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Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle
A potent glimpse into the behind-the-scenes workplace control mechanisms which prevent workers from defending themselves from exploitation
For most economists, labor is simply a commodity, bought and sold in markets like any other – and what happens after that is not their concern. Individual prospective workers offer their services to individual employers, each acting solely out of self-interest and facing each other as equals. The forces of demand and supply operate so that there is neither a shortage nor a surplus of labor, and, in theory, workers and bosses achieve their respective ends. Michael D. Yates, in Work Work Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle, offers a vastly different take on the nature of the labor market.
This book reveals the raw The labor market is in fact a mere veil over the exploitation of workers. Peek behind it, and we clearly see the extraction, by a small but powerful class of productive property-owning capitalists, of a surplus from a much larger and propertyless class of wage laborers. Work Work Work offers us a glimpse into the mechanisms critical to this In every workplace, capital implements a comprehensive set of control mechanisms to constrain those who toil from defending themselves against exploitation. These include everything from the herding of workers into factories to the extreme forms of surveillance utilized by today’s “captains of industry” like the Walton family (of the Walmart empire) and Jeff Bezos.
In these strikingly lucid and passionately written chapters, Yates explains the reality of labor markets, the nature of work in capitalist societies, and the nature and necessity of class struggle, which alone can bring exploitation – and the system of control that makes it possible – to a final end.
For most economists, labor is simply a commodity, bought and sold in markets like any other – and what happens after that is not their concern. Individual prospective workers offer their services to individual employers, each acting solely out of self-interest and facing each other as equals. The forces of demand and supply operate so that there is neither a shortage nor a surplus of labor, and, in theory, workers and bosses achieve their respective ends. Michael D. Yates, in Work Work Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle, offers a vastly different take on the nature of the labor market.
This book reveals the raw The labor market is in fact a mere veil over the exploitation of workers. Peek behind it, and we clearly see the extraction, by a small but powerful class of productive property-owning capitalists, of a surplus from a much larger and propertyless class of wage laborers. Work Work Work offers us a glimpse into the mechanisms critical to this In every workplace, capital implements a comprehensive set of control mechanisms to constrain those who toil from defending themselves against exploitation. These include everything from the herding of workers into factories to the extreme forms of surveillance utilized by today’s “captains of industry” like the Walton family (of the Walmart empire) and Jeff Bezos.
In these strikingly lucid and passionately written chapters, Yates explains the reality of labor markets, the nature of work in capitalist societies, and the nature and necessity of class struggle, which alone can bring exploitation – and the system of control that makes it possible – to a final end.
216 pages, Paperback
Published July 23, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 10, 2022
The title of Michael Yates' "Work Work Work" lets you know up front that his is not a book about the wonderful dignity and soul-enriching splendor of labor in a capitalist society, but of its immiserating, spirit-killing, back-breaking, endlessly repetitive pointlessness. This is a slender book that tells you in great but totally unpretentious detail something that many workers might already know: that work fucking sucks. I say "many" and not "all" because in the United States lots of us are still committed to crazy ideas like "nobody wants to work" and "America is less great than it used to be because we don't work as hard." That American capitalist brainworm wriggles into our heads as soon as we're born-- "Work Work Work" is an effort to dig that thing out so we can at last try to live decent and fulfilling lives, lives that we, and not our billionaire overlords, set the spiritual parameters of.
In most of the essays here, Yates sets his sights on the kind of ticky-tack thinking that only re-affirms the basic structures of capital, even and perhaps especially the thinking that supposedly represents a challenge to the status quo. Unions in particular are the subject of scrutiny. At some point, radical ideas about worker power and collective working class determination were replaced by limited visions of beneficent bosses cooperating with white male union heads to achieve moderate wage gains every couple of years. Yates blames corrupt and selfish leadership (the chapter on Cesar Chavez is brutal-- total news to me that he was sort of a shithead) but also union rank-and-file who would align with MAGA freaks for temporary (and finally illusory) gains instead of seeking kinship with laborers around the world (kinship that will require us to focus on ideas that are frequently taboo for labor movements, like ending racism and averting climate catastrophe). As a dues-paying member of the a union that for some reason VOLUNTARILY GAVE UP STRIKE POWER during last contract negotations, this stuff resonated with me completely. The only worker-management "relationship" that has ever meant greater power for normal people is an adversarial one. It's important as unions seem to gain cultural clout again that we don't lose sight of this fact, or get snookered by liberal self-help guru pro-labor people counselling us against anger and action that is completely justified, and necessary.
It is to Yates' great credit that his ideas of the working class-- and his ambitious recommendations for achieving workers control, so as finally to abolish work as we know it-- are expansive, often referencing the Global South, workers of color, women and gay and trans people. If I have a critique of "Work Work Work," it's that I wish there was more of this kind of stuff. The book somewhat confusingly begins with a review of "Rivethead," the memoir of an assembly line worker, and too often Yates locates the idea of "worker" in the image of the hard-hat man in a factory. Maybe as a service/retail/clerk guy I'm biased, but... I would love to see more books like this that center the alienation and physical strain that comes with, say, the work of childcare, or the much-derided experience of being, oh, a barista at Starbucks. (I wonder if part of the reason is the union movement got hamstrung in the 70s and 80s was, well, it's refusal to seriously reckon and incorporate the labor experiences of young people, women, immigrants, etc.( (I'm sure Yates wonders this too, as well. And maybe has even written some books about it?)
My other issue-- man, can the Left really be propping up Mao Zedong and Hugo Chavez in 2022? I ask this, like, sincerely. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that revering any sort of head of state at this late stage of the game is sort of, uh, counterproductive?
Nevertheless, "Work Work Work" is a stimulating and thoughtful book, both as a set of history lessons and a set of recommendations for potential class strugglers. It was exactly what I needed this Labor Day week.
In most of the essays here, Yates sets his sights on the kind of ticky-tack thinking that only re-affirms the basic structures of capital, even and perhaps especially the thinking that supposedly represents a challenge to the status quo. Unions in particular are the subject of scrutiny. At some point, radical ideas about worker power and collective working class determination were replaced by limited visions of beneficent bosses cooperating with white male union heads to achieve moderate wage gains every couple of years. Yates blames corrupt and selfish leadership (the chapter on Cesar Chavez is brutal-- total news to me that he was sort of a shithead) but also union rank-and-file who would align with MAGA freaks for temporary (and finally illusory) gains instead of seeking kinship with laborers around the world (kinship that will require us to focus on ideas that are frequently taboo for labor movements, like ending racism and averting climate catastrophe). As a dues-paying member of the a union that for some reason VOLUNTARILY GAVE UP STRIKE POWER during last contract negotations, this stuff resonated with me completely. The only worker-management "relationship" that has ever meant greater power for normal people is an adversarial one. It's important as unions seem to gain cultural clout again that we don't lose sight of this fact, or get snookered by liberal self-help guru pro-labor people counselling us against anger and action that is completely justified, and necessary.
It is to Yates' great credit that his ideas of the working class-- and his ambitious recommendations for achieving workers control, so as finally to abolish work as we know it-- are expansive, often referencing the Global South, workers of color, women and gay and trans people. If I have a critique of "Work Work Work," it's that I wish there was more of this kind of stuff. The book somewhat confusingly begins with a review of "Rivethead," the memoir of an assembly line worker, and too often Yates locates the idea of "worker" in the image of the hard-hat man in a factory. Maybe as a service/retail/clerk guy I'm biased, but... I would love to see more books like this that center the alienation and physical strain that comes with, say, the work of childcare, or the much-derided experience of being, oh, a barista at Starbucks. (I wonder if part of the reason is the union movement got hamstrung in the 70s and 80s was, well, it's refusal to seriously reckon and incorporate the labor experiences of young people, women, immigrants, etc.( (I'm sure Yates wonders this too, as well. And maybe has even written some books about it?)
My other issue-- man, can the Left really be propping up Mao Zedong and Hugo Chavez in 2022? I ask this, like, sincerely. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that revering any sort of head of state at this late stage of the game is sort of, uh, counterproductive?
Nevertheless, "Work Work Work" is a stimulating and thoughtful book, both as a set of history lessons and a set of recommendations for potential class strugglers. It was exactly what I needed this Labor Day week.
June 11, 2023
This book is a brief overview of a very complex topic, but for me a good starting point for thinking about the nature of work and capitalism, what came before, and how we can replace them.
The analysis of work in our lives and the reproduction of capital starts with a review of Ben Hamper's autobiographical Rivethead (one of my favourite books when I was a teenage socialist activist). Perhaps it would fall a bit flat if you weren't familiar with the book, but it is worth a read anyway. Yates both praises it for the unflattering picture of a very traditional blue-collar working class workplace, and criticises it for not being more analytical. I'm not sure the latter is fair, but whatever Yates thinks Hamper's autobiography lacks, he tries to supply it in the following chapters on the inhumanity of our modern labour system.
And by "modern" I mean the system of capital, since its inception. In this way the book ties in well with The War Against the Commons by Ian Angus (which I just read). People didn't end up as wage-slaves because it was a good option: they had all other options taken away. And then, once trapped in the beast, generations of working class people have been subject to the fads, whims, and intensifying exploitation of capital's endless quest to exploit them in order to grow.
So far so good, and although it's quite readable and concise, it's probably not revolutionary new material for people reasonably familiar with Marxist and radical critiques of capital. What particularly inspired me was the closing two chapters where Yates sketches a bit of a manifesto for a new movement that might be able to save us (and the planet) from capital's increasingly disastrous management.
What I liked about this was that Yates does not just look to revolutionaries of yesteryear (although, rightly or wrongly, Mao Zedong and Hugo Chavez get a nod, so does the "Transitional Program" which is a touchstone of Trotskyism - a diverse range of influences, at least). Rather than appealing to any particular dogmatic strand of historic socialist states and sect-making, Yates sketches the kind of grassroots organising that is necessary to rebuild a combative movement against capital. In my experience, and that of many, calling yourself a socialist has too often meant spending weekends and evenings on windy street corners trying to sell a tattered inventory of old pamphlets and magazines to mostly disinterested passers by (with predictably meagre results). I became increasingly disenchanted with that sect-building model of activism. Yates has provided a good starting point for forgetting such dead ends of the 20th century left and getting back to the main game: organising the working people to take control of the conditions of their labour and the environment in which they do it.
The book is brief. It's far from comprehensive, and much of the concluding material consists of exhortation and assertion rather than detailed critique. But as a starting point for a movement, this too is probably, mostly, a strength. While we need to conceive of where we are trying to get to, there is no point in trying to predict every contingency and turn along the way.
The analysis of work in our lives and the reproduction of capital starts with a review of Ben Hamper's autobiographical Rivethead (one of my favourite books when I was a teenage socialist activist). Perhaps it would fall a bit flat if you weren't familiar with the book, but it is worth a read anyway. Yates both praises it for the unflattering picture of a very traditional blue-collar working class workplace, and criticises it for not being more analytical. I'm not sure the latter is fair, but whatever Yates thinks Hamper's autobiography lacks, he tries to supply it in the following chapters on the inhumanity of our modern labour system.
And by "modern" I mean the system of capital, since its inception. In this way the book ties in well with The War Against the Commons by Ian Angus (which I just read). People didn't end up as wage-slaves because it was a good option: they had all other options taken away. And then, once trapped in the beast, generations of working class people have been subject to the fads, whims, and intensifying exploitation of capital's endless quest to exploit them in order to grow.
So far so good, and although it's quite readable and concise, it's probably not revolutionary new material for people reasonably familiar with Marxist and radical critiques of capital. What particularly inspired me was the closing two chapters where Yates sketches a bit of a manifesto for a new movement that might be able to save us (and the planet) from capital's increasingly disastrous management.
What I liked about this was that Yates does not just look to revolutionaries of yesteryear (although, rightly or wrongly, Mao Zedong and Hugo Chavez get a nod, so does the "Transitional Program" which is a touchstone of Trotskyism - a diverse range of influences, at least). Rather than appealing to any particular dogmatic strand of historic socialist states and sect-making, Yates sketches the kind of grassroots organising that is necessary to rebuild a combative movement against capital. In my experience, and that of many, calling yourself a socialist has too often meant spending weekends and evenings on windy street corners trying to sell a tattered inventory of old pamphlets and magazines to mostly disinterested passers by (with predictably meagre results). I became increasingly disenchanted with that sect-building model of activism. Yates has provided a good starting point for forgetting such dead ends of the 20th century left and getting back to the main game: organising the working people to take control of the conditions of their labour and the environment in which they do it.
The book is brief. It's far from comprehensive, and much of the concluding material consists of exhortation and assertion rather than detailed critique. But as a starting point for a movement, this too is probably, mostly, a strength. While we need to conceive of where we are trying to get to, there is no point in trying to predict every contingency and turn along the way.
October 1, 2022
An excellent contemporary primer on a socialist critique of capitalism. Plain language, easy to read, and though primarily US-centric, definitely does not ignore the Global South. Also makes some well deserved critiques on the failure of social democracy.
This book would be a great introduction to anyone with socialist/anti-capitalist leanings, or someone who is questioning the capitalist system, but might have limited exposure to the complex history and political theory of socialism. There's something in this book for everyone.
This book would be a great introduction to anyone with socialist/anti-capitalist leanings, or someone who is questioning the capitalist system, but might have limited exposure to the complex history and political theory of socialism. There's something in this book for everyone.
September 11, 2022
Reads like a Twitter thread, but slightly more radical. He's not wrong with anything he says, but he writes like shit and there's not much to be gained unless you've never heard of socialism before in your whole life.
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April 20, 2025Found it. Finished it. Liked it
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews