The Problem With Anti-Work

OK, but...

Discussion of the issues in this era largely lacks nuance and fails to account for consequences. 

Defund the police? Great hashtag that sums up the passions of the moment. But then what? Well, explaining the whole needed reconfiguring of our current criminal justice behemoth would take much more than we can fit into a hashtag, so we'll have to deal with that at some later stage. But the problem is, people reacting to the hashtag aren't prompted to wait for that stage. It's a bandwagon, so jump aboard!

Hashtags have their place, when used for a specific need -- I've known people who got quick action using one when a family member desperately needed to resolve a snag with a certain government service.

But using a hashtag to explain a cause that would reshape a whole national or world institution is woefully inadequate.

Like, what does "anti-work" mean? For some, it's ending the present capitalist arrangement through which our work results inordinately in billionaires becoming richer and the rest of us losing ground.

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LINK: Amazon's methods make the Anti-Work case

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For others, the term means the esoteric reshaping of human purpose; no longer doing unfulfilling labor to achieve some truly fulfilling end. The labor of our lives should reflect our creative yearnings.

Yet others hear "anti-work" as a lure to take life easy -- with no structural change of the system that is causing the injustices. The open-ended term "work" being attacked in the movement's name leaves those who wish to see a better system replace capitalism vulnerable to their revolution sinking to a far lower level. It could bring a world where the average person despises the tilling of the soil as much as they do the agri-chemical and food corporations who control what's produced from that soil.

Even when workers as a group control their enterprises' earnings, they still have to work, as in do the toils that produce things they want to produce and that people need. Work would still be a job.

And that is not entirely a bad thing, as nice a sound as there is to the idea of replacing the job with creativity.

A job also means a commitment - and not necessarily to the corporate owner, their hedge fund, their PAC, or their dream of flying up to the Karmen Line. 

Having to adhere to a work schedule and to meet the workplace's standards can be the way to compel a worker to honor their commitment to the greater society.

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LINK: A more measured approach. The end of 'Workism'

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Restaurant customers waiting for their food certainly do not want to hear, "Sorry, the chef said they're just not feeling pasta today, so they're making you sandwiches instead of the lasagna you ordered."

Or, for that matter, that the chef suddenly decided that making memes is their real calling, so they just left permanently.

Is it that jobs crush our souls, or that
they don't bulge
our bank accounts?

Anti-work is so broadly defined that it could easily become anti-commitment, a way of thinking that promotes a selfish, callous existence.

Another hazard of launching movements with two or three catchy words is that any political principle or ideology is going to be understood on multiple levels. As a journalist in Louisville in the 1990s, I covered the forming of a new group in a suburban county opposed to what it said was overreaching by that county's zoning agency.

Most were small business owners and were upset  by receiving "Criminal Complaint" notices for such violations as storing pipes outside on their industrial property in sight of nearby homes. The chief founder of this group had wider horizons; his literature said it would also take on the EPA over its nationwide practices.

One year later, the zoning notices no longer said "criminal" and the county zoning agency was talking more with businesses to resolve these marginal violations short of filing complaints.

Satisfied with that, about 90 percent of this group's members had stopped being involved. The founder's hard charge against the EPA would have to wait.

The same pattern could deflate the anti-work realm, if reforms make a job once again a way in which people can afford a residence, receive health care and pensions, get out of college debt and get their weekends back.

The great bane of radical revolutions is the enactment of moderate reforms. Of course, the converse is that by resolutely blocking those reforms, the billionaire PACs make revolution inevitable -- if we give a revolution the beyond-hashtag depth it needs.

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, where he opposes corporate greed, but also vague open-endedness in naming a movement.