Friday, July 30, 2010  The right to work (less) posted by lenin
Nina Power applies the scalpel of socialist feminist critique to
the Right to Work campaign in today's Guardian. This is most
welcome, because the campaign against the cuts, and against
unemployment, should be the topic of urgent debate in the press
- which otherwise shows little interest in the concerns of the
working class. (Ask yourself this: all newspapers have a
'business' section, overwhelmingly concerned with the doings of
chief executives, financiers and multinationals, so why is there
no labour section?) Power's basic point is that the slogan
'Right to Work' is problematic because of the way in which it
suggests that access to waged labour is itself a sufficient
solution, and secondly because of certain connotations that it
may have in participating in a discourse that elevates work to
"the ultimate mark of a man or, in more recent decades, a woman
too."  Indeed, while I don't completely agree with Power's
analysis, there's a real probl