Kassandra Vee [$]: “We find pleasure and compensation in even the most banal endeavors, because we have to survive everyday life in this capitalist hellscape… But there is a serious danger in confusing these survival mechanisms for desirable horizons of possibility. Let’s start recognizing the truth: Hating your job is smart, and it’s the right relationship to work. Finding pleasure and happiness at our jobs is a way to make ourselves able to show up at work the next day, not a reflection of work’s intrinsic moral value. … What if we tried to conceptualize a struggle whose central goal was reducing the amount of work, both in the process of struggle itself and in the world we want to build? … How much can we steal, eat, pilfer, and destroy? How much time can we take back for ourselves? … Why not build a politics around material reality—that we hate our jobs, that our productivity is destroying the planet—instead of around some magical idealistic notion about the dignity of our labors. Fuck that. Your job sucks, and so does mine.” (I don’t entirely agree with all of Vee’s conclusions, but it is a challenging essay and well worth subscribing for.)
11 October 2019