Ivan Illich in Conversation by David Cayley

Author:David Cayley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004080
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Published: 1992-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

V

The Last Frontier of Arrogance

CAYLEY: Your book Shadow Work appeared at the end of the 1970s just at the time you were beginning to teach at Marburg. How did you come to the idea that you express in the title essay of that book?

ILLICH: Shadow Work was my reaction to what I saw happening in the Society for International Development, founded by Gunnar Myrdal. I got in touch with it first when Lester Pearson asked me to give the main address on their tenth-anniversary meeting in Canada, in 1968. I spoke about “Outwitting Developed Nations.” Then in 1978 or 1979, Paul Streeten invited me to speak at a conference of the Society of Development Economists. I wanted to address them about what I called the colonization of the informal sector, the economization of unpaid activities. I saw an attempt by economists and therefore also by administrators to get hold of unpaid activities and improve their quality and their contribution to the economy. It seemed very important to me, economically, to make a distinction between culturally determined human activity in the subsistence sphere, on one hand, and, on the other, unpaid activities into which people are forced in a commodity-intensive society in which the upgrading of commodities into something useful requires very specific labor inputs which are not paid. It was then that I wrote Shadow Work.

I also wrote this in reaction to what I thought was a nonsensical and self-defeating discourse of the then more radical women’s movements who claimed pay for housework and demanded an equal share of the employment cake, which I foresaw would become smaller during the next decade. It was there, with Shadow Work, that I made my first attempt to shout for some reasonableness in this, for me, extremely important and significant attempt by women to study their own condition. I must say that I was surprised at how my work was received. Obviously, I didn’t know how racist sensitivities had become by then, and how male academics of the highest caliber would begin to respect female racism.

CAYLEY: Could you say a little more in detail what it was you saw happening that made you want to draw this distinction between subsistence and shadow work?

ILLICH: People have always labored, worked, sweated, and toiled, but the idea that paid employment is the only dignified way in which people can engage in unpleasant activities began to become recognizable about 150 years ago. It was already pretty general in Western societies 120 years ago. The idea began to spread that work which is done by employees who get a paycheque is productive. Any other kind of work is re-productive, or constitutes an exploitation of the person who does it. During the nineteenth century this idea translated into a social distinction between the poor males compelled to go out for employed work and the females of the species who had to be protected by being put into a domestic sphere where they could engage in household activities which people like Marx called re-productive activities, activities reproductive of the labor force.

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