*Disclaimer - I wrote this about a year ago when I was in a really pissed off mood. I no longer agree with everything here, and its not a finished piece of writing. Still, I think there are some useful points *

Work, and why I do it.

Entrée

There was a time in my late teens when I turned on, tuned in and dropped out. I was waiting for the moment everyone told me was coming: the moment when I would grow out of my anarchism and face the Real World with insensitive resolve, ready to do What Needed to be Done.

I ate at friends places, I walked through the city, I watched people, I read like crazy, I wrote in my diary. Trains were free when you used the right stations and the five finger discount could get luxuries like Brie and dark chocolate. People With Cars were often good for a lift, and there seemed to be no end of folk wanting to buy beers and meals for a wayward child like myself.

I genuinely felt that I traded something with the people who supported me. I honestly believed that my freedom was worth something to them because it made life more interesting, less banal and through me, they saw another possibility for life. I didn’t work. Had I been cleaner, straighter, more astute, then maybe I’d be dumpster-diving and begging scraps from restaurateurs.

So I know what its like to live free of work. When I criticize this behavior, its because I’ve been there and I’ve thought about what it means.

Anarchist guilt about working

Does working somehow stop you being an anarchist? Does the act of going to a job, performing work tasks set by another, or even setting work tasks for another, implicitly destroy your political being? Does spending 8 hours a day at a place of work delete your identity? Does work have that power?

There’s no doubt that work can suck. Study is an equally alienated institution, yet lots of anarchists will stay in study while rejecting work.

If you work in an anarchist bookshop, or a creative studio, or helping children, or at legal aid, is your work any better? Is accepting minimum wages and fucked conditions any easier to bear?

Hearing and reading about activists attitudes to work, I’m sometimes reminded of the squeamish rumors about sexual activity that used to circle the playground (“you can get AIDS from holding hands, kissing makes you pregnant, lesbians all want to be men, girls who sit with their legs apart are sluts”).

Work is alienated, but alienating yourself from society and from your class is not the answer to work. At best, you become a charity case; at worst, it alienates you from the class, and class politics.

Marxist analysis of the working class and why we need to be there

In terms of Marxist analysis, the working class is the big one. Who’s the working class – simply anyone and everyone who must work to survive in today’s alienated, dog-eat-dog capitalist world. Why is the working class so important? Well, they’re the ones who have the power over the means and tools of production. They’re the ones who can perform that revolutionary action: withdrawal of labour power because without the working class, nothing gets done.

There are lots of reasons why anarchists can benefit from being members of the working class.

Other reasons its good to work

Learn new skills (like desktop publishing, typing, fixing machinery, prioritizing tasks, communicating effectively)
Get free stuff (like photocopying, computer use, faxing, email)
A real chance to combat alienation and build community
Learn to work with others co-operatively (even if you don’t like them)
Stay in touch with what working people (including yourself) actually think, and you can talk to them about what you think
Work can be enjoyable

Working – a co-option of my politics?

I don’t have the same politics as the people I work with. So?

Not working – stereotyping, infantilism, dependence and enclaving

Dependence

When you don’t work, then you place yourself outside society. You also place yourself on the receiving end of another person’s labour power. Cadging off friends, stealing, begging scraps at restaurants, and dumpster diving are all ways to re-appropriate the waste and inequities of capitalism, but they are also simply living off other people’s work. The restaurateur goes to work at 6am to cook, clean, take stock and serve rude customers. Asking her for leftovers at the end of the night is asking her to support you.

Infantilism

Rejecting work is easily seen by others as a knee-jerk reaction. It can be characterized as an infantile rejection of the adult world – a world in which nothing is pure and doing What Needs To Be Done is a daily reality (before you start thinking that only capitalism presents this conundrum: think about whether adults really want to clean baby shit off nappies and why they do it anyway).

Enclaving

Rejecting work often means hanging out with, forming communities with and doing cool revolutionary stuff with others who also reject work. This is voluntary enclaving – isolation of yourself as a revolutionary from the working class (and from class power).

Stereotyping

Its easy to spot the group of folk who don’t work: cool cats with dreads and torn clothes, beautifully malnourished (rake-thin women who reject the beauty myth gall me). If one were to come down from the pedestal of rejecting work a moment and talk to me about revolution, it would be easy for me to discount what they say. Easy, because I can see they do not live in a world of responsibility (to themselves, to the class, to the bills, to the loved-ones, to political knowledge, to workable solutions). Someone else feeds this person, someone else clothes them, while I work, they read Bakunin and they call themselves superior to me because I have not read Bakunin. When I tell them I disagree, they tell me I am wrong because I’m brainwashed by work and the conventions of shopping, cooking, cleaning, eating and drinking as a worker. Then I end the conversation with “you don’t know what you’re talking about”.

The political power is zero because a stereotyped image discounts any political insight you might have to offer.