<sarcasm>Yes, it’s true: before work was invented everyone lived in their own filth and starved all the time because work hadn’t been invented yet. </sarcasm>
Beyond jokes, my intention here is to clarify what is meant by antiwork. Antiwork does not mean that a world that has abolished work would see people live in filth and starve. In a world that has abolished work, people will still farm, clean, teach, provide medicine, take out fires, et cetera. Antiwork means the revolutionary abolition of the world of work and all that entails: a waged-labor, a division of labor between waged work and house work, alienation, bullshit jobs, a division between leisure and waged work, compulsion to work or starve, et cetera. Some people call this degrowth, others communism, still others anarchy.
So:
What is work?
Work is a lot of things. For starters, it developed historically from feudal times and had since evolved in its current form in the capitalist mode of production. Within the context of the capitalist mode of production work is waged-labor or reproductive (or house) work and is defined by divisions and alienations. These include a division of labor between waged work and house work, alienation, a division between leisure and waged work, and a compulsion to work or starve. That last one is important. Working people today are free to not work, or starve. This is the freedom that work grants us.
Will people starve and live in filth?
No. Antiwork does not mean that a world that has abolished work would see people live in filth and starve. In a world that has abolished work, people will still farm, clean, teach, provide medicine, take out fires, et cetera.
Will people be bored without work?
I think it’s more accurate to say people will be bored by work. A world that has abolished work will still see people that keep themselves busy. Historically speaking, during the Age of Enlightenment, it was the leisure class that didn’t do work that was able to make all sorts of exciting and revolutionary ideas about science and art. They won the right to not work because they were privileged due to their wealth. If everyone was able to free themselves from the drudgery of work, what wonders could they achieve?
I expect this post to be a sort of living document. Please feel free to ask questions and I’ll try to answer it in the post. ___
Antiwork means the revolutionary abolition of the world of work and all that entails: a waged-labor
BBC World News recently covered a trend of employees quitting the conventional style of work. These workers reject the culture of breaking one’s back bending over backwards to satisfy their boss’s every wish. The concept is for workers to put their own well-being above the corporate bottom line, which generally means forgoing¹ promotions, raises and advancement in the company because it’s just not worth it. To own the work, and work at a comfortable pace and comfortable fashion.
I don’t recall what term they used for this trendy new view, but “antiwork” could be taken to be a more general concept that covers the extremes of complete abolition of work as well as the less extreme concept of simply rejecting unwanted excessive overwork. Before reading your post I would have assumed “antiwork” would include “antiworkmyassoff”.
¹ by “forgoing” I don’t mean rejecting offers, but just accepting that promotions and significant raises won’t typically be offered.
Sure.
both here and back-in-the-day on the other site, a lot comes down to terminology – it’s not “work” we’re opposed to so much as the “job” – I would love to work in my garden, I like working on my house, but I never have time because of my job – “anti-job”, “anti-exploitative-boss”, “anti-nature-destroying-corporation” just don’t roll off the tongue as easily, they don’t catch your attention as quickly as “antiwork” …
The reason why it is called antiwork is because the goal of the socialist movement from 200 years ago is the self-abolition of the working class through self-liberation. Antiwork means workers against their own workerness, “anti-workerness” if you will, hence “antiwork.” And what does anti-workerness mean? It means workers against wage-labor, division of labor, alienation, et cetera. Hence antiwork is a shorthand for anti-workerness and all that that implies.
How do you guarantee that enough people will, of their own accord, do the unpleasant jobs required to keep society running?
Maybe they won’t and for a time they’ll live in their filth and starve. But who wants to live like that? Since time immemorial people have been finding ways to feed and clean themselves and others without notions of profit, wages, division of labor, mute compulsion of work or starve, etc. People have figured this out before and we can do so again.
Surely you clean your own house and stock your own food, if not cook it yourself? The same compulsion that drives one to clean their own homes and feed themselves will continue to exist on a societal scale even after work has been abolished.
Antiwork does not mean unpleasant tasks will disappear, rather that these will vs collectively managed in a way to maximize leisure. In the book The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, a book that has a lot of antiwork themes, people take turns cleaning and dedicate 1 day out of 10 to take their turn doing chores in their community. Every other day they’re free to self-actualize in whatever way they see fit. There are some parts of the book that isn’t antiwork, like a machine that sometimes assigns people to only manual labor when they’d rather write, but generally the book isn’t a model for antiwork and that plot point was part of the central drama of the text.
What if people refuse to help clean or take turns doing unpleasant jobs if they are able, however minimized it has been made? In the The Dispossessed, this is mentioned. In the book, those people are treated differently, and people regard them less. Think of it if you had a roommate who is a slob. You’d be contemptuous of them. But who wants to be held in contempt? People want to be liked. The cost of these tasks is no longer “work or starve” but “help out or you’ll be disliked.”
There will be other ways to persuade. I cannot recount them all. And if they persist? Let them. It is better that a few freeloaders live than everyone live under a regime of work.
Because people want to. People like society. There’s no shortage of people who would do whatever needs to be done to keep things running, they just don’t want to be forced to.
The things that end up dying? They’re not important to society, and so we’re wasting energy keeping them running. If it’s important, people will do the work.
are you any happier doing bullshit jobs? even it it’s not sewage treatment specifically, people in general are happier when they are doing something actually productive, something where they can see a material result from their effort
Do you have a roadmap for the steps needed to get from where we are today, to your envisioned antiwork society?
There’s no one method. A lot of people, however, choose various syndicalist and unionist methods of organizing workers to fight back against the bosses. You’ll get a lot of different answers from different people.
Can we start with yours?
If you ask me, I’m an anarchist and communist, so I’d advocate for building workers’ power in a struggle against their workerness. In prerevolutionary situations, that means building capacities of workers to struggle on their own behalf. This means strikes, occupations, sabotage, etc. In a revolutionary situation, these capacities transforms into crisis activity that has the capacity to transform social life and abolish work. In such a revolutionary situation, people take over their workplace, and resumes activity under their own control and willpower. In such cases, production is radically transformed into meeting needs rather than profit. Without the profit motive, people don’t need to produce as much and various forms of alienations and divisions can be overcome.
How does this manifesto view automation?
You know the meme where in this society it’s like “oh no! A robot took my job! I’ll starve!” Under conditions wherein work as we know it is abolished, it is instead, “a robot took my job, I’m free to enjoy what I want to do!” Of course there will be people taking care of automotive tasks, but again, this kind of labor is vastly different in a world without wages, alienation, division, et cetera. People enjoy making robots and making automation. It’s like a game or a challenge to them. So it can be after work is abolished.
I’m good with that
As long as automation is not just a transfer of labor, there is not really anything negative about it.
But in our current world automation does not necessarily mean that something takes less human labor to produce, it usually is just cheaper to produce it that way. Like a robot might make my work day shorter (or just save the capitalist some money) but for robot to exist it needs materials mined, refined, assembly, quality control, shipping and more. Maybe those actions actually need more hours of labor, but because those happen in places where its way cheaper to hire workers the capitalist do that auromation anyway.
Good intervention.
Not OP, but AI and automation would be the most amazing thing to ever happen to humanity, if they were not in the hands of a handful of corporations that have dystopia wet dreams.
So we’ll get techno indentured servitude instead of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.
