Hard(ly) Working: The Promises, Problems, & Politics of Work

You are not your job—or are you? Do you live to work or work to live? Consider a job you hope to hold after graduation: if it disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice? More fundamentally, why do we work—and why are we expected to work at all? These are the motivating questions of this seminar. Drawing on Marxist and feminist political economy, we will examine how work has come to function not merely as an economic necessity but as an ethical imperative in modern capitalist societies. We take seriously Kathi Weeks’s provocation that work has become the primary axis through which political subjects, social respectability, life’s meaning, and moral goodness are constituted (The Problem with Work, 2011). The problem with work, in this sense, is not only that it is often exploitative or alienating, but that it is compulsory—structurally and ideologically.

We will also reckon with a peculiar feature of contemporary finance capitalism: the proliferation of “bullshit jobs” in administration, finance, corporate services, and other industries (Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, 2018)—jobs which arguably don't produce anything and whose elimination makes no material difference to the world. We will examine them alongside the rise of the gig and content creation economy, the increasing precarity of waged work, and the changes ushered in by technology such as AI and robotic automation (Standing, The Precariat, 2021). If bullshit jobs expose the hollow promise of meaningful work, these latter phenomena belie the fiction that work brings material stability. We conclude the term by examining antiwork politics and their imaginative project of a post-work society. We ask whether labor movements organized around fair wages, better working conditions, and recognition of unpaid labor represent a path toward emancipation from the employment relation, or whether they reproduce the very compulsion they contest.

The course is valuable for students who want to engage critically with the demand and desire that binds us to work, who struggle to map out a future career that balances meanings, values, and material wellbeing, or who wish to cultivate a creative imagination about a post-work future. Students who are in the process of applying for internships, job hunting, or exploring post-graduation opportunities might find this seminar especially valuable. While the seminar does not address career preparation directly, it helps build the capacity to navigate the material and ethical demands of work with clarity and integrity.

Students will be evaluated through a combination of seminar participation, reading responses, and a final project. Seminar discussion might be supplemented by opportunities to conduct ethnographic interviews with community members about their relationship to work and career.