The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
When work is good, it can be really good. When you’re interested in something, and good at it, a task can completely absorb you and deliver hours of productive bliss and a satisfied fatigue.
But when work is bad, it can be soul-crushing – and that’s a best-case scenario. Even if your job doesn’t require heavy physical labor, it’s likely to be mentally exhausting. Your job might leave you so drained at the end of the day that all you can do is zone out in front of a screen until you fall asleep.
In modern capitalist societies, access to satisfying work is profoundly unequal. The vast majority of us struggle with boring, repetitive, and meaningless jobs. That begs the question: What’s so great about work that society wants to create more of it?
The key message here is: Modern society has centered itself around work – to the benefit of no one.
The answer might seem obvious. Work is society’s way of distributing wealth. Through work, people have access to the things we need, like food and shelter.
But it’s far more insidious than that. Our identities, status, and access to community are all tied to our jobs. The gradual rollback of social services in the late twentieth century means that even critical needs like health care or retirement are tied to employment. We may resign ourselves to the fact that work has always been this way, but history proves otherwise.
In what sociologist Max Weber calls “traditional,” or pre-industrial, societies, the priority was free time, not financial accumulation. When a worker was offered a pay raise, he was excited by the opportunity to do less work for the same amount of money, calculated specifically to meet his cost of living.
Today, people are excited about raises because it means they can do the same amount of work for more money. Nowadays, we work in order to enjoy our money, not our time. And, the more we enjoy, in the form of consumption and consumerism, the more we need to work.
This is not how thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries envisioned the future, either. Karl Marx believed that technology would lead to massive leaps in productivity, freeing the worker from the drudgery of labor. John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1932 that by 2030 the average person would work only 15 hours per week.
Instead, today’s high-ranking workers clock in even more hours at their desks, while many lower-ranking workers struggle to get by with low-pay, insecure jobs, or no jobs at all.
For many, work is no longer a reliable source of income, rights, or belonging. It’s time, then, for a reevaluation.
The Refusal of Work (2015) is a critical look at the way our society is structured around work. Given the fact that 40 hours of work per week makes many of us exhausted, irritable, and actually ill, it doesn’t seem right that it’s the only way we can access necessities like income, social acceptance, and a sense of belonging. Author David Frayne engages with the theory and practice of resisting the way we are expected to work, invoking critical thinkers and interviews with people who have reduced their hours, or given up working altogether.
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Blink 3 von 12 - Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit
von Yuval Noah Harari
