Work in the Twenty-First Century: A Marxist-Feminist Reconceptualization on a Communicative Model

Abstract

In the following paper, I explore the possibility of utilizing a Habermasian communicative model to collectively reimagine the content, meanings and values that future forms of emancipated work should embody, and to finally arrive at a different paradigm of institutions of work, social and political support for work, and new forms of discourses around work and the worker. I critique that both the liberal and Marxist theories fail to deliver on their promises of emancipation through work. I examine feminist considerations of work to gain a glimpse of what kinds of values future emancipated work could potentially encompass. Lastly, based on the insufficiencies of all three forms of theorizing above, I argue that a communicative framework could provide us with a paradigm, or methods and procedures, by which new, unoppressive and emancipatory understandings of work can emerge in localized, contextualized deliberation. I demonstrate that a communicative framework is solvent because of its unique ability in confronting and countering the all-pervasive effect of reification in the present capitalist society.GovernmentBachelors of Arts (BA