A World beyond Work? Labour, Money and the Capitalist State between Crisis and Utopia

Abstract

Ana C. Dinerstein and Frederick H. Pitts’s A World beyond Work? collects in one volume a series of essays that critically appraise the new wave of postwork and postcapitalist thought that has emerged since the middle of the last decade. The authors argue that the “postwork prospectus” focuses too heavily on the abolition of concrete labor, leaving its abstract social forms—and with them the social relations of capitalist society—unthought and unmoved. Though this fetishism of concrete labor forms the body of their critique, Dinerstein and Pitts reproduce this fetishism in their own political recommendations, offering a Marxist-humanist thesis of counter-alienation located in their own celebration of the “social” characteristics of concrete labor.

Key Words:

• Open Marxism
• Postcapitalism
• Social Reproduction
• Value Form
• Work