Undoing work, rethinking community: A critique of the social function of work
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Undoing work, rethinking community: A critique of the social function of work James A. Chamberlain Ithaca, NY and London, 2018, 182 pp., ISBN: 9781501714887 Contemporary Political Theory (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00327-x
It is a regrettable and now tired truism of contemporary work life that ‘what we do’ increasingly determines ‘who we are’. Our choice of employment – should we have such a choice – confers not just a sense of social status and recognition, but also, in a deep and perverse way, our self-worth. Today we work not simply to maintain an increasingly precarious livelihood, but also to find our ‘true self’, ‘actualize our potential’, and leave an indelible mark on the world. By extension, to fail at work – or not work at all – equates less to any structural determinacy beyond our control and more to a personal sense of failure. Following Freud, we might claim that work has become ‘overdetermined’: like the dream image, work takes on outsized significance in the psyche. And following Weber (2002), we might add that any connotation of work as a dream quickly devolves into a nightmare: ‘The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so’ (p. 123). In line with these formidable thinkers, we find Chamberlain’s Undoing Work, Rethinking Community, a succinct yet sophisticated assessment of work’s preeminence in even our most progressive ideas for combating inequality and injustice. Whether they be regimes of flexibility, worker cooperatives, unconditional basic income, or renewed calls for socialism, all potentially suffer from an unexamined valorization of work that, according to Chamberlain, helps maintain work’s exclusionary quality – namely, its tendency to elevate those who work from those who cannot. It follows from this that any real undoing of work, let alone any gesture toward a postwork society, can only happen alongside a rethinking of community. In other words, the ‘hard work’ of moving beyond work’s preeminence requires us not only to fundamentally reexamine our social bonds and relations, but also to ‘resist the idea of the community as a collective work’ (p. 127). The book opens with persuasive commentary on the value of work in contemporary society, and specifically on how the ideal of gainful employment infects popular discourse on both the political left and right. From there, the author sets the stage for demonstrating work’s embeddedness in the way we conceive of Ó 2019 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
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society and especially community. Chapter 2 then serves as a spirited academic engagement with these themes through an extended dialogue with Andre´ Gorz’s scholarship, which, while perhaps tangential to the uninformed reader, also moves beyond Gorz by demonstrating what Chamberlain calls ‘the inner workings of the work society: in particular, that it rests on an individualist social ontology and that the resultant society, understood as an association, constantly risks disintegration back to its
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