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Title: If not now, then when? Subtitle: (stop going to work) Date: January 12, 2022 Authors: Anonymous Topics: Anti work, COVID 19, Subsistence, Labor Published: 2022-01-12 00:00:00Z
It is as clear as it has ever been, if not more, that none of us like work. Many of us in a US context went back to work after the winter holidays last week or are going back next week. Many more of us worked through the winter holidays without a break. While any given Monday may be an occasion to “hate work,” being forced to return to work into the highest rates of covid infection that we’ve seen while also experiencing the dark, cold seasonal depression of any winter, heightened by the realization that indoor gatherings are once more off limit, plus the existential incomprehensibility of the end of the world that we face as a result of industrial civilization, capitalism, and human greed, all make the brief break of the national holiday-from-work season seem not-long-enough if one got any time off work at all.
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Personally, my uncle got diagnosed with stage-4 lung cancer over “break.” He’s younger than my dad, and they both recently retired. My uncle was an MTA maintenance worker who already fought (legally) to have the MTA cover the hearing aids he needed as a result of the daily sounds of the subway that caused his hearing loss. He smoked, and he worked under ground and on the 9-11 site. My uncle is going to die early in his retirement—a member of the generation “lucky” to have had a life-long career with retirement—his body having been systematically degraded through the technology of profit and civil function that is work.
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If not now, when will we act on what we all know—that work is both killing us and even if it weren’t we just don’t want to be doing it?
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Laboring activity is not the same as work. This is one of those massive gas-lighting tactics that people throw in your face when you silently or verbally yell at them through your whole gut, “FUCK WORK!” And you should yell this at them. You know their rebuttals are just their own distorted avoidance tactics. Work is abstract labor directed not at one’s own subsistence, meaning, social relations, etc. Work is doing what “needs” to be done according to outside standards, for abstracted reasons, in order to generate profit somewhere down the line for someone else, but more directly so that you can get the wage that you need to live. And that is real. But only in our historical, social order where food and land are private property and self-maintenance, dreaming, and social relations are either instrumentalized or undervalued. Don’t let them tell you that people would be lazy fucks if they didn’t work. People clearly act in all sorts of ways that are not waged work—this is what the neoliberal technology of extracting value from the precariously employed “human capital” subject relies upon after all.
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I just want to do what I want. I’ve been working overtime for 24 years at this point, have literally 4 higher education degrees, and still somehow don’t have a securely employed job. I think my CV is 11 pages long. I really don’t care any more about meeting deadlines to produce writing that no one needs, wants, or will read. Honestly, why the hell does that matter. I will not apply for a job that requires me to move. Really, look at the fucking situation we are in. If I get sick, who will take care of me? I’ve lived in enough cities, I’ve moved enough for work and school. Why are we still pretending this expectation is a “normal” and reasonable demand?
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No one likes working under some one else’s direction. No one likes giving over all the hours of so many of their days to things that really mean so little to the direct needs and wants of their lives beyond needing money to literally be able to live. It is so clear in covid how fucked this whole system of work is. We need to stop believing in work. It is nowhere near worth believing in. It literally is about producing other people profit. It literally is killing us and taking time away from rest and relationships.
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Stop going to work.
Share money. Steal Food. Don’t pay rent. Fuck debts. Fuck money.
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The system as we know it has not always existed. People really did once just do activity—making food, hanging with friends, taking care of health, repairing shelter, preparing for winter, etc, whatever—that had nothing to do with this thing we call work.
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