The horror of work - the dream of life
I can empathize with the tired worker coming home, wanting to do nothing but lean back in the easy chair, watch some television, eat dinner, and go to bed, only to start the day again tomorrow. Who hasn’t done the same? The weekend is an escape, our two-sevenths of freedom. And how do we use this time? We drink, watch more television, read a book, do a tiny bit of that project we never have enough time for. We play with our children.
At my last job, I cared for small children with women I loved. Still, I hated it. I hate work, even when I like my job and my co-workers. Work kept the babies' mothers from them. Work confined me to the same rooms and routine every day.
Work sucks. Work domesticates us. Work is a mechanism of social control. We work because the alternative is homelessness and hunger. We are so alienated from meeting our own basic needs—food, water, clothing, and shelter—that we accept an unfulfilling job we might lose tomorrow because we need money to meet those same basic needs today. Most of us don’t get benefits and most of us aren’t paid a living wage.
How many of us know how to make our own clothes, build our own houses, grow our own food? Well, actually, quite a few.
We have skills collectively culled over lifetimes of experience. Everything we need—the land, the skills, the tools, each other—is all around us. All that remains is to reorganize them in a way in which no surplus (nothing extra) goes to the boss. As gang-veteran, poet, and dedicated community organizer Luis Rodriguez suggests in Hearts & Hands: Building Community in Violent Times, “What we need is a fundamentally different system of relationships that, as a whole, sets conditions in which anything that can happen will happen.” (Rodriguez, 67) What we create together can be ours. We need only make this a more concrete possibility. Work is stopping us.
"The horror of work is less the work itself than in the methodical ravaging of all that isn't work: the familiarities of one's neighborhood and trade, of one's village, of struggle, of kinship, our attachment to places, to beings, to the seasons, to ways of doing and speaking."
The Coming Insurrection by the invisible committee, 30
The Coming Insurrection is a slim anarchist text produced by the anonymous “invisible committee” that outlines the Big Social Problems of first world society and offers a few ideas on how to fix them. The book serves as the main piece of evidence against the its alleged authors, a group of political prisoners in France known as the Tarnac 9. They stand accused of sabotaging rail lines.
Many of TCI's left and right wing critics tend to focus on the few paragraphs of the text that mention sabotage, property-destruction, and the use of arms in self-defense. However, the book's most challenging and interesting idea is that of “building the commune”. “Commune” here means more than a geographical space in which an intentional community blooms. "Building the commune" means radically changing the ways in which people interact by shrugging off and moving beyond our roles as consumers and producers to become self-consciously inter-dependent.
Though we are all already connected, we often prefer to see ourselves as self-made individuals out of the context of society and economics. In reality, we are what we are and what our worlds make us—each person's unique being is in fact a collection of experiences and environmental influences. The only way to save ourselves is to nurture new ways of being and connecting that have the potential to develop into healthy, autonomous communities. Rodriguez would agree, I think, that the most important work happens on a human-to-human level—that it isn't “work" in the capitalist sense, work that you can simply abandon at the end of the day.
The invisible committee's idea of organizing is incorporating the things that organizations attempt to do (and sometimes succeed in doing) into daily life. It is methodical, strategic, and disciplined. TCI warns against creating “organizations” and instead suggests maintaining a level of invisibility that can't be kept by communicating with the media, labeling oneself, or establishing official non-profit corporations. The invisible committee writes, "The exigency of the commune is to free up the most time for the most people. And we're not just talking about the number of hours free of any wage-labor exploitation. Liberated time doesn't mean vacation. Vacant time, dead time, the time of emptiness and the fear of emptiness--this is the time of work. There will be no more time to fill, but a liberation of energy that no 'time' contains; lines that take shape, that accentuate each other, that we can follow at our leisure, to their ends, until we see them cross with others." (the invisible committee, 70) This re-imagining of existence stands in sharp contrast to our workaday experiences of routine exploitation and compulsory boredom.
Having a job is our supposed duty and responsibility as good, hard-working Americans. Consider the image of the typical American. Who is he? In "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference", Audre Lorde describes this "mythical norm" as "white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure." (116) This myth, like all myths, colors our perceptions of right and wrong, of good and bad, of citizen-worker and terrorist; of reality. This is “the model of itself which the bourgeoisie presents to the people as the possibility of their own ascent.” (Freire, 147) The myth of the Ameritocracy is that those who have a lot earned it because they were better and worked harder than everyone else. The “American Way" with its dreams and bootstrap theories seems to function much like the manipulation Paulo Freire describes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for success.” (149) If that's the myth, then what is this reality?
The gap between rich and poor is consistently spreading wider and wider and more and more Americans are having a difficult time making ends meet. Intersecting oppressions work to hinder socioeconomic mobility, thereby placing us in relative positions of privilege and oppression. Most Americans, regardless of class, swallow this bitter pill. Why? Many never learn to critically analyze their situations--they never truly perceive the world as it is and their place within it. Others choose passivity and acceptance as the safer alternative to resistance. When one's means of survival is dependent upon an employer, it becomes very dangerous, potentially life-threatening, to disobey this employer and risk jeopardizing his/her interests. As we have seen again and again throughout history, from the 1886 Haymarket Riots to the 2006 Smithfield meat-packer strikes, the state will meet any serious challenge to the capitalist status quo with violence.
With the erosion of state-funded social welfare programs, one must wonder at the state's true purpose. According to Christian Parenti in Lockdown America, “[T]he heart of the state’s function [is] protecting powerful minorities from majorities.” (14) Police and prisons are finely tuned mechanisms of social control. Over the past forty years, the justice system has become better and better at containing and controlling "social junk" and "social dynamite"--the poor, the young, the criminal, the rebellious, and the undocumented. (Parenti, 45)
We have seen stricter drug laws, increased police and prison spending, and rapidly accelerating incarceration rates since the socially unstable 1960's. In the 60's, the U.S. government and the capitalist elite learned that there was much to fear in an angry, organized populace. As a result, they created institutions like the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) to neutralize "troublesome" struggles to end to racism, sexism, homophobia, and imperialist war. Parenti writes, “The LEAA’s primary function during the first half of the 70’s was to address the police failures of the sixties. That is, it was intended to forge an infrastructure capable of containing rising crime, protest, rioting, and cultural upheaval.” (14) Freire was familiar with this kind of state repression, as he warns in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “the oppressors halt by any method (including violence) any action which… could awaken the oppressed to the need for unity.” (141) For the capitalist class, it is never convenient for the oppressed to know and name the cause of their oppression.
Capitalism is a super-adaptive economic system. It works through the state to create the most profitable social conditions. It requires exponential growth and is constantly seeking new markets and new ways to extract surplus value. Anything that can be commodified, even the seemingly uncommodifiable, is fair game. Even the "anarchist" has been commodified and turned into a superficial identity and, even worse, a social milieu. What is an anarchist to most Americans but a black-clad punk or senseless terrorist? What is an anarchist to an anarchist? The term is almost useless these days. From the beginning “anarchy” has been consistently conflated with “chaos”. In fact, anarchism demands very deliberate organization. To live in commune with others without a sky-daddy bureaucrat telling you what to do is a very serious undertaking. For some of the first "anarchists", Pierre-Joseph Proudon and Mikhail Bakunin, "anarchy was both the most colossal disorder, the most complete disorganization of society and, beyond this gigantic revolutionary change, the construction of a new, stable, rational order based on freedom and solidarity." (Guerin, 12) To live without hierarchy and domination requires accountability and cooperation, not because someone else requires it, but because you choose to associate in this manner.
These days, many self-described anarchists tend towards outwardly (and rightly) hostile forms of resistance to authority, like breaking things and going stick to baton with cops. Slower forms of resistance and movement-building are often reviled as "liberal" and, thus, insufficient. "Radical" becomes synonymous with "uber-critical". But how can we see ourselves in others and move towards growing authentic community if we always regard each other with a sideways, suspicious gaze? How often do we sit down and talk with each other—not about the party we went to last weekend or what band we like or even the rad new book we’re reading—but about what we think and feel about the work we’re doing, together, side by side, but, far too often, in isolation?
Rodriguez writes that “the period of possibility we are in suggests that shifts in policy won’t suffice. Instead we must reorient our thinking on how young and old are joined in the political and social matrix of the land—where the people are fully activated and their dreams, aspirations, and strivings are central to what makes up community.” (Rodriguez, 18) Rodriguez isn't advocating for reform--he's talking about radically re-rigging the very ways we connect--or don't. He's talking about replanting our roots where they've been yanked-up and watering them where they've shriveled. And this doesn't happen with changes in laws, but with teaching ourselves how to be, not humans, but humane. Because we forgot along the way.
There do exist moments of spontaneous inter-dependence, when our beautiful selves bloom in bursts of fire and color, and we hold hands, running.
More often, we interact like stray cats circling a pile of rotting fish guts. Claws out, soft underbellies turned away from each other, defenses stiff as the hair on our tails. We tear into each other as we yearn to pull each other close.
And yet, in these same alleys, we sing the depths of our love, meowling to a waning moon. In her essay “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger”, Audre Lorde describes these strained, strange relationships:
“Often we give lip service to the idea of mutual support and connection between Black women because we have not yet crossed the barriers to these possibilities, nor fully explored the angers and fears that keep us from realizing the power of a real Black sisterhood. And to acknowledge our dreams is to sometimes acknowledge the distance between those dreams and our present situation.” (153)
Though she is talking specifically of the ways in which Black women learn to hate themselves and each other in this patriarchal, racist society, I feel a very, very visceral connection to what she is describing. The subjective experience of internalized oppression shapes the way we see ourselves, each other, and oppressive forces. Freire posits that the oppressor and the oppressed can never be dichotomized, or cut into two distinct opposites. To be oppressed is to feel oppression from both the inside and the outside. This internalized hatred and fear effects all of our relationships, often precluding connection altogether.
Meanwhile, connection is our dream. And, as Lorde imagines, “Acknowledged, our dreams can shape the realities of our future, if we arm them with the hard work and scrutiny of now. We cannot settle for pretenses of connection, or for parodies of self-love. We cannot continue to evade each other on the deepest levels...” (Lorde, 153) The fear and hate of difference keeps me from crossing the scary wooden bridge that connects my cliff to yours—and the rift gets deeper and wider the more times goes by. But we can shift like tectonic plates, moving under and into each other, realizing we are all essentially the same. Meeting your gaze, exchanging questions and stories, I can see myself in you. When we dare to bare ourselves, to be vulnerable, to speak, to listen, we dare to love. This process is also known as dialogue.
Dialogue is central to liberation. “Dialogue, as essential communication, must underlie any cooperation.” (Freire, 168) Dialogue is listening, not sloganeering and propagandizing, not viewing the “masses” as vessels to be filled with enlightenment. Information is most relatable and digestible when it is connected to people’s lived experiences. Something on a poster downtown might resonate deeply within someone, breaking through the surface and traveling through miles of water to reach the person drowning inside. But how is that person to swim to the surface? Engaging in dialogue, one finds buoyant comrades and partners-in-struggle. We learn to see ourselves in relation to capitalism and begin name our oppressors.
It is only through dialogue that we can even begin to build the commune. We hate and distrust each other because we hate and distrust ourselves. We have been taught since we were old enough to toddle down the toy aisle that we must be something we can never really become. We learn to fear difference by the glowing blue light of the evening news. Our desires are shaped by magazine-sleek fictions that can never be our truths. The only truth, all that we have, is what lies around us: the earth, the tools we create, and what is inside us, waiting to sprout and to bloom, waiting to rise to the surface, gasping like a drowning victim—saved.
Works Cited
Rodriguez, Luis. Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times. New York: Seven Stories Press. 2001. Print.
the invisible committee. The Coming Insurrection. Boston: Semiotext(e). 2006. Print.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. 2006. Print
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: The Crossing Press. 1984. Print.
Parenti, Christian. Lockdown America. New York: Verso. 1999. Print.
Guerin, Daniel. Anarchism. New York: Monthly Review Press. 1970. Print.