#kathi weeks

The institution of the family has, of course, undergone dramatic changes since the period of high Fordism. But just as the work ethic has managed to survive the transformations of work, the ghost of dead family values continues to haunt us as well (Stacey 1996, 49). As one White House report from the 1980s put it, the family, as the "seedbed of economic skills, money, habits, attitudes towards work, and the art of financial independence," plays a key role in the transmission of work skills and ethics; "neither the modern family nor the free enterprise system would long survive without the other" (quoted in Abramovitz 1988, 350-51). The family ethic endures in this post-Fordist period, serving various family-values campaigns as a tool of political-economic discipline arguably for many of the same reasons it was defended earlier: for the role it plays in reproducing a stable and able workforce with little in the way of public funding—or, to put it another way, because otherwise we might "destroy the golden egg that produced cheap labor" (Kessler-Harris 1990, 39).

The refusal of work is not in fact a rejection of activity and creativity in general or of production in particular. It is not a renunciation of labor tout court, but rather a refusal of the ideology of work as highest calling and moral duty, a refusal of work as the necessary center of social life and means of access to the rights and claims of citizenship, and a refusal of the necessity of capitalist control of production. It is a refusal, finally, of the asceticism of those—even those on the Left—who privilege work over all other pursuits, including “carefree consumption.” Its immediate goals are presented as a reduction of work, in terms of both hours and social importance, and a replacement of capitalist forms of organization by new forms of cooperation. It is not only a matter of refusing exploited and alienated labor, but of refusing “work itself as the principle of reality and rationality” (Baudrillard). In this sense, “work which is liberated is liberation from work” (Negri). Rather than conceive the refusal of work narrowly, in terms of a specific set of actions—including strikes or slowdowns, demands for shorter hours or expanded opportunities for participation, and movements for improved support for or altered conditions of reproductive work—the phrase is, I suggest, best understood in very broad terms as designating a general political and cultural movement—or, better yet, as a potential mode of life that challenges the mode of life now defined by and subordinated to work.

despite Marx's insistence  that waged work for those without other options is a system of 'forced labor', it remains for the most part an abstract mode of domination. In general, it is not the police or the threat of violence that force us to work, but rather a social system that ensures thet working is the only way that most of us can meet our basic needs

Productivist ethics assume that productivity is what defines and refines us, so that when human capacities for speech, intellect, thought, and fabrication are not directed to productive ends, they are reduced to mere idle talk, idle curiosity, idle thoughts, and idle hands, their noninstrumentality a shameful corruption of these human qualities. Even pleasures are described as less worthy when they are judged to be idle. And what might be cause for ethical distaste in the case of the individual can, when compounded into a generalized indiscipline, become a threat to the social order. This fear of free time, whether manifested as idleness or indiscipline, should not be underestimated. If nothing else, it can testify to the ways in which models of both the individual and the collective have been shaped by the mandate to work, and continue to be haunted by what [Daniel T.] Rodgers describes as the 'immense, nervous power' of the contrast between work and laziness.

And meanwhile the proletariat, the great class embracing all the producers of civilized nations, the class which in freeing itself will free humanity from servile toil and will make of the human animal a free being, – the proletariat, betraying its instincts, despising its historic mission, has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work. Rude and terrible has been its punishment. All its individual and social woes are born of its passion for work.

The racialization of the work ethic also played a role in the postindustrial economy by facilitating the acceptance of white-collar work. Indeed, C. Wright Mills notes that, despite the fact that most such work was routinized and unskilled, white-collar workers in the United States could nonetheless claim greater prestige than blue-collar workers on the basis of the whiteness and citizenship status of those in the white-collar occupational niche (1951, 248). Once again, the norm's exclusions based on race, nation and ethnicity fueled its inclusiveness in terms of class. One's status and comportment as a waged worker, as a member of the working or middle class, was not just a matter of asserting one's moral worthiness and social standing as "a worker," but as a white worker, a working man, an American worker, or, to recall an earlier example, a "high-priced man"—that is, via one's relative privilege as a racialized, gendered, national, or classed subject.