In his book, James A. Chamberlain provides an in-depth critical review and assessment of the contemporary politics of postwork. He does this through an engagement with the contributions from the late critical-social theorist André Gorz’s (1923–2007) collected works, and from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Nancy Fraser, Kathi Weeks, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Postwork politics generally refers to a range of scholars and activists thinking critically about the changing nature of work under capitalism—from material to immaterial (affective, cognitive, care, creative)—in relation to conditions of precarity, and usually provides some sort of alternative vision informed by an imaginable, if not conceivable, politics leading toward a postwork society. In this regard, Chamberlain offers his conceptualization of a “postwork community,” or a community whose basis of inclusivity is no longer premised on the requirement of work (p. 8).
As the conditions of precarity become increasingly generalized, one might presume that the political validity and contradictions of work under capitalism would be increasingly called into question, but as Chamberlain points out, politicians across the political spectrum continue to reinforce the value of work despite its disappearance and diminishing rewards (p. 2). Distinguishing his approach from left-liberal reform, which would seek to save or redeem work, Chamberlain argues that a true postwork politics must struggle against capitalism to decouple community from work as the basis of societal membership. Toward this end, and in discussion with Hardt and Negri’s vision of a postcapitalist society by way of refusal and “exodus,” he introduces Nancy’s concept of “inoperative community,” which he translates as “unworked community” (p. 125) as an alternative grounding for community toward a postwork society (p. 35). In his comprehensive analysis and evaluation of the social function of work under capitalism, Chamberlain demonstrates repeatedly that even prominent postwork scholars do not escape the remnants of work. Moreover, he provides a reassessment of neoliberalism’s regimes of flexibility, and analyzes how both “flexibility” and an “unconditional basic income” are and can be further co-opted by capitalism, thus troubling the emancipatory possibilities of each (p. 2).
Importantly, Chamberlain not only introduces Gorz, an arguably less acknowledged critical-social theorist whose work integrates Marxism, feminism, and ecology, but also devotes an entire chapter to assessing his lifetime contributions to postwork politics. In particular, he highlights Gorz’s analysis of the “work society” and the “ideology of work” (p. 19) as instrumental in upholding capitalism’s continued domination of the terms and conditions of work, to the distinct advantage of the capitalist class. However critical of the “ideology of work,” Chamberlain argues that Gorz nevertheless understands work as the foundation of community and therefore never fully divests from the idea of work (paid or unpaid) as a social obligation. He explains Gorz’s rationale as understanding work as that which “emancipates the individual from relations of personal dependence [because] it brings the individual into an association with others, thus forming society” (p. 35). However, he points out that Gorz ultimately moves beyond this position by later making a distinction between cooperation and work, whereby cooperation still involves work, but it is no longer commodified (p. 36).
Chamberlain persuasively demonstrates that Gorz seems unable to separate the origins of society from work (p. 36). Here, the author makes a convincing point, which is sustained throughout the book: “If society is thought of as a product of work and justified to its members in terms of the benefits this work in common can offer, then it is easy to understand why work would constitute a social obligation” (p. 42). According to Chamberlain, it matters less how any given theorist, be it Karl Marx or Hannah Arendt, defines work (versus labor, for example) than how work is understood in its historical context and how it “operates politically as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion” (p. 14). Given his attentiveness to the inescapable relationship between freedom and equality, this is one of his primary concerns. To avoid the pitfalls of the ideology of work, Chamberlain’s solution is to decouple work from community in order to open up the possibilities for solidarity beyond those social bonds formed in and around work (p. 131).
Chamberlain ultimately contends that decoupling work from community must involve “rethinking community at the level of ontology” (p. 42) in order to move from an “individualist social ontology” toward a “social ontology,” or “ontological relationality” (p. 139), to better resist capitalism’s ability to profit from the responsibilization of neoliberalism’s flexible worker. For example, Chamberlain makes a connection between the growing feminization of work and its increased flexibility: “Employer-friendly flexibility is best understood as a privatized response to the contemporary deficit or crisis of care, which has its roots in shrinking public support for care and work and the expansion of women’s labor-force participation” (p. 67). Here, Judith Butler’s (Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 2015) insights on precarity, specifically her theorization of how the reality of human dependence and interdependence might politically be transformed into solidarity, would complement the “ontological relationality” aimed at by Chamberlain (p. 139).
At the level of practicality, Chamberlain lists steps to move toward a postwork community, which include the familiar go-to institutional strategies for postwork scholars, such as expanding already existing employee-friendly forms of flexibility and legislating an unconditional basic income (UBI) to lessen the need for wages in order to survive. What he adds is a “cultural shift in the meaning and value of work necessary to realize the emancipatory potential of both flexibility and the UBI; a radical change in how we think about and enact community that embraces our ontological relationality; and last, a transformation out of capitalism” (p. 139). However, he maintains throughout that without this cultural shift, capitalists’ ability to co-opt flexibility and unconditional basic income remains a constant threat, which undermines a politics of postwork (p. 139).
To address this dilemma, Chamberlain offers Nancy’s “unworked community,” which, he argues, disrupts the commonsense relationship between work and community: “Nancy insists that ‘one does not produce [community]’; rather, ‘one experiences or one is constituted by it’” (p. 125). By contrast, Nancy argues that capital “negates community . . . because it places above it the identity and the generality of production and products” (p. 127). Therefore, Nancy proposes “literary communism” as an antidote because it provides “thinking, the practice of a sharing of voices and of an articulation according to which there is no singularity but that exposed in common, and no community but that offered to the limit of singularities” (p. 127). Literary communism might be considered similar to the New York Public Library picking the same book for the entire city to read independently, but collectively for a summer. Although Chamberlain rightly devotes an entire chapter to rethinking community and hints at community outside of work as already existing, this important theoretical discussion could be strengthened by including more specific contemporary examples of community beyond his more generalized examples of “cooperatives, peer-to-peer production (such as Wikipedia), and . . . UBI” (p. 142).
Although Chamberlain provides a careful and thorough analysis of Gorz’s, Hardt and Negri’s, and Nancy’s respective contributions, his attention to Weeks’s important intervention is considerably less engaged, especially with regards to her use of Ernst Bloch’s “concrete utopia,” which he seems to skip over in his more limited review of Weeks’s discussion of utopia (p. 102). Bloch’s (1959) concrete utopia is “an anticipatory kind which by no means coincides with abstract utopia dreaminess, nor is directed by the immaturity of merely abstract utopian socialism,” but is practice oriented (p. 146). Further, a deeper engagement with Weeks’s work would have compelled Chamberlain to write more in depth about the sexual, racial, and global divisions of labor, which socialist feminists’ theorizing of work (see the domestic labor debates in particular) have argued will not simply disappear once work is abolished. Beyond the concrete steps Chamberlain provides, it is unclear who the political actors might be in leading the way toward a postwork society.
By comparison, Guy Standing’s analysis of the politics of precarity is arguably more concrete in identifying specific political actors beyond the more general categories of the “poor” who will take up postwork politics in their struggles against capitalism. For example, Standing argues that the precariat is in the process of becoming a self-conscious class with the transformative potential to fight for a new system of progressive distribution, not over work—which is increasingly insecure and untenable for the vast majority of people—but around broader issues related to “socioeconomic security,” including democratic control over time, space, knowledge, and financial capital (“The Precariat and Class Struggle,” RCCS Annual Review 7, 2015). Standing demarcates the precariat, generally defined by their relationship to insecure work, into three groups who are not necessarily politically aligned with one another, and may in fact blame dispossessed subgroups within the precariat, such as “migrants and minorities” (pp. 7–8).
These criticisms aside, theorists interested in learning more about contemporary postwork politics and theorizing community beyond work should read Undoing Work, Rethinking Community as it offers a substantial understanding of what is at stake in postwork politics, including the specific obstacles confronting, and possible ways toward, a postwork, postcapitalist society.
