The End of Work

 

 

I remember as a teenager when the “I have to go to work” schema first invaded my mind. There was something exciting about it, then, since "going to work" meant becoming an adult and becoming an adult meant that one had some control over one's life. I never took it very seriously. Indeed, it felt like I was “playing work”:  ironing my uniform and heading off at a brisk speed to avoid the stigma of being “late”. Going off again to the nice clean plastic place to perform some mindless task. While there, I’d always do a little extra just for a “thank you” from my coworkers or a riveting pat on the back from my grumpy boss. Of course, at the time I had such a good attitude because I harbored the naïve notion that the slog was “temporary”: since it was so overtly demeaning and unsatisfying that surely no serious person would think someone could stay at it for a lifetime.

I’m now forty-eight and I’m still just “going to work”. I still iron my uniform, though not quite so meticulously.  I run off at a less brisk pace, sometimes I'm late. When I am there, I don't really do anything extra. When the phone rings and the caller ID reads "work", I ignore it and don't bother calling back. The biggest difference between then and now is that I am no longer fooling myself. I know that I will be doing this forever. I know that I will not ever have agency in my life. I go to work with a lump of resentment in my throat. 

The resentment has been building steadily over time as I gradually recognized that it doesn't matter what job one is performing: the “forty hour” work week is a great big lie. First, assuming one job is enough for a person to stay afloat in this economy, one is almost always required to work more than that just in the regular day to day operations. Second, even if one is not physically working, one is usually preparing for work, recovering from work, commuting to work, making arrangements around work, complaining about work, receiving calls from work to work “extra”; All of this adds up. Work consumes a person’s life. Work makes a big assumption: that it is the priority in your life when it most definitely is not. It forces itself upon you. When a person is at work, she gives herself up to be entirely at somebody else’s mercy. A working person is trapped in someone else’s version of how things should be, and that version is usually inhumane, inefficient or both.

 

The “job creators” are often presented as so generously providing us helpless cogs with our livelihoods that we should be on our knees thanking them that we are not starving. Forget the fact that we spend most of our precious time making them rich, surrendering our own dreams in the process.   

Don’t get me wrong: there are ways out for the lucky few, and if a working person is doing something that he loves than none of this matters. However, I argue that these options are far from ubiquitous.  There is only so much of this to go around. Most of us, out of necessity to avoid starvation, find ourselves doing  something that is at best  inconsistent with our natural talents and at worst something we utterly dread. We usually have unreasonable expectations thrust upon us in the interest of productivity, making us sacrifice quality and whatever internal reward we may get from doing a “good job”. So, derived from this is a heaping helping of stress and anxiety and the health outcomes that follow.  

Yeah, thanks for the “retirement” fantasy. Never mind the fact that I can’t save any money; I’m not going to make it out alive. 

After over thirty years of being a working class person in America I have finally arrived at a rather radical conclusion of what is required to change the system. Surprisingly, it isn’t fighting for better wages, benefits and working conditions in the traditional sense. I’m not talking about strengthening unions. Unions were born in a different time and a different economic climate. Unions, my working class friends, are as obsolete as retirement. This was when automation was not the threat that it is today and workers had some leverage. Though I am grateful that the issue of economic inequality is solidly upfront in the 2016 election, what working class people need to do to foster real change in the condition of their labor is divorce themselves completely from the “job creators”. Enter the “worker-owner”. Enter the “cooperative”.  

A working person in my generation is so used to the autocratic hierarchy that it just seems natural: the “way it is”. The assumption that the “doers” have to be dependent on the “deciders” throughout the entire process is a given. The fact that we have to “look for a job”, show up when we are told, work within the system that has been set up whether it is sensible and humane or not, and not have any real say in the very environment in which we must spend such a large chunk of our time are all artifacts of dependency.

I’m talking “Atlas Shrugged” folks, except those that are shrugging are the “doers”.  In the words of Todd Snider: hang your own dry wall. The “deciders” have set up these hierarchies for their own benefit.  We need to stop playing by their rules. It is, in fact, a matter of survival. We are entering a new era of automation and the “deciders” won’t need us anymore. Workers must take control of their own lives. We must become worker-owners: the cooperative is the only model that is going to save us.

The Art Center

Dear Screams:

It has been a while since I have written engaged as I have been in the crisis that has gripped me over the last several months. I know, you snicker, "when have you not been in crisis?" and I cannot deny that this is so. It is difficult to say when it began, or why it even started, but I think it was early, perhaps in the second grade, when I began to feel this need to punish myself. I distinctly remember an episode on the playground when my classmates and I were playing "castle" or some such fantasy game and nearly everyone wanted to be royalty and I wanted to be the "slave". Needless to say my desire to play this role was granted without protest and I went on  being a very idle slave while everyone else argued over who would be Queen right up until the bell rang. Then, of course, the long quest for love that started when I was fifteen or so and ended when I was forty five and for most of that time was in the form of giving myself sexually to people who did not love me.

Only recently, as the crisis was overshadowed by the long quest for love driven by some amorphous fantasy of starting a hippie family, a hobby farm, lots of bare feet and dreadlocks and an earthy, carefree approach to living and parenting, have I recognized that the desire to punish myself was also true in my career life. That also started early with my self-loathing so powerful that anything that I was interested in or "cut out" for must itself be shameful. I thought: "I'm much more interested in art so I think I'll go into science. "I'm very bad at public speaking so I think I'll go into teaching".  "I cannot stand up for myself at all so I think I'll go teach adolescents". "I have no ability to think clearly and practically so I think I'll go into nursing."

Of course I did not immediately recognize this trend as "punishment". I had convinced myself, Screams, that my resolute desire to perform jobs entirely inconsistent with my nature was a noble quest to challenge myself and improve  Though it did, in fact, end up doing just that, in the mean time the self loathing, the punishment, the escape fantasy that would never occur, pursuing careers I wasn't cut out for, formed a very tight, very secure cage: a self imposed cage that I have been simultaneously forming and trying to escape from for as long as I can remember. It is the root of my ever present anxiety.

Now, I have finally emerged from this long period of thumb sucking punishment. Though I'm not sure when, maybe slowly over the last few years, I finally woke up to realize that only I was going to break myself out of the cage. This move was not, in fact, ever going to be facilitated by some super man whisking me away from my hum drum working class struggle to the freedom of the hobby farm. It is painful, of course, that it took me this long to realize this very basic truth but I've always been a late bloomer and my mind is so convoluted and chaotic that finding the clarity of the obvious is usually a major achievement for me.

Ironically, however, what I have also realized is that my self imposed prison created by performing jobs that as a shy, bumbling, confused, self conscious wreck of a human being, were completely inimical to my nature has not, in fact, been a complete waste of time but has actually provided me with the very skills necessary to make the great escape from the prison possible. In other words, if I hadn't built the prison in the first place, I never would have been able to escape from it. Besides gaining very practical talents such as maintaining good posture, public speaking and eye contact, as well as honing the more logical side of my mind, the journey through teaching and nursing and science has taught me that the world is not against me, it is there for the taking. More importantly, it has taught me that there is no reason at all to be afraid of people, since most are just as bumbling a confused as I am. Lastly, of course, as a hospice nurse the grim icing on the cake that is shoved down my thoughts on a daily basis is that death and disease are a-coming sooner than I think.

This very basic shift in my fundamental world view has opened a whole new treasure chest of possibilities.

So, why then, you ask, the crisis? The phrase "A whole new treasure chest of possibilities" sounds very positive. I'll tell you why: even though the long emergence from the dark cell of insecurity into the confident human being that stands before you was not a waste of time for the reasons I have mentioned, when I look around at the world that I've emerged into I've discovered that I am surrounded by yet another cage. Of course, I've known it was there all along, but finally shedding my personal prison has rendered the walls of the larger external prison more visible.

Have I always bitched as nauseum about the frustrations of being a cog in the capitalist machine? Of course I have. One need to only look at, well, all of my blog posts and poems to find some reference to this. But now that the walls of my personal cage have been busted through, I find myself not just annoyed by it, but genuinely angry and entirely incapable of playing the role anymore. It is far too unjust to subject myself to this humiliation. Of course, I don't think I am special somehow. I don't think anyone should have to be subjected to it which is why I'm a socialist, but in this post I'm focusing on my personal journey not the transformation of society which I advocate and embrace.

And so, Screams, I'm getting out, and I'm not doing it slowly. The long slog out of my personal prison has left me with very little patience to embark on another long slog out of the societal prison. My friend, who has abandoned me, The Blasphemer from the Hinterland, told me how much he loved the phrase I wrote once: "my skin has formed around the straps" in reference to how I felt about my relationship to the trap of capitalist America, but, fuck it, I'm going to allow myself to bleed. I can and will have agency in my life. That's what being alive about: molding the minutes one has on this planet into a form that is consistent with one's values: not merely existing within a system that is pathologically unjust, agreeing to exist only because if one doesn't agree than one faces starvation. What a pathetic way to be forced to live.

I will not be Tantalus: standing in one place forever struggling for food and water that the capitalists keep just slightly out of reach. What the capitalists don't want a working person to know is that she doesn't have to stand there. There are more humane places to go just over the hill.