Social Text’s Periscope web page currently features a number of essays on “Work and Idleness in the Age of the Great Recession.”
This special issue of Periscope on “Work and Idleness in the Age of the Great Recession,” reconsiders our sense of what qualifies as work or idleness when there is little or no work to be had.
The Introduction to the collection, by Alex Wescott, begins this way:
“This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence–to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.”
Refusing the valorizing impulse that so often characterizes American perspectives and discussions of work, this rather dour opening passage from Studs Terkel’s Working serves as a reminder of our quotidian relationship to labor. While many Americans may often find themselves declaring their love and passion for work, Terkel’s observations seem far more in line with our everyday experiences and feelings; after all, while some of us may have the privilege of “enjoying what we do,” even in these cases we may find ourselves complaining more than celebrating, feeling exhausted more often than energized, miserable more often than appreciative.
This idea, that we should appreciate what we have–that we have a job at all–is, of course, valid in the sense that at any given time in the history of American capitalism, and no more so than during the hard times of economic recession, there are those who cannot find work and therefore are unable to “make a living.” Yet the idea that employment is a privilege, and that it is “what we do” and how we “make our livings,” reveals the limits of our conceptual frameworks regarding work under capitalism.
After all, as Andrew Ross notes, “Today’s livelihoods are pursued on economic ground that shifts rapidly underfoot, and many of our old assumptions about how people can make a living are outdated pieties” in these precarious times (Ross 2009).
This special issue of Periscope on “Work and Idleness in the Age of the Great Recession,” reconsiders our sense of what qualifies as work or idleness when there is little or no work to be had. The role idleness might play in our lives, and in our collective imaginaries, may strike some as unthinkable or even irresponsible when so much suffering and uncertainty has been triggered by high unemployment rates.
Recent “right to work” legislation and rhetoric, primarily used by conservative politicians and pundits to reduce workers’ rights while espousing work as a fundamental (if not human) virtue–or as Ronald Reagan once put it, “We’ve rediscovered that work is good in and of itself, that it ennobles us to create and contribute no matter how seemingly humble our jobs”–should give us pause.
Earlier writers such as Paul Lafargue, Oscar Wilde, and Walter Benjamin, to name a few, saw the radical potential of idleness (or laziness) as an oppositional stance; a counter-gesture to the exploitation and alienation of work and the increasing speed and efficiency of life that became the hallmark of modernity. Lafargue’s critique of the Right to Work in his 1880 anti-work manifesto, The Right To Be Lazy, reveals the ways in which (even on the Left) the insistence for the Right to Work in a capitalist society serves only to reify the logics of capitalism itself, and reflects “a proletariat corrupted by capitalist ethics.”
As an alternative, he offers the Right to Laziness, and insists that the proletariat take for itself the privileges enjoyed by the bourgeoisie, not in the form of extended leisure time but laziness as a form of play that lies outside of the labor-leisure dyad.
Among this rich offering I was drawn to these two essays: Retromania, the Canon, the Refusal to Work and the Present: The Crassical Connection by Gregory Dobbins and Imagining Non-Work by Kathi Weeks