first two essays, as they are most relevant to the development
of the wages for housework perspective. Besides this pamphlet, I draw most
Epilogue
1. This is a danger that Peter Fleming investigates interestingly in relation to some
of the di√erent ways that we might seek to secure ‘‘a life’’ by ‘‘reclaiming it from
work so that self-identity (or personal authenticity) might be achieved’’ (2009,
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references 273
Index
....................
276 index
class: class composition, 19, 94; laborist creative activity: freedom as creative
work ethic and, 59–60; ‘‘leading role practice, 22; Illich on convivial aus-
of the proletariat,’’ 93–94, 127; as out- terity and, 241n4; materialism and,
come, 16–19; process notion of, 19– 18–19; refusal of work and, 99–100;
20; subjectification function of work shorter hours and, 169; social labor
and, 9; subordination, insubordina- and, 102–3; work ethic and, 82
tion, and work ethic, 57–61; working Cremin, Colin, 240n21
class as category, 94–95; work in rela- critical utopias, 208, 210–11, 251n31
tion to, 16–20 ‘‘culture of poverty’’ discourses, 64
Cleaver, Harry, 91, 95, 97, 236n7 Cutler, Jonathan, 237n23
clothing and professional discourse,
73–74 Dalla Costa, Mariarosa, 119–30, 133–36,
Cobble, Dorothy Sue, 154 141, 243n8, 244n12
cognitive mapping, 130–31, 245n14 daydreams, 190–94
‘‘cold stream’’ Marxism, 188–89 Delany, Samuel, 211
Cold War anti-utopianism, 178–79 Deleuze, Gilles, 201, 227, 232, 249n12,
Collins, Patricia Hill, 247n6 253n3
command and obedience. See domina- Del Re, Alisa, 137, 244n9
tion and subordination demands and demanding: better work,
The Communist Manifesto (Marx and 104–9; directional demands, 220–21;
Engels), 85, 214–16, 252n34 enforcement of wage and hours laws,
concrete utopias, 195–97, 202–3, 212–13, 237n21; ‘‘getting a life,’’ 231–33; as per-
216, 221, 249n16 spective, 128–31, 139–45; as provoca-
concrete vs. abstract labor, 87–88, tion, 131–36, 145–46; slavery repara-
90–91 tions, 252n39; utopian, 176, 218–24.
consumer politics models and decline See also basic income demand; time
of work-based activism, 4 and shorter hours demand; wages for
consumption: production, relationship housework
to, 8, 88–89, 146; production con- denaturalizing e√ect of wages for
nected to, in socialist humanism, 88– housework demand, 130
89; professionalism discourse and, Denning, Michael, 23, 235n1
74; refusal of work and ‘‘carefree con- dependence vs. autonomy, work ethic
sumption,’’ 98–99; shorter hours and, 51–57
and, 169–70; work ethic and, 47–51, desire: basic income demand and, 146;
75. See also asceticism education of, 207; family and, 165;
‘‘convivial austerity,’’ 241n4 ressentiment and, 185–86; wages for
Cooper, Anna Julia, 65 housework and, 134–35; work ethic
cooperation and social production, and, 54, 75–76. See also asceticism
91–92 desire, utopian. See utopias
Corlett, William, 236n10 dialectic contradiction vs. antagonism, 96
Cornell, Drucilla, 123, 247n8 dialectic model of feminist theory, 115
Cox, Nicole, 122 DiFazio, William, 76–77
coyote (‘‘Call O√ Your Old Tired di√erence, utopia and, 211–12
Ethics’’), 67–68 directional demands, 220–21, 228–29
index 277
Disch, Lisa, 72 ifesto, 85, 214–16, 252n34; The Ger-
disciplinary subjectivity, work ethic man Ideology, 18–19, 85, 241n6; mate-
and, 53–55, 239n14 rialist methodology, 18–19; utopian-
Dispossessed (Le Guin), 211 ism and, 187, 222
distancing, utopian, 205–8, 250n24 equality vs. freedom, 20–23
division of labor vs. class, 17–18. See also estrangement, utopian function of,
gender division of labor 205–8, 213–14, 218, 250n22
domestic production and reproduction: eternal return doctrine (Nietzsche), 194,
demystification of, 129; domestic 199–202
labor debate, 118–20, 244n12; gen- ethical discourse of work. See work
dered work ethic and, 63; hired ethic
domestic workers, 172–74; recogni- exchange values vs. use values, 87–88,
tion of, as work, 66–67; refusal of 90–91
work and, 109, 124; shorter hours exclamation points, in manifestoes,
and, 162–64; as unproductive, from 214–15
capital’s perspective, 244n12. See also exclusion, racialized work ethic and,
wages for housework 61–63
domination and subordination: beyond exit concept, 100
exploitation, 20–21; conflict of indi- exodus concept, 100
vidual and control, 55–56; work ethic exploitation: domination and subor-
and autonomy vs. command, 51–57; dination as beyond, 20–21; exploita-
work ethic and subordination vs. ble subjects made at the point of pro-
insubordination, 57–61 duction, 10–11; gendered, in domes-
dreams, day vs. night, 190–94 tic space, 25; socialist modernization
dual-systems model and Fordism vs. and, 83; work ethic and exploitable
post-Fordism, 28 subjects, 51, 53–55, 239n14
Du Bois, W. E. B., 62
Fair Labor Standards Act, 247n10
Eagleton, Terry, 211 family: care work and, 243n14; as com-
economic imaginaries, outdated, 235n5 ponent of wage system, 121; Fordism
Edelman, Lee, 240n16 and family-based model, 27; income
Ehrenreich, Barbara, 237n17 and family membership, 143–44;
eight-hour movement, 162, 169 Lehr’s Queer Family Values, 167–68;
Eisenstein, Zillah, 66 separate spheres ideology, critiques
Elson, Diane, 97 of, 129; shorter hours demand based
employment contracts, dominance and on, 155–61; wages for housework
submission in, 20–21 demand and, 116; work ethic and
empowerment of workers in human- family ethic, 164–66; work-family
resources approach, 107 balance discourse, 156, 235n6; work
‘‘The End of History?’’ (Fukuyama), hours constructed in reference to,
178–81 163–64
enforcement of wage and hours laws, family ethic: gendered work ethic and,
demand for, 237n21 63–64; social welfare policy and, 165;
Engels, Friedrich: The Communist Man- work ethic and, 165–66, 240n16
278 index
fear vs. hope, 197–98 Friedan, Betty, 65–66, 151–52, 173
Federici, Silvia, 122, 245n13 Fromm, Erich, 85–87
The Feminine Mystique (Friedan), 65– Fukuyama, Francis, 178–81, 186, 189–90,
66, 151 247n2, 248n3, 248n5
feminism: periodizing models in his- functionalism, 27–28, 127
tory of, 114–18; poststructuralist, 115; futurism vs. utopianism, 196–97
refusal of work, relevance of, 109–11;
strategies that reinforce work values, gay and lesbian marriage discourses,
12–13; utopianism and, 181–86; 239n16
women’s liberation, 21–22; work gender: basic income demand and gen-
ethic and, 65–68. See also gender; der neutrality, 147–49; domestic
Marxist feminism; wages for house- space, exploitation and inequality in,
work; women 25; feminine frailty/masculine pro-
‘‘The Feminists: A Political Organiza- tection trope, 154; plasticity of, 11;
tion to Annhilate Sex Roles,’’ 217 tramp figure, male and female, 165–
Firestone, Shulamith, 182 66; work as a site of gendering, 8–11;
Fitting, Peter, 251n30 work ethic as gendered discourse,
Fleming, Peter, 106–7, 231, 252n1 63–68; work hours and, 164. See also
Folbre, Nancy, 246n22 feminism; women
Foner, Philip, 174 gender division of labor: domestic, 148;
Ford, Henry, 64 shorter hours and, 157–58, 160, 162–
Fordism and industrial production: 64; wages for housework demand
dual-systems model, 28; family-based and, 137; work ethic and, 63
model under, 27; independence and, genealogical vs. tendential method, 102
51–52, 55–56; laborist work ethic, 59– generational discourse, 116
60; production and consumption, Geoghegan, Vincent, 205, 250n23
linking of, 49–50; social mobility, The German Ideology (Marx and
promise of, 46; wages for housework Engels), 18–19, 85, 241n6
demand and, 140. See also postin- Gerson, Kathleen, 247n10
dustrial, post-Fordist production ‘‘getting a life,’’ 231–33
Foucault, Michel, 27, 54, 184–85 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 66, 209–10,
Fraser, Nancy, 52 240n18
Freedman, Carl, 213 Gini, Al, 104–5, 108
freedom and autonomy: basic income Glazer, Nona, 6–7
as provocation to, 145–46; equality Gompers, Samuel, 153
vs., 20–23; Marxist view of, 86–88, Goodwin, Sarah, 183
145–46; as process vs. goal, 22; Gordon, Linda, 52
shorter hours and, 153, 167–68; work Gorz, André, 77
as political problem of, 35; work ethic Grundrisse (Marx), 27–28, 90–93
and command/dependence vs. inde-
pendence and autonomy, 51–57 Halberstam, Judith, 168, 240n16
Freeman, Carla, 10, 73–74 Haraway, Donna, 126, 252n37
Freeman, Caroline, 244n11 Hardt, Michael, 100, 246n23
Freud, Sigmund, 190–92, 250n18 Hartsock, Nancy, 24–25
index 279
Hays, Sharon, 80, 157–58 independence. See freedom and
‘‘hedonist Marxism,’’ 98 autonomy
Hegel, G. W. F., 248n3 the individual: Foucault on production
Hemmings, Clare, 115 of disciplinary individuality, 54; free-
Hennessy, Rosemary, 169 dom and individual will, 22; problem
Henwood, Doug, 70 of control and, 55–56; socialist
Herland (Gilman), 209 humanism and, 85–86, 89; social
Higgins, Kathleen, 200 production vs., 91–92; work, individ-
historicism, of Hegel and Marx, 248n3 ualization of, 3–4, 238n12; work ethic
Hobbes, Thomas, 178, 198, 248n5 as individualizing discourse, 52–53
Hochschild, Arlie, 70, 74, 155–61, 174, industrialization and privatization of
246nn2–3 work, 3
home as hidden abode of production, industrial production. See Fordism and
24–25. See also family industrial production; Taylorism and
home economics movement, 66 post-Taylorism
hope, utopian, 188–89, 193–204, inequality, 16, 25
249nn13–16 instrumentality, noninstrumentality,
hours. See time and shorter hours and the work ethic and, 44–45, 238n8
demand insubordination and the work ethic,
housework. See domestic production 57–61
and reproduction; wages for intensification of work, better-work
housework approach and, 107–8
humanism, socialist, 82, 85–89, 92, 97 the irrational and the work ethic, 42–47
humanist work ethic, 104–5, 242n9
human-relations management model, Jacobs, Jerry, 247n10
106 James, Selma, 119–36, 148, 167, 222–23,
human-resource management, 106–8 228–29, 243n8, 244n12, 244n13,
Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline, 154 245n14
Huntington, Samuel, 181 Jameson, Frederic, 46, 130, 197, 203, 206,
212, 251n33
idealism, 18, 40, 196–97
identification with work, professional Kelley, Robin, 79–80, 183
ideology and, 74 Kitch, Sally, 251n29
identity politics, 148–49, 183 Kolakowski, Leszek, 98–99, 103
idleness, fear of, 170 Kornbluh, Felicia, 144
Illich, Ivan, 241n4
imagination: Bloch on utopianism and, labor, living, 14–15, 236n9
188–89, 194; political imagination labor, work in relation to, 14–16
and utopia, 212 laborist work ethic, 59–60, 68, 242n9
immanent critique, model of, 102 labor markets and individualization of
immigrants and racialized work ethic, work, 3–4
62–63 Laclau, Ernesto, 224
inclusion, exclusion, and racialized Lafargue, Paul, 98–99, 103
work ethic and, 61–63 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 56
280 index
‘‘leading role of the proletariat,’’ 93–94, sion, 21; on freedom, 145–46; on gen-
127 eral intellect, 141; The German Ideol-
Lebowitz, Michael, 93 ogy, 18–19, 85, 241n6; Grundrisse, 27–
Left anti-utopianism, 181–86 28, 90, 91–93; historicism of, 248n3;
Left asceticism, 135 on labor and agency, 18; materialist
Left melancholy, 185–86, 249n18 methodology, 18–19; on shorter
Le Guin, Ursula, 211 working hours, 98–99; socialist
Lehr, Valeri, 167–68 humanism and, 85–87; theory of
Leidner, Robin, 10–11, 70, 235n3 value, 97, 119; use vs. exchange value
leisure and shorter hours, 162 and concrete vs. abstract labor, 90–
Lenin, Vladimir, 83–84 91; utopianism and, 187, 222; Weber
less work, demand for, 104–9 compared to, 39–40, 57. See also Cap-
liberal feminism. See feminism ital (Marx)
liberalism: anti-utopianism, 177–81, Marxism: Anglo-American, 85; Bloch’s
248n3; on freedom, 22; work and ‘‘cold stream’’ vs. ‘‘warm stream,’’
private-public economy of, 3 188–89; living labor in, 14–15; prod-
life, ‘‘getting a,’’ 231–33 uctivism, critique of, 81–83; utopian-
life against work, 230–31 ism and, 186–87, 248n8. See also
Lipset, Seymour Martin, 238n10 autonomous Marxism
living labor, 14–15, 236n9 Marxist feminism: class as outcome, 17;
living-wage reform campaign, 32–33 dialectic model and, 115; domestic
Locke, John, 3, 235n4 labor debate, 118–20, 244n12; expos-
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 37 ing reproductive labor as key for, 137;
Looking Backward (Bellamy), 209–10, functionalism and, 27–28; human-
250n20, 251n28, 251n30 ism and, 88; publicizing, politiciza-
López, Maria Milagros, 241n2 tion, and transformation of work in,
Luther, Martin, 238n4 23–30; socialist feminism vs., 236n15
Lyon, Janet, 214–16, 218 mass production. See Taylorism and
post-Taylorism
Macarov, David, 247n9 materialism, 18–19, 40
Malos, Ellen, 128, 243n7 McGregor, Douglas, 106
management discourses, 106–9, 231, McKay, Ailsa, 143–44
242n11 McKenna, Erin, 251n32
manifestoes, 213–18, 222, 252nn34–38 McLellan, David, 87
‘‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’’ (Haraway), melancholy, 185–86, 249n18
252n37 memory, 194–95, 199
Marin, Louis, 206–7 Mies, Maria, 88–89
market exchange and Marx’s descent to militant optimism, 250n19
site of wage-based production, 5–6, Mill, John Stuart, 1, 3, 248n5
20, 24 Mills, C. Wright: on middle-class
Marx, Karl: on class, 16; The Communist worker, 55; on professionalism, 72–
Manifesto, 85, 214–16, 252n34; on 73; White Collar, 1, 3, 35; on white-
cooperation and social production, collar work, 62
91–92; on domination and submis- Mink, Gwendolyn, 66
index 281
modernization, socialist, 82–86, 92, 97 personality, 71, 73
Molyneux, Maxine, 243n6 Peters, Tom, 71–72
More, Thomas, 208, 250n25 Pfaelzer, Jean, 206
Morris, William, 12, 53 pink-collar workers, 66–67, 73–74
Moylan, Tom, 183, 210, 251n31 political theory: on freedom, 22–23;
Muirhead, Russell, 104–5, 108, 235n2 marginalization of work within, 2–4,
Muñoz, José, 213 23; work as political problem of free-
dom, 35
National Welfare Rights Organization, politics vs. ethics, postwork, 227–29
80, 138, 144 Popper, Karl, 178–81, 186, 247nn1–2,
need: desire vs., 134–35; expansion of, 248nn3–5
102–3; as justification for work, 4, 7, postindustrial, post-Fordist production:
44, 80; temporality of, 245n18; wages alienation critique and, 89; basic
for housework demand and, 134–35 income demand and, 142; depen-
Negri, Antonio, 90–96, 99–100, 102, 141, dency and, 52–53; family ethic and,
229, 244n9, 246n23 64; ‘‘flexploitation,’’ 238n12; produc-
neoconservative discourse, 181 tion and consumption, relationship
neoliberal anti-utopianism, 179–81 between, 50–51; production and
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 91, 194, 198–203, 233 reproduction, relationship between,
normative theory and utopianism, 140–42; production vs. reproduction,
184–85 28; professionalism discourse, 71–75;
the ‘‘Not-Yet-Become,’’ 189 wages for housework demand and,
the ‘‘Not-Yet-Conscious,’’ 190–93 140; work ethic and, 46, 60, 69–71
novum (Bloch), 194, 196–97, 216 Postone, Moishe, 7–8, 15, 84–85, 102
poststructuralism and utopianism, 184
O’Brien, Jean, 72 poststructuralist feminism, 115
O√e, Claus, 246n24 ‘‘The Post-Work Manifesto’’ (Arono-
‘‘On Social Contract’’ (Rousseau), 209 witz et al.), 161–62, 168, 231
The Open Society and Its Enemies (Pop- postwork politics vs. postwork ethic,
per), 178–81 227–29
optimism, automatic vs. militant, postwork society and utopian pos-
250n19 sibility, 30
overman (Nietzsche), 194, 199, 201–2 poverty discourses, 64
overtime, 164 The Power of Women and the Subversion
of the Community (Dalla Costa and
parenting as reproductive labor, 141. See James), 119, 128, 243n8
also child rearing; family power relations, history of struggle
participation income, 139 vs., 27
part-time work, 164 precarity movements, European, 80
Pateman, Carole, 20–21, 144 predestination, 45
performance measurement issue in The Principle of Hope (Bloch), 187
post-Fordist context, 70–71 privatization of work, 3–4
performative quality of utopian process ontology of being, 189, 249n11
provocation, 206–7 production: exploitable subjects made
282 index
at the point of production, 10–11; reform vs. revolution, 228–29
Marx’s descent from site of market refusal of work: abolition of work, 101–
exchange to wage production, 5–6, 3; development of, 96; feminism, rel-
20, 24; social factory and, 120 evance for, 109–11; negative and posi-
productivism: basic income and, 230; tive processes of, 99–101; overview of,
Baudrillard’s critique of, 81–83; con- 13–14, 26, 123–24; wages for house-
sumption connected to, in socialist work demand and, 123–26; work-
humanism, 88–89; consumption focused capitalism and, 97
linked to, in work ethic, 47–51; reification of work, 3
domestic work and, 124; idleness, relationship time, 168–69
fear of, 170; industrial and postin- religion and the work ethic, 42–45, 51
dustrial work ethic and, 45–46; reproductive labor and social reproduc-
Lafargue on, 98; in Marxist femi- tion: basic income demand and, 230;
nism, 25; shorter hours and, 169–70; capital accumulation vs. social repro-
socialist modernization and, 84. See duction, 27–29, 148, 229–31; cogni-
also work ethic tive mapping and, 130–31, 245n14;
professionalism discourse in post- extending refusal of work to, 109;
Fordist management, 71–75 functionalism vs. expanded concep-
property relations, 3, 84 tion of, 28–29; in Marxist feminism,
prostitution, 67–68 24; publicizing and politicizing, by
The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Cap- demand for wages for housework,
italism (Weber). See Weber, Max 137; waged production in relation to
Protestant work ethic. See work ethic domestic reproduction, postin-
provocation: basic income demand as, dustrial, 140–42. See also domestic
145–46; ‘‘getting a life,’’ 231–33; man- production and reproduction
ifestoes and, 214, 217–18; utopian Republic (Plato), 251n30
function of, 206–7, 213–14; wages for ressentiment, 185–86, 199–201, 249n18
housework demand as, 131–36 revolutionary agitation: demand for
Puchner, Martin, 214–15 wages for housework as revolution-
ary strategy, 135; manifestoes and,
Queer Family Values (Lehr), 167–68 218; reform vs., 228–29
‘‘queer time,’’ 168–69 rights vs. desire, 134–35
Robinson, Randall, 252n39
race and racialized discourse, 61–63, 65 Rodgers, Daniel, 164, 170, 235n5
Rajchman, John, 253n3 Roediger, David, 62, 174
Raventós, Daniel, 246n25 Roof, Judith, 116
Read, Jason, 94 Rose, Hilary, 209, 211
realism: Bloch’s ‘‘real realism,’’ 189; uto- Ross, Andrew, 74
pianism and, 179–81, 187, 189, 193 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 209–10
Real-Possible (Bloch), 194–96, 213
reason and rationalism: Bloch’s utopian Salzinger, Leslie, 11, 56
reason, 188–89; Popper’s anti- Sargent, Lyman Tower, 210, 251n31
utopianism and, 178–79, 188–90; scarcity and postscarcity, 103
work ethic, the irrational, and, 42–47 Scheman, Naomi, 245n17
index 283
Schleuning, Neala, 88 power of, 102–3; wages for house-
scum Manifesto, 217 work and, 148
secularization of the work ethic, 46– social reproduction. See reproductive
47 labor and social reproduction
Seidman, Michael, 79 social wage, 139
self-a≈rmation, 201–2 Socrates, 251n30
self-control, valorization of, 164 Solanas, Valerie, 217
self-development of employees, 71–72 Spivak, Gayatri, 91
self-discipline, 48, 73 stakeholder grants, 139
self-fulfillment as postindustrial work standardization, professionalism as, 74
ethic promise, 46 Steensland, Brian, 138, 246n27
self-preservation, 249n11 Stillman, Peter, 211
self-realization and socialist humanism, style, professional discourse and, 73–74
86 subjectivities: autonomous Marxism
self-valorization: autonomy and, 95–96; and, 93; demands and the antiwork
laborist work ethic and, 59; refusal of political subject, 223–24; exploitable
work and, 32, 100, 103 subjects made at the point of pro-
separate spheres ideology: critiques of, duction, 10–11; fearful vs. hopeful
129–30; shorter hours and, 158–59; subject, 198; Nietzsche’s overman,
wages for housework and, 140 201–2; subjectification function of
separation, in autonomous Marxism, work, 8–9; Taylor, individuals, and,
95–96, 100 56; utopian desubjectivization, 205;
sex work, 67–68 Weber on construction of capitalist
Shklovsky, Viktor, 250n22 subjectivities, 39–40; work ethic and
Shor, Juliet, 163 exploitable subjects, 51, 53–55,
shorter hours. See time and shorter 239n14. See also the individual
hours demand subordination. See domination and
slavery reparations demand, 252n39 subordination
Smith, Dorothy, 236n8 surplus value, production of: absolute
social factory, 120–23, 127–28, 140, 142 vs. relative, 153; domestic labor and,
socialism: domestic work and, 125–26, 119–20; self-valorization vs., 95; social
244n13; Lenin and, 83–84; liberal reproduction vs., 27; sovereign indi-
anti-utopianism and anticommu- vidual subject of exploitation and, 51;
nism, 177; utopian politics and prob- wage and, 122
lems with, 29–30 Suvin, Darko, 205, 250n22
socialist feminism. See Marxist
feminism Talwar, Jennifer Parker, 240n24
socialist humanism, 82, 85–89, 92, 97 Taylor, Barbara, 113, 136, 149
socialist modernization, 82–86, 92, 97 Taylor, Frederick W., 56, 71–72
social mobility as industrial work ethic Taylorism and post-Taylorism: commit-
promise, 46 ment from post-Taylorist workers,
social production: family as site of, 123; 69–70; dual-systems model and, 28;
Marx on cooperation and, 91–92; independence and, 55–56; Lenin and,
modernization and, 86; productive 84; management and, 71–73; mass
284 index
organizing and, 94. See also postin- utopias: abstract and concrete, 195–97,
dustrial, post-Fordist production 202–3, 212–13, 216, 221, 249n16;
‘‘tendential method,’’ 102 Bloch’s concrete utopia and ontology
text and act, utopian forms of, 219 of hope, 193–98, 202–4; Bloch’s
Thatcher, Margaret, 180 ‘‘Not-Yet-Become,’’ 189; Bloch’s ‘‘Not-
Thompson, E. P., 80, 169, 207 Yet-Conscious’’ and daydreams, 190–
time and shorter hours demand: eight- 93; Bloch’s utopian reason, 188–89;
hour movement, 162, 169; feminist conclusions, 224–25; feminist utopi-
time movement, toward, 170–74; for anism and Left critique, 181–86;
freedom and autonomy, 167–71; functions of estrangement and
Hoschschild’s family-centered provocation, 204–8, 213–14, 218; lib-
rationale, 155–61; nonwork time as eral anti-utopianism, 177–81; man-
relationship time, 168; overview and ifestoes, 213–18; Marxism and, 186–
history, 151–55; true length of work- 87, 248n8; More’s word play in term,
ing day obscured by wages, 122; uto- 250n25; multiplicity of forms, 208,
pianism and, 222; for ‘‘what we will,’’ 250n27; Nietzsche and utopian hope,
161–66, 169–71; work time as gen- 198–204; overview, 175–77; ‘‘social-
dered construct, 164; work vs. non- ism’’ and, 29–30; socialist humanism,
work time, 15 85–88; socialist modernization, 83–
time and temporality: a√ective tem- 85; traditional and critical literary
porality and hope, 199–204; ‘‘getting utopias, 208–13; utopian demand,
a life’’ and, 232; utopian forms and, 176, 218–24
221–22
The Time Bind (Hochschild), 156 valorization: Friedan and, 152; over-
traditionalist perspective on work ethic, valorized and devalorized work, 76;
43–45 reproduction vs., 230; of self-control,
tramp figure, male and female, 165– 164; self-valorization, 32, 95–96, 100;
66 socialist modernization and, 84; of
transformation in Marxist feminist tra- unalienated labor, as strategy, 107;
dition, 29–30 unwaged labor and, 122, 159; work
Trott, Ben, 220–21, 223 and capitalist valorization, 6, 18. See
Trouble on Triton (Delany), 211 also wages for housework
value theory of labor, 97, 119
unconscious and Bloch’s ‘‘Not-Yet- Vanevery, Jo, 143–44
Conscious,’’ 190–93 van Parijs, Philippe, 246n25
unemployment and underemployment: Vincent, Jean-Marie, 101, 103
basic income demand and, 43, 149; Virno, Paolo, 100, 141–42, 227
benefits and, 247n10; shorter hours
demand and, 33, 172–73; work ethic wages for housework: basic income
and, 65 demand as successor to, 147–49;
universal healthcare demand, 237n22 basic income demand compared to,
use values vs. exchange values, 87–88, 139–46; domestic labor debate, 118–
90–91 20, 244n12; as ends or means, 128,
Utopia (More), 208 135–36; feminist advantages and dis-
index 285
wages for housework (cont.) Willis, Paul, 10
advantages of, 148–49; feminist his- Wilson, William Julius, 65
tory and, 115–18; limits of the anal- Winkiel, Laura, 217
ysis, 126–28; as perspective, 128–31; wishfulness, 249n16
problems with, 137; as provocation, Wollstonecraft, Mary, 65, 182
131–36; refusal of work and, 123–26; women: denaturalization of role of, 130;
reproductive labor publicized and domestic production, recognition of,
politicized by, 137; social factory the- 66–67; equal access to waged work,
ory, 120–23, 127–28; utopianism and, 12, 65–66; Friedan’s vision of careers
220, 222–23 for, 151–52. See also feminism; gender
wage system: arbitrariness of what is women’s liberation, 21–22. See also
waged, 143; demystification of, 129; as feminism
dominant mechanism of capitalist work: defined, 14; labor in relation to,
incorporation, 122; family as compo- 14–16; marginalization within politi-
nent of, 121; Hochschild’s demoral- cal theory, 2–4
ization of, 159; wages for housework work day. See time and shorter hours
demand as preserving, 137; Weber on demand
work ethic and wage incentives, 44 work ethic: family ethic and, 164–66;
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 248n8 gendered inclusion and exclusion,
‘‘warm stream’’ Marxism, 188–89 63–68; history of rebellions and
Washington, Booker T., 65 refusals, 79–81; humanist, 104–5,
Weber, Max: on calling, 37, 238n4; on 242n9; hybrid types, 238n7; as ideol-
capitalist development and con- ogy, 239n13; independence and
struction of subjectivities, 38–42; life, autonomy vs. command and depen-
concept of, 233; limits of account, 57– dence in Weber, 51–57; laborist, 59–
58; Marx compared to, 39–40, 57–58; 60, 68, 242n9; post-Fordism and
on productivism, consumerism, and focus on worker attitudes, 69–71;
worldly asceticism, 47–51; the post-Fordist management and pro-
rational, the irrational, and fessionalism discourse, 71–75; post-
defamiliarization of work ethic, work politics vs. postwork ethic,
42–47 227–29; primitive construction of
Wegner, Phillip, 251n31 subjectivities in Weber, 38–42; prod-
welfare discourse: basic income and, uctivism, consumerism, and worldly
138; linking to work, 247n9; asceticism in Weber, 47–51; racialized
racialized, 62; reforms, 80, 165; ‘‘wel- exclusion and inclusion, 61–63; the
fare queen’’ figure, 166; welfare rights rational, the irrational, and Weber’s
movement, 144; work ethic, family religious roots of secular ethic, 42–
ideal, and, 165 47; rea≈rmation of, in contesting,
‘‘wellness’’ of workers, 106–7 68–69; structural coercion and indi-
white-collar exemption, 247n10 vidual consent, 37–38; subordina-
white-collar workers, 62, 73 tion, insubordination, and class
whiteness and the work ethic, 62, 65 struggle, 57–61; traditional work
Wiegman, Robyn, 116, 243n5 values, 11–14. See also productivism
286 index
‘‘work-family balance,’’ 235n6 work values. See work ethic
working class, autonomous Marxism worldly asceticism, 47–51, 89, 103
on, 93–95
working hours, Marx on, 98–99. See Young, Iris, 17–18
also time and shorter hours demand
work society, 5–8, 101–2 Zerilli, Linda, 22–23
index 287
kathi weeks is associate professor of women’s studies at
Duke University.