TOTW: Quit Your Job

Why do anarchists work so much, and what are creative ways to live without working? Even if we don't abolish work completely, what are strategies for reducing the amount of work in our lives, or for making work an attack on an capitalist way of life? Is a world without work truly possible?

By 'work' I'll use a definition from CrimethInc: "Work—which is to say, all activity that is determined by the necessity to make a profit for someone, rather than chosen on account of its intrinsic value—is precisely what prevents us from fulfilling our needs." Work alienates our time and activities from us, it directly contributes to the commodification and exploitation of people and resources, it directly funds government and military expenditures through taxes, it keeps people too busy to revolt against this state of affairs. Work is miserable, so how can we eliminate it from our lives?

Abolishing work doesn't mean ceasing to do anything meaningful or useful. We will still have needs and it will still require effort to meet them. Life without work frees us to focus our efforts on how to meet these needs while undermining the legitimacy of capitalist modes of production. There are so many ways to meet these needs without working, to name a few: squatting, forcing landlords to evict you instead of paying rent, receiving social benefits (e.g., food stamps, Medicaid), participating in and using community food distribution (e.g., food banks, Food Not Bombs, community gardens), dumpstering, migrating seasonally to places with temperate weather, pooling money and resources with friends, refusing to repay debts, stealing and fraud, lying flat and leeching off of society. Such a lifestyle may seem tedious to some, but is work any better?

Obviously there are some things that are very difficult to acquire without paying for them. Not everyone wants to live in a barrel like Diogenes, so maybe it's sometimes more practical to work for a bit of money than constantly live in evasion. To that end, how can we make work benefit us and undermine capitalism? Besides the obvious examples of slacking off and stealing from work, a few examples come to mind: taking a retail job to learn about store layouts and camera coverage; taking a job at a print shop to print zines for a distro project. Are there other ways to subvert employment beyond petty workplace theft?

More Readings on Anti-Work

The Abolition of Work
Anti-Work: From "I Quit" to "We Revolt"
What Work Steals from Us
Well, I Quit
Anarchism in the Workplace

There are 65 Comments

Honestly that would be kinda fun. Have the preteen title of king of the pirates. Whoever has the highest provable anarchy number is the pirate king. Instead insurrection anarchists should spend their time competing to get the best high score.

Ah, anarchist kings... Nothing contradictory for sure!

I agree

Combative prole translation:
"Since what we're about isn't an opposition to the larger social order, but an individualistic, drop-out culture accommodation to it, how do we make ourselves feel good about this while continuing to callourselves anarchists?"

Does a group of proles do to destroy a social order, then? explain to my dumb ears how property and morality can be abolished in one fell swoop, from inside *or* outside?

"in one fell swoop" is a red herring. Consumer society promises instant gratification. But the negation of this is a long-term daunting process of militant engagement with and against the larger social order around us.

What proles do to abolish -- attempt to abolish -- a social order: Conspiracy of Equals in Paris in 1796, Paris 1871, Mexico 1915, Russia 1917-1921, Spain July to Sept. 1936, France May-June 1968, some aspects of the so-called 'Cultural Revolution' in China in the late 1960s...

And there are others.

i'm still here to ask again why you think those events posed threats to capital, morality, civilization, three things that transcend individual states and are just as rooted in human normative momentum as they are in the laws and constitutions of existing states... what is the special mid-and-post-revolution trajectory that turns a soc auth dem commie war into a rejection of norms, morality, and rejection of attempts to influence and control the people around you? Do the communists become zen indigenous daoists after some kind of revolutionary criteria is met?

So answer me this, genius: the stuff that you are so excited about that the Conspiracy of Equals was doing in Paris in 1796, or the communards in Paris 1871, etc. etc. (we're going to leave out the Cultural Revolution because fuck you, you Maoist piece of fucking trash)... was that *work*? Or was it not work?

If it was work, according to the explicit definition given above, it was not a break with capitalist society. If it was not work, then you yourself are committed to an anti-work agenda, and you had better SHUT THE FUCK UP with your strawman critiques of anti-work.

Don't let Kevin Keating work you up so much. It's not like anyone has ever listened to him

> sensors

no, shamebot. "sensors" is a correct usage, and is what makes it clever.

who shames the shamebot? oh right, bots can't be shamed.

Obviously I'm not a Maoist if I call it the so-called Cultural Revolution, ignorant asshole.

Sounds exactly like something a Maoist would say just before dragging the elderly into the street to be shamed and have their belongings redistributed.

why would i want to "abolish" morality? everyone's got their personal morality, and I don't really believe in psychological egoism/hedonism as an explanation for human behavior as Stirner does

and when they apply their moral framework to measure or judge other people they act as just another cop. i don't really enjoy coercion of any kind, and the only way to use morality interpersonally is to try to influence or coerce. get rid of bourgeoisie morality, get rid of your morality, and admit that the other people around you are autonomous actors outside of your control. this is the starting point for learning how to live together in balance. any value framework is just a crutch to aid (stifle) thinking. this world is absurd, people are absurd, so stop pretending to be able to objectively place value on things and just do your thing!

that's right, we each have our own way to see, experience, view, have opinions about, etc etc, the world. i can think people are autonomous actors and still have opinions about their actions. if we have the right relationship, i might even let you know if i like or approve or dislike or find questionable your actions. or i may try to influence you by talking with you. those are my prerogatives as an autonomous actor, yes?

and, aren't you trying to persuade by typing "so stop pretending to be able..." etc. ?

it's *impossible* to be a logically consistent actor, especially with the disadvantaged starting point many of us learned from. i'm on the fence about influencing people, myself. i kinda feel like if you're trying to do so you might as well call it "subtly manipulating" the psyche of your friends and lovers "for their/your own good." but there's something in there about the only meaningful learning comes from within, teach to learn how to fish, don't give a fish, don't teach to fish... ya know? maybe to influence is to be a pessimistic troll always pointing out when people are acting colonized, or maybe it's to be a very pessimistic troll, pointing out why people will never be able to purge colonized influences from themselves when colonized tools and incentives is all they are holding on to... :)

maybe logical consistency is the problem. have you tried being logically inconsistent? or illogically inconsistent?

i think influence is influence and subtle manipulation is subtle manipulation. to me, influence is me suggesting to a friend a book or a podcast. not "for their own good" but to offer a bit of information or entertainment. i also probably have a broader idea of what it means "to influence" like, i think what you ingest influences you, the music you hear etc,. i expect the world to influence me. that doesn't mean have no choice in what i keep and what i pass on.

let me ask you, if all meaningful learning comes from within, where did what's within come from?

i don't really buy that judging other people is somehow comparable to policing, or this narrow definition of morality. you can totally claim to know moral facts while thinking you shouldn't force those on other people.

i think only Kant believed in automous actors driven by reason, which is by definition a constraint of autonomy.

Nu uh.

If everyone lives like me civilization would collapse. It would be pretty close to that Idiocracy movie. Without the proles working the machinery of the death machine it would all just break down. if everyone just became lazy and did nothing capitalism would be destroyed.

Wanna be a revolutionary? Don't go to work and watch TV instead!

gotta agree with 8:56 for the most part. individualistic work arounds (pardon the pun) will not undermine capitalist logics or relationships. if i slack off all the better for me, i guess, except now some other person has to pick up that slack, if we're talking on the job slacking. (the boss ain't gonna do that task!)
but even things like dumpster diving rely on the excesses of capital.

otoh 9:07 brings up a decent point; just how do we undermine property relations? my first, flippant, answer is climate catastrophe. but that is not really a good answer.

some things can increase operating costs for capital: property damage or any action that results in increased spending toward repression. that juxtaposition creates a bit of a double bind of increasing risk with more effective damages...

some things can fund the poors without too much risk, damage, or notice from the authorities: dumpster, store theft, diy. this is the double bind claimed by critics of lifestylism (along with the often correct fallacy that these are the only vein a person swims in). it meets needs without posing a threat and therefore it may almost be a "sustainable" activity as long as there is capital and an upper (professional) class that performs waste.

when one of the coyote activities moves into wolf territory (smash and grab, vehicle theft, burglary, arson of passion) it instantly attracts much more enforcement funding and perversely long prison sentences (in the bougie white burbs where i live), not to mention shitty media takes and weird moralizing from audience members.

i suspect the math adds up poorly on generalizing activities of threatening type, maybe for reasons outlined by foucalt and deleuze/guattari. And aragorn! told me he didn't think sexy rebels alone was enough to break out of a subculture. Some evidence suggests that anarchy thoughts can only ever enter the mainstream by adopting mainstream logic. are all these sources roughly correct?

the state of control functions by identifying the animal behavior of humans and constructing a set of structures so that the house always wins. when my more decolonized friends act on impulse to the exclusion of their tactical logical capacities, they fall more readily into the traps of 5-0 or simply the many many soft social coercion mechanisms all around us. for these reasons i worry laziness alone will easily be/has already been coopted and defanged. laziness is what gets professionals to get degrees and run from labor jobs, so it plays a huge role in forming class strata. to my mind laziness also creates aspects of bigotry type othering, because every fool white cis construction worker wants to act like they work so hard, and they sometimes do, but it's all for retirement and the weekends, and it lets them complain and avoid doing the dishes. how many people are honest with themselves/others about how hard they work or how much more they could do/how much they want to quit and find a way to live without income... such civilized animals.
it might behoove (ha ha) us to reflect on why the house always wins, and whether it will "win" climate change, or what might be done... :)

i really just meant that property is not just out there, but it is also a thing/concept in our minds. for some of us, it takes a lot to pull us out of that set of beliefs. it might take a catastrophe to break those deeply ingrained habits of mind.

in the meantime, short of making someone else do your work for you, doing whatever you able to do to slack seems like a no-brainer.

i'm curious what you think aragorn! meant by "mainstream logic," or what you mean anyway?

on my view people are importantly but not exclusively mimetic, and there exist many respectable ways of living these kinds of principles that one could mimic; but they often seem perversely high-cost or high-effort, even while they deny on their face they have any reasonable chance of payout (the house always wins indeed!). there's a sense in which the ask is to give your whole life over to performing a particular kind of show, and even a person who is inclined to give their life for it might reasonably balk at the specifics.

or, on the other hand, living that way can seem to demand a kind of networking (the subculture i assume you mean) that is no different from the kind you're supposed to submit to if you want any other good job or career or social niche or whatever. i prefer to meet people because i want them in my life, not because i need to know them to engage in some community that claims my principles.

so, is it "mainstream logic" when these questions take on an ethical character (you should or shouldnt do X if you believe Y, this way of living is or isn't capable of Z but at least its /consistent/ etc)? does that mean the question is how to propagate willingness to perform in these particular ways, as prefigurative sacrifices to the world in which they have become generalized, even if that propagation requires playing some higher stakes social game? maybe nettle is right that climate collapse will force the issue, im not so sure. people will look to what underlies the comfort of their home (such as it is) first, and balk at rejecting that--not just because they rely on it for comfort, but because the act of rejection then (apparently) becomes a new kind of production, a constant demand, a different job. is there a way of qualifying an outwardly, apparently normal or mainstream way of life as antagonistic to the engines that pump out those designations?

i think i was quoting "against friendship" for aragorn's statement "being sexy rebels is not enough", and then, separately, by "mainstream logic" i meant "i'm worried every thinking pattern that successfully enters non anarchist people's minds is necessarily coopted by doing so." and therefore that its not interesting to me to present my ideas to liberals or authority-minded people. but it brings up a question like yours: on the individual scale, is it possible to act in a way that is not coopted, controlled, and owned by threatening powers? at a societal scale, will deleuze's control state only end with the extinction of humans or might it be brought to end sooner? or might it only be replaced by some methods of control even more nefarious?

it's quite possible that there is no answer, but i suppose in the interest of specifics we have to be there to know... every general thought may have been thought, but the specifics of each time and place are always in development, and there are creatures there to participate along the way. it kinda sucks to be Civilization's unconsenting bitch, for my part... and it doesn't help to lean into it.

yes, work sucks. i limit it to a bare minimum, i simplify my life to as little financial exchanges as necessary and create as much of my own shit as possible. BUT, i also must say, that those who shout the loudest about work often need to do so the least because of the inherited intergenerational wealth (or hitching one's wagon to someone's)....just sayin'. good for them, seriously, but maybe they should also shut the fuck up sometimes about work.

The big question posed in this exchange is, is this an expression of an authentic revolutionary antagonism to capitalist social relations? One that might spread in a big way in the larger world around us? Or is it a self-indulgent, passive and disengaged drop-out culture trip?

I'm unconvinced that anything anyone does can be an authentic expression of revolutionary antagonism while within the necrotizing panopticon called civilization. I can't even take a shit without smartphones listening to me. How authentic can any action I take be when I have to censure myself, even here? Even among trusted friends 99.9% of the time, all because of the All-Seeing, All-Hearing Rectangle God?

Sounds like you have an impressive amount of actually lived experience of real world opposition to capital and the state.

High net worth individuals like would do well to ask your broker.

Sex work is work but I've never worked a day in my life :-(

Tang ping(躺平), bailan(摆烂), hikikomori, hermit, NEET, touching fish, bedrotting, oogle pride, dropping out, going goblin mode, hedonism, a manuke revolt, gone to croatan; there are many words and phrases for shirking work. Does this lifestyle have a place in anarchism or is it counter revolutionary clap trap? Do you always need to maximize pleasure or does life not have to be glamorous? Do you find yourself exerting the least amount of effort possible? Napping even? Sauntering? Are you too lazy to even BE lazy? Do you find yourself feeling some slacker pride or do you get bored easily? Do you take your laziness with a side of DIY? Taking it slow or in a rush? Are you so lazy you even neglect stuff you want to do? Is it just that if you were living somewhere else you’d have more stuff you actually want to do but for now you’re in the wrong town? Tune in next week to find out!

tbh being a hermit/NEET/hikikomori is a lot more than just refusing work

Hikkikomori is an extreme form of social alienation, more than an "unplugging", personal strike or quitting. Ok, maybe a kind of personal strike, but that's as far as it gets. NEET doesn't mean anything much... it can be someone on the dole or on the sidewalk.. or some vanlyfer.

Tang Ping/Manuke Revolt is where it's at, especially for these super-consumerist economies. Hedonism is liberal hipster shit, and also a culture based on addiction and consumption... full stop with these brutish conflations, brow. Read Epicurus for once!

Gone to Croatan I'll look it up... but please quit comparing oranges to onions for fuck's sake. I don't wanna cook with a cross-eyed maniac on meth like you.

Get 2 ppl to work the same Brinks truck shift. Crash the truck in an accident and have some friends help with clean up. Never work again. Spend your free time doing revolutionary shit or nothing. Anarcho-win.

Anarcho-Litigationist for the win, use liberal courts to make capitalists pay for your injury. Live free of financial insecurity and enjoy being a cripple/victim!

Based

Or have a movement where you bait noobs into getting wrongfully arrested in some dumb action then siphon their court settlements into your land project

Yea... and you get a bonus if you collaborate with the pigs, facilitating their job. I see where you're getting at, Miss-Based.

Better if you avoid the court system and go straight for the jugular by becoming a corrupt cop, the anarcho-police! Seize drugs off dealers and all their capitalist cash profits and spend it on a land project and don't go to jail.

The question of whether or not to work (as defined here) depends a lot on what skills you have. If you are skilled in a trade and can reliably produce, the alternatives to getting a job look a lot different than they do when you're unskilled or you are skilled at things that don't fit into the legal economy. If you have wilderness skills, then that's another thing as well.

Example:

If you are a plumber with 1-year of experience, you can expect to make $23.15/hr or $48,326/yr in Arizona ( based on https://www.indeed.com/career/plumber/salaries/AZ ). Assuming there are some, what alternatives come even close to that? Can you find customers on your own without getting a job? Probably. Enough to compare with the job? Maybe.

Compare that with the minimum wage, which was just raised from $13.85 to $14.35 on Jan. 1, 2024 ... $29,848 a year if I didn't fuck the math. Now think about alternatives that approximate ~$30K/yr. How much is a squatted room worth compared to renting a room in the same location? How much is the dumpstered food worth? And so on. In my experience, living on food stamps, medicaid, dumpstered food, cheap or no rent rooms, and the rest compared pretty favorably to working for an asshole boss with annoying co-workers at times I didn't want to work and for lengths of time that I didn't want to work for. But when I began to gain skills, not only was the income better... the work relationships themselves were better, the hours were better, the interactions with customers (if there were any) were better, etc. I'm not even sure if it would be worth my time to find customers myself for my skillset when I can get a job with companies that already have a reliable customer base. The "no job" options just don't compare favorably.

That has almost nothing to do with my point that skill development changes the implications of working vs not working.

Actually I see how that’s relevant now, but it’s because I lost my own point as I was thinking out loud in the form of a comment.

Just trying to say that skill development changes both the options of not working AND the options of working. It just struck me how often this conversation seems to kind of assume the scenarios of an unskilled individual. I like skills.

skills

I just use my incredibly sexy strong body and charming personality to seduce the booj into showering me with allowances and residences. Monaco is lovely this time of year for a little anarchy. The best advice I can give you fellow anarchs looking to not work is to simply not be ugly.
Bella ciao

Just because someone doesn't have a boss doesn't mean they don't work! In some cases building something yourself instead of buying it may be mountains of work, but if you are doing more than just bolting factory-made parts together you stretch money by a factor of as much as 5x or even more.

Lots of us build bikes, but that should be the beginning not the end. If you've seen me at an action, you've no doubt seen me on one of the steeds built with my own hands. Building my own stuff goes back to when I was a little kid. My family was one of the least well off on the block, so lots of things I wanted my parents could not afford to buy for me. They'd say to wait for Christmas, I'd say to forget that and start working on building it myself. As I got older the results improved.

Consider a modern, front wheel drive car with a busted gearset in the transmission. If you take it to the dealer and get a brand new transmission, that's $10,000! At a "real" transmission shop still several thousand bucks. Instead, you can get the gearset, a rebuilt kit, and even a transmission jack all for under $1000 for all. The work takes about a week the first time around, less if you do this job a second time for a friend. This IS a case of bolting factory made parts together for that matter.

Now consider sheds in which to keep tools, parts, or anything else: You can buy a shed for several thousand dollars, or you can build one out of scrap wood, cutting the pieces yourself and finding the main expense is the screws to put it together. Want hurricane resistant construction? Look at an expensive shed, perhaps one certified to tough South Florida building codes. Look at how its put together and copy that. You can buy the steel brackets ready-made (they save time), or make them yourself from scrap metal and save $100 or so. If you can get out of range of building inspectors and zoning assholes, this can be scaled up to a house BTW. Take the time to make everything actually fit right, you'll be glad you did. Sometimes the hardest part is getting the foundation actually level. Dig and pack, dig some more, pack some more dirt back, take another measurement, repeat as needed.

I may not be able to SELL my work, but that is not the same as not working! if it expends energy and has a useful output, it's work. This has been observed by stay at home parents for untold generations.

Saying that people not employed by capitalists don't work is like saying sex workers who work independently of pimps are not sex workers-or that people who are not sex workers don't have sex at all! Even more extreme, it's like saying subsistance farmers don't work, anyone saying THAT knows nothing of how much work a farm really is.

As far as realistic compromises that can work for some people, being over-employed is a pretty good way to get a lot of money in a short amount of time so you can not work for a while. Just got to pass an interview and make it through the first couple weeks.

How do we passive drop-outs accommodate our submission to capital in ways that make us feels good as anarchist subculture dwellers?

no, it's more "how do we deal with the internalized protestant work ethic we intend to eschew as it pops up in unexpected ways to sabotage our best attempts at anarchy?"

Firstly, develop a stoic and cynical view of all adult behavior, and never become sombre, or you ressentiment will emerge and seethe within you brah!

What's you conception of anarchy? Playdates with scenesters? Cause that's all I've seen here for more than forty years.

To the work-cucked idiots commenting here:

1) Working a job prevents you from doing other things that require time, mobility, and risk. For example, participating in a long-term land defense, or doing things that would risk arrest and losing your job.
2) Working a job directly supports the federal government through taxes, and indirectly supports the entire capitalist and civ systems through participating in their system of economic relations.
3) Working a job prevents you from developing new social and economic relations that are opposed to the current system. Instead of some DIY housing project, or whatever, you're working. Instead of spending time writing, reading, exploring, or doing whatever you enjoy with friends you're either working or too tired to do anything so watching Netflix. Working a job pushes any oppositional activity to nights and weekends activity. And when you get engaged with anarchist projects, you bring in your work relations, your PowerPoints, your meetings, your dumb business organization formulas, your superficial hang-out-over-beers social relationships, your rules and regulations, and your totalizing objectives of effectiveness and efficiency.
4) Working a job invests you in a system that you supposedly hate. You want your company to do well, you want others to do well too, you want your stonks to go up, and you want to save for retirement. You've capitulated to not only supporting your supposed enemy with most of your life and creative powers, but also waiting to do anything outside of that until retirement.
5) Working a job absolutely warps your mind to believe that nothing else is possible. To interpret this prompt as being about "dropout" with no merit simply reveals both your lack of imagination and fear of what life might be without following the beaten path. You've accepted capitalist realism. You've been so contorted by cognitive dissonance from the contradiction of engaging in work and also being an "anarchist".
6) The argument that nothing makes difference or this is just individualistic or whatever is nonsense: when you cease to enslave yourself, you change. When you stop submitting to work, you might stop submitting to other things. That's maybe the most important part: caring about yourself and your own freedom is a prerequisite for doing the same for others.

I can see practical reasons for working a job. Not everyone has scams or schemes or supportive comrades or family to get by. Not everyone wants to live hard all or even most of the time. But I don't see any arguments for why quitting your job is inherently childish or moronic.

Come to terms with your cognitive dissonance or just accept that you're a fucking capitalist.

you left out that not everyone taps into a trust fund and acts poor cause it looks cool.

The anti work argument is fine and makes plenty of sense, but it also seems to play a little hide the ball that the alternative is literally being an in deep, full time criminal of some sort or another. That’s great, but it’s also it’s own work. Being anti work is easy when you’re young and have a ton of buddies who it seems are on the same page. But yeah-moonbeam over there has parental money to fall back on, and saffrxn is taking classes for some profession, and jackalope is just slumming for a couple years and already has a degree. The scene doesn’t let you know you’ll end up 30 something, skillless, unemployable, and somehow the others will have figured their shit out while the free staples copies have dried up, all the stores in the area have your picture up for shoplifting , and no body wants to come to your meeting for some thing or another.

just make a bunch of friends and start a land project with them (super easy /s) and then that'll be your job!

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