this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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Antiwork
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For the abolition of work. Yes really, abolish work! Not "reform work" but the destruction of work as a separate field of human activity.
To save the world, we're going to have to stop working! — David Graeber
A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. ...the love of work... Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists, and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. — Paul Lafargue
In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. — Karl Marx
In the glorification of 'work', in the unwearied talk of the 'blessing of work', I see the same covert idea as in the praise of useful impersonal actions: that of fear of everything individual. — Friedrich Nietzsche
If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves. — Lane Kirkland
The bottom line is simple: all of us deserve to make the most of our potential as we see fit, to be the masters of our own destinies. Being forced to sell these things away to survive is tragic and humiliating. We don’t have to live like this. ― CrimethInc
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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.