Feminist Next System Literature Review

Kathi Weeks

Kathi Weeks teaches Women's Studies at Duke University and is known for her focus on "anti-work" politics. "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."
 

Weeks is interested in studying work (not class, which she sees as an outcome of work), and how it’s present formation—alienation, division of labor, Protestant work ethic, etc—imprisons us. To liberate ourselves, we must reimagine work. Programmatically, this can be accomplished by three means:

1. Rejecting the work ethic, also included in socialist modernization
2. Guaranteeing a basic income
3. Reducing the workweek to a thirty-hours

Work, according to Max Weber, was a life calling (42). The work ethic helped the working class identify as a class (59), and it also defined the worker as a white working male (62). Work that was feminized (unwaged household work) was not considered work during early industrialization (63). The structure of the patriarchal, nuclear family was overlaid atop the industrial workplace (63). Therefore, racialized and gendered bodies who didn’t conform to the work ethic were reasoned to suffer from the lack of the family structure (also known as the culture of poverty thesis) (64).

The work ethic in capitalism and socialism don’t differ much. Both political theories celebrated productivity and fetishized labor (81). This was certainly the case with socialist modernization (83-84). Even with socialist humanism, which grew out of a critique of alienated labor (85), but thought that better work would be our salvation (preferably in the form of preindustrial craft production) (86-87). 

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