part of the difficulty with living with work, as an anarchist, is that persistent refusal to let a day just be Wednesday or Monday. to feel the need to amplify each day as yet another opportunity to engage with the Glory of Life, but the racial regime of Capital instead says excute x, y, z and keep it moving. the reward (a wage!) comes in two-week intervals, but those two-weeks… gone forever. labor time, in exchange for money, is one of the most impoverished way to lead your day, contrary to the high priests of hustle culture. our activity is removed from our daily life, whether commuting to a work site from the exurbs to the city-core to only earn wages enough to maybe report back the next day, or working from home and yet being estranged from the very life one typically enjoys at home. (this is not to say that the home is a neutral place when it comes to work. Marxian Feminists have noted that the home is also a crucial realm within the world of work. But, typically the home is a site for the work needed to return to work the next day, whether for the so-called ‘breadwinner’ or the ‘unemployed’ homemakers. Though with working from home, the home becomes integrated into whatever organization one works for.)
the fact is that the abolition of work is not a lifestyle choice among all the other choices to be found on the market: you can go ‘paleo,’ or be minimalistic but you can’t go ‘anti-work’ alone. it is not another consumption-based identity or mere performance, it’s a social thing. why? though we often experience work as a singular drudgery, those of us who are compelled to work also help recreate the social world of work. though stating this fact of social life under the racial regime of Capital is not about assigning guilt. proletarians (or those who have been so dispossessed that they need to work for someone else just to get by) are compelled to work in this world under duress: we have little to no choice (even engaging in the black or grey market of labor is no exit. hustle is hustle).
so then the exit? we saw glimpses of this exit during what some called the Great Resignation, or the Great Refusal. during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, proletarians were faced with a contradiction that was difficult to ignore: our work was both “essential” (for the functioning of the capitalist world) and yet our well-being was not. though, what we saw was not so much a move towards the absolute aboliton of work, but rather an important aspect of the abolition of work: the refusal of labor.
as anti-workers, we can help proliferate the tactics of refusal of labor & general work shirking but these are not enough. everyday proletarians, who may have never heard of ‘anti-work’ or ‘the refusal of labor’, do their best to do the least every fucking day and they are likely much more numerous than any of us ‘anti-workers’. this is just a natural phenomomen for beings who are predisposed to a certain amount of idleness. but idleness alone is not the abolition of work. doing nothing is not the abolition of work. to understand this we need to understand the nature of what work is.
work!?
a common mistake made by some who embrace the abolition of work is the idea that this means nothing will be done, by anyone, for anyone. but this is what the rich do. they do nothing (or close to it, but never as much as necessary to build their wealth to such obscene levels via a direct wage) and live off the work of others. what the abolition of work points to is the elimination of the exploitation of some by others and the elimination of alienated labor / activity.
in practical terms this means that things will still built, food will still be harvested and you may still have some difficult tasks during your day. but the crucial important here is that your activity will be directly lived and directly a part of the life of yourself and whom you make community with. you may sow some chia seeds along a creek so that you, and the rest of our living relatives can enjoy; you may help erect a tent for a communal festival; you may help with child care so that some can go on a retreat; you may help your neighbors push start their car with the starter problem. and when all these acts of communal activity build up, we develop a communal culture of mutual aid: where our activity benefits each other and that benefit is known but exists beyond the constant bookkeeping of capitalist order: for relations without measure.
now will come the naysayers, that say no one will do anything without getting paid: a sentiment which reminds me that capitalist indoctrination runs deep. yes, in this world many of us may not do much without pay because we’re fucking dispossessed! not only dispossessed of our basic needs, but even of time enough to truly enjoy ourselves or help each other. but when our needs, and our desires, are met; when we are not chronically exhausted mentally, physically & emotionally; when we are not just counting the days to the next payday; you’re going to have a lot of time on your hands: or rather, timekeeping will fall as an everyday mental activity. for who needs to count the hours when the breakneck rhythm of Capital is smashed? we associate almost any activity with the world of work. i am not calling for an embrace of ‘hard labor’ as State Socialist Regimes of the past have done (down with the hammer & sickle!), but that difficult activities feel qualitatively different without the pressures of a boss, the rent, a cop or a teacher hanging over your head. life will continue, with all its hardships, the abolition of work is not a magical wand opening a portal to a pure utopia.
communism as the abolition of work
the abolition of work is either the real movement which abolishes the present state of things or it is nothing. the abolition of work is not a moment, a season or a lifestyle: it is part of the content of communism. by communism, i simply mean a free, classless way of life where what we need and what we desire (absent of capitalist conditioning) can be had and we can live our lives as we see fit. the details of this arrangement would be up to those who live that out, but many radicals have their own ideas (see anarchists). the only way to eliminate work, as we experience it now, is to live in common.
why?
because the very basis of our dispossession is not only divorcing ourselves from our time (labor-time), from our activity (wage labor) but also from each other. this is also a basic need (for lack of a better term) that is stolen from us, day in and day out.
under capitalism, the accumulation of the products of our labor (commodities as they are known under capitalism, whether physical or service-based) get whisked away to the market for the highest price and for the lowest possible wages. with communism, the so-called products of labor are no longer destined for the market and because the abolition of work implies the abolition of coercion, the State would also be eliminated from its 20th c. State Socialist role as ultimate arbiter. truly, the metabolism of our post-capitalist communist (or anarchist) activity no longer are products, commodities, nor services: they are just things and activities which we re-create to make life possible for ourselves and those we are in communal association with.
the way back to a world without work is not through a program, a list of instructions or State-mandated policy: it is through each other.
