Life Not Work

I don’t remember which anarchist organisation produced the leaflet headed ‘Not the right to work, but the fight to live’; it may have been the Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty, the claimants’ support and advocacy group that I was active in when living in or near Edinburgh. The slogan needs to be argued for in light of the UK government’s proposals to cut disability benefits. While those proposals have been accompanied by an intensification of western society’s long-standing work ethic, now imposed even on the disabled, public protest has mainly focused on the poverty that will result from the cuts. But the underlying ethos must be attacked in its own right as an insidious poison threatening our most basic needs and rights.

Work, whatever its nature or conditions, isn’t inherently good but is necessary because, in our vulnerability to death and pain – our mortality and sentience ‒ we’re all disabled: the 20-year-old athlete just as much as the 90-year-old hospice patient, the amputee, the wheelchair user, or the mental patient whether psychotic, addicted, traumatized, or clinically anxious or depressed. None of us is a self-sustaining organism that could live on air. Whether by our own or others’ efforts, we have to get things from outside our bodies.

The pay and conditions of work, whether under industrial or post-industrial capitalism, or under Stakhanovist state capitalism, can be improved, but even then, work is a necessity, not a choice, valuable for enabling survival and well-being. It can only be a servant of life, not ‒ as the government and the DWP insist ‒ its master.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the needed goods and services have been provided under the system of wage-slavery, enforced by persecution of the unenslaved. ‘Late in the 18th century, … [t]he increase in expenditures on public relief was so great’  ‒ Reeves’s excuse ‒ ‘that a new Poor Law was enacted in 1834, based on a harsher philosophy that regarded pauperism among able-bodied workers as a moral failing. The new law provided no relief for the able-bodied poor except employment in the workhouse ….’

The spirit of the Poor Law lives on, with Reeves declaring in 2015 that Labour ‘is not the party of people on benefits’. Yet even the 1834 law restricted the persecution to the able-bodied. When those hitherto exempted from work, albeit under harshly bureaucratic conditions, become the targets of work-worship, we observe that ethos acquiring an even more sinister power.

No-one is exempt! There’s a sick joke that goes: ‘Can Johnny come out to play baseball?’ ‘Of course not, Johnny is a quadruple amputee’. ‘That’s all right, we just want to use him for second base.’ To Reeves, Kendall and friends, this would be perfectly reasonable. Everyone must work with whatever capacities they have; we must just assign Johnny a job coach to help him back to work.

This ideology seeps into society even while people protest angrily against the poverty being inflicted in its name.

Perhaps in our protests we should stop speaking favourably of ‘work’ – as long as, in our society, it means wage-slavery. Even when we’re being generous to the unenslaved, we tend to convey the message that such work is a good thing despite some people, sadly, being unable to obtain it or do it. Some socialists do suggest referring to the interests, not of ‘workers’, but of ‘the working class’. This is an improvement, as it includes all those people (and their dependents), regardless of actual employment status or capacity, who have nothing to sell but their potential labour. But it still stems from the acceptance of ‘work’ as a social and moral baseline, occupying an honoured, emotionally strong but misdirected place in socialist language.

The ideology may be somewhat weaker in Scotland, where the public are keenly aware of the proletarianisation achieved through expulsion of the people from the land. As Marx observed, ‘what “clearing of estates” really and properly signifies, we learn only in the promised land of modern romance, the Highlands of Scotland. There the process is distinguished by its systematic character, by the magnitude of the scale on which it is carried out at one blow (… in Scotland areas as large as German principalities are dealt with), finally by the peculiar form of property, under which the embezzled lands were held.’

Being comparatively left-wing, Scotland has its own devolved Adult Disability Payment, although it could be impacted by the Westminster proposals. The latter have been attacked as ‘“devastating” for disabled people by Scotland’s Social Justice Secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville. Scotland is better on the issue of poverty, but the ideology justifying poverty hasn’t been prominently attacked.

However, given that work is, collectively speaking, necessary, shouldn’t everyone do their bit?

How much work is actually necessary? When robots are ‘taking people’s jobs’, how can it be asserted that everyone must work to maintain adequate production? Specific skills may be needed, but that involves fewer people than the mass mobilisation implied by the conscription of the disabled. As Bertrand Russell wrote in 1935, ‘Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone’, while ‘only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists’.

It’s taken for granted that there is a need for ‘jobs’, with concern expressed over the enslavement statistics, and an outcry, because ‘jobs will be lost’ when an industry or company is threatened with closure ‒ even if the outfit concerned is ethically or environmentally questionable.

But it’s the wages, not the jobs, that people need. Under the puritanical work ethic, however, it’s immoral to advocate actually giving people anything they need; the only need it’s considered acceptable to meet is the need for a ‘job’, i.e. ‘work’ – a bleak concession to generosity being sometimes allowed through the claim that work is good for one’s mental health.

And even where a certain level of production or service is identifiably necessary – say, at the level of the household or the small tribe – disabled people have not, up to now, been expected to provide it.

On the other hand, isn’t some work creative or otherwise fulfilling? In such cases, considering the historical linkage of the word ‘work’ to wage-slavery, when an activity is meeting the higher-level needs of user or producer, we still might call it something other than ‘work’. Even if it’s just the satisfying component of an otherwise oppressive job, that component could be allowed a better name.

Experience tells me that yes, gainful activity can be fulfilling. When self-employed, working from home, I’ve actually looked forward to Mondays! The words of the Desiderata, ‘Keep interested in your career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time’, ring bells for me.

It’s still ‘work’ in that I earn money by it, and in that, although it’s quite interesting, I wouldn’t do it just for fun. Yet such ‘work’ is indeed satisfying ‒ and for that reason shouldn’t share a label with wage-slavery. Where a money-making pursuit is life-enhancing, call it a career, a business, an activity, an occupation, a gig … but not ‘work’.

How sad that even the trade unions have been so conditioned by their members’ subordination that they feel obliged to keep, and bring, all gainful activity within the wage-labour prison, denouncing forms outside it as ‘precarious’; joining in the clamour for ‘jobs’; and only criticising the persecution of the disabled and other unenslaved people with weak arguments that tacitly accept the state’s own premises, such as ‘it doesn’t work’, ‘it doesn’t save money’, or ‘more fraud is committed by the rich’.

All of us are inherently, existentially disabled by mortality and sentience; some of us are contingently, clinically disabled as well. As ‘the disabled’, we all demand something better than forced labour with its joyless ethos. We demand, as per the anarchist slogan, life.