[D66] The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought

[A.OUT]

https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030125851

The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought
>From Charles Fourier to Guy Debord

Authors: Hemmens, Alastair

    Offers a critical and historical approach to the meaning of work in
society


    What is work? Why do we do it? Since time immemorial the answer to
these questions, from both the left and the right, has been that work is
both a natural necessity and, barring exploitation, a social good. One
might criticise its management, its compensation and who benefits from
it the most, but never work itself, never work as such. In this book,
Alastair Hemmens seeks to challenge these received ideas. Drawing on the
new ‘critique-of-value’ school of Marxian critical theory, Hemmens
demonstrates that capitalism and its final crisis cannot be properly
understood except in terms of the historically specific and socially
destructive character of labour. It is from this radical perspective
that Hemmens turns to an innovative critical analysis of the rich
history of radical French thinkers who, over the past two centuries,
have challenged the labour form head on: from the utopian-socialist
Charles Fourier, who called for the abolition of the separation between
work and play, and Marx’s wayward son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, who
demanded The Right to Laziness (1880), to the father of Surrealism,
André Breton, who inaugurated a ‘war on work’, and, of course, the
French Situationist, Guy Debord, author of the famous graffito, ‘never
work’. Ultimately, Hemmens considers normative changes in attitudes to
work since the 1960s and the future of anti-capitalist social movements
today. This book will be a crucial point of reference for contemporary
debates about labour and the anti-work tradition in France.