SHADOW WORK
by Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich is one of the most important writers currently working. In Shadow Work, five of his essays are reprinted, followed by extensive notes and bibliographies. Illich embarks on a major historical and sociological analysis of modern man's economic existence.
"We have seen that wherever wage labor expands, its shadow, industrial serfdom, also grows. Wage labor, as the dominant form of production, and housework, as the ideal type of its unpaid complement, are both forms of activity without precedent in history or anthropology. They thrive only where the absolute and, later, the industrial state destroyed the social conditions for subsistence living. They spread as small-scale, diversified, vernacular communities have been made sociologically and legally impossible¾ into a world where individuals, throughout their lives, live only through dependence on education, health services, transportation and other packages provided through the multiple mechanical feeders of industrial institutions."
Illich deals provocatively with the controlling uses of language and science and the valuation of women and work. Drawing on unfamiliar historical sources, he lays bare the roots of much of the social ordering which affects industrial man: his own creation, but one which, at the same time, connives at his own oppression.
1981, 5 x 8, 158 pp, hard cover.
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