Abstract
This erudite and powerfully argued book is the outcome of a dedicated programme of research into work undertaken over many years. Another outcome of this research is a collaboratively assembled online repository, which can be consulted at https://onwork.edu.au/. With entries on almost hundred topics including animals, dirty work, ergonomics, laziness and slavery, the repository indicates just how voluminous and variegated the literature on work is and how many directions debates about work can go in.
The Case for Work represents the culmination of an ARC-funded Discovery Project of the same name (DP190103116). Professor of philosophy Jean-Philippe Deranty prosecutes a systematic case for the ‘centrality of work’ (p. 1). Deranty argues that work is of central significance to human life ‘as a form of individual experience and as an institution of human societies’ (p. 1), past and present, across cultures. Deranty suggests that this contention makes intuitive sense and that anti- and post-work theorising is somewhat of an academic indulgence: to many people ‘it is obvious that work is an important part of human lives’ (p. 1).
Deranty engages an expanded notion of work throughout this book. ‘Work’ denotes the gamut of waged and unwaged activities untaken to reproduce the world. A clear distillation of the book's claim is this: ‘The sheer mass of work that is needed for collectives and their individuals to be reproduced daily means that a lot of work is simply necessary’ (p. 97).
More specifically still, Deranty advances a four-part definition of work. Work is, first, an instrumental kind of human action – it aims to produce something (this doesn’t need to be a concrete thing) rather than being undertaken for its own sake. Work thus fulfils perceived needs. Second, work has a ‘technical dimension’ (p. 12). It involves acquisition and mastery of techniques, although what it means to do a job well varies according to cultural ideals and expectations. Third, Deranty shows that work is a ‘socially embedded gesture’ (p. 12): work is ‘addressed’ to another person or a whole or part of society (p. 13). Fourth, work is undertaken under constraints, which are manifold and severe.
The Case for Work is organised into two halves. In the first half the putative aim is to survey the case against work. Across the first six chapters the philosophical lineage of certain anti- and post-work positions is excavated, developed and then critiqued: the case against work never stands for long. Discussing in turn Weber, Marx, Foucault, Aristotle and Nietzsche, as well as many thinkers influenced by each of them, Deranty shows that positive images of work are, in fact, to be found in the writings that have inspired anti- and post-work arguments. For instance, Marx's account of alienated labour within capitalist modernity is of course the story of class domination and capitalist relations so evocatively described by him in Capital Volume 1 as a ‘vampire thirst’ (Marx, 1990, p. 367). However, Deranty emphasises that Marx described and critiqued the capitalist organisation of waged work, not work itself. Marx envisaged the liberation of what he called ‘living labour’; he regarded the application of human energies as core to the human condition.
The chapter on Weber is especially weighted towards correction and critique. Weber famously sketched the ‘protestant work ethic’: a devotion to work in this life first emerged as a religious calling, according to Weber, and renders ascetic work discipline a moral imperative in its secular guise. Weber is an important if elastic inspiration to Kathi Weeks, who is a key interlocutor of Deranty's throughout The Case for Work. Other anti- and post-work theorists also draw on Weber in their notion of ‘work dogma’. Deranty corrals scholarly scrutiny of Weber's thesis, showing that certain of his historical arguments have been discredited. To give a sense of only some of these very interesting criticisms: the role of Puritanism as causal in the development of modern capitalism is rejected by scholars who highlight the role of Catholics who left absolutist Spain, France and Italy but did not convert to protestant faiths, and by other scholars who highlight the role of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal. Other scholars show that the notion of a ‘calling’ and the belief that doing one's work pleased God has roots in Christian theological traditions that predate Calvinism. Further, Deranty sets The Protestant Ethic within a much richer body of Weber's writings on work: he takes Weber's intense and fine-grained interest in many aspects of the modern work experience as evidence that Weber recognised the centrality of work.
The extent and depth of Deranty's scholarship is especially evident across these early chapters. Yet readers from outside the discipline of philosophy should not be intimidated. Deranty's arguments are patiently and meticulously made, and the key ideas of the book are frequently revisited as they are built upon.
The first half of the book concludes with two chapters that explore the case against work in terms likely more familiar to readers of this journal: these are somewhat empirically grounded chapters that train attention on work in the present. Chapter 7 is titled ‘The imminent obsolescence of work’. Deranty shows that current anxieties about the prospect of automation and AI producing mass technological unemployment have many precedents. However, economic history teaches that ‘new technologies have consistently created new jobs, both directly and indirectly’ (p. 147).
Chapter 8 discusses the ‘post-industrial’ society thesis, which arose in the 1980s. That is, anti- and post-work theorists point to the fragmentation and increased precarity of work in post-Fordist Global North polities, probing the declining role of work as the basis for class consciousness and political organising. Deranty summarises a wide range of perspectives and proposed responses to the declining relevance of work in post-Fordist conditions, including arguments for the Universal Basic Income. Deranty is ultimately unconvinced by thinkers that anticipate a future in which there is far less waged work to distribute. Yet some societies must grapple with this reality. I am thinking of the late James Ferguson's book about South Africa, Give A Man A Fish (Ferguson, 2015). Ferguson showed that a productivist notion of work no longer holds in South Africa and instead the poor must press claims on others, expending a kind of social labour in the process, which Ferguson called ‘distributive labour’.
The second half of this book develops the arguments for work in earnest. Two core influences stand out here – feminist thinking and the ethnographic record. Chapters 9 and 10 outline feminist thinkers’ ambivalent perspective on work and the importance of social reproduction theory. These chapters are the ‘hinge’ of the book's two-direction structure. I have already flagged the expanded notion of work that undergirds this book. In these chapters, Deranty spells out his debt to Marxist feminist theorising of the ‘essential work’ that ‘the reproduction of lives’ demands (p. 191). Indisputably necessary tasks have been naturalised and are not valued as work – the succour and care of infants; the renewal of home environments which daily decay; providing and cooking food. These are all vital to sustaining life.
The ethnographic record is another major source for the arguments of this book. As documented throughout twentieth century anthropology, which provided richly detailed descriptive accounts of social wholes, a range of gardening societies, mobile hunting, gathering and collecting societies, and herding societies, all revolve around the necessity of toil and accord social value to skilled work achievements, as Deranty shows. This is the case, he argues, even if ‘work’ and other aspects of human experience are densely intermingled in radically different ways of living in and grasping the world. That is, work is not universally a separate, named sphere of activity. Core social imperatives such as raising and teaching children, renewing attentive relations with potent ancestral sites, strengthening social ties, food provisioning and healthcare might be accomplished together. My own anthropological fieldwork taught me this, while also calling into question my obsession with a life of waged work based on individual success and as much competition as cooperation. However, I am assuming Deranty would conclude this is a question about the organisation of my work within the neoliberal managerial university not the centrality of it.
At first glance this is a book fuelled by scepticism. The tone is stern and Deranty's argumentation dense. As I have already explained, he refutes misguided theoretical assumptions such as Weber's thesis. Rather than scepticism, however, The Case for Work is steeped in a generous and pro-social vision of human flourishing. Earlier I summarised Deranty's four-part definition of work. The first element of this definition is that work is undertaken to fulfil perceived needs; the third element is that work is addressed to another person or to a whole or part of society. These first and third elements particularly highlight the ‘intrinsic sociality’ of work (p. 13). Humans have fundamental, existential needs. These needs cannot be fulfilled by oneself. We are all dependent on others, and thus we all need other people's work, since work is geared towards the building and reproduction of a shared world.
This is not to say this book has seen me embrace the ‘case for work’ holus bolus. I’ve noticed that when I have told people I am reading a book called The Case for Work they have tended to assume the message of the text is, in essence, ‘suck it up’ – that it must lean towards a pro-employer defence of existing ways of organising, distributing, recognising and remunerating work. In fact, as I explained to my jaded friends, all of whom are consumed by the work that they do, facing the fact of human interdependency and facing the necessity of work provides a basis on which to reject the irrationality of capitalism, ‘which values activities whose outputs are often irrelevant or even destructive of individual minds and bodies, communal bonds, and their environments’ (p. 204). My defence of Deranty's arguments within these conversations was sincerely made. However, I did find myself frequently confused in reading this book. I wondered: are the anti- and post-work theorists as fundamentally in disagreement with Deranty as is presented by him?
Kathi Week's influential The Problem with Work (Weeks, 2011), is an energising tract, which makes valuable arguments. ‘[E]ven the best job is a problem’, writes Weeks, ‘when it monopolises so much of life’ (p. 1). Weeks argues that when our lives revolve around work other possibilities for individual, social and collective undertakings are cruelled. She ultimately advocates for shorter working hours – as a perspective and a provocation. Sign me up! But would Weeks really disagree with the idea that work is necessary and central to the human experience? Or is it a matter of her wrestling with the empirical reality of capitalist work as it is currently organised, and her envisaging the way this essential work might be contained to make room for other aspects of the human experience? After all, her book, written before the global pandemic, was about the ‘problems with work today’ (p. 1, my emphasis).
Disagreement between Deranty and Weeks emerges more strongly in a roundtable discussion they were both a part of, presented in the edited collection Debating a Post-Work Future (Celentano et al., 2024). Weeks comments in this roundtable, ‘When someone proposes a future of unalienated labour or one when we’re all doing creative work, it just sounds like a Steve Jobs commercial presenting a world where we’re all still supposed to commit to worthwhile work’ (Cholbi et al., 2024, p. 17) Somewhat frustratingly, Weeks then ventures that ‘our lives and subjectivity are dominated and profoundly shaped by the exigencies of work’ to the extent that we can’t begin to imagine how else we might live or be (Cholbi et al., 2024, p. 17).
Weeks’ position orients us to explore what's possible and not yet knowable, which is exciting, but it is also hazy. Deranty's book inspires a different orientation. Facing the necessity of work turns us towards labour struggles and political contestations over the extremely troubling and unjust realities of work as it is currently organised within post-Fordist capitalism: it heightens the importance of collective action aimed at transforming aspects of work, since it accepts this work is central. Deranty's perspective then is unexpectedly more galvanising and ultimately more socially committed.
