The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: Our Lifelong Nightmare

{David D’Amato’s CV was unknown to me when I read his essay and decided to excerpt it here. Whoever wants to cast the first stone, D’Amato’s life history (see below) affords plenty of ammunition, and good reasons, to do just that.}

“Humiliation and self-denial are at the center of the agglomeration of activities we call work; the thing can scarcely be imagined without at least implied reference to these.”

David D’Amato (from his Foreword to Abolish Work, edited by Nick Ford):

Work is necessarily predicated on a disorienting and Orwellian denial of reality.

Premised on what David Graeber accurately calls “a hyper-fetishism of paperwork,” the bowels of our hellish corporate economy are simply bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake, a moribund world of anxiety and alienation.

Wasting away in our etiolated worlds of cubicles, fluorescent lighting, and power strips, we learn a new language — corporatese — a Newspeak that teaches us to deny everything we know and feel, that is, to believe that we are happy, free, and making a valuable contribution. What is “professionalism” but the insistence that we hide ourselves, that we conceal the resentment we feel toward our enslavement and its upholders?

The dogmatic, workerist main current of anarchism, hopelessly tied to an outmoded, dying language, amounts to a worship of work that would leave its institutions intact. Insofar as the workers own and control the factory, the factory itself is glorious, a hallowed place to which we return devotedly and eagerly each morning. But we know — and have known for some time — that this can’t be right, that work is inherently oppressive. In point of fact, work may be the encounter with crushing, dehumanizing power that we know best of all. Work, the reality of corporate feudalism, is immediate and tangible rather than remote and abstract, its daily impositions alienating us from ourselves and humanity in the most obvious ways.

For most of us in the twentieth century, it is work — not government, not the church, not family — that is the most direct day-to-day attack on our freedom. The most basic, uncontroversial facts of human biology and the evolutionary road it followed reveal the profound unnaturalness of work. Mindless drones alternately bored to tears and easily diverted, we drift from one glowing rectangle to another, detached from the self-determination long ago extinguished by a school system that abominates creativity and imagination.

But work, that lifelong nightmare from which we can never awake, is also changing us in ways more immediate, corrupting even our genetic material. Constant disruption of our circadian rhythms — first due to compulsory schooling, our preparation for work, then because of corporate drudgery — actually alters the functioning of our DNA. Dependent on natural and complete sleep cycles, genes that govern metabolism, immunity, and stress responses begin to change when we are deprived of that sleep. Work is quite literally killing us, particularly those with less education and money and those who belong to minority groups. Beyond rendering us prone to depression and anxiety, work and its consequences are increasing incidences of medical conditions such as heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, stroke, and cancer.

These physical tolls are apparent even if not on the level of consciousness, for it is difficult to describe the exquisite relief of leaving work in terms other than those provided by the carnal pursuits. Indeed, for most of us, trapped in the bleak halls of corporate prison, clocking out for the day is actually much more than orgasmic; it is a restorative re-exposure to freedom, even if only a small measure of it, a reminder that even work’s ceaseless attacks on mind and body have not succeeded entirely in extinguishing the vital, inner anarchism of, in Renzo Novatore’s words, “individual, violent, reckless, poetic, decentering audacity.”

To be clear, the case against work is not one for a shorter workday, for better jobs, working conditions, or benefits, but rather for the enthusiastic retrieval of a kind of autonomy and energy that remains unthinkable as long as work endures. Violently and imperiously, work steals our opportunities for self-creation; it forecloses any possibility of Emile Armand’s beautiful idea — “personal life as a work of art,” whereby life is lived in favor of oneself, not as a funereal exercise in abstention.

_____________________________

If you look for David D’Amato on Wikipedia, you are directed to a page titled “Usenet Personalities” and to the sub-heading of “Criminal and Eccentric Personalities,” where you will find this:

David D'Amato – former assistant principal and director of guidance at West Hempstead High School, he actively spammed and trolled a variety of newsgroups (particularly "alt.gothic" and "rec.music.phish") from roughly 1996 to 1999, initiated e-mail bombings against those he considered "opponents", and solicited for video recordings of young adult males being bound and tickled, all while using the pseudonym/alter ego “Terri DiSisto,” who was supposedly a female college student. D'Amato was found guilty of e-mail bombings which caused service outages at a number of colleges and universities, was fined $5,000 (USD), and spent six months in federal prison after being convicted in 2001. He is a subject of the 2016 documentary Tickled. He died in March 2017.

Inspirational workforce poster

 

Labor Day: A Better Way of Work

{To close out our Labor Day weekend seminar on the curse of labor, we turn to an essay from thirty years ago, in which L. Susan Brown made the revolutionary assertions that (a) workers are people, too; (b) labor cannot be a commodity because it cannot be detached from the person; and (c) under our current system, paid employment is wage slavery, which is better than the other kind but still not good.}

L. Susan Brown, from The Politics of Individualism (1993):

One of the first questions people often ask when they are introduced to one another in our society is “what do you do?” This is more than just polite small talk — it is an indication of the immense importance work has for us. Work gives us a place in the world, it is our identity, it defines us, and, ultimately, it confines us. Witness the psychic dislocation when we lose our jobs, when we are fired, laid off, forced to retire or when we fail to get the job we applied for in the first place. An unemployed person is defined not in positive but in negative terms: to be unemployed is to lack work. To lack work is to be socialIy and economically marginalized. To answer “nothing” to the question “what do you do?” is emotionally difficult and socially unacceptable. Most unemployed people would rather answer such a question with vague replies like “I’m between contracts” or “I have a few resumes out and the prospects look promising” than admit outright that they do not work. For to not work in our society is to lack social significance — it is to be a nothing, because nothing is what you do.

Those who do work (and they are becoming less numerous as our economies slowly disintegrate) are something — they are teachers, nurses, doctors, factory workers, machinists, dental assistants, coaches, librarians, secretaries, bus drivers and so on. They have identities defined by what they do. They are considered normal productive members of our society. Legally their work is considered to be subject to an employment contract, which if not explicitly laid out at the beginning of employment is implicitly understood to be part of the relationship between employee and employer. The employment contract is based on the idea that it is possible for a fair exchange to occur between an employee who trades her/his skills and labor for wages supplied by the employer. Such an idea presupposes that a person’s skills and labor are not inseparable from them but are rather separate attributes that can be treated like property to be bought and sold. The employment contract assumes that a machinist or an exotic dancer, for instance, have the capacity to separate out from themselves the particular elements that are required by the employer and are then able to enter into an agreement with the employer to exchange only those attributes for money. The machinist is able to sell technical skills while the exotic dancer is able to sell sexual appeal, and, according to the employment contract, they both do so without selling themselves as people. Political scientists and economists refer to such attributes as “property in the person,” and speak about a person’s ability to contract out labor power in the form of property in the person.

In our society, then, work is defined as the act by which an employee contracts out her or his labor power as property in the person to an employer for fair monetary compensation. This way of describing work, of understanding it as a fair exchange between two equals, hides the real relationship between employer and employee: that of domination and subordination. For if the truth behind the employment contract were widely known, workers in our society would refuse to work, because they would see that it is impossible for human individuals to truly separate out labor power from themselves. “Property in the person” doesn’t really exist as something that an individual can simply sell as a separate thing. Machinists cannot just detach from themselves the specific skills needed by an employer; those skills are part of an organic whole that cannot be disengaged from the entire person, similarly, sex appeal is an intrinsic part of exotic dancers, and it is incomprehensible how such a constitutive, intangible characteristic could be severed from the dancers themselves. A dancer has to be totally present in order to dance, just like a machinist must be totally present in order to work; neither can just send their discrete skills to do the work for them. Whether machinist, dancer, teacher, secretary, or pharmacist, it is not only one’s skills that are being sold to an employer, it is also one’s very being. When employees contract out their labor power as property in the person to employers, what is really happening is that employees are selling their own self-determination, their own wills, their own freedom. In short, they are, during their hours of employment, slaves.

What is a slave? A slave is commonly regarded as a person who is the legal property of another and is bound to absolute obedience. The legal lie that is created when we speak of a worker’s capacity to sell property in the person without alienating her or his will allows us to maintain the false distinction between a worker and a slave. A worker must work according to the will of another. A worker must obey the boss, or ultimately lose the job. The control the employer has over the employee at work is absolute, there is in the end no negotiation — you do it the boss’ way or you hit the highway. It is ludicrous to believe that it is possible to separate out and sell “property in the person” while maintaining human integrity. To sell one’s labor power on the market is to enter into a relationship of subordination with one’s employer — it is to become a slave to the employer/master. The only major differences between a slave and a worker is that a worker is only a slave at work while a slave is a slave twenty-four hours a day, and slaves know that they are slaves, while most workers do not think of themselves in such terms.

What would a better way of work look like? It would more resemble what we call play than work. That is not to say that it would be easy, as play can be difficult and challenging, like we often see in the spores we do for fun. It would be self-directed, self-desired, and freely chosen. This means that it would have to be disentangled from the wage system, for as soon as one is paid one becomes subservient to whoever is doing the paying. As Alexander Berkman noted: “labor and its products must be exchanged without price, without profit, freely according to necessity.” Work would be done because it was desired, not because it was forced. Sound impossible? Not at all. This kind of work is done now, already, by most of us on a daily basis. It is the sort of activity we choose to do after our eight or ten hours of slaving for someone else in the paid workplace. It is experienced every time we do something worthwhile for no pay, every time we change a diaper, umpire a kid’s baseball game, run a race, give blood, volunteer to sit on a committee, counsel a friend, write a newsletter, bake a meal, or do a favor. We take part in this underground free economy when we coach, tutor, teach, build, dance, baby-sit, write a poem, or program a computer without getting paid. We must endeavor to enlarge these areas of free work to encompass more and more of our time, while simultaneously trying to change the structures of domination in the paid workplace as much as we possibly can.

Does Work Really Work? | The Anarchist Library

The Politics of Individualism - Wikipedia

Please to enjoy the annual proletarian celebration, comrades. Now back to work!

Sunday Sermon: The Carrot of Happier Tomorrows

{Raoul Vaneigem’s 1967 ‘The Revolution of Everyday Life’ reads like an angry French version of Theodore Roszak. Quite honestly, General Electric did more to revolutionize everyday life than did Raoul Vaneigem; nevertheless, the spirit of Maynard G. Krebs lives on in Vaneigem’s quaint manifesto.}

“The cult of work is honored from Cuba to China; socialism is nothing but the perfected form of capitalism.” (Raoul Vaneigem)

Raoul Vaneigem, from The Revolution of Everyday Life (1968):

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create. What spark of humanity, of a possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at six every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures, spun dry by statistical controls, and tossed out at the end of the day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals of departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of weekends, where the crowd communes in weariness and boredom? From adolescence to retirement each 24-hour cycle repeats the same shattering bombardment, like bullets hitting a window: mechanical repetition, time-which-is-money, submission to bosses, boredom, exhaustion. From the butchering of youth’s energy to the gaping wound of old age, life cracks in every direction under the blows of forced labor. Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live. The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry. Already the front against forced labor is being formed; its gestures of refusal are molding the consciousness of the future. Every call for productivity in the conditions chosen by capitalist and Soviet economy is a call to slavery.

In the nineteenth century, the misery of the working classes made the right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, a right claimed from the dawn of time by prisoners about to be massacred; it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically. The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on, however, people want to live, not just to survive.

Labor means ’suffering’. At least the nobility never forgot their own dignity and the indignity which marked their bondsmen. The aristocratic contempt for work reflected the master’s contempt for the dominated classes; work was the expiation to which they were condemned to all eternity by the divine decree which had willed them, for impenetrable reasons, to be inferior. Work took its place among the sanctions of Providence as the punishment for poverty, and because it was the means to a future salvation such a punishment could take on the attributes of pleasure; basically, work was less important than submission. Today, the bourgeoisie does not dominate, it exploits. It does not need to be master; it prefers to use. The principle of productivity simply replaced the principle of feudal authority.

Why has no one even attempted to understand this? Is it because work ameliorates the human condition and saves the poor, at least in illusion, from eternal damnation? Today the carrot of happier tomorrows has replaced the carrot of salvation in the next world; in both cases the present is always under the heel of oppression.

Is it because work transforms nature? Perhaps, but what can we do with a nature ordered in terms of profit and loss, in a world where the inflation of techniques conceals the deflation of the use-value of life? Besides, organized labor transforms the surface of continents as a by-product, not a purpose. Work to transform the world? Tell me another. The world is being transformed in the direction prescribed by the existence of forced labor, which is why it is being transformed so badly.

Perhaps man realizes himself in his forced labor? In the nineteenth century the concept of work retained a vestige of the notion of creativity. Zola describes a nailsmiths’ contest in which the workers competed in the perfection of their tiny masterpiece. Love of the trade and the vitality of an already smothered creativity incontestably helped man to bear ten or fifteen hours which nobody could have stood if some kind of pleasure had not slipped into it. The survival of the craft conception allowed each worker to contrive a precarious comfort in the hell of the factory. But Taylorism dealt the deathblow to a mentality which had been carefully fostered by archaic capitalism. It is useless to expect even a caricature of creativity from the conveyor belt.

Nowadays ambition and the love of the job well done are the indelible mark of defeat and the most mindless submission. Which is why, wherever submission is demanded, the old ideology wends its way, from the Arbeit Macht Frei of the concentration camps to the homilies of Henry Ford and Mao Tse-tung.

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The Situationist International Text Library/The Revolution of Everyday Life (nothingness.org)

Raoul Vaneigem - Wikipedia

"Treatise on Good Manners for the Younger Generations"

Saturday Lecture: An Intelligent Laziness

{Emil Cioran was a Romanian philosopher and lifelong insomniac known for his 'philosophical pessimism'; his writings focused on 'suffering, decay, and nihilism'. This is what happens when you don't get enough sleep.}  

Emil Cioran, “The Degradation of Work” (1934):

Men generally work too much to be themselves. Work is a curse which man has turned into pleasure. To work for work’s sake, to enjoy a fruitless endeavor, to imagine that you can fulfill yourself through assiduous labor — all that is disgusting and incomprehensible. Permanent and uninterrupted work dulls, trivializes, and depersonalizes. Work displaces man’s center of interest from the subjective to the objective realm of things. In consequence, man no longer takes an interest in his own destiny but focuses on facts and things. What should be an activity of permanent transfiguration becomes a means of exteriorization, of abandoning one’s inner self. In the modern world, work signifies a purely external activity; man no longer makes himself through it, he makes things. That each of us must have a career, must enter upon a certain form of life which probably does not suit us, illustrates work’s tendency to dull the spirit. Man sees work as beneficial to his being, but his fervor reveals his penchant for evil. In work, man forgets himself; yet his forgetfulness is not simple and naive, but rather akin to stupidity. Through work, man has moved from subject to object; in other words, he has become a deficient animal who has betrayed his origins. Instead of living for himself — not selfishly but growing spiritually — man has become the wretched, impotent slave of external reality. Where have they all gone; ecstasy, vision, exaltation? Where is the supreme madness or the genuine pleasure of evil? The negative pleasure one finds in work partakes of the poverty and banality of daily life, its pettiness. Why not abandon this futile work and begin anew without repeating the same wasteful mistake? Is subjective consciousness of eternity not enough? It is the feeling for eternity that the frenetic activity and trepidation of work has destroyed in us. Work is the negation of eternity. The more goods we acquire in the temporal realm, the more intense our external work, the less accessible and farther removed is eternity. Hence the limited perspective of active and energetic people, the banality of their thought and actions. I am not contrasting work to either passive contemplation or vague dreaminess, but to an unrealizable transfiguration; nevertheless, I prefer an intelligent and observant laziness to intolerable, terrorizing activity. To awaken the modern world, one must praise laziness. The lazy man has an infinitely keener perception of metaphysical reality than the active one.

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(From On the Heights of Despair)

Degradation through Work | The Anarchist Library

Emil Cioran - Wikipedia

A prophet honored in his own country!

The Furious Mania for Work

{The long Labor Day weekend is upon us; traditionally, we take this opportunity to celebrate the virtue(s) of labor and to honor America’s working women and men. However, I am choosing instead to feature a series of brief essays, each of which questions the nobility and even the necessity of work. I begin with Paul Lafargue’s passionate denunciation of the worth ethic. Lafargue was the son-in-law of Karl Marx; famously, Lafargue’s interpretations of his father-in-law’s writings led Marx to say (to Friedrich Engels), “Whatever I am, I know I am not a Marxist.”}

“All individual and societal misery takes its origin in the passion of the proletariat for work.” (Paul Lafargue)

Paul Lafargue, from The Right to Be Lazy (1898):

The ancient philosophers taught contempt of work, this derogation of the free man; the poets sang of laziness, this gift of the Gods; “God gave us this idleness,” sings Virgil. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ teaches: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin, yet I say unto ye that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

A strange mania governs the working class of all countries in which capitalist civilization rules, a mania that results in the individual and collective misery that prevails in modern society. This is the love of work, the furious mania for work, extending to the exhaustion of the individual and his descendants. The parsons, the political economists, and the moralists, instead of contending against this mental aberration, have canonized work.

Even the proletariat, the great producing class of all civilized nations, the class which by its emancipation will release mankind from servile work and will create a free being out of the human animal; the proletariat, too, mistaking its historical calling, has allowed itself to be seduced by the dogma of work. Its chastisement is hard and terrible. All individual and societal misery takes its origin in the passion of the proletariat for work.

If the sufferings resulting from compulsory work have closed upon the proletariat, more numerous than the locusts of the Bible, it is the proletariat itself who have conjured them up. The same work which the proletarians demanded, weapon in hand, they have laid upon their families; they have handed their wives and children over to the factory barons. With their own hands they have destroyed their household hearths; with their own hands dried up the breasts of the women. They have allowed pregnant and nursing women to go into the factories, into the mines where they shattered their nerves and tortured their spine; with their own hands have they undermined the life and the vitality of their children. Shame upon you, proletarians! Whither are gone those women with playful speech and fresh humor, of whom our old legends and tales relate? Whither are gone those vivacious women, who, always cooking, always tripping about, scattering life, brought healthy and strong children into the world when they gave themselves the pleasure? Today we have women and girls in the factory, stunted flowers with pale complexion, colorless blood, poor stomachs, and exhausted limbs. A healthy pleasure is unknown to them. And the children? Twelve hours’ work for the children!

All the academicians and all the clergy could have devised no evil more stupefying to the mind of the children, more injurious to their disposition, more ruinous to their organism than work in the pestiferous atmosphere of capitalist workshops! Our century is called the century of work; actually, it is the century of pain, of misery, of corruption! And yet the bourgeois political economists and philosophers individually and collectively have sung loathsome songs of praise to the God Progress, the oldest son of work. To listen to them, it would seem as if happiness must rule upon earth, and as even now its presence might be felt. They have meandered through the centuries of earlier ages, burrowing through the dust and misery of feudalism in order that the sun of the present day may shine more brightly.

Capitalist morality curses the flesh of the worker by reducing his needs to the minimum, by smothering his pleasures and his passions, and by condemning him to play the part of a machine out of which work is exploited without rest and without thanks. To the revolutionary Socialists, therefore, is assigned the task of mounting an assault against the morality and social teachings of capitalism and of eradicating prejudice from the brains of the class which is summoned to action; prejudice, the seeds of which have been sown by the ruling class. It is for the revolutionary Socialists to proclaim that the earth will cease to be a valley of tears for the workers.

Work without moderation and without aim is the worst frightful scourge which mankind has ever known; only when work is regulated according to reason and is limited to a maximum corresponding to the social needs, will it be a spice to the pleasure of idleness, a useful exercise to the human organism. Meanwhile, the age of leisure, prophesied by the ancient poets, has not come to pass; the blind, insane and homicidal mania for work has transformed the machine, from an instrument of emancipation, into an instrument of enslavement for free beings: the productive power of the machine has become the cause of the pauperization of the masses.

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lazy_pl.pdf (slp.org)

Paul Lafargue - Wikipedia

Paul Lafargue, trying to look like he's doing nothing at all

Sunday Sermon: "What Work Is"

Philip Levine, "What Work Is”: 

We stand in the rain in a long line

waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.

You know what work is—if you’re

old enough to read this you know what

work is, although you may not do it.

Forget you. This is about waiting,

shifting from one foot to another.

Feeling the light rain falling like mist

into your hair, blurring your vision

until you think you see your own brother

ahead of you, maybe ten places.

You rub your glasses with your fingers,

and of course it’s someone else’s brother,

narrower across the shoulders than

yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin

that does not hide the stubbornness,

the sad refusal to give in to

rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,

to the knowledge that somewhere ahead

a man is waiting who will say, “No,

we’re not hiring today,” for any

reason he wants. You love your brother,

now suddenly you can hardly stand

the love flooding you for your brother,

who’s not beside you or behind or

ahead because he’s home trying to   

sleep off a miserable night shift

at Cadillac so he can get up

before noon to study his German.

Works eight hours a night so he can sing

Wagner, the opera you hate most,

the worst music ever invented.

How long has it been since you told him

you loved him, held his wide shoulders,

opened your eyes wide and said those words,

and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never

done something so simple, so obvious,

not because you’re too young or too dumb,

not because you’re jealous or even mean

or incapable of crying in

the presence of another man, no,   

just because you don’t know what work is.

 

 

What Work Is by Philip Levine | Poetry Foundation

What Work Is

"You know what work is—if you’re / old enough to read this you know what / work is, although you may not do it." (Philip Levine, “What Work Is”)

At Current Affairs, Matthew James Seidel favorably reviews Gavin Mueller’s book Breaking Things at Work, a book which asserts as its thesis the claim that The Luddites Were Right. This claim has been advanced before—most notably by Kirkpatrick Sale’s 1995 Rebels Against the Future—but it seems especially timely now, what worth employers bemoaning an inexplicable labor shortage which has nothing at all to do, I’m certain, with low wages, minimal benefits, or generally unpleasant working conditions.

As Seidel notes, the Luddites have been maligned and caricatured as simple-minded technophobes. In fact, “they were gifted artisans resisting a capitalist takeover of the production process that would irreparably harm their communities, weaken their collective bargaining power, and reduce skilled workers to replaceable drones as mechanized as the machines themselves.” Alas, even the 19^th- and 20^th-century Left, including Marx and Lenin, embraced the promised abundance of industrial capitalism and its quasi-magical technologies, even while aspiring to put the proletariat in charge. According to Seidel, “The ‘two-stage’ strain of Marxism holds that societies must evolve from one stage to another, with the last transition being from capitalism to communism. It follows that if the erosion of workers’ autonomy via new technology is part of capitalism’s road to self-destruction, well, workers must simply accept it, while holding out for a better future.” Thus did Lenin import ‘Taylorism’ and ‘Fordism’ into Russia hoping to keep pace with the industrialized West while awaiting the development of the proletariat; “The Taylor system,” said Lenin, “is preparing the time when the proletariat will take over all social production.”

That was then, and this is now: “The oppressive power of technology,” writes Seidel, “is clearer in our own day than ever before. Consider the algorithms used by Amazon to surveil, discipline, and punish employees. Mueller cites a case where a worker failed to keep up with the inhuman, brutal pace set by the algorithms. After exceeding three automated warnings, she was fired. But managers were quick to explain, “We didn’t fire you, the machine fired you because you are lower than the rate.” The threat of new technology extends far beyond the workplace. The police frighten citizens with robot dogs and use drones to spy on unsuspecting beachgoers, while firms like Cambridge Analytica secretly harvest online data in order to predict and influence the behavior of millions of voters. Silicon Valley has armed surveillance capitalism with tools to threaten autonomy not only over our jobs, but our data and our very identities.”

In Seidel’s estimate, “Breaking Things at Work lays out the unprecedented threats to our autonomy in the workplace and beyond, but it’s not just doom and gloom. Mueller also reminds us people are fighting back. Burgeoning tech worker unions, the decelerationist movement, tractor-hackers—all are infused by the spirit of Luddism whether they know it or not. By acknowledging the connection between activism today and Luddites of the past, we can unite seemingly disparate struggles into a single front.” He concludes, “A socialist analysis is crucial to resisting the reactionary tendencies of the tech industry. But Mueller makes it clear that, unless this analysis is informed by Luddism, the Left is bound to make the same mistakes all over again.”

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The Luddites Were Right ❧ Current Affairs

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Along the same lines, Aaron Benanav (at The Nation) takes a deep and extended dive into James Suzman’s Work: A Deep History. Suzman is a South African anthropologist who asks, in this book, “whether we might learn to live like our ancestors did—that is, to value free time over money. Answering that question takes him on a 300-millennium journey through humanity’s existence.” According to Benanav, “The ‘principal purpose’ of his undertaking, Suzman explains, is ‘to loosen the claw-like grasp that scarcity economics has held’ over our lives and thereby ‘diminish our corresponding and unsustainable preoccupation with economic growth.’ It is an arresting intervention, although one that reveals the limits of both contemporary economics and anthropology as guides to thinking about our era of climate emergency.”

Allow me to quote Benanav at length regarding the fundamental confusion in mainstream economic thought:

Economics positions itself as the study of how the choices we make under the constraints of scarcity facilitate the allocation of our productive capacities. Every gain in economic efficiency loosens those constraints just a bit, so some of us can afford to satisfy a few more of our desires without taking away from other people’s ability to meet their own needs. Why the wealthy few are able to satisfy so many of their whims before the world’s poor achieve basic levels of economic security has always been an uncomfortable question for the economic profession. But economists assure us that, in any case, the only long-term solution to global poverty is more economic growth.

That is why economists speak of our history primarily as one long story of economic expansion, as if our task as humans always has been and always will be to struggle out of penury and acquire more things. Seeing the world that way has enormous consequences for how we think about climate change, among the many other ecological threats to human well-being, such as deforestation and overfishing. If confronting these threats means making do with less, such a limitation can only appear, in the economist’s eyes, as a regression against which human nature will rebel.

The account of human nature undergirding this standard economic perspective is precisely what Suzman’s anthropological evidence allows him to reject. In reality, the scarcity postulate applies only to a limited period of humanity’s existence. For the vast majority of our history, humans have thought of their material needs as limited. Families divided up the work required to meet those needs, and when the work was done, they called it a day. When people have found themselves in possession of an abundance of goods, they have generally seen those goods not as resources to be deployed in the service of economic expansion, but rather as so many excuses to throw gigantic parties. In many cultures, giving away or even ritualistically destroying one’s possessions at festivals has been a common way to show one’s worth. That people all over the world continue to spend their meager incomes on elaborate marriage celebrations and funerals is something mainstream economists can understand only as anomalous.

For Suzman, anthropological insights into our pre-scarcity past lend support to a post-scarcity tradition in economics, which he associates with the work of John Maynard Keynes, who wanted not merely to stabilize Western economies but to advance beyond them, to a post-scarcity society in which economic concerns had largely faded from human consciousness. To so much as conceive of this alternative, Keynes asserted, economists would have to reconsider the nature of economics.

The “dismal science,” as economics has been called, famously knows the price of everything but not the value of anything. It is based on inaccurate history and inaccurate assumptions about human nature; and it condemns us, if we continue to grant it authority, to a lifetime of work intended towards the pointless acquisition of money and the accumulation of things that money can buy, none of which are ultimately of much importance. If we want to avoid such a bleak future, we need to embark upon what historian Harvey Kaye has called “the education of desire,” a humanistic reorienting of our efforts towards the things that matter most. ¹

As well as citing economists such as Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith, Suzman also draws on the work of other anthropologists—James Scott, David Grabeber, and David Wengrow, among others—“who have mustered the available evidence to demonstrate that human nature is far different from what economists have long led us to believe. We humans are capable of ‘moderating our personal material aspirations,’ but only, as Suzman suggests, if we address currently unsustainable levels of economic and social inequality.”   

Aaron Benanav, it should be noted, is skeptical about some of Suzman’s claims, e.g., the rate at which automation will displace human workers; Benanav believes that will be a much slower process than does Suzman. “Humanity,” Benanav writes, “can’t just wake up to the end of work.” He is likely correct, but can we not wake up sooner rather than later to a different understanding of what work is? That would be a welcome start.

____________________

Do We Need to Work? | The Nation

¹ Daniel Bell Jr.’s book The Economy of Desire has a similar premise.  

Labor Day

A Modest Proposal: What this country needs is a strong labor movement and a nationwide general strike.

"The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes no proper basis of civilisation. The time has come to regenerate society—we are on the eve of a universal change." --Eugene V. Debs

Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

https://archive.iww.org/culture/official/preamble/

The General Strike (speech by Bill Haywood, 1911)

How anyone can take the position that a general strike would not be effective and not be a good thing for the working class is more than I can understand. We know that the capitalist uses the general strike to good advantage. Here is the position that we find the working class and the capitalists in. The capitalists have wealth; they have money. They invest the money in machinery, in the resources of the earth. They operate a factory, a mine, a railroad, a mill. They will keep that factory running just as long as there are profits coming in. When anything happens to disturb the profits, what do the capitalists do? They go on strike, don't they? They withdraw their finances from that particular mill. They close it down because there are no profits to be made there. They don't care what becomes of the working class. But the working class, on the other hand, has always been taught to take care of the capitalist's interest in the property. You don't look after your own interest, your labor power, realizing that without a certain amount of provision you can't reproduce it. You are always looking after the interest of the capitalist, while a general strike would displace his interest and would put you in possession of it.

The justification for political action is to control the forces of the capitalists that they use against us; to be in a position to control the power of government so as to make the work of the army ineffective, so as to abolish totally the secret service and the force of detectives. That is the reason that you want the power of government. That is the reason that you should fully understand the power of the ballot. Now, there isn't anyone, Socialist, S. L. P., Industrial Worker or any other workingman or woman, no matter what society you belong to, but what believes in the ballot. I know, or think I know, the power of it, and I know that the industrial organization, as I stated in the beginning, is its broadest interpretation. I know, too, that when the workers are brought together in a great organization they are not going to cease to vote. That is when the workers will begin to vote, to vote for directors to operate the industries in which they are all employed.

So the general strike is a fighting weapon as well as a constructive force. It can be used, and should be used, equally as forcefully by the Socialist as by the Industrial Worker.

The Socialists believe in the general strike. They also believe in the organization of industrial forces after the general strike is successful. So, on this great force of the working class I believe we can agree that we should unite into one great organization--big enough to take in the children that are now working; big enough to take in the black man; the white man; big enough to take in all nationalities--an organization that will be strong enough to obliterate state boundaries, to obliterate national boundaries, and one that will become the great industrial force of the working class of the world.

https://archive.iww.org/history/library/Haywood/GeneralStrike/

                                                                                              
 

The Wages of Star Parker is Nonsense

Star Parker, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, appeared this morning on Fox News and succinctly explained the conservative version of the “iron law of wages”:

"Wages are negotiated between the person working and the person offering a job." 

I believe that Ms. Parker believes that; I am even willing to believe that has been her experience. That is also, no doubt, the experience of elite entertainers, athletes, and media stars (so to speak) whose relatively scarce talents are in high demand: more power to them, by all means, and more power to Ms. Parker.

Contra Parker's claims, however, the ordinary worker, blue-collar or white-collar, has absolutely no negotiating power whatsoever—unless, of course, she is lucky enough to belong to a union. Absent a union, the way it works—I explain this for Ms. Parker’s benefit, since she appears not to know it—is that a person applies for a job, the employer states what salary and benefits come with the job, and the applicant (assuming she is offered the job) can take it or leave it. ¹

Star Parker went on to explain how the nanny state undermines the natural order of things:

What we've done as a society is said nope, government should interject itself into the market of that, and so instead of people saying let me get in that first rung and prove to this employer that I can do really good so that somebody else is going to want you to come work for them, what we've done is gone to the nanny state and said, fix this for us. We should not even have a minimum wage. Wages are flexible because talent is put on the table and somebody buys that talent.

Ms. Parker—whose life, as far as I know, is a legitimate “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” success story—displays here a breathtaking ignorance of the turbulent history of American labor and what it took to bring about the minimum wage, the 40-hour work week, and other limitations on the power of employers to exploit workers. Such regulations were not arbitrary diktats of nanny-state busybodies, nor were they gifts from magnanimous employers: they were concessions painfully extracted from both government and private-sector management after decades of strikes, violence, and the deaths of countless working people. ²

Whatever else they accomplished, those concessions, limitations, and regulations brought an end to the labor strife that had wracked this country in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries; they created, eventually, an environment where employers could pursue profits in peace, as they have done since the end of World War II, and where workers had at least a modicum of dignity, security, and opportunity.  

We have already—that is, conservatives like Ronald Reagan have already—all but eliminated unions from the labor-management balance. If Ms. Parker were to get her way by removing government from that balance as well, leaving workers on their own to “negotiate” with employers over wages, hours, and the like: neither she nor anyone else is likely to enjoy the consequences.

_____________________________________________ 

https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2019/02/19/fox-guest-we-should-not-even-have-minimum-wage/222905

¹ The Spanish Falangist politician Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, by no means a liberal, wrote this in 1933:

“They [the powers that be] came to offer us economic slavery, saying to the workers: You are free to work as you wish; no one can compel you to accept specified conditions. Since we are the rich, we offer you the conditions that please us; as free citizens, you are not obliged to accept them; but as poor citizens, if you do not accept them, you will die of hunger, surrounded, of course, by the utmost liberal dignity.”

² It was Henry Ford who realized, much to the dismay of his fellow capitalists, that it made sense to pay workers enough that they could afford to purchase the automobiles and other consumer goods that American factories were turning out. That employment strategy made Ford not a selfless benefactor of the working class, but a shrewd businessman—notwithstanding, the auto industry continued to be roiled by strikes and other labor disturbances for decades, while Ford went on to become, among other things, a world-class anti-Semite.

When Work Doesn't Work

You would be well-advised to skip this blog entry and go directly to The Hedgehog Review to read Jonathan Malesic’s “When Work and Meaning Part Ways”.  Some excerpts from Malesic’s essay may motivate you to do so: 

The very meaning of work is in jeopardy right now, and a big reason is that we expect too much meaning from work. We believe the false promise that work confers dignity, character, and purpose, and we inculcate that belief in our children and students. But in the present stage of American capitalism, working means having a job. It means having an employer who puts our time, sweat, and (one hopes) talent to use in accordance with current managerial doctrines and for the sake of profit. So what we say about work—at the dinner table, at graduations, in opinion columns, in sermons, on the floor of the Senate—doesn’t match the reality of the work we do. This mismatch leads us to a sad, profound irony: Our commitment to the work ethic, meant to help us live the good life, is actually keeping us from doing so. 

Alert readers may notice a similarity between Malesic’s critique and the critique made by Paul Goodman (GROWING UP ABSURD) in the early Sixties: our society pressures people to prioritize work as a source not just of income but of meaning, but fails to provide them with meaningful work—or even, increasingly, a living wage. 

Malesic explains how we have divided our world into virtuous “makers” and parasitic “takers”: 

Having a job is the sole pathway to dignity, which the sociologist Allison Pugh defines as “our capacity to stand as fully recognized participants in our social world.” If you have a job, others acknowledge you as a contributor to society and thus as someone with a say in how it operates and a right to claim its benefits. In short, work is how you earn the right to count in American society.  

Given that just under half of the country’s total population is in the civilian labor force, many Americans’ dignity is in question. To shore up the non-employed majority’s claim to social citizenship, we describe parenthood and schooling in terms of work. We call these activities “jobs” not simply because they’re difficult, but because we lack a vocabulary to talk about meritorious noneconomic activity... 

Retirees get past the social checkpoint because they’re resting after decades of hard work. They’ve put in their time. People whose illnesses or disabilities keep them from working get, at best, a grudging pass. They’re exempt from the social requirement to work and can legitimately accept meager public benefits (even John Smith made an exception for the seriously ill), but they often have to endure skepticism about their condition. They are always under the suspicion that they’re faking their disability. He sure looks like he can work says the strangely envious person of the neighbor who bears an invisible disability or suffers inescapable pain. 

There is, says Malesic, a “Get Out from Under Suspicion” card that certain non-working individuals can play, a card that reads “Control of Capital”: 

The other big exception to the working/worthless binary is owners of capital, who make money passively, through other people’s labor. They’re even better than workers; they’re “job creators.” With their godlike power, they make it possible for others to enjoy the social esteem of work and avoid the shame of unemployment. 

Our cup overfloweth with gratitude for the job creators, without whom we could not put food on our family, find meaning in our lives, or look our neighbor in the eye. 

Work does serve a number of purposes, individual and social. It is one thing, however, to claim that all work possesses inherent dignity. It is quite another to pretend that all work is personally meaningful or satisfying: 

The transformation of work into a spiritual enterprise, the site of our highest aspirations—to transcend ourselves, to encounter a higher reality, to serve others—is the work ethic’s cruelest unfulfilled promise. Like the idea that work earns one dignity and character, belief in work’s higher purpose trains people to accept lower salaries and worse conditions in their jobs, convinced that spiritual satisfaction is a fair substitute. That on its own isn’t inherently cruel. There is, indeed, more to life than money. We should applaud and not weep for the talented attorney who chooses public service over a career in corporate tax law. She’s responding to a noble calling. 

We tell people “Do what you love,” knowing full well that option isn’t available for most and knowing full well that such rhetoric will lead people to feel guilty that they aren’t doing what they love—after all, they chose to take a bullshit job:   

But the language of self-fulfillment even appears in rhetoric around low-pay, low-status work. “Vocation” remains a common catchall term for work in Christian circles, sacralizing every position in the business hierarchy. The Wegmans grocery store chain has used the phrase “Do What You Love” in ads inviting applications for work stocking shelves and ringing up groceries. (Miya Tokumitsu rightly criticizes the imperative to love our jobs in her book, Do What You Love and Other Lies About Success and Happiness.) This high-flown language coexists with a sense in office culture that we aren’t really doing anything. We aren’t making a dent in the universe parked in front of our laptops at our fourth strategy meeting of the day. We aren’t sure the universe—or even our customers—would notice if our jobs ceased to exist. We have what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs.”   

At the same time, those whose jobs do provide a sense of purpose and satisfaction are overworked, underpaid, and rarely appreciated. In our culture, unless you’re in the military or you’re a “first responder,” no one considers you a hero: 

Meanwhile, people whose work has undeniable social value—nurses, physicians, teachers—burn out at alarming rates. Their love turns to hatred. Their pursuit of purpose leads to spiritual barrenness. In a tragic irony, they go beyond themselves, but they end up feeling useless and unfulfilled. 

In the end, Malesic does his best to put a positive, but not entirely convincing, spin on the situation: 

Our work-centered culture hasn’t collapsed yet. We have time now to get off the rickety scaffolding and build a new culture before disaster hits. If we do that, then the fully automated age won’t be a disaster at all...The system that finds so much meaning in work already doesn’t do what it purports to do. We just have to stop insisting that it does, and then we can begin to change. 

As I said, you should really just read the essay yourself. 

https://iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2018_Fall_Malesic.php