Skip to main content

Anti-Work and Everyday Marxism: an Op Ed -Anomnachi

 “Had marxism not existed, ‘post-marxism’ would have had to invent it, so that “deconstructing” it once more would give the ‘deconstructionists’ something further to do.”


“The problem of ideology, therefore, concerns the ways in which ideas of different kinds grip the minds of masses, and thereby become a ‘material force.’”


The Problem of Ideology--Marxism without Guarantees, Stuart Hall


In the hallowed halls of the academy, debates have raged for generations about what Marxism can explain. Meanwhile, among assembly line workers and Amazon drivers, among meme pages and people who hate their jobs, the debate rages about what Marxism can do. When Stuart Hall and members of the New Left set out to define “post-marxism,” they wanted to fill in the gaps in Marx’s understanding of how social ideas arise. Today, exhausted by the crushing weight of existence under capitalism, members of the r/antiwork Reddit community enact new social ideals in a way that can only be termed Everyday Marxism.


Seemingly, most working class people are not on the same page, despite their common interests. There is little left to do in explaining why the Communist Manifesto failed to ignite the flame of socialist revolution and topple the bastions of capitalism. The answer is in the question. Capitalism sports a host of in-built defenses against revolution, including, but not limited to, surveillance, state violence, debt, and ideology. Post-marxism addresses the latter: post-marxist thinkers complicate the notion that ideology functions in a top-down manner, making important strides in how scholars approach “working-class thought.” They seek to recognize the multitude of ways working-class people have to think and act to navigate existence under capitalism. Disagreements are all too common among working class people, who are faced with the choice to resist or embrace capitalist existence


Recently, there has been a shift in the common sense approach to explaining why we are not all on the same page. If we want to meet people where they are, we have to recognize that we are all on a much more similar page than scholars assume when crafting their arguments. This shift reveals ways of thinking and acting under capitalism that I term “Everyday Marxism.” Traditional Marxism assumes that the failure of the working class to revolutionarily destabilize capitalism is the result of an entire class gripped by the ideology of the bourgeoisie. Post-Marxism, however, reveals that a working-class person’s existence under capitalism is characterized by market relations, which require them to continue being exploited.


In a society where Marxist ideology has been percolating in one form or another for generations, people today are more equipped than ever to understand the conditions of their exploitation. Everyday Marxism characterizes the manifestations of Marxist ideology in people bound by the interlocking systems of capitalism. This manifestation is stronger nowhere than in the community of r/antiwork. The concept of Everyday Marxism draws heavily on history scholars who champion the notion of “everyday resistance” in other contexts. Here, however, it is manifest in the actions taken by individuals to subvert the institution of work itself, and the adulation of their online peers when doing so. It is not uncommon in this community to see the spread of distinctly Marxist social ideals, but what is “everyday” about this formation is the agreement they have made between these ideals and work. Everyday Marxism is a way to negotiate living in a world where one must work to survive, and an existence where one understands work as exploitation. 


This negotiation commonly takes the form of working as little as possible. Adherents of the anti-work philosophy might “steal” time from employers by lazing on the clock. They might encourage employees of an understaffed store to band together and close the establishment for themselves. They might trade tips on flexible work arrangements. Whatever they do, they do not embody the “capitalist” ideals that traditional Marxists argue one must to explain the continued existence of the working class. If we opt instead for a post-Marxist framework, calling in sick constitutes an act of Everyday Marxism.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Journals and Prose

My two questions from this week have emerged from the Judith Butler piece, A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back , both centered around the journal, Philosophy and Literature —which Butler describes as the self-proclaimed “arbiter of good prose.”  I agree with Butler’s staunch defense of questioning common sense and provoking “new ways of looking at a familiar world”, and was reminded of David Harvey’s quote in the introduction to his Companion to Marx’s Capital : “Real learning always entails a struggle to understand the unknown.”   Butler describes Philosophy and Literature as a “culturally conservative academic journal” which naturally led me down a longer-than-anticipated visit to the journal's website . I was greeted with a video presented by the Philosophy and Literature’s editor Garry L. Hagberg, who rails against the “jargon infested” work that litters the journal’s field, locating Philosophy and Literature in clear opposition to such bothersome clutter.  However, Hagberg...
Post a Comment
Read more

Articulation_by_Abby Escatel

 In "Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance," Stuart Hall is concerned with complicating Marxist theory's tendency to overgeneralize and universalize its claims that are specifically located within a European history of labor. Questions concerning slavery, coloniality, unfree/forced labor come to the fore and force Marxist theorists to grapple with the need to be specific in their contextualization and historicization of particular moments, ruptures and conjunctures. My questions are as follows:  1. How do we move forward with Marxism while taking into account the component of "unfreedom" when conceptualizing class, labor, and labor power? How does the "proletariat" fail to account for the lived realities of racialized bodies?  2. It seems as though Hall is also saying that race is not all encompassing and also shouldn't be overgeneralized/universalized. In short, labor and race are both always already at work. As a scholar who ce...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 5

  What are the differences between Gramsci’s concept of the “organic intellectual” and Hall’s “public pedagogy?”   On the topic of the diasporic intellectual, Kuan-Hsing Chen mentions that “Some of the diasporic intellectuals I know of have exercised their power, for better or worse, back home, but you have not. And some of them are trying to move back, in whatever way. So, in that sense, you are very peculiar” (503). Although Hall felt some reconnection with the Carribean through the Black diasporic population in Britain, he insists that cultural identity is not fixed but “comes out of very specific historical formations, out of very specific histories and cultural repertoires of enunciation, that it can constitute a ‘positionality’, which we call, provisionally, identity” (503). Individuals can negotiate, rearticulate, recontextualize their different identities, but how does this rearticulation work at an institutional-level?   Thelma
Post a Comment
Read more