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Title: The Psychopathology of Work Author: Penelope Rosemont Date: 2004 Language: en Topics: anti-work Source: Retrieved on August 20, 2009 from http://deoxy.org/psychowork.htm Notes: published in Green Anarchy #15, Winter 2004
“Work, now? Never, never. I’m on strike.”
— Arthur Rimbaud
Depersonalization and alienation from our deepest desires is implanted
during childhood via school, church, movies, and TV, and soon reaches
the point where an individual’s desire is not only a net of
contradictions, but also a commodity like all the others. “True life”
always seems to be just a bit beyond what a weekly paycheck and credit
card can afford, and is thus indefinitely postponed. And each
postponement contributes to the reproduction of a social system that
practically everyone who is not a multimillionaire or a masochist has
come to loathe.
That is the problem facing us all: How to break the pattern of work — of
week-to-week slavery, that habit of habits, that addiction of
addictions; how to detach ourselves from the grip of Self-Defeating
Illusions For Sale, Inc., a.k.a, the corporate consumer State.
Especially ingrained is that pattern of working for someone else: making
someone else’s “goods”, producing the wealth that someone else enjoys,
thinking someone else’s thoughts (sometimes actually believing them
one’s own), and even dreaming someone else’s dreams — in short, living
someone else’s life, for one’s own life, and one’s own dream of life,
have long since been lost in the shuffle.
The systematic suppression of a person’s real desires — and that is
largely what work consists of — is exacerbated by capitalism’s incessant
manipulation of artificial desires, “as advertised.” This gives daily
life the character of mass neurosis, with increasingly frequent
psychotic episodes. To relieve the all-embracing boredom of daily life,
society offers an endless array of distractions and stupefactions, most
of them “available at a store near you”. The trouble is, these
distractions and stupefactions, legal or illegal, soon become part of
the boredom, for they satisfy no authentic desire.
When the news reports horrible crimes committed by children or teenagers
trying to be satanists, or superheroes, or terrorists, or just “bad
guys”, we can be sure that these kids lived lives of intolerable
dullness, that they were so isolated from their own desires and from the
larger society that they didn’t even know how or where to look for
something different, or how to rebel in such a way that it might
actually make a difference. Instead, they picked up some trashy notions
from bible school, Hollywood and TV which promised a few minutes of
meaningless “excitement” followed by lots of publicity — also
meaningless. Each time something like this happens we hear cries to
“monitor” films more closely, and to ban “violence” on TV. Rarely,
however, does anyone criticize the Bible or the Christian churches,
despite the fact that Christianity — by far the bloodiest of the
“world’s great religions” — is far more to be blamed. Similarly, one
rarely hears criticism of the armed forces — a gang of professional
killers whose influence on children cannot be anything other than
baleful.
And even less often does one encounter criticism of another
intrinsically violent institution: the nuclear family. Indeed, at this
late date in human history, this relic of patriarchy is still held up as
some sort of ideal. Replacing the extended family as we know it today is
an invention of the nineteenth century. Constructed by white bourgeois
Europeans to meet the needs of expanding industrialization, it reflects
capitalism’s model of the “chain of command”. It continues the sanction
of male supremacy as a time-honored tradition dating back to a mandate
of God, no less. In the nuclear family, he works at a job, and she works
in the home (and increasingly also at a job). As for the children, they
are the family’s private property, and remain so for years after they
reach biological maturity.
Children too learn to work, or at least how to suffer boredom. From the
earliest age they are taught to obey orders. School and church teach
them the necessity of going to and staying at a particular place for a
prolonged period, even when they would rather be anywhere else. All the
classic parental admonitions — “Sit still!”, “Do what I tell you!”,
“Don’t talk back!”, “Stop behaving like a bunch of wild Indians!” — are
part of the education of the well-behaved, uncomplaining wage-slave...
The world today is confronted by greater, more earth-shaking, more
life-threatening problems than ever before: wars all over, massive
pollution, global warming, the return of slavery, white supremacy,
oppression of women, ecological disaster, neocolonialism, state
terrorism, the prison industry, genocide, cancer, AIDS, the traffic
death-toll, xenophobia, pesticides, genetic engineering — the list goes
on and on. Ceaselessly bombarded by news reports and sound bites of one
catastrophe after another, most people have no idea what to do, and
lapse into paralysis. On the ideological front, this widespread
passivity, itself a major social problem, is maintained by Andre Breton
called miserabilism, the cynical rationalization of misery, suffering
and corruption — the dominant ideology of Power in our time.
Every hour, moreover, countless billions are spent on propaganda,
advertising and other mystifications to sustain the delusion that the
crisis-strewn society we live in today is the best and only one
possible.
What is most important to grasp is that work is at the center of all
these problems. It is work that keeps the whole miserabilist system
going. Without work, the death-dealing juggernaut that proclaims itself
the “free market” would grind to a halt. “Free market” means freedom for
Capital, and unfreedom for those who work. Until the problem of work is
solved — that is, until work is abolished — all other problems will not
only remain, but will keep getting worse...In a world too busy to live,
work itself has become toxic, a form of “digging your own grave”.
Renewed scarcities and engineered economic crises notwithstanding,
society today has the capacity to reduce work to a tiny fraction of what
it is now, while continuing to meet all human needs. It is obvious that
if people really want paradise on Earth, they can have it — practically
overnight. Of course, they will have to overcome the immense and
multinational “false consciousness” industry, which works very hard to
make sure that very few working people know what they really want...
Work kills the spirit, damages the body, insults the mind, keeps
everyone confused and demoralized, distracts its victims from all the
things that really matter in life...Our struggle calls for labor
organizers of a new kind...To bring about the meltdown of miserabilism,
we need awakeners of latent desires, fomentors of marvelous humour,
stimulators of ardent dreams, provokers of the deepest possible yearning
for a life of poetic adventure.