I recently finished reading The Last Night: Antiwork, Atheism and Adventure by Federico Campagna. The interesting title and fact it’s published by Zero Books attracted me to it. It is rather short and does tend to digress away from the particular issue of work in the second half, but there are a few key points and nice passages that I think are worth highlighting.
In this post I’ve tried to summarise and organise the key points and lessons from the book that resonated with me.
WHY DO WE WORK? WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF WORK?
Obviously, we work to earn money to survive because this is what the system demands of us.
But why do we work so hard? And often harder than we’re expected to? Because we believe we have to in order to succeed? Because this is what everybody else appears to be doing?
WE DON’T NEED WORK – IT IS BOTH HARMFUL AND UNNECESSARY
Harmful: Making products and services is no longer the main purpose or outcome of work. There is a disjuncture between work and economic production. We have overproduction, characterised by excess supply, too little demand and too much emphasis on economic growth. We also have an environmental crisis because of this overproduction and rising consumption.
Unnecessary: We have the technology available to make most human labour redundant.
These two factors should point us towards a dramatic downsizing of human investment in work. And yet…
WE’VE NEVER BEEN MORE OBSESSED WITH WORK. WHY IS THIS?
It’s not only because our SURVIVAL depends on it. Yes, it’s true we live in a world where, for the majority of people, wage labour is the only means to access the market of resources.
But there’s also a SOCIAL aspect: work is “the main platform for the exchange of social recognition”. It is also strongly bound up in ideas surrounding happiness. Most important of all is its impact on the SELF: a person assesses their worth and productivity through their work.
If work is bound up (both in reality and in our imaginations) with survival, happiness, social recognition and self-esteem it makes sense that our world is a work-obsessed one in which:
“Every moment of the day that escapes the universe of work is a wasted moment, a time of despair and loneliness. Without work, outside of work, we are nothing, and so much so that even consumption has had to be turned into a work-related activity”.
So work has a strong grip on our lives for all of these (mainly abstract) reasons. But we still haven’t explained why this is.
We as humans have created NORMATIVE ABSTRACTIONS to believe in, which include Religion, Progress, Career and the State, among many others.
The author argues that these normative abstractions open up a line of DEBT on its believers’ lives from which all necessary obedience and sacrifice are extracted.
Applied to the normative abstraction of Work or Career:
The salary we receive for wage labour can be thought of only in terms of “interests” on the debt. We are used to believing that a salary is the full repayment of the life-time that we lend to those we work for. But our salary can only possibly repay the interests on our lending of life-time. If we were to be repaid in full, a credit of life-time would need to be repaid with an equivalent amount of life-time. This isn’t what happens, so the debt in never repaid to us in full.
Why do we put up with this?
In order to provide the allusion of repaying the debt, the normative abstraction adopts the system of the PROMISE which relies on stocks of HOPE to produce obedience and self-sacrifice. For workers under capitalism, the promise is success in our career. But the repayment is postponed indefinitely. Stocks of hope can never be retrieved in full. If you tried to claim back your stocks of hope the system of the promise crumbles (i.e. working in a career would not lead to imagined success) and all your years of work cease to count for anything, even in the virtual currency of hope.
Here, the author makes links with religion, belief in the afterlife and our desire for immortality. He argues that the limits of the flesh are not recognised, we are “tricked” into believing we will receive our reward/repayment as soon as we reach the next horizon.
The author makes an autobiographical diversion: faced with a potentially life-threatening medical emergency he lies on a hospital bed and feels nothing but anger. Anger for the hours spent at school, for the time spent commuting, for the summer days spent in the office, for the late shifts at work, for the cocktail parties and the enforced fun. Anger for all he didn’t do. Anger at having wasted so much life trying to believe in the higher purpose of his work, at having blindly poured so much energy into his studies, career and good behaviour. All without reaping him any benefits (besides increased stocks of hope, which he ceased to believe in)
So what does the author propose as a potential SOLUTION?
RADICAL ATHEISM as a tool to exit the system of the unfulfilled promise. The goal is autonomy and the creation of conditions for an individual to take control over his/her life and to enjoy life fully and within its limits.
The concept of LIMITS is key here. We need a ready understanding of the limits of lives and of our enjoyment of them. If we reject an abstract belief in immortality and embrace death as the reality, then we are less likely to waste our time investing in false promises.
“In the face of customary overtime of most workers, religion sees the expansion of the limits of their mortality, stretching towards the abstract shores of success. Radical atheism only sees the inhibition of enjoyment within a life that demands too much of itself”.
Instead of hoping, that is investing belief in the promise of moving one step further towards the immortality of abstractions, we should focus on the PRESENT. We should view the present, and life as a whole, as a limited container full of opportunities for enjoyment which are confined only by the limits of one’s biological nature, appetite and reason.
The author advocates SQUANDERING and disrespectful opportunism as solutions. He seems to accept the fact we have to work at jobs we dislike. (I’m not sure why he doesn’t advocate pursuing the avenue of finding paid work we love to do – perhaps because it is so rare?). He says at work we shouldn’t openly rebel, as this would mean being fired resulting in the squandering of precious material resources (that the “impoverished middle classes” can’t afford to do*). What we should be squandering is belief in normative abstractions. We should blend in, put in the right appearances, but then squander behind the scenes. Pillage, break rules, take naps, and never get found out. This section of the book reminded me of Corinne Maier’s book about laziness at work (which I wrote a post on here). The idea seems to be: accept work as necessary for survival, taking what you need from it (a salary), without investing yourself too heavily (actually investing yourself as little as possible).
*“Most of us can be classified as part of the impoverished middle class. We are not banned from the job market, but our jobs are mind-numbing exercises of patience and degradation. Wage labour or state welfare gives us enough money to survive, but never to break free from the perennial quest for survival”
The book also makes other observations, talking about Adventure and Politics, but I’ll stop here for now as I found these a little less relevant to my main concern with Work.
I’m not sure I agree with everything the author says, especially in terms of squandering as the solution. But the core idea about self-sacrifice in the name of abstract beliefs that ultimately leave us unfulfilled is a powerful one.
A couple of thoughts / criticisms:
- What if you enjoy your work? This book is obviously only for those that dislike their work (which admittedly is probably most people)
- What if you don’t buy into normative abstractions of Career and Success, but instead work only for money and material possessions, things that work does grant us, i.e. what if you accept the trade-off between life-time and salary?
Also, here is a critical review of the book – http://review31.co.uk/article/view/197/a-hyperbolic-fudge
Finally, Federico Campagna also wrote a short piece for the Guardian a couple of years back based on similar themes. Here’s my favourite part:
In an age struggling between crises of economic overproduction, environmental catastrophe, falling salaries and increasing robotisation, there cannot be any other explanation for the current culture of “hard work” than that of a burgeoning religious cult… Yet work is hardly devoid of ideological content. As we do it and understand it today, work has become in itself the very essence of ideology: the act of willingly submitting the short time allowed to us by our mortality, to an all-encompassing, faceless abstraction… What really matters, and really defines us as worthy people – unlike those benefit scroungers – is that we keep working hard, regardless of whether our work goes towards the production of land mines, the deforestation of the Amazon forest or the supply of frog-shaped slippers to gadget shops. Abstaining from work, or being forcefully cast out of it, puts one in the dangerous position of a stateless person during a war, or of an atheist in a theocracy.
A new idea he introduces, which is not in the book, concerns the links between obsessive work culture and the party hard culture:
While in the past the devastation caused by working class alcoholism used to be regarded as an ugly side-effect of industrialisation, today’s party culture is an integral part of the cult of work. Now that human work has become devoid of any true economic function, as the unemployment rate largely demonstrates, its essence boils down to the relinquishment of any whim of taking control over our own lives or of pursuing any personal existential goals, in favour of a mystical union with the abstract flow of global capital. The degradation of drunkenness, or of a ketamine blackout, perfectly mirrors the essence of dehumanising office jobs. In both cases, the point is to stop being ourselves, to go beyond our limits to the point of becoming unrecognisable even to ourselves. Performed in overcrowded spaces, as mediated by standard technologies, and aimed at complete yet subtle conformism, fun and work have finally created an boundless common land.
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