p.2 two reasons for the inattention to work within political theory
1) the privatization of work
work and family (the institute of private property secures the privacy of employment relation alongside the marriage relations) private and public division
p.4 As a result of work's subordination to property rights, its reification, and its individualization, thinking about work as a social system –— even with its arguably more tenuous private status— strangely becomes as difficult as it is for many to conceive marriage and the family in structural terms.
2) the decline of work-based activism in US
P5 buying and selling of that very "peculiar" commodity labor power
presents two free, self-interested individuals, each an owner of property and both equal under the law, who enter into an exchange of equivalents.
p.8 Work is the primary means by which individuals are integrated not only into the economic system, but also into social, political, and familial modes of cooperation. That individuals should work is fundamental to the basic social contract; indeed, working is part of what is supposed to transform subjects into the independent individuals of the liberal imaginary, and for that reason, is treated as a basic obligation of citizenship.
p. 11 agains the normativity and moralization of work
p 12-13 critique past feminisms for its tendencies toward the mystification and moralization of work
13. "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 efforts."
16- 20 work and class
1) work allows broader reacher
p17. 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.
p. 60 ( historicizing postindustrial work ethic)
The postindustrial work ethic, with its new emphasis on work as an avenue for personal development and meaning, was at least a response to the rebellions in the 1960s and early 1970s against the disciplinary subjectivity of the Fordist period and the problem of worker alienation that they helped to publicize. The human-resources movement that had come into its own by the 1980s attempted to change work processes in ways that would address, in profitable terms, the problem of work quality posed by activists. Thus the shift from the industrial ethic's focus on work as a path to social mobility to the postindustrial emphasis on work as a practice of self-realization is part and parcel of the confrontation of competing versions of the ethic and the struggles over the organization and meaning of work that they signified and facilitated.
Post-fordism and work ethics
p70 Whereas Fordism demanded from its core workers a lifetime of compliance with work discipline, post-Fordism also demands of many of its workers flexibility, adaptability, and continual reinvention.
Cremin, Colin. 2010. "Never employable Enough: The (im)possibility of satisfying the boss's desire." Organization 17 (2): 131-49.
Managing post-fordist independence: being professional
a complex art of cultural fashioning and emotional engineering typical of many managerial regimes today
p. 72 the discourse of professionalism today enjoys a wide application, serving as a disciplinary mechanism to manage the affects and attitudes of a service-based workforce that is less amenable to direct supervision.
professionalization style and dress
p74 the professional look, and the time and resources necessary to achieve it, tie us not only economically and socially but also aesthetically and affectively to work
Chapter 2 marxism, productivism and the refusal of work
The lack of critique of the value of work inside marxist traditions
1) socialist modernization (originated in the context of revolutionary moments in europe )
(Lenin)
p.86 an ideal of social and economic progress grounded in the continuing development of science and industry
an insufflaient critique of capital
p.84 This tribute to proletarian labor and to the progressive development of productive forces replicates the fundamental attributes of capitalist society… here we find an endorsement of economic growth, industrial progress, and the work ethic similar to the one that can be found in bourgeois political economy, with its naturalization and celebration of the process of economic modernization.
{for my purpose, perhaps it is exactly this socialist modernization made it so easy to transform into capitalist mode of modernization in the 1980s}
2) Socialist humanism (gained popularity in the 1960s coincided with the rise of the new left)
Fromm
p86 labor is understood as an individual creative capacity, a human essence, fro which we are now estranged and to which we should be restored.
p. 89 individual is the unit of analysis "the critique of alienation becomes attached to a prior claim about the nature of the human subject"
"As Baudrillard describes it, this model of the human founded in a transhistorical capacity for labor mimics the standardization and generalization of work that was established under the conditions of industrialization. To put it in other terms, the abstraction from the concrete and particular that allows one to grasp labor quantitatively is what also allows one to conceive the commensurability of its qualitative instances as the expression of an essential humanity."
p90. Negri expresses no interest in the problematic of alienation as a discourse of interiority
