Work is Bad, Actually
What is work? What work needs to be done? Who gets to work, and more importantly who gets to not work? And are anarchists just layabouts who want to avoid work?
These are questions I ask having just been kicked off of SNAP for failing to meet the 30 hour work requirements. 30 hours of mandatory labour need to be done if I want the pittance the government agrees to pay me. Of course, they’ll likely pay me even less than I was previously getting if I do have a job, even though most readily available jobs are below the minimum wage, and the minimum wage is not a living wage anywhere in the country. No matter what job I get, I will have to beg the government for supplementary income, and I’ll still have to live with my parents. They don’t charge me rent in cash, but as I’m sure most people living with parents of the Baby Boom or X Generation are aware, it certainly comes with a toll. Emotional, if not financial.
Part I: A Resume
On top of the difficulties of even finding a job as someone with little more than a degree from a fake school and no transportation to speak of in this little place that’s not quite homogenous enough to be called a suburb and nothing within an hours’ walk, I’m a neurotic mess. I’ve claimed employment at three places in my nearly thirty years of life, and none of it was good:
- Once working in a giant metal cup selling little pellets of ice cream to tourists at Virginia’s premier themed amusement park, dealing with the oppressive heat and humidity of the midsummer afternoons by liberally stealing from my employer.
- My second job was similar, working food services, except that this time I wasn’t alone, and nearly every single day I had to put up with sexual harassment from my coworkers, giving me shit for my bisexuality (the girl who got me the job outed me before she left, accidentally I assume), my virginity, and whether or not my long hair meant that I wanted to be a girl (it did, though I certainly wouldn’t admit that to them). I knew that if I told my manager — a man who once bought everyone working except for me a chicken dinner from the local supermarket — I would be the one fired. I dreaded the weekends, and the only thing that kept me from feigning sickness like a kid trying to get out of going to school was the fact that I knew if I did, I’d likely be fired.
It was a terrible job. My neuroses made it impossible to perform, and after a few months of slowness, mistakes, and general incompetence, I was pushed down from three or four days a week to barely working ten hours a week, until it finally became too much to bear and after a stress filled argument I was fired. And then I quit. It had already felt like I was being pushed into quitting, encouraged to do so by getting fewer and fewer hours. The entire thing gave me anxiety and actual nightmares. Repetitive, existential nightmares where all I did was make sandwiches and suffer from alienation.
I had the job for maybe eight months. - My third job was in many ways the best. I worked from home, using a remote desktop program to “fix” people’s computer problems. The most common problem being “my computer is slow from years of garbage and spyware, how do I get rid of these toolbars?”. I had no set hours, though I could commit to some for a bonus. On the rare occasion SuperAntiSpyware and CCleaner couldn’t solve the problem, I could always Google it or kick it up the line. By all accounts it was a good job. 25 bucks to run a virus scan and remove unwanted programs, or install something.
Except that I barely did it. It was a good job that I, if not enjoyed, didn’t actively hate doing. But every time I would have to psych myself up for up to an hour beforehand, terrified of this or that. What if I had to go to the bathroom and someone decided to call and I missed it and I’d get reprimanded? What if I was a complete incompetent dumbass again and did something to accidentally fuck up someone’s computer and they made me pay for it? What if some deviant and heinous porn pops up?
(That last one is a constant fear of mine, even on other people’s computers, and even when most of the deviant and heinous porn I indulge in is text based, but paranoid fears aren’t exactly rational, and it’s not like I want to see *other* people’s deviant and heinous porn. Even if I didn’t accidentally discover child porn or snuff or weird homemade versions of 50 Shades on someone’s computer, even stumbling across the tame voyeuristic stepmother porn that Ted Cruz likes would be mortifying)
It was a great job, one that the person who introduced me to it did to such aplomb that she made 300$ an hour some days. And my insecurities and fears kept me from doing more than a few hours a month. And then the job ceased to exist. The company’s contract with Geek Squad, who as far as I’m aware was their only client, ended, and Geek Squad abruptly decided to do in-house tech support instead of outsourcing. Overnight and without warning, not only was I ‘fired’, the entire freelance agency was fired.
This is what Work is like. And from friends I have who either don’t share my neuroses or are able to work through their own — by force of will or pharmacological assistance — long enough for a shift at Tim Hortons or a gas station or a Subway, or even for eight hours trapped in a cubical, punching numbers into a computer as their life drains from them, their experiences of Work don’t sound too dissimilar to mine. Work is bad. Work is unfulfilling.
Work is alienating.
But I’m just describing how Work makes me feel. What *is* work?
Part II: What is Work?
Work can mean a lot of things, and this causes quite a bit of confusion when it comes to anti-work Discourse™, which is probably going to have died down on Twitter by the time I actually publish this essay, though surprisingly enough there is actual political discourse outside of whatever my sphere of Twitter decides to argue over this week. I’ve seen critiques that Bob Black’s definition of work is playing with definitions, a claim his essay The Abolition of Work denies.
For the purposes of this discussion, the definition of Work that we’re going to be using is the same as Bob’s: forced labour. To work is to do labour against your own will. To work is to do labour because circumstance forces you to do so. Whether it’s to make rent, to put food on the table, or simply because a man with a gun will take you away to a prison if you refuse.
No one who called themselves a socialist should see forcing labour. Being made to work causes alienation, even outside of a strictly capitalist framework. Having no control over one’s own labour is dehumanizing and stifles the human spirit. Many people want to be productive. No one wants to work.
Why then are there so called socialists who abandon the core Marxian concern of alienation from labour? Why does the Party for Liberation and Socialism, as well as so many Twitter theorists — whose armchairs are at least as plush as the ratty one I pulled from the dump — see the downright fascist notion of full employment as some wonderful thing, regardless of a paltry and reformist thirty hour work week?
There’s no doubt that a thirty hour work week and a steady job would improve thousands, if not millions of lives. But this is a fact only because of the function of capitalism. Work is necessary even in an increasingly automated world because the people who own the food and water and shelter and communications infrastructure and entertainment and things are loathe to part with even a fraction of their hoard. In a socialist society, that dragon should be slain, not simply chained up.
Anything less means using state violence to force the proletariat to perform, and failing to undo the very systems of oppression that communism intends to be rid of.
Part III: Reaganite Communists
Many of the criticisms of the anti-work movement from neo-Stakhanovites should sound familiar to any socialist. The belief that if people aren’t forced to work, they might shirk their moral duty to produce for society, and that when people are allowed to shirk, society will collapse. The problem with anti-work society, they claim, is that parasites will take advantage of the community and give nothing back.
The problem with a society where people are no longer forced by circumstance or threat of violence to do work, the criticism goes, is that eventually you run out of other people’s labour.
The entire argument is nothing more than repackaging neoliberal anticommunist propaganda to explain how we can’t have real communism, we need to have a strong and powerful state filled with men who carry guns and crunch numbers to lead us into some far, far off future where maybe our great grandchildren will be able to live in a world where the state has withered away. Assuming they don’t first have to engage in yet another revolution to once and for all do away with those men with guns, who will likely be unwilling to part with either the gun, nor the authority that the gun grants them.
More than that, in a society that values work and demands it from all citizens, what of the disabled, whether mentally or physically? Many of the anti-anti-work communists who staunchly defend the notion of full employment with a mandatory 30 hour work week claim that they are against ableism. Those very same people, even the ones who happen to be disabled themselves, seem to have no problem calling people parasites, but no matter. How does a society where work is mandatory — whether by gun or rationing — deal with disability? If the means of claiming disability are simple, then anyone could claim to be disabled and shirk the mandate to perform productive labour, and we wouldn’t really have a problem, because now it’s clearly optional. If not, then what method is used? What method even could be used that wouldn’t have people who slip through the cracks, just as they do in our current capitalist society? Will we simply means test the socialism, like the liberals want to do with government social programs now? Will I be cut off of my Communist Welfare because I don’t work 30 hours a week, just like the United States government is currently doing to me with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program? Disabled people now, in our current society, have a multitude of criticisms of the way that social welfare is means tested, and how means testing results in situations where people could perform productive labour, but if they perform enough to feel useful, suddenly they can’t get benefits. This isn’t something that tweaking the numbers can solve, because it’s a symptom of having that sort of system in the first place.
Even if society somehow overcomes these humps andand creates a world where people with “legitimate” reasons not to work aren’t forced into it, there’s still the fact that the social system forced labour creates means doing nothing to change the ableism already present in our current productivity focused society. We can’t simply undo ableism if we’re going to continue to see people as little more than their productive output. Those who work, because they’re forced to, will look down on those who don’t, whether they don’t work out of “laziness” or because of illness and disability. When work is a virtue, not working becomes a vice. Only in a society where work is voluntary is this avoided, because labour no longer becomes an imposition. If labour is not a demand, then the disabled won’t be treated as parasites draining the resources of those forced to create.
This fear of Welfare Queens taking valuable resources that they haven’t earned speaks to an incredibly capitalist mindset that doesn’t result in changing the social relations to the means of production, that act that is integral to the core of communism. If we aren’t going to change the world, only who is in charge, we’ve changed nothing.
Worth noting, too, that these criticisms also apply to anyone who does other non-productive work. Society currently values human beings who create and produce for society, even if it’s just producing economic output (and often the people whose only productive output is economic are seen as being the most valuable), and undervalues anyone whose labour is creative or ephemeral or emotional. While I’ve seen people walk back and say “oh, obviously artists would count as workers”, it seems strange that they’d be given a pass when so much emphasis is placed on 30 hours, and full employment. A novelist or painter doesn’t exactly have billable hours as such.
What’s even more relevant is just how unnecessary it is to put 206 million Americans of employment age to work in the first place.
Part IV: We Already Have Too Much Shit, Jesus Christ, We Don’t Need More
It is not 1917, and this is not Tsarist Russia. America is not in need of rapid industrialization to bring it into the modern era. We do not need to devote 206 million people to productive labour, because we already perform far more than enough productive labour. We have six empty homes for every homeless person. We create such a surplus of food that a lot of it is burned, and more is thrown out into garbage cans, sometimes covered in bleach just to fuck over any starving homeless people who might want to fill their bellies. Toys and consumer goods that don’t get sold are broken apart in the dumpsters. Factories are manned by robots, with some factories being completely automated. The fact that Amazon workers have to piss themselves for fear of losing their jobs is all the more fucked up when you learn that most of the work at Amazon is automated. People are being replaced by robots at an astounding rate, and 50% of all labour worldwide is soon going to be automated, even in a world where employers would still rather have humans working for slave wages instead of slow automatons with a high initial cost.
No one needs to work. Even in the production and distribution of food, one of the most essential necessities there is, only 11% of the American economy is dedicated to it, and of that 11%, over half is servers and cashiers, not anyone directly involved in the creation of food goods. With less than 2% of the country involved in farming, we produce a surplus. The idea that 206 million people will need to be forced to manufacture the necessities is ridiculous, and shows a severe lack of understanding of just what the “material realities” of 2018 are.
Even taking into account the infrastructural issues at home and abroad, a society where distribution is based on need instead of greed would drastically alter people’s lives without requiring extreme demands of production or labour to the point that they need to be forced out of people. Freed from the necessity of working 40 or more hours a week just for food tokens, the public works projects necessary to bring not only the country but the entire world up to the same standards of interconnectedness becomes so much easier for volunteers to complete. There are millions of people who would willingly devote their time and effort to building up their communities if only the resources were available to them, and they didn’t need to spend their days earning money or recuperating from work. Plenty of people already do donate their time and energy — often time and energy they don’t really have — on helping their communities.
On top of all of the vast surplus that we already have, one of the biggest effects of Capitalism has been the destruction of the planet in ways that are likely irreversible. I fully believe that we can undo the damage, and restore the ecosystem, but those scars are going to remain, even after we’ve brought down the ozone and kept the ice caps from melting. We don’t need to increase our production, we need to shift it to the meaningful places, degrow, and help the places scarred the most recover.
It isn’t going to take the entire working age population of a country forced into total employment with a mandatory 30 hours for an indeterminate amount of time to raise up the living conditions of people in the global south, and increasing our productivity to such a degree would be disastrous to the global south in the first place, considering those areas are the ones hit hardest by climate change.
Full employment and 30 hour work weeks might be necessary to rapidly industrialize areas of the global south if they were on their own, but when people talk about the PSL’s strategies for America and promises to the American proletariat, those concerns are facile. If America and England and other major powers were to embrace socialism, the cornucopia of international society would overflow without a single person being made to perform labour that they themselves didn’t choose to, and the currently blighted land could heave a sigh of relief. But that can’t happen in a world that continues the capitalist mindset of eternal, exponential, productivity.
Part V: A Cottage Industry Of NonWorkers
One of the most ridiculous and self-defeating aspects of the anti-anti-work argument is that by arguing in favour of forced labour, an entire series of unproductive jobs are created. Officers of the law to oversee the labour, and make sure that no one is shirking, or to threaten them with violence or incarceration if they do. Prison guards, to do the same, making sure that labour violators aren’t allowed to go free. Bureaucrats, who keep track of just who has and hasn’t earned their keep, as well as determining who truly is disabled. Middle managers, to watch over and supervise the workers, who in performing labour they didn’t choose will slack.
All of these people won’t be performing productive labour. Instead, they’ll have unproductive jobs that only exist to oppress the actual workers, creating the very same class divisions that we’re supposed to eliminate.
All this to keep people from sleeping instead of hammering at metal beams with a hammer.
In the end, criticism of the anti-work mentality falls into two categories:
- We need to do enough work to get to some unspecified goal
- We need to do work (forced labour) because if we don’t, parasites will undermine society
Neither is true, and both beliefs fail to understand just what the world is really like, and just what we’re all capable of, whether it be how human beings behave, or how much productivity is actually necessary. Don’t fall into this reactionary mindset, and don’t let anyone ever tell you that socialism is a world that is slightly better, but has all of the same problems and structures as this one. A better world is possible, and it will come about with more than a coat of red paint and a few hamsicks.
As I mentioned at the start, I’m too neurotic to hold down a real job, so if you found this useful or informative or it made you think about things in a different way, please leave me some sort of tip at Paypal or consider becoming a Patron at Patreon. There’s also Cash.me, but I’ll be honest I can’t find my card.
