The Refusal of Work

by Frayne, David (2015)

Key Passage

In this book I will follow André Gorz’s observation that the prevailing cultural understandingof ‘work’ in modern capitalist societies is that it is an activity carried out for a wage. Colloquially, it seems that the label ‘work’ is most often used to distinguish paid from unpaid activities, andrefers to the operations performed in ‘jobs’ – things that we ‘go to’ and ‘come home from’. Illustrating this definition, Gorz suggested that a market gardener can be said to work, whilst a miner growing leeks in his back garden is carrying out a freely chosen activity (Gorz, 1982: 1). Elsewhere, Gorz has referred to this predominant understanding of work as ‘work in the economic sense’. It represents the contractual exchange of a certain amount of productive time for a wage, and is distinguished from the separate category of ‘work-for-ourselves’ (Gorz, 1989). If one of the key characteristics of a paid job is that it serves society in a general sense, work-for-ourselves is distinctive because the worker performs it for the direct benefit of either himself or others with whom he shares a relationship outside the commercial sphere. Work-for-ourselves is conducted according to principles of reciprocity and mutuality rather than commercial exchange; it has the quality of a gift, performed out of respect for, or a sense of obligation to, others. In today’s employment-centred society, work-for-ourselves tends to be limited to domestic chores such as grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning, squeezed unhappily into evenings and weekends (and performed disproportionately by women). However, in a society with more free-time, Gorz believed that this category could in theory encompass a whole host of activities– anything from repairs to community gardening, healthcare and informal education.Both work in the economic sense and work-for-ourselves are contrasted with a third category, which Gorz called ‘autonomous activities’. Autonomous activities encompass those actions which are performed as ends in themselves. They are self-initiated and stem from a conscious choice which nothing forces the person to make. From an individual’s perspective, the primary goal of autonomous activities is not to earn money, nor is it necessarily to meet any purpose that can be easily put into words. Instead, autonomous activities pursue the Good, the True and the Beautiful, as defined by the subject performing them. The value of such activities cannot be measured in terms of economic worth or social utility; autonomous activities are undertaken for their own sake, out of pleasure or interest. Gorz suggested that a telltale sign of autonomous activities is that the actions which achieve the goal may confer as much personal satisfaction as actually scoring it (Gorz, 1989: 165).  (p.20)

Keywords

No Keywords

Themes

Concepts of Work

Citation

Share

How to contribute.