Work; an Overview of The Problem

And so it begins, the final arc in this section on Utopia: a short series on Kathi Weeks' 2011 The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. If you couldn’t guess it from the title, we’ve got a lot to unpack here, and there’s no way this is all going to fit in one episode. I’m going to be breaking this down into two sections, over several episodes. Following Weeks, I’m breaking these sections into what she calls the Refusal, the diagnostic and deconstructive dimension of a critical theory of work, and the Demand, for remedies and for the imagining of alternative futures.

Join the conversation on Patreon!

Obligatory bibliography, or books (and articles) you may also want to check out:

Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work : Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.

Links to check out:

Exploring Feminist Theory: Angela Davis to Housework Obsolescence

Sung Ho Kim. “Max Weber.”

Transcript

Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other philosophical and socio-political questions regarding Work, Life, and Death. I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey. 

Episode 20: Work; an Overview of The Problem 

And welcome to our little series on Kathi Week’s The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries, and, if you couldn’t guess it from the title, we’ve got a lot to unpack here, and there’s no way this is all going to fit in one episode. I’m going to be breaking this down into two sections, over several episodes. I’m not going to go too deeply into the methodology of the nonteleological utopia part of the argument as I covered that before in Episode 10, “Work and Utopia’s End.”

Following Weeks, I’m breaking these sections into what she calls the Refusal and the Demand. The first part, the Refusal of Work, being the diagnostic and deconstructive dimension of a critical theory of work: the work society and the work ethic, what that is, our religious, political, and moralized approach to work and where that comes from, our general failure, as a society, to approach work, critically (and therefore our failure to approach work politically), following its privatization and individualization as a result of the work ethic; and antiwork politics – the disruptive force that reveals the flaws and weaknesses of the work society. The second part, the Demand, for remedies and for the imagining of alternative futures, are the prescriptive and reconstructive aspects. The postwork imaginaries that stand in as a “placeholder for something yet to come.”

Now, it’s important to note that Weeks isn’t merely critiquing Capitalism, but work and the work society as such. She also critiques Socialism in explaining why she uses “postwork” as a placeholder for something yet to come, rather than advocating for socialism as a Capitalism alternative. In this regard, Capitalism isn’t the root of the problem, it’s a result that follows from what Marx referred to as the primitive accumulation of wealth that necessarily precedes Capitalism, and that accumulation, Weeks notes, is a direct result of the Protestant Ethic. I noted before that I had a faculty advisor that wasn’t particularly fond of my pairing Marx and Weber, but Weeks does, I think, an elegant job of explaining why we need to take them both together in a critical theory of work – we’ll get to this in a minute. To make a rough medical analogy, Capitalism is AIDS, but the work ethic is HIV. 

Over the course of this little series, we’re going to be surveying quite a lot of theory, much of which we’ll get into in more detail later down the line; Weber’s sociological approach to the Protestant Ethic and Capitalism; Marx’ contributions to Labor Theory and his analysis of Capital; Marxist approaches to confronting the problem of work, such as Autonomism and Marxist Feminism; Feminism, in various waves, and the positions of gender and queerness and the labor market; Foucault on discipline, Baudrillard on alienation, Nietzsche on Ressentiment, as well as Nietzsche as utopian thinker; and the utopianism of Ernst Bloch and the ‘not-yet-become’ – and I’ll likely toss in a little Deleuze as far as some parallels I see in his work on becoming, difference and “dividuation,” and the control society. So, whaddya say we, um, well, get to work? 

Today, we’re going to be addressing Weeks’ introduction and some key concepts/figures, in an overview of the history and theory, the work society; the work ethic (or Ethics), and five antinomies Weeks identifies in the work ethic. 

First, some terminology, starting with the aforementioned antinomies. A lot of you may be familiar with dialectics, generally, being the philosophical or rhetorical method of argument by contradiction; the classic example here being Plato’s Socrates arguing with other characters in order to prove the point, as opposed to simply laying out the argument in terms of logic. Or, as in the Hegelian Dialectic – the analytical structure of Thesis, the first argument/proposition; Antithesis, the counter argument that contradicts the first proposition, and Synthesis, resolution of the contradiction in a new thesis. As for antinomies, we’re getting into Kantian epistemology – the field of philosophy that’s concerned with a theory of knowledge, and, in this specific case, following Emmanuel Kant’s methodology in the Critique of Pure Reason. An antinomy, in contrast to a dialectical contradiction or synthesis, being the simultaneous appearance of two logically derived states that contradict; which sounds like a convoluted way of saying paradox, but it’s more nuanced than that. Now, I’m not going to tempt the worm-can that is theological antinomy – if you want to go down that rabbit hole, check out anyone writing around the Epicurean Paradox (in short, that evil cannot exist if God is all-powerful and all-Good; or, that if God and Evil both exist, then God is either not all-powerful or not all-Good). For our purposes here, we’re just going to lean on what Kant refers to as a Dynamical Antinomy (in a Mathematical Antinomy, both conclusions are false because, well, math). In a Dynamical Antinomy both sides of an argument may prove correct. The important part here is that we’re pivoting away from Hegel and the dialectic model, which was foundationally important to Marx and Marxism and most critiques of Capitalism since. Socialism, to a great extent, is a Hegelian-type synthesis trying to reconcile labor, the human productive force, with the means of production. The goal here is a robust critical theory of work as such, not just a mere alternative to work as under conditions of capitalism. 

Now, I’ve already said a little about antiwork and postwork, and these will both be addressed more directly in episodes to come, with antiwork as the politically active project and “postwork” being the semiotic placeholder for this something yet to come. I’ll add, this is markedly different from Livingston’s use of the term as in defining what we do day to day after we tell work to fuck off. 

That leaves us with some historical terms; Fordism, Taylorism, Marxism, and (Marxist) Autonomism. Feminism comes in different waves and forms, each with their own subtle or explicit differences in aims and methodologies, that impact a critical theory of work, but I’m going to take as given that if you’ve been following me so far, you’re at least nominally familiar with Feminism as theory and movement. As it arises in The Problem with Work, we’ll address specifically what Weeks addresses. 

Okay, Fordism, in brief, named for Henry Ford, extends beyond the factory itself and the use of assembly lines as a structure of social and labor systems in general. It holds that standardization, mass production, and mass consumption all go hand in hand. The best way to produce something is in economics of scale. You want to produce cars? Produce one kind of car and produce thousands of them en masse, dividing up the labor process on the assembly line model. Station A puts in the seats, Station B puts on the wheels, Station C builds this part of the transmission, and so on, and so the job is easily filled because you can grab anyone off the street that needs a job and show him how to do that specific job instead of going through the grossly inefficient apprentice/journeyman/master builder of teaching someone how to build an entire car from the ground up. However; you also need buyers in the market for all of these cars, so you need to pay your employees well enough, and price your cars low enough, that you can sell them all, focusing your profits on volume. And this extends further, your workforce (including access to an unemployed/underemployed surplus that you can replace your employees with) needs to be relatively close by, and they all need to buy-in to the process (and this is, for now, putting aside the broad societal impacts of modeling your production this way, as far as impact on the larger labor market. Why earn $2 a day at GM when you can earn $4 at Ford? And all of those derivative impacts to your competition and their profits, and the ensuing political support from politicians hoping to leverage this model for larger improvements for the community, and so on). Not only your workers, but the entire community’s lives need to function around the job. Your best employee is a family man that can’t afford to lose their job, since they’re the sole provider, and they don’t have to worry about reproducing their labor because they have a wife at home to cook, clean, raise the kids, etc. Everything in and around the work serves the purpose of the work, and this model largely governed working lives, especially in the US, throughout the 20th century – and largely serves as the nostalgia-ridden basis of the conservative formulation of the ‘American Dream.’ 

Taylorism, named for engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, is the system of workplace and industrial management that follows from Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911). Ford hired Taylor in 1908 to perform an observational analysis of the Ford plant’s processes, and Taylor analyzed every step in the vehicle production to determine the most efficient version of it. If you’ve ever worked somewhere and experienced some procedure or policy, or dealt with an efficiency expert, that controlled your behavior down to the most minute detail – exactly how many turns of a screw it should take to tighten a screw, exactly how many steps it should take to go to the restroom, etc., you’ve experienced the results of Taylorism. Now, Taylor’s methods did give Ford a massive competitive advantage in terms of reducing costs and increasing productivity, and Taylorism remains deeply ingrained in the fabric of the workplace.

Note, when I was in IT Asset Management, one of my most common issues was having to explain to a branch manager why their printer request was denied – when I started, print materials and printer lease costs were through the roof, the company was blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars a quarter on active leases on missing and damaged printers – no small number of which were eventually determined to have been ‘office spaced’ by a service tech that, somewhat ironically, refused to work with IT Support to get it fixed – sometimes in creative ways involving heavy construction equipment – and an obscene amount of toner that magically never correlated with the company’s actual business needs. Inevitably, the butt hurt branch manager would insist I had to approve their order because of “kaizen,” the company’s efficiency program, where some Taylorist efficiency expert would come in and do things like counting the steps from each employee to their closest printer, and then provide their recommendations on what to order, what to move where, who to move where, etc. Well, in terms of IT, this generally resulted in the branch requesting a substantial amount of redundant assets, to be added to already underutilized assets, and/or assets that had no known utilization at all. As far as we were concerned, “kaizen” (Japanese, meaning “improvement,” which, as a ‘business ethos’, is basically Taylorism with a fresh coat of paint, has been borrowed by American companies from Toyota) was not a valid business reason on our side. If the manager really wanted to be a ‘good and responsible steward’ of company assets, they’d account for and properly utilize the assets they were already assigned. But, I digress. 

If Fordism is the ethos of productivity for profit applied to the whole society, Taylorism is the granular obsession of that ethos; that it’s not actually enough that society serve the purpose of production and consumption, but that every single finite aspect of society serve production for profit in the most efficient form possible, it’s Fordism with OCD. So, if you want to know why pro-business interests align with culture war, far-right politicians, well, social equality, women in the workforce, LGBTQ rights… they fundamentally conflict with this conception of the most efficient form of for-profit production and consumption. Legislating who can love who and who can use which restroom protects the bottom line, whereas one’s individual freedom of expression violates the principles of Taylorist-Fordist work. 

Which leads us to our next bit of vocabulary, Weeks’ conception of the Work Society. She notes, “In general, it is not the police or the threat of violence that force us to work, but rather a social system that ensures that working is the only way that most of us can meet our needs.” “The social role of waged work,” she continues, “has been so naturalized as to seem necessary and inevitable, something that can be tinkered with, but never escaped.” This is why, she notes, Marx aims to critically analyze the “economic, social, and political functions of work under capitalism…” Weeks makes a pivot here from Marxist analysis of work in the economy and the relationship of workers’ wages and employers’ wealth, by turning her attention inward to the workplace, to view the work of individuals across society as fundamentally structured by our relationship to, and domination by, work, stating, quote

Work is thus not just an economic practice. Indeed, that every individual is required to work, that most are expected to work for wages or to be supported by someone who does, is a social convention and disciplinary apparatus rather than an economic necessity. That every individual must not only do some work but more often a lifetime of work, that individuals must not only work but become workers, is not necessary to the production of social wealth. The fact is that wealth is collectively produced, despite the persistence of an older economic imaginary that links individual production directly to consumption.

She concludes this section, 

Dreams of individual accomplishment and desires to contribute to the common good become firmly attached to waged work, where they can be hijacked to rather different ends: to produce neither individual riches nor social wealth, but privately appropriated surplus value. The category of the work society is meant to signify not only the centrality of work, but also its broad field of social relevance.

Okay, a brief word on Marxism. We are not, here, referring to the blatantly mischaracterized American boogeyman where Marxism is a catch-all phrase for Bolshevism, Sovietism, Stalinism, Maoism, or, basically, anything remotely descendent from Marx’ actual work that America’s political, financial, religious, and military elites have long been opposed to. We are referring to the school of thought that follows from Marx’ post-Hegelian class consciousness, historical materialist analysis of labor and wages, the means and conditions of production, wealth accumulation, alienation, exploitation, etc., and the thinkers that have tried to address structural and systemic socio-economic problems, holding that Marx was, generally speaking, correct in his analysis. Now we’re going to have a whole section on Marx and Marxism coming up in the near future, so we’ll save the greater detail for then. Which brings us to our last bit of terminology, for now, Autonomism.

Autonomism, or Marxist Autonomism, is a political movement, originating in Italy, that develops from the works of Antonio Negri, Franco “Bifo” Berardi (whose text The Soul at Work was highly formative for my research on intellectual labor and digital aesthetics), Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno, and Sylvia Federici. As far as theory, Autonomism expands the field of Marx’ analysis of labor in the factory setting, to all intellectual and social labor as well, including, from Marxist feminist writing, the role of the unpaid labor of women in reproducing the paid labor of others – so-called, traditional women’s work. As a political movement, Autonomism finds root among many in the quote-far-left, anti-capitalist, anarchist, and (leftist) libertarian movements, holding generally that the two greatest dangers to the modern world are capitalism and authoritarianism (to wit, some include, state socialism, representative democracy, and any political movement that follows a hierarchical structure) upholding, rather, a radical commitment to grass-roots democracy – the goal here is autonomy. 

Okay, I think we’ve got the important terminology out of the way, but, I realized I haven’t actually told you who Kathi Weeks is yet.

Kathi Weeks, at the time The Problem… was written, in 2011, was an Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Duke. She’s still at Duke, but is now Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies.

Okay, sorry, just needed to give us all a second to make sure Musk, Trump, or the anti-woke Gestapo weren’t about to break the door down and ‘protect the country’ from gender ideology. 

She’s also written quite extensively on Utopian studies, Marxism, Historical Materialism, Feminism, Postmodernism, Labor, and Basic Income. While James Livingston disagrees with her conclusion in The Problem…, he credits her as critical to having paved the way for what he was writing in No More Work. If you’ve got 30 minutes to spare, I recommend hopping on YouTube and watching “Exploring Feminist Theory: Angela Davis to Housework Obsolescence.” Weeks is part of a panel discussion, including Sylvia Federici and Sara Clarke Kaplan, on Marxist Feminism and Poststructuralism, centered on Davis’ 1971 essay, The Black Women's Role in the Community of Slaves.” It’s a thought-provoking discussion about intersectionality in feminist theory, race, labor, and social structure. Link in show notes.

Speaking of intersectionality, let’s talk about Work and Class (one of three of Weeks’ “conceptual pairings” that follow from her analysis of the work ethic and the work society, the three being Work and Labor, Work and Class, and Freedom and Equality). I’ve previously noted that I like to draw a distinction between work and labor (and I contrast the two with toil, but that’s a different story for another time, check out the episode “Toward Meaningful Work” if you’d like to know more – oh, man, now I have Starship Troopers stuck in my head; I wonder if Neil Patrick Harris ever did a ‘would you like to know more?’ in the style of ‘have you met Ted?’); Weeks, however, notes that she doesn’t, or at least for the purposes of this book doesn’t, distinguish between work and labor terminologically. 

Sidenote, she does note that Hannah Arendt, in contrast to Livingston’s criticism of The Human Condition, does critically distinguish between the two terms. Stating that she, Weeks, ‘runs roughshod’ over Arendt’s distinction. Weeks’ analysis is concerned principally with “thinking systematically about work” (as opposed to “this or that job”) noting, “the label ‘work’ will refer to productive cooperation organized around, but not necessarily confined to, the privileged model of waged labor.” Whereas for Arendt, “labor [is] the activity that reproduces biological life [note, not just the physical act of giving birth, but all that falls under what Marx refers to as reproductive labor (cooking, eating, bathing, cleaning, sleeping, child rearing, educating, learning, etc.)] and work as the creation of an object world…” Arendt’s distinction between work and labor “serves, among other things, to establish by way of comparison a third category, action, as the definitively political activity of being in common.”

Weeks does retain the distinct relationship of work and class, though she extends this beyond Marx’ proletariat and bourgeoisie, as work, in the current work society, serves to ossify (to make like stone) class inequalities that maintain different workers in conflict, or at least in tension, with one another, which serves to preserve the social power of the reigning class. (I’m hesitant to use the phrase ruling class; as in a capitalist democracy, while class power is certainly real, the membership and status of individuals within the capitalist class, and certainly the political class, is, somewhat at least, more fluid. The WWE always has a Heavyweight World Champion, but that belt is frequently changing hands).

Weeks draws on Marx’ description of the encounter between the buyer and seller of labor in The Market as described in Capital; the two meet in the market as equals, but as opposed to a farmer and craftsman that perform an exchange of equal commodities, the buyer and seller of labor leave as distinctly unequal persons. They, the buyer, the capitalist, leaves, with the seller, the worker, following. The buyer has purchased the seller as though they were a commodity themselves. 

Notes Weeks, quote

Where we had observed two equal individuals, each in possession of a commodity, who agree to make an exchange for the benefit of each, now we witness the inequality that separates the one who steps out in front from the one who follows behind; with this shift of the locus of perception from the marketplace to the workplace, the existence of a social hierarchy based on class comes into sharp focus.

But, as noted, this simple class distinction between capitalist and worker is insufficient, it fails to take account of any form of unpaid work or other social structures either instituted or supported by the work ethic or the work society; that, thus, contribute to the inherent inequalities of economic class (let alone the inequalities within classes). And so Weeks focuses her attention here, on the work ethic and the work society, rather than isolating her argument to class struggle, in the Marxist sense, or cultural ideas, in the sociological sense. The problem of class, in a society that isn’t structured by birthright nobility and serfdom or religious caste, results from the problem of work. 

I want to linger on this idea of the work society for a moment. Weeks notes that in focusing here her hope is to shift the discourse “from state and government to political economy, from cultural products to the sites and relations of their production, from public spaces and marketplaces to workplaces.” Weeks is doing two things here; first, she’s shifting the locus of the discourse from the public sphere to the private. By doing so, we can open the possibility of critical analysis of work (and the work ethic) whether we’re talking about manufacturing, service work, intellectual work, sex work, care work (paid and unpaid). As Livingston notes in his argument against full employment, both the right and the left are ultimately arguing for full employment on the basis of what they contend is best for the society as a whole – shitty jobs for everyone – and as Graeber notes as regards our willingness to work bullshit jobs as fundamentally reliant on blind acceptance of the work ethic and the general need for money, both being aspects of the public sphere. The private sphere though, what occurs in the workplace, whatever the work, the relationships between individuals (and the dynamics of power in those relationships) is largely left private, to be determined between the specific worker and the specific employer, and not to be reckoned as a social problem – not far afield, I’d note, from the power dynamics of an abusive relationship behind closed doors. Weeks seeks to drag the abuse out into the light of day. The second thing is something of a Heideggerian queering of work, breaking the equipmentality of work and the work ethic, making it strange so that we can more readily see its flaws. Now, Weeks doesn’t cite Heidegger anywhere, but it does seem, to me anyway, that it’s relevant to the discussion. 

And, I know, a lot of contemporary thinkers are adamantly opposed to invoking Heidegger at all, viewing his entire work as tainted by his choice to join the Nazi party, and, yes, it’s deeply problematic, I completely get why they think that. Put another way, I was mortified to discover Kevin Spacey is (allegedly, and with some strong evidence) an abuser. He was one of my favorite actors. But does that change the fact that “The Usual Suspects,” “Se7en,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” are great movies? Personally, no, I don’t think so. Did America win the space race to the moon on the work of Nazi rocket scientists? Yes. Would I ever own a Ford? No, but I’ve considered Fords to be kinda shitty since long before I discovered Henry Ford was a rabid anti-semite that used his wealth and power, garnered from selling his cars, to publish Nazi propaganda in the US and urge American politicians to align with Hitler. But, I think we may be getting a little too far off the point. I would note though, that I think this particular aspect of the relationship of the individual to their work – and, I’ll note, not a part of Weeks’ analysis – is far more complicated than merely ‘canceling’ (often) warrants, and some of the cancellations seem arbitrary. Take for example Harvey Weinstein, convicted class A sexual predator – with more than half as many allegations of sexual assault and/or harassment as his 80+ Oscars; I don’t recall ever hearing anyone call for cancelling any of the award winning films he produced, like Good Will Hunting, Pulp Fiction, Chicago, The Crying Game, My Left Foot, The Lord of the Rings (the Two Towers, the second in the first trilogy), and on. Is it worth putting an asterisk on these careers? Oh yeah. Is it worth throwing everything they touched away? [sigh] I’m inclined to say no. If for no other reason than to prevent their offenses from becoming forgotten along with their work. 

Right, back to Weeks and the Work Society, and this Heideggerian move – now, ‘revelation’ is not a strictly Heideggerian move, Hegel writes similarly of aesthetics and religious art – that the function of art (Classical Greek, Medieval, and Renaissance) is to reveal to us the inner spirit of God – and Marx too makes a similar move in seeking to follow the buyer and seller of labor from the market to the workplace to reveal the inner truth of the relationship between the two. I’m leaning on Heidegger’s work in that I think it better helps lay the grounds for thinking about work’s in-itself (the workliness of the work, to go full Heidegger) in connection with analyzing the relationships and products of work.  

Notes Weeks, regarding the shift in perspective from the market exchange to the “labor-process itself,” the activities and social relations “that shape, direct, and manage” “wage-based production,” quote

…[W]hat are the benefits of this vantage point? What do we see when we shift our angle of vision from the market sphere of exchange to the privatized sphere of production? As the language about revealing secrets suggests, part of what Marx seeks to accomplish by descending into this “hidden abode” [where our buyer of labor leads the seller of labor to do the work, out of the sight of the public] is to publicize the world of waged work, to expose it as neither natural precursor nor peripheral byproduct of capitalist production, but rather as its central mechanism (the wage) and the lifeblood (the work).

Let’s swing back to this pairing of work and class. 

Following Iris Marion Young’s move in her 1981 article, “Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: A Critique of the Dual Systems Theory” (this referring to the ‘marriage’ of Marxist and Feminist theories as socialist feminism (or feminist socialism)) to, methodologically, shift Marxist analysis from class division to division of labor, states Weeks, quote

After all, work, including its absence, is both important to and differently experienced within and across lines of class, gender, race, and nation. In this sense the politics of and against work has the potential to expand the terrain of class struggle to include actors well beyond [the classical] figure of traditional class politics, the industrial proletariat.

“By this measure,” She continues, referring to social and institutional relations of labor, particularly “relations of interaction and interdependence in a society,” “whereas class addresses the outcome of laboring activity, the division of labor points toward the activity itself.”

It’s because of the division of labor – and not just gendered division of labor, though that is important, it’s the division itself and the valuation placed on this or that job, not to mention the gendered and racialized structures and restrictions workplaces and work-cultures employ, formally and informally, that produce and maintain class division. So, if we want to address inequality, we have to look beyond class to the problem of work itself. Concludes Weeks, “…by at least one way of reckoning, class and work belong to different fields of analysis, and my project pursues the critical study of work instead of class analysis and antiwork politics as a substitute for class struggle. … The distinction between the two fields of analysis becomes rather less clear when class too is conceived in terms of a process rather than an outcome.”

I also want to point out a particularly American problem of class as regards the general pointlessness of the term “middle-class.” The vast majority of Americans rich and poor, blue, pink, white, or collarless, typically consider themselves middle-class as a kind of economically sterilized, simultaneously anti-snob/anti-elitist/anti-underclass (which I’m using as a generic placeholder, it seems just about everyone that identifies as middle class has some form of underclass they aim to distinguish themselves from, and generally fall under group names like hillbilly, redneck, white-trash, and basically every racial slur as group name you can think of). The whole, I work to earn a living, but I’m not working class, I’m middle class. Or, sure we’re well off, we own our home, we go on vacation, college is paid for, but we’re middle class. And always, we are definitely not like either of them. 

Thinking back to Roland Barthes and semiotics, “middle-class” as a sign has become so watered-down, so vague, that it no longer signifies an actual class. It’s become mythologized, it stands in now for a completely different, normalizing (or naturalizing) and politically motivated concept. For the working class to consider themselves ‘normal’ in America (as in not a part of the underclass) they have to consider themselves middle-class; a concept which is fed to them and supported for them by marketing, news media, and propaganda. 

Weeks also points to “middle-class” as a problem for class as an analytical or political category, noting “middle class has absorbed so many of our subjective investments that it is difficult to see how the working class can serve as a viable rallying point in the United States today.” And Weeks will say similar for “socialism,” that it no longer serves as a viable anti-capitalism imaginary because of all of the emotional and psychological baggage American culture has dumped on it. 

Well, of course, this was in 2011. I expect Weeks wasn’t counting on someone like Donald Trump coming along with his politics of resentment and his rhetorical race to the bottom, glorifying the underclass (the MAGA deplorables) as superior, valorizing ignorance as independence of thought and economic struggle as patriotism. One could not caricature a better example of what Nietzsche railed against as ressentiment and the weak will to power than Trump and MAGA.

When conservative evangelicals start complaining about bible passages that portray Jesus as “weak,” you know you’ve gone off the deep end. Turn the other cheek? Shelter migrants? Feed the poor? Positions of authority for women?? Not my Jesus. 

Alright, before we go any further afield, let’s pivot back and take a look at antinomies – seemingly contradictory pairs that function in tandem (and are not reconciled as dialectics). Weeks uses five specific pairs to explain the movement from Traditionalist, to the Protestant, to the (modern) Secular Work Ethic, which, I’ll go ahead, as a bit of a teaser, to list here; Rational and Irrational Behaviors, Productivist and Consumerist Values, Tools of Subordination and Insubordination, Individual Independence and Social Dependence, and Mechanisms of Exclusion and Inclusion. 

We’ll break these down next episode, but, as we’ve still got quite a lot to go, let’s first take a look at a bigger and bolder antinomy, Marx and Weber.  

Less a household name than Marx, Weber is no less a critical player in thinking about work, or the social sciences in general for that matter. Maximillian Carl Emil “Max” Weber (1864–1920), was a German sociologist, one of the founding intellectuals of the field itself in fact. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes him “as a principal architect of modern social science along with Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim.” (And yes, Frenchman Auguste Comte often gets the credit for being the founder of the field as the founder of positivism – the philosophical school of rational justification, logic, mathematical proofs, and experimentation (in other words, science) as applied to social concepts and phenomena from art to politics to music to science itself – and some listings will tell you Comte, Marx, and Durkheim and others will tell you Weber, Marx, and Durkheim, and I’m sure there are others that play mix and match with the four of them, and now that I’m thinking about it, it may be worth thinking about them all when we get to the section on History). Now, for our purposes, I’m not going to get into a whole biography of Weber – we’re revisiting Weber soon enough anyway, but there’s a couple of interesting things to grasp here. First, Weber wasn’t solely a sociologist (not in the sense one might specialize today), he was an intellectual, a positivist social theorist (giving rise to modern sociology), a co-founder of the German Democratic Party (during the Weimar Republic), and an avid Euro-centrist. Critically, here, though, unlike Marx, who was, at least initially, among the ‘Young Hegelians,’ focused on historical materialist phenomenology; Weber, educated in Baden, followed the Southwestern or Neo-Kantian school as regards epistemology and ethics as the basis of his research. Marx, with a materialist approach, and Weber with a Rationalist approach – and, yeah, if you’re giving it a swirl and appreciating the nose on this lovely philosophical table wine, I’d say you’re on the right track if you’re picking up notes of Aristotle and Plato.

We’ll get more deeply into what Weber brings to the table, for Weeks’ argument, specifically in the next episode, but I want to note really quick her aforementioned elegant reasoning for using both Marx and Weber, when they are often held in contrast, if not in conflict. 

Weeks notes, quote

The private ownership of property may be fundamental to capitalist exploitation, but that does not itself guarantee the participation of exploitable subjects. Thus to Marx’ account of the primitive accumulation of private property, Weber adds a story about the primitive construction of capitalist subjectivities.

One could pose Weber’s project – as indeed many have – as a historical idealist alternative to Marx’ historical materialism, an analysis centered on cultural forces to counter Marx’ privileging of economic production. And certainly Weber’s insistence on the role of ideas in history is sometimes cast in terms that match Marx’ occasionally polemical claims about the primacy of material forces. But both Weber and Marx recognize that, formulated as a dichotomous pair, neither materialism nor idealism is adequate; they may at times serve some rhetorical or heuristic purpose, but they should not be treated as viable methodologies.

… the cultural explanation of economic developments… is insufficient without an economic explanation of cultural developments.

So, there. This is where I’d love to say something along the lines of ‘take that faculty advisor,’ but, sadly, I must have skimmed over this part and missed that line, as I totally failed to include it in my MA thesis. Also, man, that line belongs at the beginning of every art history syllabus. 

Okay, that should bring us to Freedom and Equality, recall here Hegel’s master/slave dialectic; that the slave is the existential precondition of the master; likewise, labor is the existential precondition for (private) capitalist wealth. Freedom and equality are distinct. Returning to Marx’ example of the buyer and seller of labor, the two (freely) meet as equals in the market, but leave in an unequal relationship of power and authority – this is where neoliberalism and right-leaning libertarianism are dangerously wrong in their insistence the government be limited to protecting ‘free contracts’ and the ‘free market,’ over and above, where not explicitly in place of, protecting basic equality, as this enables relationships of domination. This is also why Marx, as Weeks points out, doesn’t limit his critique to wages alone – and why we, now, shouldn’t’ be limiting our political action to something like fighting for a living wage or eliminating the gender pay gap – as Marx put it, “better payment for the slave.”

Weeks points specifically to the labor contract (think of this broadly speaking, including any agreed upon employer/employee relationship entered into in Right to Work states that don’t have strong union protections or literal “labor contracts” – ask any labor attorney, or just go check your “employee agreement” it’s a contract, ‘I the undersigned agree to x, y, z terms and can be terminated at any time, forfeit my right to litigate against the employer, will enter into arbitration, yada yada yada.’ It’s a contract. Just if you’re in a so-called Right to Work state, it places all of the Rights on the side of the employer, and all of the obligations on the side of the employee. 

Notes Weeks, citing Carole Pateman, British, feminist political theorist, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, UCLA, quote

The domination and subordination experienced at work is not merely incidental to processes of exploitation. Carole Pateman’s analysis of the employment contract is illuminating on this point. By her account, the problem with the labor contract is not just a function of the coerced entry that is insured by the absence of viable alternatives to waged labor, nor is it only a matter of the inequality that is produced as a result of the contract’s terms.

To put this is Marxist terms, “the problem can be reduced neither to forced labor nor to exploitation.” Weeks continues, “Rather we need to pay more attention to the relationship of dominance and submission that is authorized by the waged labor contract and that shapes labor’s exercise.” 

 Okay, to close this episode out, let’s take a peek in the direction of what Weeks is going to lead to as far as what to do about the problem – the methodology and theory for the refusal and the demand; what she refers to as the Marxist Feminist Redux. 

Marxist, or socialist, feminism, of the 1970s, Anglo-American ‘tradition’ is the most formative version of Feminism Weeks is leaning on in her argument. It is specifically anticapitalist and feminist, with a focus on labor to interrogate “capitalist and patriarchal social formations.” The tradition serves to ground both critical analysis and disruptive political action, with the aim of radically transforming work. 

From here, we’re not simply following Marx’ buyer and seller from the market to the workplace, but also following the seller from the workplace to their home, in order to analyze all of the various hierarchies and inequalities, and, specifically, gendered forms of hierarchy and exploitation.

Weeks also, however, calls out this feminist tradition for its “productivist tendencies” – similar to the fault she finds in socialism as a potential alternative in it’s being ‘the work society perfected.’ It’s not imaginative enough and fails to escape the productivism of the work ethic; likewise a problem Livingston identifies, in that, while trying to confront capitalism, we’re continuing to treat work as though in itself, it’s worth doing, regardless of how demeaning, degrading, or dangerous. If we fall into the trap of fighting solely for better wages, we wind up chasing better payment for the slave; should we reimagine work in productivist terms, we’re merely chasing better work for the slave. What Weeks is after, in the postwork imaginary, is radical change, a placeholder for something yet to come. In a very Nietzschean sense, we need to revalue the valuation of work itself, and restart from there. In order to do that, we need to perform a genealogical analysis of the work ethic itself, relationships and hierarchies of exploitation and domination, the antinomies that permeate our work society. The revaluation of all work values. 

Okay, I think that’s all we have time for today. Next episode – and I’m not ruling out trying to squeeze in a happy hour in the near future, I’ll have to see how things roll over the next couple of weeks here, my own work, uh, situation, is a little up in the air at the moment – but next episode on Weeks we’ll get into the work ethic, specifically, and working with a good bit of Weber, how we get from the Protestant Ethic to the modern, Secular work ethic; and how we get from being subjects of work to victims of work – note, this is my reading of Weeks, Weeks herself doesn’t argue here, per se, that the work ethic produces “victims” of work; and I don’t mean victim in the sense Fisher, Graeber, or Livingston might use the term either. Stay with me, I think this makes sense.

‘til next time. 

If you enjoyed this episode of Philosophy vs. Work, well, you know the schtick. Please like, subscribe, follow, leave a review. It really does help to grow the show. You can stare all you want into the algorithm, but it’s doesn’t stare back without likes and subscribes.

Don’t forget to check out the show notes for details on any authors, texts, etc. referenced directly in this episode. 

If you find the project valuable, consider supporting the channel. Or maybe you’re feeling generous and just want to support my coffee habit, or keep Kiyo in catnip. Either way, links to support the channel are in the dooblydoo below. Thank you.