By David Frayne

Paid paintings is basically important to the tradition and politics of capitalist societies, but today’s work-centred global is changing into more and more opposed to the human desire for autonomy, spontaneity and neighborhood. the bleak fact of a society within which a few are overworked, when others are condemned to intermittent paintings and unemployment, is increasingly more tricky to tolerate.

In this thought-provoking e-book, David Frayne questions the relevant workplace in mainstream political visions of the longer term, laying naked the ways that monetary calls for colonise our lives and priorities. Drawing on his unique examine into the lives of people that are actively resisting nine-to-five employment, Frayne asks what motivates those humans to disconnect from paintings, even if their resistance is futile, and whether or not they may need the capability to motivate another kind of improvement, in response to a discount and social redistribution of work.

A the most important dissection of the work-centred nature of recent society and rising resistance to it, The Refusal of Work is a daring demand a extra humane and sustainable imaginative and prescient of social progress.

“This is the main enticing and complete publication I’ve ever examine how paintings dominates our lives. it really is insightful and encouraging and may be learn by way of all people who is going to paintings on a daily basis, in the event that they can locate the time.” —Sharon Beder, writer of Selling the paintings Ethic

“A humane reassessment of the ethics of labor so that it will entice an individual who has questioned even if the task they're scuffling with so tough to get, or to carry directly to, rather is definitely worth the fight. At its center lies the provocative and occasionally poignant debts of these people who can be displaying the best way in the direction of an engagement with paintings that is higher for all of us.” —Ralph Fevre, writer of The Demoralization of Western Culture and Trouble at Work

Show description

Read or Download The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work PDF

Similar capitalism books

A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari

A User's consultant to Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a playful and emphatically functional elaboration of the most important collaborative paintings of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. while learn in addition to its rigorous textual notes, the booklet additionally turns into the richest scholarly remedy of Deleuze's whole philosophical oeuvre on hand in any language.

Reification: or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism

Of the entire suggestions that have emerged to explain the results of capitalism at the human international, none is extra photograph or simply grasped than “reification”—the technique in which women and men are became items, issues. coming up out of Marx’s account of commodity fetishism, the idea that of reification bargains an unrivalled instrument with which to provide an explanation for the genuine outcomes of the facility of capital on realization itself.

Psychology and Capitalism: The Manipulation of Mind

Psychology and Capitalism is a serious and obtainable account of the ideological and fabric function of psychology in aiding capitalist firm and maintaining participants completely accountable for their destiny during the promoting of individualism.

A History of Capitalism According to the Jubilee Line (Penguin Underground Lines)

'Sometimes you listen humans say "Oh I had a nightmare trip at the tube" and also you remember that their go back and forth domestic at the London Underground used to be extra disagreeable than traditional. We don't take the note 'nightmare' to intend that during the center of a packed carriage they actually realised that they have been donning their pyjamas after which felt their the teeth crumbling as their youth maths instructor stood earlier than them pointing and giggling, purely it wasn't precisely the Tube since it used to be additionally the kitchen.

Additional resources for The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work

Example text

It appears that early capitalism faced considerable difficulty in persuading people to adopt regular, disciplined employment, and that resistance to full-time work persisted well into the twentieth century, particularly in industrial sectors that had traditionally relied on casual labourers. The history of capitalism is a history involving the gradual reconciliation of individuals with the sacrifices of the working day. This was not a smooth process, but a struggle requiring a severe restructuring of workers’ habits: ‘In all these ways – by the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports – new labour habits were formed’ (Thompson, 1967: 90).

The value of historical perspectives is that they allow us to achieve some critical distance from the current work-centred state of affairs. Weeks suggests that Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is particularly valuable in this regard, with its references to periods before and after the heyday of the Protestant work ethic inviting readers to grasp the peculiarity of modern society’s attachment to work. Readers are invited to reflect forwards, and consider the lofty status of work from the standpoint of the values inherent in the old, traditional society.

Unless humans can acquire the scope to direct them towards humane, societal ends, the savings in free-time provided by capitalism’s productive development are essentially meaningless. A politics of time is necessary because ‘the development of the productive forces may, of itself, reduce the amount of labour that is necessary [but] it cannot, of itself, create the conditions which will make this liberation of time a liberation for all’ (Gorz, 1989: 185). Gorz himself is perhaps best known for advocating a proposal for a politically co-ordinated reduction of working hours, to take place on a society-wide scale.

Download PDF sample

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance by David Frayne
Rated 4.00 of 5 – based on 15 votes