Abstract
I agreed to review this book a few weeks before the global pandemic upended society and forced us all to reexamine our underlying ideas about work and community. It may be that the coming years force us all to reckon with urgent questions about our society’s relationship to work, from what we consider “essential” services to how we compensate paid labor. The limits of our imagination may be stretched beyond what we had once considered possible. Or, we may return to business as usual without any fundamental changes to our ideas or institutions. In a time of profound uncertainty, it’s valuable to have texts that can help us rethink our society’s deep assumptions. James Chamberlain’s Undoing Work, Rethinking Community is one such book. It confronts the deepest conceptual challenges that face us as we turn toward building a common future amid the devastating evidence of our shared human frailty.
Chamberlain’s book comprises six chapters, each focused on a particular conceptual thread that forms our contemporary regime of work. The analysis moves from abstract themes of identity and membership in the first two chapters to the material conditions of contemporary work in the middle two chapters, which treat workplace flexibility and debate about how work is rewarded. The book concludes with two chapters on the idea of community and the postwork society. Chamberlain’s interlocutors vary, but in each chapter the critical idea he targets is the “work society,” his term for the underlying assumption that work reifies social attachments. In the work society, individuals precede communities, which are themselves created by work. An individual who fails to work has weakened society. The main purpose of the book is to convince readers to “abandon the view that community is constructed by work, whether paid or not” (2). Instances of the “work society” are omnipresent, staples not only of political stump speeches in the Anglo-American world and professional self-help literature but also of Marxist critiques of capitalism and social democratic proposals for an unconditional basic income (UBI).
Chamberlain devotes the whole of the second chapter to understanding the “work society” by focusing mainly on the thought of André Gorz and connecting the thought of this French New Left figure to that of Sigmund Freud and John Rawls. While Chamberlain has an affinity for Gorz’s Marxist critique of the distribution of labor, he still finds in Gorz too much of the work society. As Chamberlain sees it, Gorz’s solution only addresses the distribution of labor “rather than trying to challenge the link between work and social membership” (28). Here Chamberlain argues that Gorz, Freud, and Rawls each repeat a mistaken commitment to the idea that society is a way to meet human needs beyond the reach of a single individual. That such a diverse range of thinkers makes such an assumption provides evidence for Chamberlain that ideas about work have roots in our social ontology. However, this social ontology leads to a consideration of work as the primary sign of social membership. Without rethinking our understanding of the purpose and meaning of social life, we will retain some version—more or less draconian—of the ethical injunction to work.
At the same time that our social ontology sustains the ethical imperative to work, the systematic destruction of stable economic institutions has severed the critical connections between work and identity. The rise of so-called gig economy labor offers some workers the promise of earning income from rideshares without becoming a taxi driver, or extracting occasional rents from unused surplus living space without becoming an innkeeper or landlord. In the middle strata of the economy, workers cycle between different employers without becoming identified with a particular organization or even a specific set of skills or tasks. While recent neoliberal forms of employment have decoupled work from these professional identities, they have reinforced an individualist social ontology of the work society through the concept of “flexibility.” Chamberlain shows how the concept has circulated through the economy, and props up existing class structures by “marginalizing collective institutions” (45). As managerial practices reflect macroeconomic changes, workers themselves become individuals who “need to be liberated” from “collective institutions” (58). As these changes swept through the economy of paid work, the same neoliberal assumptions placed “the burden of responsibility on individual households” (69). While some individual workers have experienced enhanced freedom, this has come at the cost of “decollectivization and an increase in employer discretion with respect to the organization of work” (71). If the concept of flexibility smuggles an increase in managerial power under the conceptual cover of freedom, then we might place our hopes in universalist social policy that could rebalance the power of workers and owners. For those whose politics are left of center, UBI is one such policy with growing support in mainstream politics. However, on Chamberlain’s view arguments for UBI do not offer unalloyed progress. Where they provide a fairer distribution of labor, they also fail to dismantle the work society. Most arguments for UBI seek to correct labor market and social policy failures in pursuit of full employment. In this way, they fall short of challenging the goal of full employment and questioning the value of paid work. For UBI to expand freedom, then whatever form it takes would have to “accompany efforts to cultivate institutions and opportunities for cooperative production” (97).
In an engagement with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Chamberlain assesses a variety of ways in which leftist thought has imagined a postwork future. In his view, Hardt and Negri’s critiques of capitalism do not go far enough. In all of their postwork visions, community and social ties remain a function of work, albeit unpaid work. In this way, they leave open the possibility that society will remain fractured by hierarchies of prestige and privilege that result from “certain forms of work.” Social solidarity remains difficult and elusive, the individualist social ontology intact. To move beyond the pervasive individualist social ontology, Chamberlain turns to the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, who regards human experiences as relational rather than individual. What Nancy calls “literary communism” emerges as a central form of resistance to ideas about community that reduce it to “a collective work produced by its members” (127). As concrete suggestions, Chamberlain lends tentative support for minimum wage increases and conditional support for UBI efforts as a means to liberate people’s time to engage in social movements that challenge capitalism.
Chamberlain’s book should be read by scholars interested in anticapitalist thought, especially that of André Gorz, the thinker who receives the most sustained engagement. It is the internal tension in Gorz’s work that reveals Chamberlain’s most compelling insight—that even committed critics of capitalism struggle to imagine society without first assuming the priority of work. Ultimately, this book’s project lies in its call to imagine labor on new terms. Although the book engages with practical questions about UBI and flexible work, the “work society” is more conceptual than material. And in this respect, the book successfully shows that in both theory and practice some of the most thoughtful critics and promising economic interventions leave intact the conceptual architecture for hierarchy and domination. When it comes to solutions, the book does not give account of how societies create new ontological foundations, only that the conditions to do so require us to spend less time engaged in work. Until we do, Chamberlain warns, efforts to transform the economy will remain limited by our individualist social ontology.
Readers who are not already engaged in ongoing research about the concept of work will find the book’s accessibility limited in a few respects. First, the wide range of interlocutors risks confusion about why or how the ideas and texts are related. For example, the second chapter is a close reading of a French New Left thinker that ends with a brief excursus into Freudian sociology. The following chapter’s primary interlocutor for its discussion of the concept of flexibility is a recent career manual in the business self-help press. While we might expect André Gorz to be more sensitive to the ontological foundations of the society he critiques, the same could hardly be said for a manual that offers advice to a laid-off, middle-aged worker bewildered by the rapid changes in the postindustrial economy. For readers familiar with Ilana Gershon’s anthropology of contemporary job hunting, Down and Out in the New Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Chamberlain’s treatment of flexibility shows that flexibility is a new face of the deeper problem of socially compulsory work. However, a methodological discussion might have helped readers avoid the impression that the New Left shares common faults with a literature whose explicit purpose is to reconcile workers to exploitation.
The book’s second limitation is that Chamberlain offers few if any concrete examples of how to imagine community beyond the work society. He points to Nancy’s “literary communism” and the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham as signposts. Readers familiar with their work will understand the terrain they chart. Other readers, after learning from Chamberlain that so many other paths forward are insufficient, might wonder whether a closer reading of these texts would not reveal similar limitations. On the one hand, the lack of concrete suggestions is not a serious limitation since the book primarily targets an underlying social ontology. But the more the book emphasizes its ontological argument, the more it raises doubts about the connection between theory and practice. Indeed, in the book’s final pages, Chamberlain equivocates on the instrumental value of UBI-based solutions to the current distribution of work and hopes that the redistribution of labor will give us time to imagine and demand different forms of community.
The book’s most serious limitation for readers not already immersed in the role of work in society is the absence of a definition of work. In drawing a target around the concept of the “work society,” Chamberlain assumes an understanding of work that comprises any cooperative effort to meet collective needs. Yet a range of thinkers in a variety of traditions of political theory could have provided some parameters, from Hannah Arendt’s heterodox republicanism or Deweyan pragmatism to orthodox Marxism or Lockean liberalism. In Chamberlain’s work society, everything is work—domestic and household maintenance, volunteering time to community organizations, and alienated wage labor all fall within the sphere of work. Such a broad brush skips over the fine conceptual distinctions, such as between labor and work, that thinkers like Arendt have noticed. To take one example, the capacious definition of work keeps at a remove the concept of alienation, one idea that might have driven home the tragedy of the work society. The ideology of the work society sustains a kind of ontological alienation, reinforcing the idea that individuals create community rather than the other way around.
Despite these limitations, Chamberlain’s book provides an important challenge to our assumptions about work and its place in society. Even as it moves quickly over Marx’s ideas about human nature, it offers an implicit challenge to the post-Marxist Left to spend less time analyzing late capitalism and more time understanding Marx’s critique of alienation. Chamberlain never says it outright, but his book reminds readers throughout that Marx was just as much a theorist of “species-being” as of homo faber. We are part of a society, whether we work or not. We don’t create society through our work; our social nature inspires us to imagine and create. Perhaps getting back in touch with the concept of “species-being” could show the way toward the perennially appealing vision of organizing our lives just as we have a mind to do.