Review: The Problem with Work, by Kathi Weeks

[Russ Allbery]

The Problem with Work
by Kathi Weeks

Publisher: Duke University Press
Copyright: 2011
ISBN:      0-8223-5112-9
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     304

One of the assumptions baked deeply into US society (and many others)
is that people are largely defined by the work they do, and that work
is the primary focus of life. Even in Marxist analysis, which is
otherwise critical of how work is economically organized, work itself
reigns supreme. This has been part of the feminist critique of both
capitalism and Marxism, namely that both devalue domestic labor that
has traditionally been unpaid, but even that criticism is normally
framed as expanding the definition of work to include more of human
activity. A few exceptions aside, we shy away from fundamentally
rethinking the centrality of work to human experience.

The Problem with Work begins as a critical analysis of that centrality
of work and a history of some less-well-known movements against it.
But, more valuably for me, it becomes a discussion of the types and
merits of utopian thinking, including why convincing other people is
not the only purpose for making a political demand.

The largest problem with this book will be obvious early on: the
writing style ranges from unnecessarily complex to nearly unreadable.
Here's an excerpt from the first chapter:

  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 relations of work can also account
  for its relative neglect in the field of mainstream economics. But
  the lack of attention to the lived experiences 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.

This is only a quarter of a paragraph, and the entire book is written
like this.

I don't mind the occasional use of longer words for their precise
meanings ("qualitative," "hierarchical") and can tolerate the academic
habit of inserting mostly unnecessary citations. I have less patience
with the meandering and complex sentences, excessive hedge words
("perhaps," "seem to be," "tend to be"), unnecessarily indirect
phrasing ("can also account for" instead of "explains"), or obscure
terms that are unnecessary to the sentence (what is "animation of
commodities"?). And please have mercy and throw a reader some paragraph
breaks.

The writing style means substantial unnecessary effort for the reader,
which is why it took me six months to read this book. It stalled all of
my non-work non-fiction reading and I'm not sure it was worth the
effort. That's unfortunate, because there were several important ideas
in here that were new to me.

The first was the overview of the "wages for housework" movement, which
had not previously heard of. It started from the common feminist
position that traditional "women's work" is undervalued and advocated
taking the next logical step of giving it equality with paid work by
making it paid work. This was not successful, obviously, although the
increasing prevalence of day care and cleaning services has made it
partly true within certain economic classes in odd and more capitalist
way. While I, like Weeks, am dubious this was the right remedy, the
observation that household work is essential to support capitalist
activity but is unmeasured by GDP and often uncompensated both
economically and socially has only become more accurate since the
1970s.

Weeks argues that the usefulness of this movement should not be judged
by its lack of success in achieving its demands, which leads to the
second interesting point: the role of utopian demands in reframing and
expanding a discussion. I normally judge a political demand on its
effectiveness at convincing others to grant that demand, by which
standard many activist campaigns (such as wages for housework) are
unsuccessful. Weeks points out that making a utopian demand changes the
way the person making the demand perceives the world, and this can have
value even if the demand will never be granted. For example, to demand
wages for housework requires rethinking how work is defined, what
activities are compensated by the economic system, how such wages would
be paid, and the implications for domestic social structures, among
other things. That, in turn, helps in questioning assumptions and
understanding more about how existing society sustains itself.

Similarly, even if a utopian demand is never granted by society at
large, forcing it to be rebutted can produce the same movement in
thinking in others. In order to rebut a demand, one has to take it
seriously and mount a defense of the premises that would allow one to
rebut it. That can open a path to discussing and questioning those
premises, which can have long-term persuasive power apart from the
specific utopian demand. It's a similar concept as the Overton Window,
but with more nuance: the idea isn't solely to move the perceived range
of accepted discussion, but to force society to examine its assumptions
and premises well enough to defend them, or possibly discover they're
harder to defend than one might have thought.

Weeks applies this principle to universal basic income, as a utopian
demand that questions the premise that work should be central to
personal identity. I kept thinking of the Black Lives Matter movement
and the demand to abolish the police, which (at least in popular
discussion) is a more recent example than this book but follows many of
the same principles. The demand itself is unlikely to be met, but to
rebut it requires defending the existence and nature of the police.
That in turn leads to questions about the effectiveness of policing,
such as clearance rates (which are far lower than one might have
assumed). Many more examples came to mind. I've had that experience of
discovering problems with my assumptions I'd never considered when
debating others, but had not previously linked it with the merits of
making demands that may be politically infeasible.

The book closes with an interesting discussion of the types of utopias,
starting from the closed utopia in the style of Thomas More in which
the author sets up an ideal society. Weeks points out that this sort of
utopia tends to collapse with the first impossibility or inconsistency
the reader notices. The next step is utopias that acknowledge their own
limitations and problems, which are more engaging (she cites Le Guin's
The Dispossessed). More conditional than that is the utopian manifesto,
which only addresses part of society. The least comprehensive and the
most open is the utopian demand, such as wages for housework or
universal basic income, which asks for a specific piece of utopia while
intentionally leaving unspecified the rest of the society that could
achieve it. The demand leaves room to maneuver; one can discuss
possible improvements to society that would approach that utopian goal
without committing to a single approach.

I wish this book were better-written and easier to read, since as it
stands I can't recommend it. There were large sections that I read but
didn't have the mental energy to fully decipher or retain, such as the
extended discussion of Ernst Bloch and Friedrich Nietzsche in the
context of utopias. But that way of thinking about utopian demands and
their merits for both the people making them and for those rebutting
them, even if they're not politically feasible, will stick with me.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-09-26

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-8223-5112-9.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>