“No one should ever work.” Thus begins Bob Black’s 1985 anarchist polemic, ‘The Abolition of Work’ . “Work,” he goes on, “is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.”
Black bases his indictment of work on the degraded nature of most forms of employment in the age of monopoly capitalism. While he is contemptuous of work in general , and defines wage labour as “selling yourself on the installment plan,” he argues that modern work has worse implications. People don’t just work, they have “jobs.” One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. . . . A “job” that might …show more content…
Braverman writes in his introduction:
No attempt will be made to deal with the modern working class on the level of its consciousness, organization, or activities. This is a book about the working class as a class in itself, not as a class for itself. I realize that to many readers it will appear that I have omitted the most urgent part of the subject matter. . . . This self-imposed limitation to the “objective” content of class and the omission of the “subjective” will, I fear, hopelessly compromise this study in the eyes of some of those who float in the conventional stream of social science.
Burawoy was by no means a conventional social scientist, but the lack of subjectivity did constitute a significant lacuna for him. In a review of Labor and Monopoly Capital, he wrote:
Labor-process theory suffered from an objectivist bias. . . . As many studies demonstrated, labor control was not only about constraint but also about eliciting consent to managerial goals. The workplace becomes an arena of struggle for shaping subjectivities—it becomes an arena of politics that constructs and mobilizes different identities, not just worker identities but also gender and racial identities, harnessed to managerial
Black bases his indictment of work on the degraded nature of most forms of employment in the age of monopoly capitalism. While he is contemptuous of work in general , and defines wage labour as “selling yourself on the installment plan,” he argues that modern work has worse implications. People don’t just work, they have “jobs.” One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. . . . A “job” that might …show more content…
Braverman writes in his introduction:
No attempt will be made to deal with the modern working class on the level of its consciousness, organization, or activities. This is a book about the working class as a class in itself, not as a class for itself. I realize that to many readers it will appear that I have omitted the most urgent part of the subject matter. . . . This self-imposed limitation to the “objective” content of class and the omission of the “subjective” will, I fear, hopelessly compromise this study in the eyes of some of those who float in the conventional stream of social science.
Burawoy was by no means a conventional social scientist, but the lack of subjectivity did constitute a significant lacuna for him. In a review of Labor and Monopoly Capital, he wrote:
Labor-process theory suffered from an objectivist bias. . . . As many studies demonstrated, labor control was not only about constraint but also about eliciting consent to managerial goals. The workplace becomes an arena of struggle for shaping subjectivities—it becomes an arena of politics that constructs and mobilizes different identities, not just worker identities but also gender and racial identities, harnessed to managerial