How Might We Stop Eating Ourselves?
What happens when "anti-work" really does just mean "pro-lazy"?
If you would prefer to listen to this essay in audio format, click here.
Modern workers have, I think it’s safe to say, a bipolar relationship with the idea of labor. On the one hand there is the quite profitable world of “hustle culture,” a sort of Neo-Puritan ethic readily recognizable to readers of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and followers of The Rock’s instagram alike. One also finds it among popular (typically male, often athletic) figures in the podcasting and self-help world, like David Goggins, Jocko Willink, Joe Rogan, Grant Cardone, or Jordan Peterson. This ethic fetishizes hard work, self-discipline, tolerance for pain and exhaustion, an insistence on putting all the responsibility for one’s problems on one’s own shoulders, and so on. Wherever hustle culture is, crossfit, smoothies, cryptocurrency, phrases like “get after it” or “keep on crushing it,” and assurances that you haven’t had a good workout until you’ve shit yourself in the process are never far away.
Hustle culture is a weird mixture of male chauvinism, neoconservatism, a simplistic form of Stoic philosophy, militaristic indoctrination, New Age mysticism, and Human Resource Management buzzwords all rolled into one. Paradoxically, such content seems especially popular with people in the most comfortable sectors of society-white collar workers such as real estate agents, finance bros, and corporate lackeys seem most susceptible to this sort of messaging, at least in my anecdotal experience, followed closely behind by lonely young men, lacking strong social networks or financial stability outside of that offered by their parents. If you’ve ever been to a house party, you’ve probably met at least one of these people, who are most likely there in search of “networking opportunities.” You would be forgiven if you didn’t stick around to chat with them.
On the other hand, there is the recently dubbed Antiwork movement, and (if their subreddit handle is an indication) the splintered-off Work Reform movement. Like hustle culture, this is a half political, half cultural movement, composed of a mixture of people who reject hustle culture on the basis of political principles, and less politically-minded people who are simply disenchanted with their jobs, finding their labor mindless, unfulfilling, and financially unrewarding. To those of us on the left, this self-conscious rejection of labor as a desideratum in and of itself is a breath of fresh air, breathing life into class struggle outside the realm of electoral politics desperately needed since the flame-out of the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2019.
It’s true, this general sense of the unfairness of the market economy is nothing new, even if it’s been relatively sleepy in the 21st century (compare Occupy Wall Street to the labor struggles of the 1920s and 1930s, and you’ll see what I mean). What brought it back with a vengeance, as so often happens, was unpredictable: a pandemic, in the wake of which r/antiwork saw a many-fold increase in its membership (ballooning from 100,000 members pre-pandemic to 1.7 million members as of today).
Much the way Occupy Wall Street, an initially anarchist movement, had to adjust to the influx of moderates that comes with moving up the ranks into a genuine mass movement, the growth of r/antiwork led to a predictable influx of regular working people who were not necessarily big fans of Bob Black’s The Abolition of Work, which among several other pieces listed on the subreddit’s sidebar has retroactively become its most recognizable manifesto.
Generally speaking, I wouldn’t consider myself a fan of the moderating influence of liberals, asking that the language of revolution be toned down into the language of reform. In the case of r/antiwork, this tension came to a head when one of the moderators of the subreddit, Doreen Ford, did a humiliating interview on Fox News, against the will of most of the subreddit’s active membership. In said interview, she explained to Jesse Waters that she walks dogs for a living and, in a world where she didn’t have to do compulsory labor, would instead opt to be a philosophy teacher.
The flavor of the reaction to the interview by the r/antiwork community was poignantly made by user u/JeffCloss:
Having someone who can barely take a shower, works 25 hours a week walking dogs and dreams of being a philosophy teacher is the furthest representation of what this is all about.
I've worked in the rail industry for coming on 17 years now, I can't remember the last time I worked LESS than 60hrs/week. The wages have barely increased due to the fact that my employer never bargains in good faith with the union because we're so critically important to the economy, the government forces us back to work under the threat of prison time and gives the company free reign to operate in bad faith and give us next to nothing in negotiations!
This is an industry where on average, in a 30 year career, the likelihood that you'll be witness to someone commiting suicide underneath your train is almost guaranteed. A very high risk of being severely crippled/maimed or killed on the job is always present. Deferred maintenance for the sake of shareholder profits causes a litany of potentially deadly incidents every year.
I work on call with no schedule, literally 24/7/365, never going to sleep or to work at the same time two days in a row. I miss almost every holiday, birthday, wedding, sports games, weekend, doctors appointments, etc, so I can support my family.
But the mod team decides that a person who basically just floats through life barely working a part time job while casually attending school is adequate enough to represent the ideology this community is supposed to represent? Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle, If it wasn't for pure outrage I'd be totally speechless
There were quite a few comments to this effect: the problem isn’t that we have to do work, it’s that the work we’re doing is outrageously dangerous, time-consuming, and underpaid. We don’t wish we could devote our lives to art therapy or interpretive dance, we just want fair compensation for our labor, and perhaps a vacation or two.
The Restructuring of the American Left
In my mind, a stunning shift has happened within left wing political organizing in the past century which seems to have been largely forgotten: the left has gone from a movement mostly by the working class, for the working class, to a movement led by a highly educated middle to upper-middle class the actual working class is repulsed by. Most of us are familiar with this status quo, but rarely do we reflect on how different it is from past iterations of the left (and present iterations outside the US).
No doubt this was always a long-time dynamic on the left-a founding father of anarchism like Mikhail Bakunin could never escape his aristocratic roots, and while Karl Marx was never wealthy, he did live off of the income of his buddy Friedrich Engels, the son of a factory owner, and arguably the forerunner of the long leftist tradition of using the profits of capitalist exploitation to fund a life of critiquing and revolting against capitalist exploitation.
But nevertheless, perhaps largely owing to the communication means of the time, these political philosophies took on real working class roots. Bakunin’s anarchism blossomed into the Spanish Anarchist movement, a quite indigenous product of largely uneducated Spanish peasants and industrial workers alike, allowed to develop relatively without outside influence for the better part of a century. By the early 20th century, a simplistic sort of Marxism was spread on street corners by union organizers and self-styled orators, proffering revolutionary ideas to their own neighborhoods. This period of left wing organizing is typified by figures like “Big Bill” Haywood, who started coal mining at age 15; Eugene Debs, a railroad worker from the age of 14; or A. Philip Randolph, who despite a prosperous background found his way to political organizing both due to the difficulties of finding good work as a black man, and the demands placed on his conscience, being raised by a Methodist pastor.
The point of this is not to say that being poor makes you a better leftist, or that these forms of leftism were markedly better than what came after (like most political philosophies, they had their shortcomings), but only to point out a meaningful historical shift. The idea of being politically sophisticated had no obvious separation from that of being working class-to this generation of leftists, political education was taken not to college students, but directly to the workers themselves. What changed? For a host of reasons, the modern left (from the New Left of the 1960s to today) moved from the streetcorner to the university lecture hall, carried on by tenured professors, typically from upper-middle class to upper class backgrounds, who held cushy positions in the academy and frankly had basically no idea what life was actually like for the “common people” (increasingly a fractured array of disparate and often antagonistic identity groups) they claimed to represent. One major source of the shift was the immigration of the Frankfurt school, a group of primarily German-Jewish Marxist thinkers, with ideas heavily inflected by the German Idealist tradition (and its reputation for incomprehensibility to anyone who didn’t have the time or surplus energy required to battle their way through the volumes of Kant, Hegel, and Fichte) who’s families had the means to leave Germany for the US in the wake of the fall of the Weimar Republic.
Not only were thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer not from working class backgrounds; they weren’t from American backgrounds either, and in the case of the particularly influential Herbert Marcuse, demonstrated unwithheld contempt for the vapidity of American culture. Meanwhile, labor organizing was quickly dwindling as a result of New Deal compromises and the rise of the neoliberal consensus-in essence, a large enough portion of the working class was inducted into a middle class lifestyle that a serious possibility of socialism or syndicalism of any flavor lost its momentum. This, coupled with postwar wealth, anticommunist purges, and a cultural fixation on putting kids into liberal arts schools as opposed to technical colleges and vocational schools, led to a restructuring of the political landscape. For the working class, political theory, once eagerly consumed and discussed on the neighborhood level, became a taboo topic. Politics was acceptable in the postwar American household only when the news came on, and in this context the narrative was strictly narrowed to the confines of political ideologies which fit squarely within the neoliberal consensus to which the mainstream political parties and the owners of the various news agencies subscribed-attitudes which were acceptable, more pointedly, in the context of the Cold War. Where serious left wing critique could survive, it was neutered, relegated to social studies and humanities departments in American universities where it took on the new name “Critical Theory”-taught not to the working class itself, but to a prior working class generation’s middle class progeny who had little concept of the kind of labor exploitation and poverty their parents and grandparents had experienced.
The stereotype of the young, over-educated socialist urbanite who knows nothing about actual working life seems to emerge in the ‘60s, in the rise of the New Left, a split from the working class best punctuated by the ability of college students to escape the draft, while the working classes were not only forced to fight, but became demonized by the left as the clueless or amoral agents of western imperialism in Vietnam. Thus we were left with a bizarre state of affairs: a left armed with The Dialectic of Enlightenment and One-Dimensional Man which found the actual working class repulsive, and a working class for whom leftists may as well live on another planet.
This split has never gone away. Instead, it became ever more esoteric, particularly with the introduction of predominately French Existentialist, Postmodernist, and Deconstructionist thinkers like Albert Camus, Michel Foucalt, Jacques Derrida, or Francois Lyotard into the critical tradition. Out of this milieu, we arrive at movements which are recognizable to people familiar with contemporary politics, such as Critical Legal Studies (from which we get the infamous Critical Race Theory), Intersectionality, Third- and Fourth-Wave Feminism and all their various subdisciplines, and “identity politics”, a phrase first used by the Combahee River Collective in their famous statement (which enthusiastically endorses the idea that white heterosexual men have no place in a revolutionary movement).
All of this stuff is interesting, and much of it is useful in its way-the purpose of this essay is not to criticize these various intellectual developments-but one thing nobody would call any of it is accessible. Postmodernism owes its theoretical background to developments in literary criticism as much as political economy. The broad shift on the left has been one of emphasis: from economic exploitation to cultural hierarchies; from classes to identities-compare the class consciousness emphasized by A. Philip Randolph in 1919, to the uneasy acknowledgement of class in the SDS’s Port Huron Statement, to the nearly explicit erasure of class analysis in the Combahee River Statement (how can you care about the working class, when so much of it is white, male, and heterosexual?). Proponents of these ideologies will argue, quite reasonably, that the Old Left was guilty of a kind of class reductionism, not giving adequate attention to kinds of oppression and domination Orthodox Marxism was not particularly sensitive to: misogyny, racism, homophobia, environmental degradation, etc.
But this preoccupation with cultural identity belies the uneasiness of a petty-bourgeois, overeducated left, and as Marxist political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. has argued for years, this preoccupation has become not only pathological, but readily accomodating to the neoliberal consensus-giving middle-class whites a way to demonstrate their virtuosity, and the small strata of advantaged minorities a way to hold on to an oppressed status for personal benefit. In the unacknowledged void, there is the yawning chasm of life as it is actually experienced by the majority of people of color, not to mention openly despised working class whites.
To a non-college educated leftist like myself, the ideology I see embraced by groups like the DSA, Sunrise Movement, the somewhat thawed-but-ineffectual IWW, or Black Lives Matter, seems bizarre and irreconcilable with the experience of the real, muti-ethnic working class. The Onion skit about a Trump-supporting coal miner who saw the light when he finally sat down and read 800 pages of queer feminist theory rings true for us because we all know, on some level, that the modern left is simply alien to the world occupied by the existing working class. We all know, on some level, that we will never live in a world where union carpenters or Guatemalan landscapers perform a land acknowledgement and report their pronouns to each other before starting work on a new job site-and I for one am deeply grateful for that fact. The difficulty with being a leftist in an academic setting is the need to locate oneself in a class war which you find yourself oddly outside of (operating in a political economy utterly alien to the one Marx and Engels laid out in the 19th century). What you turn to instead-and what increasingly seems to be the whole of what the left is concerned with-is not class, but culture; not communism, but equity within the neoliberal order.
The Self-Alienating Left
I bring all this up because the experience of being on the left in 2022 is simply so bizarre. Go to a meeting in any leftist organization right now, and you will find paralegals, software engineers, HR people, administrative staff, data analysts, nurses, maybe a few baristas and service workers, and apparently the odd dog walker. What you will not find (at least in any significant number) is farm workers, truck drivers, warehouse workers, uber drivers, railroad workers, line cooks, construction workers, fishermen, miners, or landscapers.
This is not to denigrate any of the professions mentioned-we all have to make a living one way or another, and I don’t have a problem with someone who doesn’t do manual labor-actually, I envy them. For Jesse Watters to laugh at Doreen Ford when she described herself as a dog walker is emblematic of capitalist hypocrisy. She’s meeting a demand in the marketplace to make a living-isn’t that what she’s supposed to do?
But the self-evident problem is obvious: the working class is not interested in what the left has to say, and there is a reason. That left looks like Doreen Ford, fodder for “SJW Gets Destroyed by Facts and Logic” compilations on Youtube, and (to use a blunt phrase) normal people don’t see themselves anywhere in that image. When people like Ford talk about how work should be abolished, they look ridiculous, because quite frankly, most working people would kill for their ease of life.
The radical spirit of the anti-work movement is not an opposition to getting off the couch and doing things. It’s an opposition to coercion. From Bob Black’s The Abolition of Work:
The liberals and conservatives and libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately deStalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other’s control techniques. A worker is a part time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called “insubordination,” just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?
Black is a controversial figure within anarchist circles, posing one of the poles of neoanarchist thought as a modern individualist who views anarchism as explicitly anti-democratic, contrasting with major anarchist thinkers of the same period like Murray Bookchin and David Graeber (and more controversially, Noam Chomsky), who view anarchism essentially as a highly libertarian form of direct democracy-in Bookchin’s case, the tension between this view and individualist tendencies like Black’s being so great that he simply abandoned the anarchist label. I’m highly partial to the democratic viewpoint, but Black’s Abolition of Work essay is nevertheless a manifesto pretty much any anarchist can get behind, and which has firm grounding in pretty much every strain of classical anarchism as well.
The problem seems to play out again and again-as any radical movement grows, it becomes a victim of its own success. Occupy began as an anti-parliamentarian, anarchist movement-by the end, it was a target for Democratic campaign fundraisers who smelled the blood of desperation in the water.
This was not a failure of Occupy-it was a testament to its success, having grown wildly beyond the hopes and dreams of its founders. But there are consequences to such a growth-the threat of recuperation, which the Institute for Social Ecology’s Blair Taylor defines in his analysis of the Occupy Movement, From Alterglobalization to Occupy Wall Street:
Recuperation is the process of opposition and critique becoming incorporated and constitutive of a new order. Thus, it is similar to concepts such as cooptation, or what Tarrow (1998) calls the ‘selective facilitation’ of movement demands. These concepts link movement demobilization to conscious elite strategies of curtailing movements by meeting some of their demands, funneling contentious actors into state channels and incorporating movement leaders into government, non-governmental organization (NGO) or business positions. Yet rather than a top-down affair where elites intentionally cherry-pick ideas and actors to frustrate movement goals, recuperation is a much more expansive and multidirectional process; it includes both intentional and unintentional borrowing from social movements that might be sincere or cynical. Not reducible to simple ‘greenwashing’ or ‘selling out’, movements act as social entrepreneurs that can offer useful tools and ideas for addressing social problems or meeting needs. In this view, social movements function as canaries in the mine — the vanguard of social conflict detection — as well as a social resource offering imaginative solutions to social problems, free of charge.
One could see the development of an impotent wokeist political programme in academic institutions as another example of radical politics being massaged into something compatible with a relatively unreconstructed capitalist order-the sort of situation in which a Silicon Valley billionaire could make a $10 million contribution to a major university to benefit an ostensibly radical movement, and it would seem to all parties like a perfectly natural fit.
But I point out this tendency as it relates to anti-work to note that this gradual de-fanging of social movements comes neither from a given movement’s academically-inclined theoreticians or its discontented working-class ranks per se, but in the disunity between the two in and of itself. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
A Potential Path Forward
In the case of antiwork, the risk is rapidly appearing of the movement being defanged into reformism (demonstrated readily enough by the influx of members into the r/WorkReform subreddit after the Fox interview). There are positive aspects of this-I for one consider it a very good thing that the movement would welcome the presence of right wing members, so long as it doesn’t go out of its way to accomodate them.
But there is also the danger of a movement which was initially explicitly anti-capitalist instead merely advocating for better wages, fewer hours, and more benefits without taking a principled stance against the tendencies of capitalism which cannot be softened-the need to grow, the need to exploit people and nature (even if you happen to be able to escape that exploitation yourself), the distortion of ethical principles to accomodate the system, the reliance on a socially corrosive conception of private property rather than solidaristic communism, and the reliance on state violence to maintain an inequitable marketplace at all.
As I’ve advocated in the past, I do believe the tradition of radical theory needs to come out of the ivory tower of academia and re-enter the public sphere, through study and discussion groups held in households, bars, libraries, and for that matter the workplace; social movements must be generated not on the internet or in lecture halls but among affinity groups of closely connected individuals, developing their political ideas on a face-to-face basis. If institutions which can challenge capitalism, or more pressingly survive an inevitable ecological crisis are to be built, they must be built by the people who today feel alienated from political and philosophical thought (and honest intellectual conflict) by the barriers of academic attainment and a socially reinforced rejection of serious intellectual inquiry by regular people.
In Blair Taylor’s previously cited critique of Occupy Wall Street, he points out that the movement was predicated on the idea of prefigurative politics-which can be summed up neatly as “the method is the message.” Occupy did not seek to build institutions which would actually combat capitalism or the state, either electorally or otherwise-instead, it seeked to whither the state by providing a more compelling alternative to it.
Taylor points out the weaknesses of this approach-particularly the movement’s inability to maintain itself without running away from ultimately inescapable internal political disagreements:
In the early days of OWS, discussion of contentious political questions had already proven to immediately shatter any consensus among the 99%, which further incentivized the reduction of politics to tactics. Thus the importance of maintaining the self-organized encampments: they neatly fill this ideological vacuum and suspend the need for further discussion; form — and the continuous demands of householding — stands in for and evacuates political content. Listening to the general assemblies held in Zuccotti Park, one hears little discussion of political vision, policy measures, the feasibility of socialism in one country or even the Tobin Tax. Instead, most discussion centers on the logistics of maintaining the occupation: feeding people, noise issues (one especially contentious example was whether or not to limit how long drum circles could play in Liberty Square), keeping warm and sleeping arrangements. As a result, general assemblies often had the character of rather long house meetings punctuated with political slogans. Frustration with perceived inefficiency of the length and efficiency of the Assemblies engendered high rates of attrition and burnout, and contributed to the short lifespan of the mobilization.
Taylor’s analysis is basically correct: ultimately, these sorts of debates are by nature inescapable, and because of the impressively wide array of political ideologies Occupy attracted-from anarchists and communists, to left-liberals and a significant faction of right-wing libertarians-those discussions about political motive and strategy would (and to a large degree did) lead to significant splintering within the “99%.”
But in a muted defense of the prefigurative model, there is a need to remember that social movements are made of people, and will ultimately be limited by the capacities of those individuals. To try to create a democratic society after living one’s life in a non-democratic one is rather like showing up at an Olympic weightlifting competition with a lifetime of experience as a tennis player. As anyone who has ever engaged in a significant degree of debate knows, dialectic is a skill-it requires the cultivation of patience, a delicate balance between humility and self-assertion, and a commitment to the form itself which prevents one from throwing up one’s hands and walking away in a huff. In other words, it is more craft than instinct.
While I do not consider myself the would-be author of a social movement, and I am as unsure as anyone whether the antiwork movement will become the catalyst for a revival of Occupy-style resistance to capitalism and reimagination of our personal and political possibilities, I can only argue that the degree to which any potential movement could succeed will be the degree to which we commit ourselves to the practice of working out our disagreements in a dialectical manner. Through such an avenue, and without the undue influence of would-be intellectual leaders, I believe a path for coherent and coordinated action could be forged.
But. Regarding the rift between the working class and the left. Yep. It's there for sure. I just disagree with how the rift happened. To me, it's that the intellectual left is just a residual development from the American cultural front of the 30's. And that movement was totally working class (with a funding boost from the USSR, of course). The welfare state saved capitalism, and so american intellectuals turned from Herbert Spenser to John Maynard Keynes to offer up apologias to the new social structure. Now that the Welfare State is dying its last gasps, I expect the residual left-wing intellegentsia to die too, in time. But to me it's all a bunch of residue. And once this pseudo-elite of college professors retire and give way to Koch foundation endowed chairs, we'll be back to Herbert Spenser before you know it.
What you point out that is especially interesting to me is the way the Fox News and right are able to leverage the intellectual left as a wedge against the working class. Such that it is these intellectuals who are called 'the elite'. Not the actual elite: the people with economic power like the bezozes and the musks. They say: "The intellectuals think they're better than you. They put sweaters on their dogs. Let's show them by getting rid of food stamps."
Your intellectual history of the left is flawed because it is liberal. You give us a 'great man' theory of history. The idea that marx came up with marxism or that bakunin came up with anachism is bullshit. That shit was in the air. Those dudes wrote down some stuff, sure. But the basic ideas were part of the zeitgeist. Which is a part of history. Which comes from the working class. The majority of people. How they live their lives. Their hopes and dreams. The whole idea of marxism is that ideas come from material changes in the world. Disturbances in the force, young Luke. Nowhere is this problem worse than in your characterization of the Frankfurt school as a bunch of rich foreign professors. The frankfurt school involved intelligencia, sure But this was Jewish-German intelligencia in the late 20's. The working class in germany was split between the real socialists and the national socialists. The national socialists sounded just like the socialists. Plus Racism. A recipe guarantee to win an election (just ask trump--racism by itself will frequently win an election). Anywho--these young jewish intellectuals no longer had a jobs in Nazi Germany where they could be part of a viable communist party hoping to gain power. They had to run for their lives. They became leaders without a movement. Professors without a university. Without a country even. The working class had betrayed the left in 20's germany. Now the question became: what happens when the left-wing superstructure, created by a left-wing proletarian movement, becomes abandoned by the movement that created this superstructure? The professors and leaders of the movement are left. But where do they go? What do they do? It's not that the frankfurt school was invented by a bunch of foreign rich white dudes. They were who they were because of a movement that had now abandoned them for Hitler. They were leftist exiles who had to struggle with the idea of how to live an ethical life in an unethical world. How to produce counterhegemonic superstructural/cultural work in the absense of a workers movement. Hence Beckett and Alban Berg and all that stuff. And Adorno's famous categorical imperative: To live in such a way that prevents another holocaust. To be a splinter in your eye.