Abstract
I am indebted to the reviewers for their interesting deployments, valuable critiques and generative expansions of the arguments in The Problem with Work. It is gratifying to see how the book’s concerns intersect with, and may be useful for, other kinds of projects. And the writers’ descriptions of their own work make clear to me how the processes of applying and adapting the analyses to different fields of inquiry can best reveal the potential of my analyses and also their limitations. But rather than respond to each commentary in turn, I thought I would proceed by theme, while trying to speak to as many of the authors’ questions and concerns as I can.
Laura Schwartz’s fascinating work on early 20th century British feminist debates about the nature and status of domestic labor encapsulates nicely the feminist conundrum that I was trying to work through and find an exit from. It is another iteration of the equality or difference dilemma: either feminists value productive waged labor as a path to equality with men or we revalue reproductive labor and risk thereby reproducing it as women’s work. As in the example Laura cited, what remains unquestioned by both sides is the traditional work ethic that pegs our humanity to our being willing and able to work.
Many of the reflections focused, rightly it seems to me, on one of the most difficult problems with this project, namely that of leveling a critique at forms of feminized reproductive labor that remain so stubbornly invisible and undervalued. In this context, one might conclude that oppositional political movements might accomplish more by claiming for this work its equal status as socially worthy labor. I imagine that was important for the struggles of the Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland that Laura Schwartz studied. It was clearly valuable for the migrant women hotel workers that Gabriella Alberti describes. In this instance, Gabriella usefully explains, the status of someone engaged in socially necessary labor could serve to alleviate some of the penalties these subjects experience as gendered and racialized non-citizens. Here too sex worker activists, as Katie Cruz notes, have harnessed work ethic discourses with some success to combat the stigma and poor working conditions many sex workers experience.
The question that these authors pose is thus an important one: ‘given the centrality of the work ethic as a positive force in historic and continuing feminist struggles over recognition and rights, perhaps it would be better to reconfigure rather than reject it altogether?’ On the one hand, I agree that it could be advantageous. Alternative work ethics have undoubtedly assisted subordinated subjects gain legibility and advance political claims. On the other hand, I remain convinced that our over-attachment to work is a major obstacle to its politicization and substantial transformation. For that reason I am more interested in the possibility of forms of political claims-making that sidestep rather than reproduce the work ethic and its celebration of the mandate to work. I’ll say a little more about that below with the example of a guaranteed basic income. For now, I will concede that what counts as an appropriate political tactic is a local concern and is always a risk – rarely a question of success or failure and more often a matter of calculating the sometimes narrow margin of difference between potential steps forward and likely steps backward.
Camille Barbagallo poses a related question about the adequacy of my refusal of the distinction between work and labor, and in particular, raises concerns about my failure to distinguish between capitalist work and some notion of socially necessary reproductive labor. Although I am deeply sympathetic to this problem, I’m not yet ready to budge on the issue. I don’t want to exempt practices of care from the critique, not only of their value, organization and distribution, but of their moralization and sanctification as well.
My general strategy was to identify and elaborate some demands that could stage the political struggle over work on other discursive terrains. The demand for a basic income was offered as a practical reform that also, to borrow from Franco Barchiesi’s formulation, gestures towards the possibilities of other political and ethical grammars. I found Katie Cruz’s claims about how this demand might be used in the context of sex worker rights activism particularly instructive insofar as it might provide some tangible human benefits that are not dependent on one’s status as a human being reduced to a ‘legitimate’ producer of value.
My interest was in theorizing the possibilities of a politics of and against work that could appeal to a potentially wide swathe of the employed, underemployed, unemployed, precariously employed and overworked – the majority of us who are not well served by the work society or its ethical support. For this reason I used the Marxist category of abstract labor to the extent that it could help me theorize the experience of waged labor as it was made over by the exigencies of large-scale production. Hence I was not willing to take up the task Frederick Pitts suggests of parsing out the relationship between this abstraction of labor and the system of exchange. I will leave that to other scholars with different agendas. I did find Frederick’s insight that the notion of the ‘calling’ was part of the means by which different labors were made equivalent very compelling. For me, its significance inheres in the way that it enables so many workers to identify as workers, and it is this specific process of subjectification that I want to politicize.
Clearly the struggle to get a life beyond work is a larger effort that must take place on many fronts. This takes us from the field of anti-work politics to the project of cultivating post-work imagination, experimentation and invention and brings me to Manuel Cruz’s questions about the task of cultural politics and the relationship between utopian cognition and affect. My separation of the latter two categories was a pedagogical conceit that may have taken on an unfortunate life of its own once committed to the page. As a counter to my own rather crude distinction, I was struck by, and heartily endorse, Manuel’s assertion that ‘affectively engaging music can incite utopian cognition’. Perhaps the way that music can be experienced might be a good example of a role that cultural politics can play in the construction of singular intensities and collective magnetisms that might entice us towards and flavour the times and spaces beyond work.
Finally, I want to return again to the opposition I offered between work and life. Franco Barchiesi raises an important and provocative question about what counts as life in this formulation, or more precisely, whose life will count as such. The project of not just liberating a pre-existing life, but rather, creating a life beyond work, requires that we come to terms with all the ways that, as Franco eloquently describes it, subjugation at work builds on other processes of dehumanization. Slavery, colonialism, white supremacies and patriarchies are wellsprings from which work as a system of hierarchy can draw. Moving beyond work will not necessarily take us beyond the myriad forces that would divide and diminish us. I think Franco is right: the meaning of life as an activist project remains both unsettled and unsettling.