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On the Clock is Motherboard's reporting on the organized labor movement, gig work, automation, and the future of work.
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Its first major real-world coordinated action will be calling on subscribers to abstain from all wage labor and shopping on Black Friday, an action described in depth in a thread called “ANTIWORK MEGATHREAD: BLACKOUT BLACK FRIDAY,” where subscribers have been prompted to brainstorm ideas for mutual aid and “ways in which this event could be impactful.” The mega-thread has received 12,000 upvotes.“I quit my job mentally but I am still at work doing nothing and collecting pay. Anyone else quit their jobs while still showing up to grab as much cash before being shown the door?”
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McKenzie is a 33-year-old living in Columbia, South Carolina. He has been a bartender for most of his adult life. In early 20s, he read Marx and Durkheim, and started to develop ideas that working-class people like himself “weren’t getting the full value of their labor.”In 2017, McKenzie joined r/antiwork which had 2,000 subscribers at the time and defined itself as “a subreddit for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggle.”McKenzie appreciated the online community for providing a space where people could talk openly and anonymously about work problems—but also for problematizing the very idea of work itself. After his daughter was born, he racked up thousands of dollars in debt in hospital and doctor’s bills because his employer provided no healthcare or parental leave benefits. “It helps to know you’re not alone in feeling like this. It’s normal to be at your wit’s end with your life as it revolves around work,” he told Motherboard. On r/antiwork, many of the posts simply chronicle wage theft, burdensome debt, ruthless bosses, or other exploitative situations at work. In a recent post titled, “Stiffed out of $6700,” u/OzTheOkay wrote about getting wages stolen from a Halloween store. “We've been working so hard all season because they promised us a pretty nice bonus this year. $100 for every 1% that we're over our sales goal,” they wrote. “Well we went over by 67% and then at the last minute they said ‘Oh hey that bonus doesn't actually apply to any of you.’ I am so pissed off along with everyone else that has been pushing sales.” The post received 12,000 upvotes.
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The explosion of r/antiwork takes place within this context. While for years, the community was populated by self-identified anarchists, communists, and radicals, it has in recent months shifted toward a larger and more mainstream audience that has come to similar realizations about the fundamental nature of work under capitalism.“Anti-work is the theme of an ongoing and much-needed conversation, but also an impulse that is present in a variety of radical oppositions to the status quo.”
The practice of refusing work dates back as far as ancient Greece, when a school of philosophers, known as Cynics, who believed living in harmony with nature, gave up all of their worldly possessions, to beg and preach in the streets of Athens, in some cases sleeping in wash tubs. For centuries, the refusal of work has been practiced by various subcultures (including enslaved African Americans in the United States), with and without political or philosophical objectives, throughout history. In response to capitalism specifically, ideas about refusing work developed out of Marxism in the late 1880s. In 1883, Karl Marx’s son-in-law Paul LaFargue, a French-Cuban revolutionary, wrote The Right to Be Lazy, a critique of socialist ideas about work. "Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy,” the book opens. Lafargue argues against the socialist push to expand or redeem wage labor through public ownership, and says we should abolish work altogether.
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