Page4 RAIN May1981 Among the many visitors to Rainhouse in recent months we were pleased to greet noted scholar, researcher, philosopher and author Ivan Illich (see RAIN July '80). Illich was on his way from Germany, where he'd been teaching medieval history, to Mexico, - which he considers his home. He stopped over in Portland for one day, thanks to the people at Portland's Lewis and Clark College who invited him as their final speaker in a lecture series on education. (Jllich's Deschooling Society [1971] is a landmark work on the subject.) I went to Mexico when I was thrown out of Puerto Rico, of the directorship of the University, in 1960 because I wanted to go to a , place from where I could stop the coming of volunteers to Latin America. I did this for five years. I chose Mexico for obvious reasons. I couldn't imagine myself to work in a Central American banana republic without creating major upheavals. Mexico is large enough to absorb me, I think. . . • Upon arriving in Portland Illich asked to be taken to Rainhouse, where we enjoyed a short but fascinating conversation on a wide range of subjects. One of these was Shadow Work, his most recent book, which arrived here hot off the presses only two days before Illich himself. It is unusual to ask an author to review his own book. But Shadow Work represents a new dimension in Illich' s thinking and, as such, does not clearly follow from his other books. I asked Illich to tell us about the significance of Shadow Work. His remarks appear below, interspersed with some passagesfrom Shadow Work (indented], followed by his re-examination of the term "self-help," his thoughts on RAIN, and a brief commentary of my own. -MR . Shadow Work, by Ivan Illich, 1981, 152 pp., $5.95 paperback, $15.00 library edition from: Marion Boyars, Inc. 99 Main Street Salem, NH 03079 Illich on Illich [Shadow work] comprises most housework women do in their homes and apartments, the activities connected with shopping, most of the homework of students cramming for exams, the toil expended commuting to and from the job. It includes the stress of forced consumption, the tedious and regimented surrender to therapists, compliance with bureaucrats, the preparation for work to which one is compelled, and many of the activities usually labelled "family life".. . [It is] a unique form of bondage, not muc_h closer to servitude than to either slavery or wage labor. I have the impression that what I'm onto now is more important than what I've done before. I'll spend the next few years-as long as it takes me-to do something that I would call a history of scarcity. You'll find the first four chapters here are finished essays; the fifth one I put in without finishing it-it has a good bibliography. I was pushed into this by some articles on women's history... . I call the shadow economy the shadow of the market economy, which has grown up simultaneously with the market economy. If you look at libraries, you'll find hundreds of books about the history of wage work, which became the ideal-typical form of work with industrialization. You'll find practically no reference to the fact that simultaneously with the expansion of wage labor, so-:called productive work, which very quickly was looked at outside of the house, for which the man in overalls is the archetype, a second new , "There is no subsistence-oriented society in which there are human activities . ... By saying this I go slightly already beyond what's in this book." • type o.f activity, of work, developed, for which the woman in the domestic sphere became in the 19th century the archetype-activities which are totally dictated by the rhythm of consumption, which art> nt>,Pssarv for tht> ~rowth of the commodity economy, which are unpaid and as new as wage labor, because they represent
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