Submitted by Stolenfromreddit in antiwork

"I’m not completely anti-work”

Even the more radical people on here keep making exceptions to their opposition to work, and so I’m here to suggest we stop doing that. The reasoning behind “I’m not completely anti-work” goes something like this:

We’re opposed to capitalist exploitation of labor, opposed to bosses and 40-hour weeks, opposed to how work is done in this system. But we’re not against work when it’s voluntary, meaningful or necessary.

I’m afraid this doesn’t clear things up. It usually leads to comments about how the term anti-work is misleading and how the subreddit should be called anti-exploitative-labor, anti-employment, anti-jobs or whatever else. It leads to folks claiming they’re anti-work, while busy making excuses for work that they deem necessary or worth keeping.

When you describe your anti-work position as a stance against “work that is exploitative, unnecessary, meaningless, alienated”, or as a stance against the 40 hour work-week, then you leave the door open to all kinds of reformist nonsense. To the average liberal, pretty much all work is (at least in some way) necessary and a good source for meaning, and so they will happily agree with your opposition: Let’s get rid of unnecessary jobs (but keep the rest)! Let’s get rid of asshole bosses (and find better bosses)! Let’s make work more fulfilling! Let’s work towards a 30-hour work week!

These dreams of a slightly less shitty world are often high-fived and upvoted, because at least they push in the 'right direction'. Good intentions leaving us with a vague, incoherent, watered-down version of anti-work. An invitation to demand small changes to work, rather than rejecting and abolishing it altogether.

Let’s define our terms

Wikipedia defines work as such:

Work or labor is intentional activity people perform to support themselves, others, or the needs and wants of a wider community. Alternatively, work can be viewed as the human activity that contributes (along with other factors of production) towards the goods and services within an economy.

Using this definition, it’s not entirely clear what exactly separates working from other activities. For example, me writing a post for this subreddit can be considered work. Why not? Who are you to say it’s not done to support myself, others, or the needs and wants of a wider community? What does it even mean to ‘support myself’, where do you draw the line?

Arguably, even my post here "contributes towards the goods and services within the economy." (Reddit wouldn’t make much money without people posting and commenting, creating a social platform and lots and lots of data.)

Another example highlighting the vagueness of the wiki definition: Cooking. When I prepare a meal for myself and others, am I working? Is it work if a friend pays me to do it? Is it work if I do it 9-to-5, as part of my job in a restaurant?

In the context of anti-work and radical politics (or anti-political traditions), it’s generally a good idea to avoid such broad definitions. If we want to take a stance against work, we better use one that can’t be applied to pretty much any activity, under any circumstances.

Luckily, plenty of anti-work authors and radicals have already given us definitions that are far more coherent and useable for our purposes:

Another form of incomprehension involves confusion over what work is. This stems in part from the fact that the word can be used in ambiguous ways. I may, indeed, say that I am “working” on an article for WD or on a translation. But when I am doing these things, it is, in fact, not work, because there is nothing compelling me to do them, I have no obligation to do them; I do them solely for my own pleasure. And here is where the basic meaning of work and its destruction becomes clear.

Work is an economic social relationship based upon compulsion. The institutions of property and commodity exchange place a price tag upon survival. This forces each of us to find ways to buy our survival or to accept the utter precariousness of a life of constant theft. In the former case, we can only buy our survival precisely by selling large portions of our lives away—this is why we refer to work as wage slavery —a slave is one whose life is owned by another, and when we work, capital owns our lives. [Wolfi Landstreicher - Willful Disobedience]

and

My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it’s done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it.

[...] Modern work has worse implications. People don’t just work, they have “jobs.” One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don’t) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A “job” that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. [Bob Black - The Abolition of Work]

Work as an institution

Both definitions offered by Black and Landstreicher paint a picture of work that we're all familiar with, and it's a lot more specific than the all-encompassing wiki definition.

Work can be understood as a highly authoritarian institution.

Institutions, according to Samuel P. Huntington, are "stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior". Further, institutions can refer to mechanisms which govern the behavior of a set of individuals within a given community; moreover, institutions are identified with a social purpose, transcending individuals and intentions by mediating the rules that govern living behavior.

Similar to how the state forces us to be citizens, pay taxes, accept its rule and its monopoly on legitimate violence, work forces us to be workers.

Sure, you can make all kinds of excuses for the state ("it protects us", "it's necessary", "it creates order", "how else would we deal with murderers?"), and so can you make excuses for work ("nothing would get done without it", "it's necessary", "people need order in their life", "how else would we deal with the lazy?"). But don't cling to these ideas and call yourself anti-work.

As long as you value the economic social relationship based upon compulsion, and as long as you can't even imagine any alternative to work as an institution, you're not anti-work, you just want work to be a little nicer.

Let's be pragmatic: Keep it radical.

Now some of you probably want to point out how we can't just switch from having a work-riddled society to a completely work-free society overnight, and so, the reasoning often goes, it's silly to be "completely anti-work".

I'ma be honest, I don't know what a future without work might look like. I don't need to know; nobody really does anyway. I also don't know how a future free of war and slavery might look like, but I sure as hell oppose these things as well. You can be 'pragmatic' without making excuses for work. We don't need to water down our opposition to work just because work is considered normal and necessary in this society.

If we want to end work, then keeping our perspective radical (as in: going to the root or origin; fundamental) is about as pragmatic as it gets. Liberals have sometimes advocated for nicer working conditions, leftists have occasionally even fought for it, but that only got us where we are today: A world full of work, more useless, destructive and alienating than ever before.

So here's my suggestion: Let's not re-invent work, let's get rid of it.

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