antiwork Concepts

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries

by Kathi Weeks · 8 Sep 2011 · 350pp · 110,764 words

Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America

by Erik Baker · 13 Jan 2025 · 362pp · 132,186 words

steam even before the pandemic, as disillusionment with the economic status quo became ever more commonplace in the twenty-first century. One of the bestselling anti-work writers of recent decades, the British writer Tom Hodgkinson, devoted his 2018 book Business for Bohemians to the subject of entrepreneurship, which was, he argued

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a publication called The Idler extolling the rewards of entrepreneurship, but the truth is that the entrepreneurial work ethic has always functioned simultaneously as an anti-work ethic—a critique of existing ways of organizing and relating to work. To be entrepreneurial is, at least potentially, not to be industrious, to substitute

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ethic, 3–6, 8–9, 13–16, 71, 78, 85, 117, 189, 210, 213, 248, 255; advocates of, 258; and anti-poverty policy, 132; and anti-work ethic, 252; and capitalism, 252; creation of, 35, 260; critiques of, 257; durability of, 252–53; and economy, 234; and economic precarity, 93; and economic

Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres

by Jamie Woodcock · 20 Nov 2016

moments of resistance discussed in the last chapter. However, what these moments do show is an unorganised resistance expressing a refusal and the tendency towards anti-work. This resistance can therefore be used to understand what kinds of strategies and tactics can develop from the experience of work itself. The challenge of

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UK is not intended as a generalised criticism of trade unionism, partly because trade unionism operates within certain constraints and so would not develop an anti-work critique. Trade unions have been the subject of a sustained attack since the 1970s and perhaps what is notable is that, despite how low the

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at a workplace level. They do, however, remain organisations in which arguments can be posed and organisational initiatives tried out – at least to some degree. anti-work In the context of ‘bullshit jobs’, it becomes important to understand the tendency toward the rejection of work. The theoretical basis of the

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anti-work perspective can be traced back to the Cuban Marxist Paul Lafargue. In a pamphlet, The Right to Be Lazy published in 1880, he argues that

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has had a limited impact on the development of Marxist thought.68 There has been a renewal of interest in autonomist Marxism and perspectives of anti-work, found for example in the writings of Kathi Weeks.69 The flight from work described in Hardt and Negri’s Empire is explicitly characterised by

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“universality” against the regime of labor in capitalism’.77 The opposition of the anti-work perspective to orthodox Marxism is a historical peculiarity. Marx himself studied the ‘antagonistic social dynamics of postemancipation Jamaica’ and ‘would develop a robust antiwork perspective in the Grundrisse’.78 While Negri’s perspective was developed through a close

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reading of the Grundrisse, the figure of the slave remains absent in his anti-work politics. For Marx, the free slaves became the active subjects of two

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modes of exploitation. This experience in the Caribbean is the starting point for Marx’s notion of anti-work, although he did not develop this in the same way as did either Lafargue or James. The anti-work perspective provides a 146 Precarious Organisation critique that is not limited to the question of control

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. L. R. James, and the link that Christopher Taylor identifies between Operaismo and the Caribbean, an argument can be posed about the possibilities of an anti-work politics. If there is a historical connection between modern management techniques and slave owners, an analysis of the development of struggle between these forms and

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the search for those engaging in a refusal: from the slave, to the Fordist worker, to the precarious worker seeking to regain some autonomy. The anti-work perspective provides a critique that is not limited to the question of control of the labour process – indeed, the possibility of control is absent at

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102–3 agency of consumers 80 of workers (see organisation; resistance) alienation 53–9, 88, 137–8 American Worker, The (study) 25–6, 27, 154 anti-work 145–7, 160 Automatic Call Distributors (ACD) 13, 65–6, 67 autonomy 19 Azzellini, Dario 94 Babbage, Charles 66 Back to the Floor (TV show

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on economic compulsion 100 on exchange 15 on labour and machines 54 on technology 12 workers’ inquiries and 22–4, 27, 30, 150, 164 Marxism anti-work and 145–7 reclaiming of 25–6 sociology and 28–9 Matheron, Francois 31 McKarthy, Kidd 138 McKinlay, Alan 85 media portrayals of call centres

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, 113–17, 119, 144–7, 155, 157–60, 163–4 continuation of after quitting 151, 152 regulators 5–6 research see inquiries resistance 97–117 anti-work 145–7, 160 in author’s inquiry 103–12 collective acts of 44, 48–9, 106, 108, 158 computer technology and 48, 103, 107–9

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work

by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams · 1 Oct 2015 · 357pp · 95,986 words

language and project, the latter prefers differences to express themselves as differences and to avoid any universalising function. The mobilisation of a populist movement around anti-work politics would require articulating a populism in such a way that a variety of struggles for social justice and human emancipation could see their interests

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being expressed in the movement. Importantly, anti-work politics provides such resources: for example, it is perhaps the best option for a red-green coalition, insofar as it overcomes the tensions between an

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allow people to see their own particular interests within them while nevertheless maintaining their differences from each other.28 For example, the demands of an anti-work politics have different meanings for a university student, a single mother, an industrial worker, and those outside the labour force; but in spite of these

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specific circumstances, with different decisions being made in the face of different political contexts. That said, a broad social movement would be essential to any anti-work politics, affording a wide range of different organisational and tactical compositions. At one end of the spectrum, there are transient bursts of political energy, in

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Times, 21 November 2013; Gorz, Paths to Paradise, p. 45. 123.For an eloquent polemic against the work ethic, see Federico Campagna, The Last Night: Anti-Work, Atheism, Adventure (Winchester: Zero, 2013). 124.Steensland, Failed Welfare Revolution, pp. 13–18. 125.Ibid., p. 17. 126.Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New

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), pp. 394–5. 21.Translation slightly modified – from ‘human energy’ to ‘human powers’. Marx, Capital, Volume III, p. 820. 22.Federico Campagna, The Last Night: Anti-Work, Atheism, Adventure (Winchester: Zero, 2013), p. 68. 23.For some investigations into what these could look like, however, see Alexandra Kollontai, Selected Writings, transl. Alix

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind

by Jan Lucassen · 26 Jul 2021 · 869pp · 239,167 words

labour. The Tillys explicitly exclude three types of activities from their definition: ‘purely destructive, expressive, or consumptive acts’.4 They regard purely destructive labour as anti-work, since it does not add use value, rather it deprives commodities of value. This would seem to exclude many or all of the activities of

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; Brynjolfsson & McAfee 2014; Livingston 2016. 30. Ford 2017, 167. 31. Cf. Deakin & Wilkinson 2005. 32. I am aware that this goes against the idea of ‘anti-work politics’ (Weeks 2011). 33. Arendt 1958, 107–8 (perhaps superfluously, the final sentence should not be interpreted as Christian self-sacrifice, but as a direct

Work Optional: Retire Early the Non-Penny-Pinching Way

by Tanja Hester · 12 Feb 2019 · 231pp · 76,283 words

what we’re all taught is the “right way” to do things, you can craft the life of your dreams, too. This book is not anti-work. Work is a good and noble thing, something nearly every person ever born has had to do in some form, whether or not they were

Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need

by Grant Sabatier · 5 Feb 2019 · 621pp · 123,678 words

to during the week? The point is, you are trading the best hours of your week and your life for a paycheck. I’m not anti-work; in fact, I like working. Humans need to work to be happy. But like time, not all work is created equal. There is a huge

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford · 14 Jul 2013 · 395pp · 110,994 words

I like most for it: unplanned work. Firefighting is vividly descriptive, but ‘unplanned work’ is even better. It might even be better to call it ‘anti-work,’ since it further highlights its destructive and avoidable nature. “Unlike the other categories of work, unplanned work is recovery work, which almost always takes you

Buyology

by Martin Lindstrom · 14 Jul 2008 · 83pp · 7,274 words

they had planted pornographic images of Brad Pitt in the movie in a deliberate attempt, according to one Web site, to enhance the film’s “anti-work message and revolutionary tone.” Accusations of subliminal manipulation have been leveled at musicians from Led Zeppelin (play “Stairway to Heaven” backward and you’ll supposedly

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019)

by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig · 15 Mar 2020

as an Obligation 79 If we pull back from distant-future utopias and address the here-and- now instead, anti-work arguments are a reasonable corrective to our excessive valorisation of work. Feminist anti-work arguments (for instance in Kathi Week’s The Problem with Work6) are particularly strong, contradicting the liberal-feminist and