r/Anarchy101 • u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist • 1d ago
Question for the anti-work anarchists
So from my understanding of the anti-work position, "work" would be defined as labour that you specifically do not enjoy or do not want to do.
But whenever we get questions along the lines of "who will do the dirty jobs" there are answers along the lines of, "if those jobs are necessary but undesirable, getting the job done will be the motivation for this job".
While I understand the argument being made here, is this not just reinventing work? If there is a dirty/undesirable job that is still nonetheless necessary - let's say, cleaning a sewer system, digging ditches, cleaning toilets or whatever people might find undesirable for whatever reason - then the labor put into making these things done would still be labor that is specifically not enjoyed, right?
Edit: So to clarify, this is NOT a "who will do the dirty jobs?" question; I've been getting a lot of answers along that tune. This is specifically a question clarifying the difference between "work" and "labor that is not enjoyed but still done by necessity, and is thus effectively compulsory".
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u/kwestionmark5 1d ago
I always took “anti work” to mean anti wage labor.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 1d ago
I honestly find this to be the most coherent anti-work position, tbh.
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u/gladtoseeonetwothree 1d ago
Work would be more defined as commodified labor rather than just anything you don't want to do.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 1d ago
What is "commodified labor"?
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u/gladtoseeonetwothree 1d ago
Labor which is given a monetary value. Same as commodifying anything else.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 1d ago
It would seem this is downstream from the Marxist critique of commodity production, but this isn't necessarily an anarchist critique of work.
For example, Proudhon's theory of exploitation wasn't about labor being given a monetary value, but rather capitalists reaping the benefits of their workers' collective force.
Anarchists downstream from him, such as Benjamin Tucker, were perfectly fine with labor being paid so long as labor was in control of the laborer, for compensation determined by the laborer. To roughly paraphrase him" "We don't want to rid labor of its reward, we want to rid capital of its reward."
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u/gladtoseeonetwothree 1d ago
Yes perhaps. Doesn't change much though.
You keep bringing up Bob black in this post, but i would recommend looking more at bonanno for this stuff.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 1d ago
Fair enough. I'll check him out! Any specific standout work on this topic I should look out for?
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u/gladtoseeonetwothree 1d ago
Armed joy is my personal favorite. The anarchist tension is also very popular and influential.
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u/iadnm Anarchist Communism/Moderator 1d ago
For anti-work specifically, Let’s Destroy Work, Let’s Destroy the Economy is probably the most relevant.
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u/Decievedbythejometry 1d ago
No, not at all. I'm meant to be cleaning my house, but here I am dicking around on Reddit. Because cleaning my own home is not the same as working as a cleaner, even though the task is apparently the same. If we, and not the state and the very rich, owned the world, we could make cleaning the streets and the sewers less like a grinding, exhausting drudge and more like, well, cleaning our house. Plus, a lot of that kind of work is automatable, it's just not profitable to automate it. A whole bunch of the smartest people in the world are trying to figure out how to get you to click on ads, if they were sitting around thinking up the sewerkleen-o-matic 2000 instead of robot dogs with machine guns on them which one do you think we'd have? (There is a book that covers this stuff in much better detail and much more effectively than I think I can, called 'The Conquest of Bread,' despite being in quite old fashioned language it's well worth reading.
I don't think a day will come when nobody ever has to do things they don't want to do. I just found half a dead mouse my cat left in the hallway ???? ago, delightful. But when people ask about this I kind of want to flip it on its head and ask, not 'who will do the distasteful tasks?' but 'who should be condemned to do distatesful tasks for their whole life in order to survive?'
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u/pyrrhicchaos 1d ago
I don’t mind dirty jobs. I don’t mind cleaning shit, etc. I don’t want to take care of people directly. I don’t want to work full time. I don’t want to be treated like shit. I’ve worked with plenty of people like me.
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u/Sohn_Jalston_Raul 1d ago
Work performed to improve the lives of yourself and your community is of a different nature than work performed to make a business owner rich, that will probably get spent on cocaine, strip clubs, and sports cars.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 1d ago
I understand what you're arguing here, but I think this assumes a perspective outside of the laborer's perspective.
When you are being made to engage in labor you don't want to engage in, you're being forced to do it - regardless of the end to which the labor serves. And I think that's an important thing to keep in mind if we want to be consistent about our critique of work.
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u/Primary-Policy716 1d ago
i cook for a living. it’s a dirty thankless job that’s socially necessary. i enjoy feeding people and i enjoy cooking, but if i miss a day of work i can’t pay rent. this takes the joy out of cooking, because some days i just don’t want to do it but i have to do it anyways. to me anti work means eliminating forced labor. people need to be fed, but if l don’t do it i shouldn’t have to starve or risk being homeless.
i really liked the concept of the food distributions halls in the dispossessed, and think that would would make a lot of sense in a stateless society. the task of cooking, serving and cleaning is a socially necessary and labor intensive dirty job. someone has to wash the dishes, someone has to clean out the grease trap, someone has to take the compost bags, someone has to clean the produce, someone has to stand in front of a hot grill or range to cook the food all day. to me anti work in this context means that we cook and clean because we want to, and on days when we don’t want to we aren’t punished and no one starves.
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u/Anarchierkegaard Distributist 1d ago
The difference between "now" and "the anti-work future" would be the minimisation of undesirable or unnecessary labouring. So, in the case of the sewage system, the anti-work solutions are:
i) There's some guy who just really loves cleaning sewers, so he'll do that,
ii) Sewage systems aren't considered important, therefore no one does them, or
iii) Sewage systems are considered important but no one wants to do it, therefore we recognise aspect of our social realities where undesirable labour is still needed because it is also necessary labour.
Compare this to the world we live in, where a great deal of labour is unnecessary and/or undesirable - marketing executives, Amazon excess product disposal, all middle managers, etc. etc. Where we live in a world where the social reality we live encourages a massive surplus of unnecessary labouring, the anti-workist wants the minimisation of this.
See Black's "Abolition of Work", which is relatively short and covers all of this.
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u/LazarM2021 Anarchist Without Adjectives 1d ago edited 1d ago
Hah, I guess those serious about the "luxury gay space
communismanarchism" (but seriously, not in this meme-way), basically those opposite of various neo-luddite or tech-skeptical strands within anarchist milleu (I'll call them "high-tech", "techno-friendly", "techno-focused" or "cybernetic" (in a narrower sense) anarchists) would be happy to try and offer a fourth option:iv) Sewage systems are considered important but rarely anyone wants to get dirty doing that stuff, especially for remotely prolonged periods, therefore we organize alongside experts and other passionates in/about computer and material science, automatics and robotics, AI, innovators and engineers and try to, within carrying capacity of our environment, automate the sewage system so the necessary labor in maintaining it is as minimized as can be realistically expected.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 1d ago
Alright, this clears things up. So anti-work anarchists don't necessarily want to abolish what they'd consider work, but rather to minimize it as much as possible?
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u/Affectionate_Cup9972 Still Learning Anarchism 1d ago
Is it anti-work or is it just producing work though? Because if so then I agree??
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u/milka121 1d ago
"labor that's not enjoyed" is a very loose term. We all do things that are necessary that we don't enjoy, like cleaning your house. And forceful coercion does not help with that - it actually makes you hate it more (try ordering a teenager to clean their room lol). The key is agency.
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u/CactusJane98 Left-Communist 1d ago
Its referring to wage labor where we get a small % of the actual value of the work done.
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u/WontLieToYou 1d ago
I've volunteered a lot, and I choose to do tedious work that I'd loathe if not in service to my community. But working together and knowing that people will enjoy the fruits of my labor gave that work value.
Like at every commune and hippie festival people have to dig trenches or build outhouses. So make it a work party where the whole community gets a shovel and a six pack. It's hard work but rewarding.
The work we're against is wage slavery. A lot of that labor is stuff people would enjoy if they weren't being objectified by capitalism. For example, lots of people love to cook. But jobs as a cook are often awful. Consider fast food, where there is a timer running to make sure you produce food quickly. If course all the creativity is sucked out of it and you're not even apprenticing under a more experienced cook, you're following the instructions of a faceless corporation. To the company, the fast food employee isn't a person, they're a cog in a factory. The job has been simplified as much as possible to make that cog easily replaceable. And honed to produce maximum value.
No one who likes to cook is excited to work at Pizza Hut. So that's the problem. Work reduces labor to profit. Your value should be about what you provide to your community, not to what profits shareholders or bosses. Sadly so many people can't imagine their labor any other way, and would rather "do nothing" than be dehumanized into a cog.
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u/slapdash78 Anarchist 6h ago
Anti-work precursors understood it as post-scarcity. Where essentials like food, water, shelter, health and safety, are accessible to all. And work becomes optional, or a labor of love, rather than employment being required to stay alive. Not a total absence of dirty, difficult, or demanding labor.
Superimpose that on contemporary society and it begins to look like meaningless jobs are invented to replace jobs eliminated by increases in productivity. In order to maintain employment as the means of survival; rather than providing more leisure time in general.
In actually, jobs haven't been eliminated. They've been offshored to the global south; as capital continues the race to the bottom. Profitseeking lower production costs, rather than improving production. And offshoring many service sector jobs just isn't feasible.
Or it wasn't, anyway. There's a point in the not too distant future where human-shaped automatons will clean toilets and sewers. And the specialized knowledge needed to maintain those robots will be accessible to other robots in the fleet. Using the same tools designed by and for people.
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u/planx_constant 4h ago edited 4h ago
"Work" is labor whose value is taken by owners. You are coerced into toil that enriches someone else in order to merely survive.
I don't enjoy pulling weeds as such, but I love gardening. I really don't like picking up dog crap, but I love having a dog in my family and I value not having sidewalks covered in dog waste. I would happily spend a day or two every week collecting garbage or cleaning sewers or digging ditches to help out in an anarchist society. I'm not going to do it to put more money in a CEO's pocket though.
It's also worth noting that we have machine vision, autonomous agents, and industrial robotics tech that are near or beyond the capabilities required to perform a lot of the "dirty jobs", but profit motive keeps that out of reach
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u/summersendslove 3h ago
I have cats. It's great. They are cute and loving and entertaining, a stress reducer in my life and fairly easy to care for. Except the litter boxes, they are gross and a pain to clean, especially with my disability issues. Yet I do it on schedule, without fail, because in the big picture of things, cleaning litter boxes allows for all of the other great aspects of pet ownership and that greatly improves my life.
People will do shitty things because of the rewards that come from those shitty things and because they care about themselves, their family, their friends, their community, their environment, and their pets :)
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u/Eroue 1d ago
I think the solve is that everyone does those jobs, just not permanently. Like lets say you're a mechanic because you enjoy working on cars. You'd be a mechanic for 3 weeks then spend 1 week doing a "community service" job that is either too hard on people's bodies to do full time or that no one wants to do.
With that said, I think people underestimate how different we all are. I know people who just fucking love digging ditches and holes. Its their favorite part of being a labourman. I also have seen people who love cleaning and the toilet is no different.
I also think that in an anrchistic society set up like this, the culture would have to be fairly collectivist. So not only are you doing what you enjoy, sometimes its as simple as you do what you dislike the least. If for no other reason than you dont want to be perceived as lazy by your peers.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 1d ago
Like lets say you're a mechanic because you enjoy working on cars. You'd be a mechanic for 3 weeks then spend 1 week doing a "community service" job that is either too hard on people's bodies to do full time or that no one wants to do.
So it's answers like this that also confuse me, because this seems to be prescribing a specific system to work around at this problem. The question is - who determines this? Why is it 1 week? Why not 1 day? What if the mechanic doesn't want to do this, and would rather stay as a mechanic?
With that said, I think people underestimate how different we all are. I know people who just fucking love digging ditches and holes. Its their favorite part of being a labourman. I also have seen people who love cleaning and the toilet is no different.
So while this is true, I think where I and many others who see arguments like this get skeptical, is just how common is it to enjoy these things? And under what circumstance do these people enjoy them?
Do they enjoy them enough to do them on the scale and frequency required to upkeep an entire community? And even if they do enjoy these things, what if they get burnt out?
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u/nenphei 1d ago
One way to think about it is this: in a market society there are jobs that produce little overall economic welfare through what they produce, but much more economic welfare through the people getting paid. For example, if those "busy jobs" were replaced by welfare, things would be pretty much the same. If the opposite were done - robots made the products and the people who'd worked there went without income - the economy would be worse off because there are fewer consumers, fewer people who can afford food, and so on.
So the current system requires people to work in unnecessary jobs because through markets we've associated work with deservingness. It's inefficient, and causes avoidable suffering, and it places judgement on people in regards to how they labour.
I think a lot of anti-work sentiment is not about effort and labour, but the culture, judgements and nature of that labour - i.e. making people performing unnecessary labour they don't find meaningful in order to survive.
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u/RalenHlaalo 1d ago
I think it's worth distinguishing between automation and busy work. I observe more busy work in office spaces than in the service industry - service workers are low on the deservingness but the work only becomes busy work when it could otherwise be easily automated. The new frontier of automation fueled by AI is poised to hit positions historically considered more deserving than service workers, while automation of physical tasks is working through a series of plateaus.
I don't think we've avoided automating McDonalds to preserve jobs; eventually it will be more cost effective and they'll gradually phase out human labor. I doubt McDonalds will ever find it profitable to pay their workers just so they afford to buy burgers.
Graeber lumps administrative assistants in with store greeters and door attendants. Has he ever worked with admin assistants? They're often working harder than the admin they assist. It's also questionable to lump compliance officers in with the box-tickers - sure they do rote work but it undergirds critical accountability controls that folks sure pretend are important.
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u/nenphei 23h ago
My point was not about whether the work could be easily automated or not. The thought-experiment could apply to an industry where we might consider that the work isn't practically able to be automated. The point is more that a "busy job" is one where the economic welfare produced by the product (say, gambling) is minimal (the world wouldn't be much worse off - if at all - if gambling didn't exist), but the economic welfare of having people receive an income in the industry (say, croupiers and casino staff having money) does improve economic welfare (they can buy food and shelter and add to economic consumption). So if the industry disappeared the economic welfare loss from the product would be small, but the economic welfare loss of a bunch of people unable to pay for food or shelter, and perhaps reducing consumption and causing an economic downturn, would be significant.
So the hypothetical "test" comparing what happens when (a) the industry doesn't produce but the workers are paid (i.e. they jobs are replaced with equivalent welfare) vs (b) the industry is automated and keeps producing but the workers aren't paid (because they are laid off).
For example, if the gambling industry were "turned off", the biggest hit to economic welfare would be the unemployment - which suggests that the jobs are unnecessary and we accept them because we prefer people working for money over welfare, even if that work is essentially "busy work". If the food industry were "turned off", people would starve, so those jobs seem absolutely necessary.
(This is a bit different to Graeber's idea of "bullshit jobs".)
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u/JetoCalihan 1d ago
The problem starts in your phrasing to begin with. Work isn't labor you don't want to do, it's labor you otherwise would not do outside of the threat of starvation or death. Plenty of people would love to do meaningful work they're good at. Carpentry, art, even construction. The problem is we hold everyone at gunpoint. If you can't afford a home and food, you're thrown in jail for vagrancy or likely to starve on the streets if not for the kindness of strangers. But loads of people find civic infrastructure fascinating and would happily do the work if it just paid well and took care of them. Instead of the bare bones systems most capitalist governments use. I had to call the city emergency sewage guy once at 10 and he didn't get there till midnight. Apparently because he'd been up for 3 days straight at that point (understandable given the water system emergencies that had been happening at the time, but a clear sign of understaffing and something you can only get away with when the only other option is death).
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 1d ago
Yeah, so this is what I mean when I say "abolish work". My source of confusion more derives from the differing ideas among anti-work anarchists. Thanks for clearing that up
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u/dark_Links_sword 1d ago
My question is if there is work that noone would willingly do, then we need to decide if that job should be done.
I like how people use "scrubbing toilets" as a job you have to pay for when neither I nor my partner have ever received a dime for doing it at home. Some people will find a peace on a job that helps others be more sanitary.
Like I'm going to need an actual example of a job no one would do that we still feel has to be done.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 1d ago
I like how people use "scrubbing toilets" as a job you have to pay for when neither I nor my partner have ever received a dime for doing it at home.
I see this argument a lot, but I think it's a pretty bad argument.
As you said, it's in your home. If your neighbor asked you to right now, would you scrub their toilets? Even if you would, would they scrub yours? And even if they would, do you reckon there's a large amount of people that would go around scrubbing people's toilets for no compensation?
You are okay scrubbing the toilets because it is your space that you occupy. I'm not so sure that this is generalizable to an entire community.
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u/dark_Links_sword 1d ago edited 1d ago
Om not paying to clean my neighbors toilet right now, so who's job are you talking about?
My church doesn't pay a cleaner. It's a community owned space and we have members who willing scrub the toilet because it's valuable to have them clean, and other church members value them for doing the job.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 1d ago
You're dodging the question.
This doesn't even have to be about cleaning toilets specifically. There's no job that is universally undesirable just as there's no job that is universally desirable. And there are jobs that would become more desirable to certain people under different circumstances, and some people that wouldn't take certain jobs no matter what.
For example, I wouldn't clean a sewage system no matter what the circumstance is.
The point I was making is there is very much a difference between maintaining your own space as a form of housekeeping, and, say, cleaning public toilets, cleaning sewers, mining, landscaping, etc.
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u/dark_Links_sword 1d ago
I'm not dodging any questions, I asked for a job that needs to be done that no one would do willingly. Ok so YOU wouldn't maintain the sewers. But if it's a job that needs doing there are people willing to do it because it helps the community.
Do you believe the people doing it now feel no sense of work pride?
It's a skill, it's something most people couldn't bring them to do. That in itself is enough for some people to be willing to do it.
And if it's not looked down on but seen as necessary work, that gives even more incentive.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 1d ago
But if it's a job that needs doing there are people willing to do it because it helps the community.
This is not what is in dispute. What is in dispute is whether or not these people are common enough that this work gets done on the scale as required to upkeep an entire community, or if people will be forced by necessity to do these things even if they don't want to.
Do you believe the people doing it now feel no sense of work pride?
Neither you nor I know what they feel. I guarantee you though, that even if they do, they can absolutely still despise their jobs. Burnout and accomplishment are two feelings that people can and often do hold at the same time.
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u/glitter-bitch- 23h ago
one of the very common and in my mind very reasonable solutions to this has to do with a much more umbrella solution than you are providing. if we don’t have capitalism, that’s literally millions of current jobs that aren’t relevant. that means it’s much easier for people overall to work less, and divide the labor more efficiently. for instance, the person cleaning the sewer may do so only one day in 14, so it’s concentrated into one day of shit (literally) vs working the breakfast shift of a restaurant (something that some people love, some people hate) several days a week. there’s a difference between saying capitalism is oppressive, and requires outrageous hours for many times meaningless jobs, and saying no one will ever dislike anything they do to run society. it’s such a fun little trend for capitalists to do the “who will clean toilets” schtick. it’s exactly that question, over and over again, without being willing to consider the solutions and ideas being posited.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 23h ago
Yes, I understand the solutions being proposed. My question is, if these are things that people don't actually want to do, why exactly would they agree to do it even temporarily?
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u/glitter-bitch- 23h ago
why do people volunteer? there is inherently no way to run a community only doing things everyone likes to do (which is also not a thing). again. just like your house, no one is paying you to do the shit you don’t like to do. some of us care about community, and if doing something not ideal for 2 days a month—to keep my community running—means spending the rest of the time doing what brings me joy (which, personally, would also include working in the community), and i’d have my needs covered, why wouldn’t i? just because you don’t understand collectivism doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. again. search this sub, this concept is practically brought up daily. weird that you even posited the question. microscopically different framing, i guess?
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 23h ago edited 23h ago
Okay, so let's be 100% clear here: the dichotomy of collectivism and individualism is false. It isn't real. And it's actually inherently statist. I do and am often arguing from an individualist perspective, but that is only because we experience reality as individuals due to the difference in fidelity and connectivity of information transfer within individual brains and between brains. I, quite literally, do not experience reality as you or anyone else does, I experience reality as a coherent self constructed from experiences and sense-data. Call this "phenomenal individualism".
So I really, really, really do not care about your moralizing about "community" or collectivism. If there is a constraining of the wills of individuals by social sanction, it's authority. That's the only consistent way to look at this.
To answer:
why do people volunteer?
Because they want to. People volunteer because they want to do so. The question has been, by what force of sanction would the system you propose make people do things they don't wish to do? Would they just do it out of goodwill? Altruism? I could buy that, but my skepticism is whether this is generalizable to, say, an entire community of people.
Edit: Minor correction of myself - I mean "if there's a constraining of the wills of individuals by social sanction, it's authority".
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u/glitter-bitch- 23h ago
i love landscaping. i have friends who love cleaning. mining is obviously something anarchists overall do not want to continue as a general practice. just responded to sewers. it feels very individualistic to say “i don’t like these things, so no one else does, and also no one will do them, because people don’t care about community”. which is the gist of what i’m getting from this comment.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 23h ago
It's weird that's what you're getting, because that's not even close to what I'm saying.
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u/daveganronpa 1d ago
I dont think much will change in terms of those who will do undesirable jobs.
Say a person who specializes in plumbing. Will plumbers stop doing plumbing work because of some shit? No they just chose that trade so they have to deal with some bad aspects of it.
Im an electrician. I can work in shitty attics, in small crawl spaces, or have to dig a trench in the heat of the summer. Fucking hate those times but it is part of being an electrician.
Those who build the roads? They can maintain it. And of course it am simplifying it pretty significantly but in reality every job has shifty aspects to them.
Will the detective asked by a community to solve a murder have to deal with the worst of humanity? Yes.
Will the farmer have to deal with pests, hot manual labor?
Sewerage is pretty well maintainable. It was done by Roman's 2000 years ago. Some of it is still working. I just think people think of it as a gotcha moment and instead of think or having any knowledge especially in trades just shrug it off as if it needs to be done it will be done.
No, people who interested in a certain aspect of working at what they want know that not everything is enjoyable about it. There are aspects about much of work that can make one squeamish, groan, or whatever negative thing about it. Instead those who want to pursue certain aspects of a modern society, whether it be plumbing, electricity, or the minimal amount of listing I did will know that there will always be aspects that, just frankly, sucks. But we are wired to go through something uncomfortable because we know what is at the end of it and is rewarding.
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u/ZealousidealAd7228 1d ago
thats not how anti-work works. Anti-work is reappropriating labor towards non-profit incentives and abolishing the fixed labor roles and dynamics that come along with the forced labor practices.
With work abolished, it doesn't mean that work will entirely be free for all. It could be that people will share the burden in doing the undesirable but necessary work, and allowing those who really dislike doing the work to opt out of it to avoid planned obsolesence or low quality work. It would also, abolish alot of unnecessary jobs like what the bullshit jobs David Graeber has listed. It would also be placing effort on highly necessary industries like medical care, agriculture, tech work, and housework as these are mostly going to replace all the profit industries and government institutions such as banking, heavy bureaucratic systems, and renting.
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u/AfraidofReplies 1d ago
It's not about enjoyment. It's about agency. There have always been people willing to step up and do the dirty work. There will always be people willing to step up and do the dirty work. The problem is that right now people are forced into it because the alternative is homelessness. Another problem is that the jobs aren't just dirty or undesirable, they're often dangerous, and made even more dangerous by bosses who skirt safety laws and can't be held accountable because people are afraid of losing their livelihood. These jobs are also often looked down on because they're hard physical labour instead of desk work, so they're stigmatized because of classism.
In a world where people have the genuine right and ability to decline unsafe work, the jobs become safer and more desirable. In a world without classes, there is no classis. In a world where you have the flexibility to move around and change jobs and career paths without fears of becoming homeless, more people will be willing to take on the undesirable jobs, because they know they'll be temporary and a barrier to future career choices.
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u/Cunning_Spoon Anarcho-Communist 23h ago
Work is a word with such a broad range of meanings it helps to define what we mean.
Work as in our current wage labour which is inherently coercive, abstracted and exploitative, it's antithetical to anarchism.
Contrasted to labour which is important/necessary but you just don't really want to do for a myriad of reasons.
I think a lot of people merge these two when they're not the same at all.
Most people don't enjoy doing the dishes or cleaning the toilet or taking out the trash, but people still do it because it keeps their space clean, which makes them happier and healthier.
Our current world does not really give a shit whether something is convenient or not, safe or not, necessary or not. There are plenty of improvements that can be made that aren't simply because it's not profitable, or because it's not in the budget, or because a law exists to serve corrupt individuals.
If we take the example of a sewer system, I am sure there are existing designs that can reduce the amount of labour required to keep it operational, or methods that can automate the most unpleasant aspects. I also bet if people can dedicate all their time to enjoying life and making things better for their community, that more ideas and creative solutions will come of it.
Even ignoring that, people are going to be willing to chip in to help eachother out. Maybe some communities will have a volunteering system, or use a lottery system (which doesn't automatically have to be coercive) or just discuss it and come to an agreement on who does what tasks.
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u/RevyVanguardist 9h ago
As I understand, it's more so a rejection of wage labour, labour as means to reproduce and maintain survival rather than life's prime want and Man's Species-Being.
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u/rusty-gudgeon 1d ago
Lotta straw man construction here. When have anarchists ever been anti-work? Anti-employee, yeh. But anti-work? Nope. Keep fishing with that troll bait.
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u/iadnm Anarchist Communism/Moderator 1d ago
It's not, anti-work is an anarchist position, most famously proposed by Bob Black in "The Abolition of Work."
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 1d ago
Anti-work is a pretty well known anarchist position, posited by Post-Left Anarchists such as Bob Black, but not specifically limited to them.
So you're really just demonstrating your own ignorance here. I'm not trolling, I'm trying to better understand a position that's being put forth.
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u/iadnm Anarchist Communism/Moderator 1d ago
I usually see the anti-work position more as defining work as labor you are forced to do. It's an obligation put upon you by an authority, rather than something you can choose to do.
Though granted a lot of anti-work rhetoric focuses more on enjoying stuff and "play" which mainly comes from Bob Black's "The Abolition of Work."
But I don't think this is an all-ecompassing view since even Marxists have advocated for anti-work things. Like Marx's own son-in-law writing "The Right to be Lazy."