Ya' Cousin Cleon
OG COUCH CORNER HUSTLA
Many on today’s Left seek to abolish work. But the goal of socialism is to transform it.
April 30, 1983, a group of Dutch radicals based in Amsterdam’s Pijp-quarter undertook preparations for their country’s yearly May Day — or Labor Day, as it’s called in the Netherlands. As the Pentecost of the global workers’ movement, the date is the only bank holiday without pagan or Christian precedents, standing out as the proud achievement of a century of hard-won class struggle. In 1884, Samuel Gompers’ Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions called for a demonstration for an eight-hour working day on May 1, 1886; four years later, after a violent day of strikebreaking that killed five , Gompers urged the founding congress of the Second International in Paris to adopt the first of May as its “official” holiday.
In 1983, however, the group in question thought the name “Labor Day” rather obsolete. Although the Dutch government had never accepted the validity of the day — mainly due to its overlap with the earlier Queen’s Day (April 27) – it remained a landmark for left-wing parties, with large demonstrations and fairs held in Dutch cities. The group proposed rebaptizing May 1 as the “Day Against the Work Ethic” (Dag tegen het arbeidsethos), celebrating the advent of a world in which humanity would be exempt from the “duty to labor” altogether. Earlier that year, members had gathered in the Amsterdam cinema Rialto to found a consortium representing the “conscientiously unemployed” (bewust werklozen) under the name “Dutch Council Against the Work Ethic” (Nederlandse Bond Tegen het Arbeidsethos). Soon, journalists showed interest, while “angry” members of the Dutch Labor Party (the PvdA) and trade unions voiced their discontent. Although the organization was officially a union of the “jobless,” figures within the mainstream labor movement expressed disagreement with the group’s intention to halt the re-integration of the Dutch army of unemployed into the labor market. Work was to remain central, the laborites claimed, and the Council was playing a dangerous game.
Opposition from the established Left, however, did little to temper the Council’s ambitions. Over the course of the 1980s, the organization grew up to be one of the most vocal components of the anti-work Left, with its monthly magazine Luie Donder (Lazybones), joining a growing chorus of leftists who believed that “the society of work” had reached its endpoint.
From Post-Capitalism To Post-Work
In many ways, the stand-off between Council and the Dutch Labor Party prefigured many of our current debates on “post-work.” In the last ten years, a distinctly new form of anti-capitalist theorizing has emerged under the heading of so-called “anti-work” politics: from Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism (2015) to Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future (2015) to Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (forthcoming, 2019). In contrast to an older, outmoded form of workerism, this “new” New Left has sought to distance itself from the “cult of labor” of previous socialist parties, and instead provide an unpretentious apology for idleness – much as the Council did before them.
Empirically, post-workerists claim to have marshaled enough evidence to underpin their project. “For the vast majority of people,” Srnicek and Williams write, “work offers no meaning, fulfillment or redemption” and is “simply something to pay the bills.” Since there is “already a widespread hatred for jobs” (coupled with the growing threat of a mass wipe-out of current jobs), socialists ought to respond to the “widespread demand that others adopt the work ethic… only by the disdain we feel for our own jobs. ” Like Bastani and Mason, both authors see the solution in active support for automation and a massive expansion of free time, taking “full unemployment” rather than “full employment” as the ultimate horizon. “In the end,” they state, “our choice is between glorifying work and the working class, or abolishing them both.”
To be sure, the authors’ brand of anti-work agitation is hardly a historical novelty on the Left. Late nineteenth-century anarchists already celebrated the “refusal of work” as the ultimate anti-capitalist tactic, while Dutch communists in the 1930s castigated their country’s “work ethic” as the “biggest disease of the century.” Most famously, Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue wrote the famed pamphlet The Right To Be Lazy in 1880, to wide acclaim in socialist circles – although it was later silenced by workerists in the German SPD.
Almost a century later, the French May 1968 and the Italian “hot autumn” of 1969 were fresh high points for European anti-work politics. Situationists, Maoists, and devotees of Operaismo cast the tumultuous May Days as a general revolt against the “imperative to produce” in industrial society; as the Belgian communist Raoul Vaneigem put it in his 1967 The Revolution of Everyday Life, “from the Nazi Arbeit macht frei to Henry Ford to Mao,” the “cult of labor” was now a universal fact in the communist and capitalist worlds.
This cult could not last, however. The late 1960s, Vaneigem insisted, would witness “automation and cybernetics” cause “mass replacement of workers by mechanical slaves.” The rise of computerized production would reveal the increasing superfluity of human labor, and show “its adherence to the barbarous procedures of the established order.” “The trickery of work has been exhausted,” Vaneigem postulated in 1967, “and there is nothing left to lose, not even the illusion of work.”
Vaneigem’s plea is surprisingly similar to that of Srnicek and Williams for “full automation” – replace “cybernetics” with “mass automation,” “mechanical slaves” with “robots,” and one quickly gets the impression that there is nothing new under the post-workerist sun.
Yet there is some new about this latest wave of anti-work agitation, and there are several ways of gauging its newness. The fate of Paul Lafargue’s tract in socialist circles, for instance, testifies to the fraught reception anti-work writing had within the labor movement in its early stage. When Friedrich Engels tasked his SPD-colleague Eduard Bernstein with a translation of the work, Bernstein cut out several passages and framed the book as a “caricature” and a “joke” – Lafargue’s book being nothing more than a “polemic against bourgeois morality,” not applicable to the workers’ movement itself. Characteristically, Bernstein delivered a “revisionist” take on Lafargue and took the sting out of his subversive piece. But the same can be said of Bernstein’s enemies as well. Soviet panegyrists of “work,” like Lenin and Trotsky – who proposed nothing less than the “full militarization of labor” and a frantic acceleration of the work ethic – hardly qualify as post-work either.
Perhaps the novelty of the latest wave of anti-work writing is best explained, then, through the fact that post-workerists take their cue specifically from a new critique of capitalism – a critique which simply did not exist in Lafargue or Bernstein’s time. In this new mode, the problem with capitalism is not that it is economically irrational or exploitative, or that it ushered in a world of spiritual desiccation. Rather, theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault castigated capitalism precisely it was unable to fulfill the libidinal demands of a society already geared to ceaseless consumption. Instead of unleashing productive forces which it cannot control, capitalism had awakened an insatiable desire which it could only satisfy periodically during periods of boom – merely to return to the moralistic mantras of austerity management once that boom turned into a bust. As the German philosopher Bini Adamczak describes this new “consumptionist” critique:
When the postwar capitalist regime of renewed accumulation went into crisis, so did the Protestant, Prussian-style social frugality that defined it. A cultural revolution spawned in its wake, opening up fresh avenues of expansion for both capital and its critics. The lifting of taboos surrounding sexuality and hedonism generated new markets, marketing strategies, and circuits of accumulation. An unprecedented focus on reproduction opened up new territories for political struggle in the home, in the party, and in the streets.
The step-motherly treatment of Lafargue also tells us something fundamental about our current post-work moment. Rather than the rallying cry of a victorious working class, the demand to “abolish work!” is being made in a time of nearly universal defeat. From André Gorz’s “farewell to the proletariat” (1983) to Jeremy Rifkin’s “the end of work” (1995), post-work writers have tailored their proposals to a generation accustomed to losing. In this sense, the current strives for a comfortable “post-utopian utopia,” offering everything to those who have nothing. The turn toward reproduction, as Adamczak notes, was undoubtedly “the historical effect of defeat within the factory.” Yet defeat rarely inspires good thinking – and it tends to lead to conceptual muddiness. There are a variety of ways in which this despondence skews the post-workerist vision. But what are they?
Work Versus Employment
The first concerns a persistent inability on the part of post-work writers to make meaningful distinctions between “work,” “effort,” and “employment.” Of course, it is immensely difficult to disentangle these terms in our current society – one cannot “work” without being “employed,” and “effort” is strongly associated with the habits of punctuality and organization imposed on us in the modern workplace. Yet the fact that all of these three qualities are so strongly enmeshed in our own social universe (or, the fact that the capitalist economy only rewards “employed work”) does not mean that we ought to simply equate them in our own thinking.
First, we need to disentangle “employment” – which denotes a specific relationship of exploitation, in which a group of people without access to means of reproduction sell a good (i.e., their labor-power) to an employer – from mere “work.” When such service is monetized and the laborer is paid for it, the substance becomes “abstract labor”: one person’s labor can be qualitatively equated with another’s, and all labor becomes “social labor.”
“Work,” in contrast, denotes something rather different. Although not a historically generalizable notion – societies have hugely divergent ways of interacting with their environment, whether natural or social – humanity’s interaction with nature (and, therefore, “his reproduction of nature as a whole”) can take myriad forms. Some of these can be highly exploitative, as in slave societies, while others are more spontaneous and free (think of the shared games of hunter-gatherers).
This does not mean that all documents of human civilization show a similar tendency for work to be glorified. In the writings of the earliest “post-work” prophets, the ancient philosophers Socrates and Plato, work was castigated as the province of servile slaves and housewives, “the amusement of the rabble.” Living off their own stakes in slave labor, Socrates and his pupils were able to roam the Athenian agora and philosophize at will without ever worrying about sustenance.
From André Gorz to Hannah Arendt, this “Socratic” post-work ideal has often been invoked as one of the prime counterpoints to our current work-crazed world. Obviously, this ideal holds a lot of contemporary appeal as well: since we presumably live in a society in which robots are on the brink of becoming our perfect personal slaves – replacing Aristotle’s “human tools” – humanity can finally morph into a race of full-time philosopher-kings, where everyone can write their own Phaedo and Laws strolling around the town assembly, joyously ruminating and exploring sensual pleasures.
Even here, however, the evidence mustered by post-workerists quickly betrays its biases. As noted by historians such as Perry Anderson, ancient Greece was hardly a slave economy. A large chunk of citizens came from the class of small farmers, who also had most to gain from a participatory political regime. Hence, the view of Athens as “a community of leisured citizens whose slaves greatly outnumbered the free is against the evidence.”
April 30, 1983, a group of Dutch radicals based in Amsterdam’s Pijp-quarter undertook preparations for their country’s yearly May Day — or Labor Day, as it’s called in the Netherlands. As the Pentecost of the global workers’ movement, the date is the only bank holiday without pagan or Christian precedents, standing out as the proud achievement of a century of hard-won class struggle. In 1884, Samuel Gompers’ Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions called for a demonstration for an eight-hour working day on May 1, 1886; four years later, after a violent day of strikebreaking that killed five , Gompers urged the founding congress of the Second International in Paris to adopt the first of May as its “official” holiday.
In 1983, however, the group in question thought the name “Labor Day” rather obsolete. Although the Dutch government had never accepted the validity of the day — mainly due to its overlap with the earlier Queen’s Day (April 27) – it remained a landmark for left-wing parties, with large demonstrations and fairs held in Dutch cities. The group proposed rebaptizing May 1 as the “Day Against the Work Ethic” (Dag tegen het arbeidsethos), celebrating the advent of a world in which humanity would be exempt from the “duty to labor” altogether. Earlier that year, members had gathered in the Amsterdam cinema Rialto to found a consortium representing the “conscientiously unemployed” (bewust werklozen) under the name “Dutch Council Against the Work Ethic” (Nederlandse Bond Tegen het Arbeidsethos). Soon, journalists showed interest, while “angry” members of the Dutch Labor Party (the PvdA) and trade unions voiced their discontent. Although the organization was officially a union of the “jobless,” figures within the mainstream labor movement expressed disagreement with the group’s intention to halt the re-integration of the Dutch army of unemployed into the labor market. Work was to remain central, the laborites claimed, and the Council was playing a dangerous game.
Opposition from the established Left, however, did little to temper the Council’s ambitions. Over the course of the 1980s, the organization grew up to be one of the most vocal components of the anti-work Left, with its monthly magazine Luie Donder (Lazybones), joining a growing chorus of leftists who believed that “the society of work” had reached its endpoint.
From Post-Capitalism To Post-Work
In many ways, the stand-off between Council and the Dutch Labor Party prefigured many of our current debates on “post-work.” In the last ten years, a distinctly new form of anti-capitalist theorizing has emerged under the heading of so-called “anti-work” politics: from Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism (2015) to Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future (2015) to Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (forthcoming, 2019). In contrast to an older, outmoded form of workerism, this “new” New Left has sought to distance itself from the “cult of labor” of previous socialist parties, and instead provide an unpretentious apology for idleness – much as the Council did before them.
Empirically, post-workerists claim to have marshaled enough evidence to underpin their project. “For the vast majority of people,” Srnicek and Williams write, “work offers no meaning, fulfillment or redemption” and is “simply something to pay the bills.” Since there is “already a widespread hatred for jobs” (coupled with the growing threat of a mass wipe-out of current jobs), socialists ought to respond to the “widespread demand that others adopt the work ethic… only by the disdain we feel for our own jobs. ” Like Bastani and Mason, both authors see the solution in active support for automation and a massive expansion of free time, taking “full unemployment” rather than “full employment” as the ultimate horizon. “In the end,” they state, “our choice is between glorifying work and the working class, or abolishing them both.”
To be sure, the authors’ brand of anti-work agitation is hardly a historical novelty on the Left. Late nineteenth-century anarchists already celebrated the “refusal of work” as the ultimate anti-capitalist tactic, while Dutch communists in the 1930s castigated their country’s “work ethic” as the “biggest disease of the century.” Most famously, Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue wrote the famed pamphlet The Right To Be Lazy in 1880, to wide acclaim in socialist circles – although it was later silenced by workerists in the German SPD.
Almost a century later, the French May 1968 and the Italian “hot autumn” of 1969 were fresh high points for European anti-work politics. Situationists, Maoists, and devotees of Operaismo cast the tumultuous May Days as a general revolt against the “imperative to produce” in industrial society; as the Belgian communist Raoul Vaneigem put it in his 1967 The Revolution of Everyday Life, “from the Nazi Arbeit macht frei to Henry Ford to Mao,” the “cult of labor” was now a universal fact in the communist and capitalist worlds.
This cult could not last, however. The late 1960s, Vaneigem insisted, would witness “automation and cybernetics” cause “mass replacement of workers by mechanical slaves.” The rise of computerized production would reveal the increasing superfluity of human labor, and show “its adherence to the barbarous procedures of the established order.” “The trickery of work has been exhausted,” Vaneigem postulated in 1967, “and there is nothing left to lose, not even the illusion of work.”
Vaneigem’s plea is surprisingly similar to that of Srnicek and Williams for “full automation” – replace “cybernetics” with “mass automation,” “mechanical slaves” with “robots,” and one quickly gets the impression that there is nothing new under the post-workerist sun.
Yet there is some new about this latest wave of anti-work agitation, and there are several ways of gauging its newness. The fate of Paul Lafargue’s tract in socialist circles, for instance, testifies to the fraught reception anti-work writing had within the labor movement in its early stage. When Friedrich Engels tasked his SPD-colleague Eduard Bernstein with a translation of the work, Bernstein cut out several passages and framed the book as a “caricature” and a “joke” – Lafargue’s book being nothing more than a “polemic against bourgeois morality,” not applicable to the workers’ movement itself. Characteristically, Bernstein delivered a “revisionist” take on Lafargue and took the sting out of his subversive piece. But the same can be said of Bernstein’s enemies as well. Soviet panegyrists of “work,” like Lenin and Trotsky – who proposed nothing less than the “full militarization of labor” and a frantic acceleration of the work ethic – hardly qualify as post-work either.
Perhaps the novelty of the latest wave of anti-work writing is best explained, then, through the fact that post-workerists take their cue specifically from a new critique of capitalism – a critique which simply did not exist in Lafargue or Bernstein’s time. In this new mode, the problem with capitalism is not that it is economically irrational or exploitative, or that it ushered in a world of spiritual desiccation. Rather, theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault castigated capitalism precisely it was unable to fulfill the libidinal demands of a society already geared to ceaseless consumption. Instead of unleashing productive forces which it cannot control, capitalism had awakened an insatiable desire which it could only satisfy periodically during periods of boom – merely to return to the moralistic mantras of austerity management once that boom turned into a bust. As the German philosopher Bini Adamczak describes this new “consumptionist” critique:
When the postwar capitalist regime of renewed accumulation went into crisis, so did the Protestant, Prussian-style social frugality that defined it. A cultural revolution spawned in its wake, opening up fresh avenues of expansion for both capital and its critics. The lifting of taboos surrounding sexuality and hedonism generated new markets, marketing strategies, and circuits of accumulation. An unprecedented focus on reproduction opened up new territories for political struggle in the home, in the party, and in the streets.
The step-motherly treatment of Lafargue also tells us something fundamental about our current post-work moment. Rather than the rallying cry of a victorious working class, the demand to “abolish work!” is being made in a time of nearly universal defeat. From André Gorz’s “farewell to the proletariat” (1983) to Jeremy Rifkin’s “the end of work” (1995), post-work writers have tailored their proposals to a generation accustomed to losing. In this sense, the current strives for a comfortable “post-utopian utopia,” offering everything to those who have nothing. The turn toward reproduction, as Adamczak notes, was undoubtedly “the historical effect of defeat within the factory.” Yet defeat rarely inspires good thinking – and it tends to lead to conceptual muddiness. There are a variety of ways in which this despondence skews the post-workerist vision. But what are they?
Work Versus Employment
The first concerns a persistent inability on the part of post-work writers to make meaningful distinctions between “work,” “effort,” and “employment.” Of course, it is immensely difficult to disentangle these terms in our current society – one cannot “work” without being “employed,” and “effort” is strongly associated with the habits of punctuality and organization imposed on us in the modern workplace. Yet the fact that all of these three qualities are so strongly enmeshed in our own social universe (or, the fact that the capitalist economy only rewards “employed work”) does not mean that we ought to simply equate them in our own thinking.
First, we need to disentangle “employment” – which denotes a specific relationship of exploitation, in which a group of people without access to means of reproduction sell a good (i.e., their labor-power) to an employer – from mere “work.” When such service is monetized and the laborer is paid for it, the substance becomes “abstract labor”: one person’s labor can be qualitatively equated with another’s, and all labor becomes “social labor.”
“Work,” in contrast, denotes something rather different. Although not a historically generalizable notion – societies have hugely divergent ways of interacting with their environment, whether natural or social – humanity’s interaction with nature (and, therefore, “his reproduction of nature as a whole”) can take myriad forms. Some of these can be highly exploitative, as in slave societies, while others are more spontaneous and free (think of the shared games of hunter-gatherers).
This does not mean that all documents of human civilization show a similar tendency for work to be glorified. In the writings of the earliest “post-work” prophets, the ancient philosophers Socrates and Plato, work was castigated as the province of servile slaves and housewives, “the amusement of the rabble.” Living off their own stakes in slave labor, Socrates and his pupils were able to roam the Athenian agora and philosophize at will without ever worrying about sustenance.
From André Gorz to Hannah Arendt, this “Socratic” post-work ideal has often been invoked as one of the prime counterpoints to our current work-crazed world. Obviously, this ideal holds a lot of contemporary appeal as well: since we presumably live in a society in which robots are on the brink of becoming our perfect personal slaves – replacing Aristotle’s “human tools” – humanity can finally morph into a race of full-time philosopher-kings, where everyone can write their own Phaedo and Laws strolling around the town assembly, joyously ruminating and exploring sensual pleasures.
Even here, however, the evidence mustered by post-workerists quickly betrays its biases. As noted by historians such as Perry Anderson, ancient Greece was hardly a slave economy. A large chunk of citizens came from the class of small farmers, who also had most to gain from a participatory political regime. Hence, the view of Athens as “a community of leisured citizens whose slaves greatly outnumbered the free is against the evidence.”