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The Double Shift:Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work
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Ebook
Forthcoming
In a world of declining wages, working conditions, and instability, the response for many has been to work harder, increasing hours and finding various ways to hustle in a gig economy. What drives our attachment to work? To paraphrase a question from Spinoza, "Why do people fight for their exploitation as if it was liberation?"
The Double Shift turns towards the intersection of Marx and Spinoza in order to examine the nature of our affective, ideological, and strategic attachment to work. Through an examination of contemporary capitalism and popular culture it argues that the current moment can be defined as one of "negative solidarity." The hardship and difficulty of work is seen not as the basis for alienation and calls for its transformation but rather an identification with the difficulties and hardships of work. This distortion of the work ethic leads to a celebration of capitalists as job creators and suspicion towards anyone who is not seen as a "real worker."
The book is grounded in philosophy, specifically Marx and Spinoza, and is in dialogue with Plato, Smith, Hegel, and Arendt, but, at the same time, in examining contemporary ideologies and ideas about work it discusses motivational meetings at Apple Stores, the culture of Silicon Valley, and films and television from Office Space to Better Call Saul
The Double Shift argues for a transformation of our collective imagination and attachment to work.
Reviews
Praise for The Politics of Transindividuality
I must, of course, reserve a special place for Jason Read’s [2016] book, The Politics of Transindividuality, not only because he does me the honour of devoting an entire treatment to my ‘theses’, but because he puts together a magisterial appropriation of the problematic of the transindividual, marshalling a whole set of classical and contemporary references (except for Freud, who is the relevant index of a divergence between us) to construct a great ‘transformation of philosophy’ with a view to the ‘transformation of the world.
In The Politics of Transindividuality , Jason Read accomplishes two equally important tasks. On the one hand, he gives a mapping of the discourse on individuation and transindividuality in modern and contemporary thought; on the other, he problematizes the concept of transindividuality itself in view of its usefulness for future politics. In this latter sense, Read’s own elaboration and remarks on important philosophical and political issues, such as his discussion of the relation between determination and liberation, give the book its philosophical and political direction and depth.
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As Jason Read has clearly explained: in the authors he analyses, the category of the transindividual is not a simple alternative to intersubjectivity, but rather the category capable of explaining the material fabric from which the category of intersubjectivity emerges and affirms itself.n other words, transindividuality helps to explain intersubjectivity not as a constitutive place of the social bond, but as its imaginary or ideological effect.
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Although Read did not himself create the concept of transindividuality, he has probably done more than any other contemporary philosopher to develop this concept by exploring its history and emphasizing its applications especially as an instantiation of what, following Louis Althusser, we could call a concept for Marxism. Indeed Read's book is a venture into Transmarxism, that is both a way of opening up Marxism in order to communicate with other philosophical and political traditions and also of summoning non-Marxist traditions to encounter the conceptual richness of Marxism at its critical best.
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Praise for The Micro-Politics of Capital
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Jason Read's book contains the most original and incisive readings of Marx's texts that I have read in years, along with equally penetrating analyses of Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. He demonstrates beautifully along the way that French poststructuralism is not opposed to Marxism, but that the two are in fact intimately related in their theories of the production of subjectivity. The book helps reorient our understandings of both Marxism and poststructuralism.
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This book represents a thoughtful reconsideration of Marx's notion of the mode of production and does so in a way that is likely to appeal to a new and younger readership by showing that mode of production is not simply an economic concept but one that can explain the forms of subjectivity peculiar to different kinds of social organization. The theoretical framework of the book is refreshingly broad; the author draws from a number of theoretical and philosophical schools and cannot easily be categorized as 'Deleuzean' or 'Althusserian.' This represents the perspective of a generation no longer constrained by the notion of opposing theoretical camps so prevalent in the 1980s and 90s.