In revealing the very human frailties of our bodies and how much we depend on other people’s labor to survive, the coronavirus pandemic has made it impossible to ignore the very old truth that, at the end of the day, many of us work to meet our other needs, not because work is meaningful or enjoyable on its own.
An anti-work movement could begin to coalesce around actions with real effects that give people a sense of their power and bring new people in.
It is because of this revelation of the grimness and misery of so much of our wage labor that there has been a rush to place huge significance on the “Great Resignation,” with commentators often overstating the degree to which workers are part of something which could be called an “anti-work movement.” It feels true in our bones, these days, that work sucks, and that we would mostly prefer to be doing something else.
As Alice Herman shows in her interviews with workers who quit their jobs on page 40 of this issue, though, most of these workers aren’t necessarily interested in joining a collective struggle to end wage labor as we know it. Instead, they’re quitting jobs where conditions have grown unbearable in a relatively tightened labor market and are seeking new jobs. The Great Resignation is, as labor scholar Rebecca Kolins Givan recently noted on my podcast Belabored, “largely the great job turnover.”
Just because some people who can quit their jobs have done so, it does not follow that there will be a massive change in the relations of power at work. To actually change those relations will require conflict on a larger scale.
And yet, as Herman’s article also shows, some of these workers are indeed asking bigger questions about the “American financial, capitalistic machine.” While the Great Resignation and the phenomenon called “Striketober,” which I covered in my last column, are hardly large enough or organized enough to be called a general strike, the time does seem ripe for the rise of a real anti-work movement. But what would such a thing look like?
In his new book, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization, political philosopher Rodrigo Nunes argues for an ecological view of movements. Rather than imagining that every organized movement of workers should look like a labor union or a political party, or be a relatively structureless horizontal network, Nunes suggests that there are many different shapes and forms political organizing can take. These differently shaped groups, parties, clusters, and networks will influence one another as they act.
In other words, no one way works on its own. “It will take all of us/shoving at the thing from all sides/to bring it down,” poet Diane di Prima wrote in “Revolutionary Letter #8.” None of us individually or even in our small groups know exactly what it will take to radically transform the world of work into something that is run to meet the needs of humans rather than capital accumulation, but answers come out of the process of struggle, and even our losses teach us important lessons. Organizing, Nunes writes, “gives each individual the possibility of expanding their limited capacity to act by pooling resources with others, constituting a collective capacity to act and extending its duration over time.”
The things we think of as revolutions are sometimes open conflicts—think the American or French or Russian revolutions—but other times are the aggregate results of lots of changes over a relatively small period of time.
The sexual revolution, for instance, began with a sense of unease, sparked by widely shared conditions. Sometimes political struggles led to the changing of laws, such as overturning bans on homosexuality or instituting no-fault divorce. But there were also more personal, intimate struggles, and consciousness-raising that led to groups of women deciding to help one another change their lives. The two types of changes, Nunes notes, reinforce and complement one another. But there must be some sort of consolidation, scaling, and institutionalization of the changes in order for them to last.
Taking Nunes’s ideas as a starting point, what does the anti-work movement look like? Most people point to three things: the uptick in strikes this fall among private-sector, largely health care and production workers known occasionally as “Striketober”; the mass quitting of jobs known as the “Great Resignation”; and the growth of the r/antiwork online community on Reddit. To this I would add the unionization waves in creative and white-collar work, from art museum workers to programmers to architects; the growth in organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, which certainly have a critical stance toward work; the work of think tanks like Autonomy in Britain and the push for the four-day workweek; a spate of anti-work books beginning with Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work and including, more recently, Amelia Horgan’s Lost in Work (which I reviewed for The Progressive’s “Favorite Books of 2021,” in the last issue) and Jamie McCallum’s Worked Over; community organizations that provide space for the unemployed and precariously employed to come together; and, if somewhat unevenly, existing labor unions. One could also include organizing around universal basic income, a movement which has its own ecology that overlaps with this one. (See interview with Michael Tubbs, page 58.)
Others might have alternative suggestions for what might make up the contours of an anti-work movement. Different structures will suit different people’s needs: Are you relatively comfortable in your current job, but coming to the conclusion that the current system is toxic to human (and planetary) well-being? You might start with reading some books, joining a Reddit page, sharing some memes, and thinking about unionizing your workplace.
If you’re currently in a job that is dangerous or untenable, you might quit—or, if you have a union, you and your colleagues might strike. If you’re already unemployed, you could be looking for a new, better job or you could be organizing a child care cooperative in your neighborhood or struggling with the unemployment system or disability support programs, and trying to find help with these things from a community group or an online community.
Not all of these actions could be considered “organizing.” Quitting a job is often a personal decision that can feel profoundly isolating and scary, and hanging out on a Reddit page is not itself taking action. It is the job of existing organizations to make themselves visible to the people who might need their support, to provide political analysis as well as practical advice, and to learn in turn from those people how best to meet their needs.
This is how people come to political consciousness, and to action; this is how classes are composed, how groups of people become more than frustrated individuals, and how ideas floating in the ether become written into the law.
What would this look like in practice? Consider the example of the Kellogg’s workers’ strike this past fall.
Creative Commons
A protester at a Kelloggs strike
In October, the workers went out, demanding that any potential new contract end the hated two- tier wage system, in which newer workers were paid much less. The workers held out through negotiations for two months, gaining support from other unions and other strikers, DSA groups, and even U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who sent a fundraising letter to his email list for strike funds.
The workers rejected a potential contract negotiated by their union leadership in early December, and it was then that the company announced it would be hiring “permanent replacement” workers. It was also then that the Reddit community, previously an intellectual discussion and informal support network, sprang into action.
According to The Washington Post, “The user ‘BloominFunions’ kicked Antiwork into action, posting links to the Kellogg’s plants’ job-posting sites . . . and urging readers to ‘clog their toilet of an application pipeline.’ ” Sean Wiggs, a Reddit regular and programmer, made a program to spam the company with fake applications, and thousands shared it. “A year ago, I had no idea I was able to get involved in something like this,” Wiggs told the Post. “Now there are ways to help even if you can’t go march for labor rights.”
The workers accepted the next contract offer, which lessens, but does not end, the two-tier system; the conditions for workers at Kellogg’s improved in a small but material way. It is an example of what a movement thinking ecologically can look like—creative contributions that do not require permission to join, yet have in mind the best interests of those primarily affected.
And so, an anti-work movement could begin to coalesce around actions with real effects that give people a sense of their power and bring new people in. Online organizing often winds up dispersing as quickly as it assembles, but in connecting with other groups built for longer-term survival (such as labor unions with dues and membership structures), it can add something to ongoing struggles.
As Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it in her classic Golden Gulag, “When the capacities resulting from purposeful action are combined toward ends greater than mission statements or other provisional limits, powerful alignments begin to shake the ground. In other words, movement happens.”