Never Work

Electoral politics is a contest to see who can promise the most jobs for Americans. In the presidential debates, one candidate will protect existing fossil fuel jobs while another will create "millions" of new renewable energy jobs. To sell their Green New Deals, campaigners must always include these same promises of jobs, jobs and more jobs. The DSA ecosocialists want to focus energies on a Federal Job Guarantee for a displaced workforce. Americans are traumatized by work. Pathetically, for many it is a thing which gives life meaning. The Situationist International was in fierce opposition to this valorization of work. Raoul Vaneigem noted how the "cult of work is honoured from Cuba to China...wherever submission is demanded, the stale fart of ideology makes its headway, from the Arbeit Macht Frei of the concentration camps to the homolies of Henry Ford and Mao Tse-Tung." My point is that there is an ecological problem with all this demented love of jobs and work as well. All those workers with those millions of new jobs are going to spend their paychecks on tons of useless, earth destroying crap. Most of which will end up in the atmosphere, the oceans or the landfill. Work is the promise and the threat, the carrot and the stick, that Capital uses to control the worker. No work = no money = misery. A form of tyranny libertarians never seem to notice, by the way. But what we will need to survive our current confluence of crises is fewer jobs and less work and less consumption. And more life. The late David Graeber pointed out how most of those jobs were "bullshit" in the first place, just as a giant part of the workforce in China is kept busy building ghost cities and superfluos infrastructure. Of course there are necessary tasks that need to be accomplished. And work can be creative and fulfilling. When profit is abolished, work will be rational and a job will be a small part of life