Kathi Weeks × Nick Srnicek
Summary
Kathi Weeks and Nick Srnicek are parallel figures within the postwork and postcapitalism scholarly tradition who engage with each other’s work substantively. Srnicek (with co-author Alex Williams) drew heavily on Weeks’s book ‘The Problem With Work’ (2011) in their ‘Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work’ (2015), dedicating ‘a pair of chapters indebted to Weeks’s The Problem With Work’ to the relationship between UBI and the work ethic. Source 1 notes that ‘for postwork writers such as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, the shift towards an economy predicated on UBI is an increasing necessary solution to problems surrounding the increasing automation of jobs,’ and that their analysis of the work ethic as ingrained into ‘our very self-conception’ builds directly on Weeks’s framework. Source 1 also contrasts their approaches: ‘The combative strategies Weeks employs against the ethics of work differs somewhat from those proposed by Srnicek and Williams, in that hers are centred around actions of the refusal of work, rather than primarily on wider cultural reconfiguration.’ Weeks provided a blurb for Srnicek and Helen Hester’s 2023 book ‘After Work,’ calling it ‘indispensable reading for anyone committed to extending the realm of freedom’ (Sources 4 and 5). Both appeared in the same Summer 2016 special issue of Canadian Dimension on Basic Income, with Weeks contributing an interview on a socialist-feminist perspective and Srnicek contributing to a debate on the same topic (Source 3). Source 2 also cites Srnicek’s ‘Platform Capitalism’ and references Weeks’s ‘The Problem With Work’ as complementary theoretical resources in an analysis of digital labor and domestic work.
Provenance
7 fodder row(s): 1fdc62cd19419b8d, 3151ab8c0776bc0f, 440e108b2c4bcaf8, 537f06f7708ad8ba, 6bdda07894fe0d86, 762854cb4cb4f220, 99be8f7468925274