num_pages: 287
description: 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.
language: English
title: The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries
publisher: Duke University Press Books