I’ll blame my recent silence on the fact that I was moving again — as of Tuesday, I’m back in the Grand Duchy. Clearly either the spirits of the Haymarket martyrs or the exploited employees of British Airways were punishing me for traveling on May Day, because I ended up spending the better part of 24 hours waiting in lines, being redirected to unexpected cities, and having my luggage lost. Consider that lesson learned.

I’ve once again managed to return to Europe just as things are getting interesting in the US, with Occupy-aligned activists pulling off some impressive Mayday actions. But you can get plenty of reporting and analysis on that from Jacobin honcho Bhaskar Sunkara, from his new perch at the In These Times “Uprising” blog.

Meanwhile, I’ve had a few new things appear recently that I haven’t mentioned here. I neglected to plug the latest issue of Jacobin, which is full of great stuff as usual. It also includes my essay on post-work politics, centered around Kathi Weeks’s book The Problem With Work, which I’ve mentioned here before. See also Mike Beggs on “Keynes’s Jetpack” and Tim Barker reviewing James Livington’s Against Thrift, which cover closely related themes.

In addition, I’ve had a couple of other things appear. There’s an essay for the most recent New Inquiry on intellectual property, which covers familiar blog themes but hopefully in some new ways. And a radio interview with Doug Henwood, where we discussed sex, work, and related topics. What these all have in common is that someone edited them, so they’re bound to surpass my usual output in clarity and precision.

Something relevant to the anti-work themes of the Jacobin and Henwood links is this recent post from John Quiggin about “housework in utopia.” He makes the point that if some kinds of drudgery can’t be automated out of existence, we can still promote “social norms that frown on unnecessary crap-work.” This gets to one of the core points of Weeks’ book, and of my review: when it comes to perpetuating the work-based society, the ideological power of the work ethic is at least as important as the technical possibilities of production.

I was happy to see Quiggin point out that “Social standards inherited from the days of cheap servant labour dictate much more cleanliness than is required for hygiene, and practices like ironing for which there is no need at all.” I look forward to the day when “a freshly ironed shirt would attract the same kind of response that is now elicited by a fur coat or an ivory brooch.” Of course, there’s a danger in taking the stereotypically male position of being cavalier about contemporary standards of neatness, since it leaves one open to the critique Belle Waring mounts here. Maybe I’m just reproducing a patriarchal fantasy in which somebody else does the dishes.

But I’ll take the risk — defending the right to be a slob is just another aspect of defending the right to be lazy. As I note in the Jacobin essay, the argument Lafargue makes in the linked essay is that the glorification of unnecessary work has often been an ideology produced and perpetuated by elements of the working class itself. He was talking specifically about wage work, but the same point applies to unwaged work. As Weeks points out in her book, the modern work ethic combines an injunction to compulsory wage labor with a “family ethic” of compulsory household labor.

Historically, it has been men who have done most of the wage labor (though this is less and less the case), and women most of the household labor (depressingly, still mostly the case). So it isn’t surprising that we see more defenses of the inherent worth and dignity of wage work from men, and more defenses of the necessity of unwaged work from women. We shouldn’t take either case at face value. Both waged and unwaged work contain much that is truly necessary for the reproduction of society and the maintenance of a decent standard of living. But they are also forms that sustain huge amounts of senseless or destructive labor, which exists only to reproduce capitalism, patriarchy, and the work ethic itself.

Quiggin makes a general point that I think bears on all discussions of the social and economic meaning of work:

For any of the tasks we think of as housework, there are four possibilities I can think of,

(1) we can do it ourselves, as a crappy chore

(2) we can do it ourselves, as an enjoyable and fulfilling avocation

(3) we can do it using a technological solution that involves little or no labour

(4) we can contract it out to a specialist worker, who may in turn either (a) enjoy the work or (b) find it just as crappy as we do

This applies not only to “housework” but to all work, waged and unwaged. Quiggin contends that the only objectionable possibilities are (1) and (4b), and I tend to agree. Those two bad options basically correspond to two inseparable aspects of degrading and alienated labor in capitalism: unpaid household labor and involuntary wage labor. Options (2), (3), and (4a) correspond roughly to the communism in which “labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want,” the “slavery of the machine” on which “the future of the world depends,” and capitalism between consenting adults. Somewhere in the intermingling of those three, you’ve pretty much got my utopia.