Tag Archives: labour

Rethinking work

Posted on July 30, 2023 by Eddie Playfair

What is work? Work is organised and purposeful human activity, some of which is waged and commodified. How work is defined, who does it, how it is valued and organised, by whom and for whom and how it impacts on … Continue reading →

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Primo Levi on work and education

Posted on May 15, 2016 by Eddie Playfair

In his wonderful La chiave a stella (The Wrench) published in 1978, Primo Levi shares with us an exchange of stories told by Faussone, the itinerant Piedmontese rigger, and a narrator who, like Levi himself, is an industrial chemist at the point … Continue reading →

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‘Useful work v. useless toil’ by William Morris

Posted on December 28, 2014 by Eddie Playfair

Introduction: This lecture from 1884 is a clear and powerful statement of Morris’s political and economic manifesto, which also informed ‘News from Nowhere’ (1890) his visionary fable of life after a revolution. His critique of the waste and inequality inherent in … Continue reading →

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