“Get a job!” has to be the most ridiculous indignation a person can hear. The problem is that starting in childhood we are taught to believe that jobs are necessary, they are where purpose is found, and that those who don’t make this a priority are somehow “lazy parasites” and even that they are stealing from us since we have jobs (as if it were out of work impoverished and homeless people who set the rules of economics!). But is this really the case? Furthermore, are jobs really useful to our existence or are they destructive of it? My answer is that jobs ultimately destroy us: the history of labor has claimed even more lives than the history of warfare (which, incidentally, is merely part of the history of labor to begin with, at least warfare as we know it since wars are fought for culture hegemony and empire building with all the jobs these imply and since at least in our society being a solider is actually a career choice of sorts, or meant to bolster opportunity for the same, rather than a draft) due to on the job accidents as well as stress and even sometimes the very nature of what one does as a job (for example: working in mines and other toxic environments, I will add that I am sure the recent boom in fracking has only made this all the more deadly). Even if this were not the case the main product of all our efforts is that we are destroying ourselves as a species with all of this production, it is the reason for the series of ecological catastrophes due to deforestation, accelerating species extinction due to habitat destruction and thus the decline biodiversity, and let’s not forget pollution, increasingly toxified environments that cause all manner of problems from giving us cancer to rendering ourselves and other species sterile and altering our hormones etc….all of this is caused by industrial production and agriculture as it is practiced in this culture and as to agriculture, certainly surplus agriculture, I might add that its problems span the entirety of civilized history. Surplus agriculture sets class society in place in order to maintain the surplus and keep us all working to produce still more: leaders of society oversee this, “priests” (for I am speaking of intellectual laborers here so this takes a secular form as well but classically this was the parlance of religion, its social function that is) rationalize this for us with their arguments about life and “the way things are” and these days in many cases fine tune the forms in which this takes place in the form of varying experts, warriors come into being to penalize those who will not play this game in various ways and, meanwhile, as we plant more and more tearing down more and more of the very habitats that were once also ours and so our food source we deplete the soil as well, which, as the population grows along with this, forces us to push outward and it is here that wars of domination and genocide, as well as various forms of slavery that follow in their wake, as well as rationalizations for the same, come into being. The everyday misery we are put through thanks to our employment, I might also add this. Who among us really likes to be ordered around by a boss, first of all? I don’t think many of us do, I don’t even think one has to be a radical to feel this as a pain in the ass. Many more of us probably fantasize about one day being the boss, an opportunity that comparatively few of us will have anyway and even then there will still probably be another boss telling us what to do as we tell those below us on the work related food chain what their tasks are. Also, being a boss, even a high level manager or owner, doesn’t mean that one ceases to be a slave, it merely means that one has become a privileged slave, even the highest rungs of the elite are merely the most pampered and privileged of slaves though of course to such types their comparative power is probably compensation for the fact that they too spend most of their lives at work, though in their case work is ordering people around and organizing them as well as meetings on how to cut costs while increasing production so as to increase profitability. What about a creative pursuit? Perhaps, in a way since I am a creative type myself, these may just be the most insulting jobs of all: this is where ones talents and passions are put to a schedule and quota and drained to feed the market, there is nothing to feel good about here, if one really feels this is all that is best about our species or whatever, which is debatable by the way, than really: what a waste when so much thought is simply being used to dominate and control large bodies of people and destroy our living conditions, find new creative ways to steal from the rest of us etc….. Our labors have built a cage for all of us and in this cage we are being crushed, one wonders how long it will be before there are no humans left to bear witness to existence itself and along with us will go many other species and all because we have been born and raised to fetish production as a good in itself, this is the heart of domination. Technology is the root of the problem, starting with agriculture, the first grid, moving out to everything that is built upon that. We like to think we are moving toward an automated push button utopia, or at least we once did, that whole era of The World of Tomorrow that was shown to us in our popular culture, well, here we are, in the world of tomorrow now, and what I see is not joy but alienation and increasing destruction of our lives. We spend more time at work now than we did in the 70’s, this means less time for the people we love and what we love doing, unless that happens to be a job, and most of us do not work jobs we love, even if we did, as I implied above, and to use a word ironically here, are we really in fact making the most productive use of our abilities and our thoughts? No, increasing technology doesn’t decrease the necessity of labor, if anything it amplifies this dynamic because ever more “resources” are necessary to maintain these increasing grids which leads to further habitat destruction which in turn accelerates ecological crisis on both the local and global levels. The current of thought within anarchist culture known as work abolition exists as an antidote to earlier ideas we have had about self managed production. These ideas do look good on paper and even I used to advocate for them. The idea is to democratize the work place so that the products of our labor are shared by all of us as is the labor where we become both manager and worker alike in one role, everyone doing a little of everything and for human ends, rather than for the profit motive. Like I said this vision does have its attractions, it certainly looks better than what we are stuck in now, but as virtually all “communist” revolutions have shown us the workers paradise never pans out and we are left with old wine in new bottles. Rarely do we actually come to see a democratic sharing of the goods of production, a guarantee of all our basic necessities and even where we do approach this it is in an atmosphere of continued repression so as to make sure we stay at our jobs and produce more crap or else be carted off to gulags for “counter revolution”. Even certain democratic socialist nations which offer us the most vacation time are only able to do this due to colonialism and outsourcing, where there are jobs there are horrors, somewhere a family is being torn apart and forced to work in a sweatshop, sometimes worked to death at gunpoint, all so we can enjoy a “higher standard of living”. So, perhaps a global revolution will rectify this problem? Well, let’s assume we could accomplish something along the lines of a social structure that guaranteed that the whole world could live at the same standard as the middle class of the developed world, which appears to be the goal here…the statistics I have heard say that this would require 8 additional earths to be feasible and with the growth of our population we can probably add more external planets to that number. The point is not to say that we keep things as they are of course, they are horrible, we need to rid ourselves of this standard we have decided to base life upon too, at least that is what I would say, especially because it is our way life, the increasing levels of consumption in the “developed world” that is, more than it is even increasing numbers of humans that happens to be responsible for ecocatastrophe. Now I must admit that “work abolition” is a somewhat poor choice of labels, or maybe not, since we now identify physical exertion as work and we identify work as a job but, if you prefer, if this makes it easier to understand, than call it by the name of job abolition instead. The point for those of us who adhere to this line of thought is not necessarily to valorize idleness anymore than to valorize labor which clearly we do not. Life is a tension between activity and rest. When one is active it can go one of two ways, at least put simplistically: we can be active in order to attain desired goals and, of course, maintain that which is necessary to our physical survival in order to have these goals to begin with or we can toil and produce goods for abstractions such as the market and because we are told it is “the right thing to do”. A work abolitionist is not proposing that one lie in bed all day doing nothing, who would want to do that anyway, well, at least apart from the deep depression many of us suffer due to an alienating society that gives us so much less time for those and what we love maybe? Classically we didn’t toil so much to produce, the earth provided it for us. Gathering and hunting bands had far more time for rest, bonding and creative pursuits because if this is how you live you have no superstructure demanding so much of your time in order to be maintained, you have more time for who and what you love. Oh but we have come such a long way from that….into the worst sort of nightmare world we could have that only gets increasingly worst (let us remember there is only one real progress in life: our journey from cradle to grave)! It will be a long hard journey to find some way out of this but if we value either our lives or our time I think it is in this direction we must head. It leaves one asking “what is to be done?” and there is no easy answer, for that matter there is no one answer, utopian solutions and their development being precisely a big part of this probloem, but perhaps it is here that we can explore, together with those we love, alternatives to our nightmare. My own contribution is to be one of those people who hold a mirror up to where we are at now to show us that things are not quite what they seem to be in all our back patting civilized rhetoric about the “wonders” we have produced.
Posted on: Tue, 15 Jul 2014 13:03:41 +0000
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