Work: What is Political Economy by Bruce Pietrykowski

Abstract

Reviewed by: Work: What is Political Economy by Bruce Pietrykowski Daniel James Joseph Bruce Pietrykowski, Work: What is Political Economy (New York: Polity Books 2019) This review of Bruce Pietrykowski's very insightful Work took much longer than I had planned because work got [End Page 219] in the way. The first was that I moved across the Atlantic, far from my home in Toronto, for work. I had no alternatives, really. I was out of Employment Insurance following my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto and my savings were drying up. The Canadian academic job market had been a dead end for me. When I finally had my feet on the ground at my new job, the covid-19 pandemic struck and I suddenly found myself locked (along with everyone else) inside, far from most of my friends and family. I had a lot of work to do, under unprecedented conditions. While the lockdown kicked into full gear here in England I watched the stock market crash, the price of a barrel of oil drop to less than zero, and economists of all stripes warn of the worst recession since the Great Depression. This had me reflecting on why I was so far from home for work, and how what has pushed this system over the edge was the cessation of work for billions of people. With friends on Zoom, I started reading Marx's Capital again and started reading E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. A few months into these dense tomes I returned to Pietrykowski's Work and found myself enjoying it immensely. Informed by recent reading I found myself nodding along with the clear lines drawn between classic examples of political economy and history and contemporary issues. In this way the book functions as Cliff Notes of sorts for the classics and gives interested readers a wealth of citations and material on contemporary debates. Key is that Work does not endeavour to offer ground-breaking new theoretical terrain, but instead situate the reader within the existing political economic literature. It begins with an introduction covering the origins of the field of political economy (in its Marxist, feminist, and post-Keynesian forms). There is a short history of the transition from feudal to capitalist modes of production. Here are also the first of what will be numerous break-out text boxes that deal with some disagreements and discussions within the field. For example, here they concern the status of animals as workers and how political economists have come to understand slavery contra wage labour. These text boxes quickly communicate that while Work is less didactic than many academic course textbooks, it's still written as an introduction for readers new to the field. The next chapter, "Inequality at Work: Skills, Wages and Productivity" builds on this core by starting with the problem of inequality and then working through a variety of apologia for, and criticisms of, inequality. I particularly enjoyed the discussion and criticism of human capital theory, something that I think about every time I enter a classroom filled with students who are told by politicians and universities that they are paying for valuable upskilling. Here Pietrykowski walks the reader through the arguments that neoclassical economists have made for decades about the unequal distribution of income in the economy as a function of skill acquisition. Pietrykowski then engages in a thorough critique showing how race, gender, and technology play an outsized role in determining wage inequality, while summarizing different political economic explanations of crisis and inequality. Chapter 3, "Gender at Work: Caring Labor" covers a considerable amount of material concerning feminist political economy, beginning with the foundational discussions and debates concerning "productive" and "unproductive" labour, and the gaps in Marxist political economy that sprang from this. From here the concept of social reproduction is introduced and the basics of global housework are discussed. The lack of bargaining [End Page 220] power in a non-waged home-bound relationship is stressed alongside varying ways in which gender is performed and understood, and exploited economically, in different cultures. There is a discussion of feminist political economy's focus on caring and...