Kathi Weeks
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).