Kathi Weeks: The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · autonomy, basic income, capitalism, critique, feminism, fordism, labour, marxism, politics, postwork, production, productivism, value, work
In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks boldly challenges the presupposition that work, or waged labor, is inherently a social and political good. While progressive political movements, including the Marxist and feminist movements, have fought for equal pay, better work conditions, and the recognition of unpaid work as a valued form of labor, even they have tended to accept work as a naturalized or inevitable activity. Weeks argues that in taking work as a given, we have “depoliticized” it, or removed it from the realm of political critique. Employment is now largely privatized, and work-based activism in the United States has atrophied. We have accepted waged work as the primary mechanism for income distribution, as an ethical obligation, and as a means of defining ourselves and others as social and political subjects. Taking up Marxist and feminist critiques, Weeks proposes a postwork society that would allow people to be productive and creative rather than relentlessly bound to the employment relation. Work, she contends, is a legitimate, even crucial, subject for political theory.
Publisher Duke University Press, 2011
a John Hope Franklin Center Book
ISBN 0822351129, 9780822351122
304 pages
Eugene W. Holland: Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, citizenship, communism, deterritorialization, labour, market, nomadology, politics, schizoanalysis, value
Nomad Citizenship argues for transforming our institutions and practices of citizenship and markets in order to release society from dependence on the state and capital. It changes Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomadology into a utopian project with immediate practical implications, developing ideas of a nonlinear Marxism and of the slow-motion general strike.
Responding to the challenge of creating philosophical concepts with concrete applications, Eugene W. Holland looks outside the state to analyze contemporary political and economic development using the ideas of nomad citizenship and free-market communism. Holland’s nomadology seeks to displace capital-controlled free markets with truly free markets. Its goal is to rescue market exchange, not perpetuate capitalism—to enable noncapitalist markets to coordinate socialized production on a global scale and, with an eye to the common good, to liberate them from capitalist control.
In suggesting the slow-motion general strike, Holland aims to transform citizenship: to renew, enrich, and invigorate it by supplanting the monopoly of state citizenship with plural nomad citizenships. In the process, he offers critiques of both the Clinton and Bush regimes in the broader context of critiques of the social contract, the labor contract, and the form of the state itself.
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2011
ISBN 0816666121, 9780816666126
344 pages
review (Benjamin Noys, review31)
Comment (0)David Harvey: The Enigma of Capital And the Crises of Capitalism (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, economy, financial crisis, labour, market, peak oil, politics
For over forty years, David Harvey has been one of the world’s most trenchant and critical analysts of capitalist development. In The Enigma of Capital, he delivers an impassioned account of how unchecked neoliberalism produced the system-wide crisis that now engulfs the world.
Beginning in the 1970s, profitability pressures led the capitalist class in advanced countries to shift away from investment in industrial production at home toward the higher returns that financial products promised. Accompanying this was a shift towards privatization, an absolute decline in the bargaining power of labor, and the dispersion of production throughout the developing world. The decades-long and ongoing decline in wages that accompanied this turn produced a dilemma: how can goods–especially real estate–sell at the same rate as before if workers are making less in relative terms? The answer was a huge expansion of credit that fueled the explosive growth of both the financial industry and the real estate market. When one key market collapsed–real estate–the other one did as well, and social devastation resulted.
Harvey places today’s crisis in the broadest possible context: the historical development of global capitalism itself from the industrial era onward. Moving deftly between this history and the unfolding of the current crisis, he concentrates on how such crises both devastate workers and create openings for challenging the system’s legitimacy. The battle now will be between the still-powerful forces that want to reconstitute the system of yesterday and those that want to replace it with one that prizes social justice and economic equality.
Publisher Oxford University Press, 2010
ISBN 0199758719, 9780199758715
296 pages
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