Undoing Work, Rethinking Community

This revolutionary book presents a new conception of community and the struggle against capitalism. In Undoing Work, Rethinking Community, James A. Chamberlain argues that paid work and the civic duty to perform it substantially undermines freedom and justice. Chamberlain believes that to seize back our time and transform our society, we must abandon the deep-seated view that community is constructed by work, whether paid or not.

Chamberlain focuses on the regimes of flexibility and the unconditional basic income, arguing that while both offer prospects for greater freedom and justice, they also incur the risk of shoring up the work society rather than challenging it. To transform the work society, he shows that we must also reconfigure the place of paid work in our lives and rethink the meaning of community at a deeper level. Throughout, he speaks to a broad readership, and his focus on freedom and social justice will interest scholars and activists alike. Chamberlain offers a range of strategies that will allow us to uncouple our deepest human values from the notion that worth is generated only through labor.

The book is well worth reading for its clear synthesis of a number of issues and thinkers on topics such as UBI, work, immaterial labour, welfare and flexibility.... In my view, it deserves to be read just for its extended treatment of André Gorz's work, which is undeservedly neglected within our discipline. Scholars of alternative organization, in particular, could usefully harness the utopian variant of UBI and the reduction of work without income to consider how organization could develop in the context of voluntary co-operation and in the service of social justice and human flourishing.