I went out for a post-new year's walk today and stopped in at Magpie magazine store to see if they had the January BC Business with Sarah Efron's piece in it (for which Sarah interviewed me). Not in yet, but... while I was browsing the shelves, I noticed a magazine called new formations whose latest issue is on intellectual work. One of the articles in it was titled "Idleness for All" and I thought that would be a good assigned reading for the Work Less Institute of Technology.
In the article "Idleness for All", the author, Scott McCracken, mentioned a book by Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting, Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives, which is glowing reviewed here (in the Guardian) by Tom Hodgkinson. Not wanting to settle for puff reviews published in non-arms length sources, I was looking at some other reviews and stumbled across an intriguing reference to A Grammar of the Multitude by the Italian theorist Paolo Virno.
It so happens that someone has posted to the web what appears to me to be the conclusion to Virno's book, "Ten Theses on the Multitude and Post-Fordist Capitalism." Virno's theses -- most specifically, thesis #3 -- in some respects pose a counterpoint to Andre Gorz's "Summary for Trade Unionists and Other Left Activists" of his Critique of Economic Reason, which I have been posting to the Work Less Institute of Technology bit by bit. So what I am going to do is post Virno's theses in alternation with Gorz's. I will start with #3, respecting Virno's claim that the sequence of his presentation of the theses is arbitrary and would lose nothing from being re-arranged.
Posted by sandwichman at January 2, 2005 05:56 PM