My alarm went off at 4:30 this morning. It was Monday (still is, in fact). The sky was grey, though this being July, it was at least light. I lay there for a time, coming back to awareness of my body, of who and where I was - and, to a lesser degree, why. This is normal: too normal for further remark. Millions and millions of humans wake up every Monday morning to their preset alarms, compelled by economic necessity to wake earlier than we would probably choose to otherwise.
In his famous essay from 1967, Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism [pdf] E. P. Thompson writes:
"Those who are employed experience a distinction between their employer's time and their 'own' time. And the employer must use the time of his labour and see it is not wasted: not the task but the value of time when reduced to money is dominant. Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent."
Time is money, as we know. Marx's insight that wage-labour is fundamentally alienating is as true now for anyone on a 40-hour-a-week minimum-wage job as it was for the industrial workers of the mid-19th century he inspired - despite the many improvements in working conditions, rights, and employment laws that have been won in the intervening years by worker and labour organisations, even long after the words "communist" and "socialist" has slipped into use as little more than pejoratives. No matter how pleasant and "flexible" your working conditions may be, how sympathetic your boss may have become to your needs and rights, the time you spend working at your "job" is no more your own than it was before such things as the minimum wage, maternity leave, occupational health assessments or paid holidays. Your value is measured in the time spent on the work assigned to you. The harder you work - the more hours you "put in" - the greater your reward. Stress, depression, the psychologically unhealthy glorification of egoistic, aggressive and inhumane competitiveness, the inevitable negative side effects of involuntary work can all be brushed away as necessary evils when considered in the context of financial gain.
Alarm clocks have been with us for centuries. The 'snooze' function is a much more recent development. That's something worth mentioning.
Alarm clocks have been with us for centuries. The 'snooze' function is a much more recent development. That's something worth mentioning.
With the emergence of the "gig economy", far less has actually changed than its promoters would have us believe. The phenomenon is an absolute triumph for spectacular capitalism: it creates the illusion of self-employment, of freedom, of maximum flexibility, while in reality condemning the economically disposable masses to longer hours, lower pay, and fewer of the rights most non-gig economy employees can take for granted; not to mention the higher-risk, lonelier and less reliable conditions that result from your income being more or less contingent on how many people within a 5-mile radius fancy a pizza. Uber, Deliveroo, and their many, many competitors all get away with this by having their workers as "independent contractors", rather than true employees: paid volunteers, in effect. Or perhaps not, as volunteers don't usually volunteer 70 hours a week of their time to do something they don't actually enjoy.
 |
| Fear this man. |
The illusion is this. That work, however efficient, however rewarding (financially or otherwise) is intrinsically valuable, and something to aspire to. That to want not to work, even if it makes your life materially poorer - in fact, knowing that this will be the result, is perverse. That the unemployed are lazy by definition; a social scourge, rather than the source of some of its greatest role models. The cockney rhyming slang for "dole" was "rock and roll". That's something worth mentioning, too.
In the classic anti-work comedy Office Space, cubicle-bound everyman protagonist Peter Gibbons finds himself stuck in a paradoxical kind of post-hypnotic clarity when his hypnotherapist suddenly collapses and dies before being able to complete the session. For almost the entire film thereafter, he lives with the singularity of purpose that comes with total indifference to the consequences of his actions, but motivated by the contempt he feels for his employers, and had been suppressed by the requirements of professionalism and adult respectability. Just before going under hypnosis, Peter explains:
In the classic anti-work comedy Office Space, cubicle-bound everyman protagonist Peter Gibbons finds himself stuck in a paradoxical kind of post-hypnotic clarity when his hypnotherapist suddenly collapses and dies before being able to complete the session. For almost the entire film thereafter, he lives with the singularity of purpose that comes with total indifference to the consequences of his actions, but motivated by the contempt he feels for his employers, and had been suppressed by the requirements of professionalism and adult respectability. Just before going under hypnosis, Peter explains:
"So I was sitting in my cubicle today and I realized that ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So it means that every single day you see me, that's on the worst day of my life".And implores the therapist:
"Is there any way that you can just, sort of, just zonk me out, so that I don't know that I'm at work? Could I come home, and think that I'd been fishing all day, or...something?"
More than the desire for revenge, for revolution, against our "bosses", I think, we 21st century proles (and that's all we are, don't let the narrative of being "middle class" fool you, there is no such thing) is driven by the desire for an inner kind of revolution. A spiritual revolution, if you must. (Capitalists gonna capitalise). It is the desire to be free not only from meaningless paid employment but from the experience of one-dimensional, linear, economic time. Raoul Vaneigem's "one huge instant...without the experience of 'time passing'."
It's been a while since I worked on a Monday. I've managed to adjust my life(style) such that I now only need to work 15-20 hours a week, on average, to make ends meet. (The secret is just in having fewer ends). This still isn't good enough. Today I went into the office for 9am. 9am on a Monday morning, just like millions and millions of others. I didn't want to be there, but I was, because of circumstance. A widely-reported recent study claimed that for anyone to start work before 10am is akin to the "torture" of sleep-deprivation. Alarm clocks are instruments of torture. We keep them next to our beds. When they don't go off and we sleep in as nature intended, there'll be someone out there in the waking world waiting for our apology. These people are not your friends.
There are several threads in this post I could draw together into a satisfactory conclusion, but I'm not going to do that. I left the office at lunchtime today, because I can. Now I'm sitting in a cafe, finishing off this paragraph, and when I've done that, I'm going home for a nap. I'm not ashamed of this, in fact I'm proud of it, though society still has a long way to go before we make it the Utopia we idlers dream of; but for now it's enough to live in a world of semi-abundance where such a thing is even possible. Workers of the world, sleep!
Related Posts
The State of Play
A Brief Rant on the Nature of Things
Thoughts from a non empty room
Working to Live
Another perspective on freedom
Marx, Money and Me
On staring out the window
Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site. I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog. So it's really nothing to be afraid of. Cheers.
Comments
Post a Comment
Your comments are welcome.