Jasper Bernes: The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (2017)

“A novel account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture, this book looks at American poetry and art of the last fifty years in light of the massive changes in people’s working lives. Over the last few decades, we have seen the shift from an economy based on the production of goods to one based on the provision of services, the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, and the emergence of new digital technologies that have transformed the way people work. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization argues that art and literature not only reflected the transformation of the workplace but anticipated and may have contributed to it as well, providing some of the terms through which resistance to labor was expressed. As firms continue to tout creativity and to reorganize in response to this resistance, they increasingly rely on models of labor that derive from values and ideas found in the experimental poetry and conceptual art of decades past.”

Publisher Stanford University Press, 2017
Post ’45 series
ISBN 9780804796415, 0804796416
viii+231 pages

Reviews: Stevphen Shukaitis (Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2017), Julian Murphet (Affirmations, 2017), Vince Carducci (Public Seminar, 2017).

Publisher
WorldCat

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Processed World, 1-33 + 2.001 + 2.005 (1981-2005)

Processed World is an anarchist magazine about the absurdity of modern office work. The magazine was founded in 1981. No new issues have been produced since 2005.

The magazine is about the absurdity and futility of modern employment practices in which a large number of college-educated people are often forced to seek temporary work with no worker benefits. The magazine details the subversive attitudes and sense of humor required for workers to be able to get through the day when forced to perform dull, degrading and boring work as wage slaves doing modern office work such as working as a computer programmer, word processor, call center operator, data entry operator, telemarketer or file clerk.

The print magazine was widely distributed to and read by office workers in Downtown San Francisco during the years the print magazine was published from 1981 to 1992.

Writers that have had work published by the magazine include Chris Carlsson, Fred Rinne, Adam Cornford, John Norton, Jesse Drew, and Donna Kossy. The magazine featured cartoons by artists such as Tom Tomorrow, Jay Kinney, and Paul Mavrides. (Wikipedia)

Publisher Processed World, San Francisco, 35 numbers, 1981-2005
via fcr

Commentary: Jacob Silverman (Baffler, 2014)

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PDF and other formats (Internet Archive)

Alex Foti: General Theory of the Precariat: Great Recession, Revolution, Reaction (2017)

“From the fast-food industry to the sharing economy, precarious work has become the norm in contemporary capitalism, like the anti-globalization movement predicted it would. This book describes how the precariat came into being under neoliberalism and how it has radicalized in response to crisis and austerity. It investigates the political economy of precarity and the historical sociology of the precariat, and discusses movements of precarious youth against oligopoly and oligarchy in Europe, America, and East Asia. Foti covers the three fundamental dates of recent history: the financial crisis of 2008, the political revolutions of 2011, and the national-populist backlash of 2016, to present his class theory of the precariat and the ideology of left-populist movements. Building a theory of capitalist crisis to understand the aftermath of the Great Recession, he outlines political scenarios where the precariat can successfully fight for emancipation, and reverse inequality and environmental destruction. Written by the activist who put precarity on the map of radical thinking, this is the first work proposing a complete theory of the precariat in its actuality and potentiality.”

Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2017
Theory on Demand series, 25
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
ISBN 9789492302182
155 pages

Publisher

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