Variations magazine

- The magazine variations is interested in work, from a critical angle. Inevitable criticism, because persuaded of the necessity of salaried work by dint of hearing its virtues in the dominant media, we have difficulty imagining a life that would be free of it. Thus we believe, bathed since our birth in the spectacle of work/consumption, that only those who benefit from an income are active, the unemployed and pensioners being considered as idlers who have time; that working for a living — like those non-Western peasants who only work when they need to in harvest time — is insufficient, without realizing that the surplus of work is justified by the created necessity to produce more objects that will be bought by individuals who will have to work to afford them — objects that most often serve as the only symbols of the consumer society, to be replaced in the short term by their programmed obsolescence; that the criticism of the myth of work is only the result of individual dispositions (idleness, interest, assistanat…). 

The magazine thus attacks the « unassailable », seeks « to weaken and unmask the fetish of work which always presents itself with an air of obvious, transhistorical necessity, which places it above all debate. Work would thus always be beneficial, useful, even neutral. If the world as it is is in crisis, labor would have nothing to do with it and we would only have to attack a very particular and restricted segment of the system, an instance that is always elusive, charged with all the evils, financial capital. In this game of hide-and-seek, where the big industrialists present themselves on the side of labor, as benefactors of humanity, trying to constantly recapture all the mediations that lie at the heart of capitalist social relations is a complex task that requires multiple analyses. All the more so since the blue tale of a necessarily positive labor is an extremely prevalent and widespread representation, and notably shared by those parties of the left who have never taken seriously the warnings given by Karl Marx in his critique of the Gotha program, or by Walter Benjamin in his theses on history. Clearly, the terms of the debate must change: it is not a question of liberating labor, but of liberating ourselves from labor. To emancipate ourselves, intellectually and socially, from its procession of commercial and bureaucratic abstractions, of which the golden rule that must ensure stable returns is only the high point. 

Taking the example of the new solidarities that are emerging in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, the magazine sees in them a form of overcoming the work necessary for the emergence of other possibilities. But work is also the work of « others », far away, who like slaves toil to ensure the delivery of modern consumer objects, such as the iPhone, whose use and its widespread use make the silence surrounding its production even more glaring: « the screens of the iPhone of the apple group are tapped and caressed by millions of consumers on five continents. These seductive « user-friendly » objects are manufactured in China in the factories of the Taiwanese group Foxconn. Recently in one of them, the anger of 2000 workers exploded against the brutality of the guards and against the working conditions. Forty workers were injured and seven are believed to have died as a result of the intervention of 5,000 riot police. 

In this issue, we present a re-edition of a dialogue between Jean-Marie Vincent and André Gorz, and an excerpt from Arno Münster’s latest work, which links Gorz’s approach to the critique of green capitalism. Pierre Dardot and Moishe Postone offer a critical rereading of Marx off the beaten track, stimulating a renewed analysis of the category of labor, David Puaud explores the effects and contradictions of a statue to the glory of the automobile industry. Book reviews, etc… 

Variations, an international journal of critical theory, « critique of work, » issue 17, fall 2012