> look pal, my speciality is in the sociology of work, unemployment and
> social inequality, i know the literature and i know where you are coming
> from. i also know exactly what the problems with your position are. you
> haven't ever made a defensible argument re antiwork.
Wow! A specialist in theorizing about wage slavery. You make a living by being an "expert" about work. I can understand why you feel you have a vested interest in defending the existence of work. I now understand why my flippant remark about the Verizon strike got under your collar.
Quite frankly, I'm not interested in explaining to you why work sucks. That should be apparent to anybody who has ever worked for a paycheck. I'm also not interested in getting into a detailed discussion about work (wage slavery) versus wirk (work that is vital to human needs). If you want to get into that, I'll start quoting Wendell Berry. Since you are reformist, who thinks that these meaningless jobs will be with us forever, I'm not sure if it would be worth it to explain to you why these jobs would disappear after the revolution. As I say to the anarcho-syndicalists who dismiss the anti-tech arguments of Zerzan as being irrelevant: who will go down into the mines after the revolution?
It doesn't take alot of academic theory and words like "valorize" and "reinscribe" to figure out what the alternatives could be. One alternative would be a non-capitalist society where people don't engage in wage slavery, but instead spend their time on things that are vital to everyday needs, like food cultivation or building houses. An example of jobs that we could do away with can be found in that quote from Bob Black that Carl forwarded. If we did away with all the crap that is necessary for capitalism to function, most of us wouldn't have to work much at all.
My advice is this: call in sick next week and spend some time fitting "valorization" into a crossword puzzle instead of e-mails to labor activists. The workers won't miss your "expert" opinions on why they should love their stupid jobs.
Chuck0