The welfare of work
Posted on | November 9, 2005 |
Ok, I realise it’s getting depressing around here, so time for a plug. I am really enjoying this ongoing thread at k-punk given my fantasies of unemployment as opposed to book writing. But the following passage is really helpful in thinking about my embryonic workplace culture project:
Nothing defines the Right so thoroughly as their detestation of welfare. The spurious economic rationale for this denigration does little to conceal its real libidinal basis: namely, the sense that They - the scroungers, the ‘bogus asylum seekers’, the immigrants - have stolen ‘our’ enjoyment. Work is deemed to have an absolute value: routinized exertion of whatever kind, no matter how useless, demeaning or even malevolent, must be thought of intrinsically good (this superstition, sadly, is widespread in the working class, as it would have to be)… Whatever the causal linkage, capitalism clearly cannot operate without an ‘ethic’ of quantitative increase that is literally pointless.
Especially relevant in Australia right now as the Howard Liberal Government debates internally (who else is there to debate with?) about proposed Welfare to Work policy. The small victory of the small ‘l’ Liberals yesterday was to ensure that single parents can stay on parenting benefits until their youngest child turns eight instead of six, and that ‘disability pensioners and those on a single-parent benefit will not have to accept a part-time job if it takes more than an hour to travel to work or if the travel costs exceed 10per cent of their gross wage.’ When this is the amendment, what were they proposing?
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7 Responses to “The welfare of work”
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November 9th, 2005 @ 11:06 am
ah but that doesn’t define the Right even a little bit; the history of the Left is all about fetishising work (as k-punk somewhat parenthetically notes). the only serious critiques of work have come from ultraleft marxists and anarchists (andre gorz does not count), while the vast bulk of the left - from liberals and social democrats through Bolshevism and beyond - are psychotically fixated on the importance of work. in AU, the ALP is as obsessive about imposing work as the dryest Lib.
November 9th, 2005 @ 12:26 pm
In _AO_ D&G argue that scarcity is a social invention of the capitalist axiomatic and that there is always an excess of production within human societies.
The meaninglessness of ‘workfare’ when there are 5 billion people in the world is amazing. Do we need all these people working? No.
In industrialised countries the pressure is on for everyone to participate in labour where surplus value is produced. It has nothing to do with how much work needs to be done, rather it has everything to do with how much profit has to be made. Hence cultures of efficiency that are not targeted towards sustainable modes of production/circulation/whatever, but through the extraction of a maximum amount of surplus value in a given unit of time. I would rather my local insurance broker or advertising agent or lawyer was on the dole than producing more shit in the world.
November 9th, 2005 @ 12:29 pm
{chuckle} Totally.
November 9th, 2005 @ 2:33 pm
Sandy, can it not be read as a turn of phrase? “Nothing defines the Right so thoroughly as… ”
What does define the Right thoroughly? If you had to define the Right, how would you? Does it only make sense in a comparative context? Is that completely your point, all the time, that politics shouldn’t be talked about like this?!!
November 10th, 2005 @ 9:33 am
my point was just that you can’t define the right by a trait it has shared with the overwhelming majority of the left for at least the last century. i probably wouldn’t try to define the Right thoroughly - that almost strikes me as a misuse of the word ‘define’. i admit what really annoyed me about the quote you posted was the lacanian bullshit part (theft of enjoyment, etc.) which, i think, adds nothing useful to the many historical accounts of the deliberate, violent and ideological imposition of the work ethic from enclosures to present.
November 10th, 2005 @ 10:36 am
Right.
November 11th, 2005 @ 9:21 am
i think i should clarify that i am not at all in favour of work. i am dead against it and hope that i will do as little of it as possible in my lifetime.i just think that zerowork politics are mystified if we pretend that its only the right that fetishises work.