<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">peter waterman</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:peterwaterman1936@gmail.com">peterwaterman1936@gmail.com</a>></span><br>Date: Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 12:59 AM<br>Subject: [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: [Debate-List] (Fwd) Radical leisure, less work, more commoning (Eva Swidler)<br>To: carlintovar <<a href="mailto:carlintovar@infonegocio.net.pe">carlintovar@infonegocio.net.pe</a>>, "<<a href="mailto:networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org">networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org</a>>" <<a href="mailto:networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org">networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org</a>>, p2p-foundation <<a href="mailto:p2p-foundation@lists.ourproject.org">p2p-foundation@lists.ourproject.org</a>>, "<a href="mailto:CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES@jiscmail.ac.uk">CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES@jiscmail.ac.uk</a>" <<a href="mailto:CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES@jiscmail.ac.uk">CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES@jiscmail.ac.uk</a>><br><br><br><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Patrick Bond</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:pbond@mail.ngo.za" target="_blank">pbond@mail.ngo.za</a>></span><br>Date: Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 7:39 PM<br>Subject: [Debate-List] (Fwd) Radical leisure, less work, more commoning (Eva Swidler)<br>To: "<a href="mailto:scorai@listserver.njit.edu" target="_blank">scorai@listserver.njit.edu</a>" <<a href="mailto:scorai@listserver.njit.edu" target="_blank">scorai@listserver.njit.edu</a>>, DEBATE <<a href="mailto:debate-list@fahamu.org" target="_blank">debate-list@fahamu.org</a>>, <a href="mailto:progeconnetwork@googlegroups.com" target="_blank">progeconnetwork@googlegroups.com</a><br><br><br>
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<p><i>Monthly Review</i><br>
</p>
<h1>Radical Leisure</h1>
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<div>by <span><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/author/evaswidler/" title="Posts by Eva Swidler" rel="author" target="_blank">Eva Swidler</a></span></div>
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<p>Connections, both real and hoped for, between the labor
movement and environmentalists have been news for at least
fifteen years now. The possibility of such a connection came
into wider view at the Seattle World Trade Organization protests
in <a href="tel:1999" value="+661999" target="_blank">1999</a>, when alliances between trade unionists and other
protest groups made headlines with catchy phrases like
“Teamsters for Turtles”—or, more prosaically, the “blue-green
alliance,” in reference to blue-collar workers joining with
green ecological activists. Despite the once-exciting and novel
possibility being now institutionalized in such organizations as
the Labor Network for Sustainability, the Blue-Green Alliance,
and SustainLabour, the thrill seems to be gone for mainstream
environmentalist discourse, and labor has largely faded from
view.</p>
<p>To be fair, the environmental movement has incorporated labor
into its thinking in some ways. “Green jobs” for the building
trades are often cited as a social benefit of retrofitting
structures for energy efficiency or new energy technologies, to
prove that reducing energy consumption and carbon production
need not harm the working class. Environmentalists point to the
health hazards that workers face in environmentally toxic
environments—farmhands handling pesticides, workers
manufacturing chemicals, miners—as destructive to humans and the
larger ecology alike. A general willingness to campaign for
workers’ rights alongside environmental responsibility is
evident, as a sort of acknowledgment of the moral rectitude of
fellow activists. Meanwhile, and in return, ecological activists
hope that workers will take up environmental issues as part of a
broad progressive agenda, creating a patchwork alliance.</p>
<p>Some environmentalists have even located capitalist dynamics at
the heart of contemporary environmental destruction, while
nevertheless failing to conclude that anti-capitalism is the way
forward. The “voluntary simplicity” movement, zero-growth
advocates, or the Transition Town movement all identify constant
growth and ever-expanding consumption as motors of environmental
destruction. Yet none of these groups seem to see the people
whose labor enacts that destruction as key to their fight.</p>
<p>Union and labor activists understand the issue somewhat
differently. They recognize the connections that
environmentalists draw between dangerous work and the pollution
that that work produces, or between energy efficiency plans for
buildings and the employment those plans create. But labor often
wants to claim a more central role in the fight for a
sustainable world. SustainLabour, the International Labour
Foundation for Sustainable Development, says: “Workplaces are at
the center of production and consumption, therefore they should
be central locations in any effort aimed to change production
and consumption patterns at local, national and international
levels.” Yet even this organization focuses on familiar ways of
linking workers and ecological destruction: training workers on
chemical risks, campaigning for green jobs, or urging climate
change researchers to consider the most vulnerable populations
in their analysis. The Blue-Green Alliance likewise pushes for
infrastructure works, efficiency initiatives, and funding to
subsidize fuel-efficient vehicle production. Such campaigns to
counter the incessantly repeated shibboleth of “jobs versus the
environment” are important, but the strain of being so
reasonable appears to have consumed labor’s radical potential:
to save the planet by challenging capitalism, profit, and even
work itself.</p>
<p>Radicals hardly do better. In her recent bestseller <i>This
Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate</i>, Naomi
Klein claims the anti-capitalist mantle of the book’s title and
gives a brief shout-out to the idea of the shorter work week as
an important strategy to reduce climate change. In interviews,
she explains that shorter work weeks could reduce the size of
the economy and thus limit environmental destruction, while
still allowing for necessary production. They would also give
people more time to live in less consumptive ways—to grow
kitchen gardens, or to cook at home, or to walk and bike places
instead of driving. Juliet Schor and organizations like the Take
Back Our Time Network and the New Economics Foundation have all
said the same for years. Rather than the so-called “productivity
dividend” (the greater economic capacity that results from
constant increases in worker productivity) going toward greater
profits for capitalists, or occasionally to slightly higher
wages, annual increases in worker productivity could lead to a
decrease in the amount of time that people work, while leaving
the quantity of goods and services produced unchanged. Voilà, a
steady-state economy.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, calls for a shorter work week tend to sidestep
the thorny question of just who will make it happen. After all,
a call for shrinking economies is effectively a rejection of
capitalism and the profit motive itself—and that will take a
fight. If the goal of that fight is to reduce work hours, then
workers seem like the strongest candidates to take it on. But
the discourse around the shorter work week makes no mention of a
labor movement, unions, or the working class. This vision seems
to presume that people of all classes will get together and talk
to their neighbors, then overthrow the world economy: a
simplistic, just-do-it voluntarism meets anti-capitalism. But
meanwhile, the prime concerns of working-class movements over
past millennia (beyond sheer survival) have been struggles over
time and leisure, and only the working classes have ever had
success on that front. Clearly the working-class fight against
work and for leisure is a missing keystone in the struggle to
defend nature against incessant growth.</p>
<p>In his classic <a href="tel:1967" value="+661967" target="_blank">1967</a> article “Time, Work-Discipline and
Industrial Capitalism,” E. P. Thompson described English
workers’ everyday struggles against the capitalist regimentation
of life. Workers of many sorts resisted the very designation of
time as the proxy for work, and time measurement as the measure
of labor; people still held onto earlier, alternative ideas of
work, time, and leisure. In studying pre-capitalist societies
around the world, Marshall Sahlins and later anthropologists
have documented other cultures’ similar prioritization of a
richness of social interaction over that of material goods. In
what Sahlins called the “original affluent society,” affluence
was measured by leisure rather than by the accumulation of
wealth. Building on this insight, agricultural historians have
also grown increasingly intrigued by foraging peoples who
understood the domestication of crops, but consciously chose to
reject or abandon agriculture as simply too much work,
preferring their non-agricultural lives of greater freedom—and
greater free time.</p>
<p>In consonance with what we might call this “leisure ethic” of
pre-capitalism, which rejects the work-intensifying proclivities
of bosses, the recorded history of early capitalist production
in Europe and North America—at least outside of slavery—shows
work as an integrated part of daily life, accompanied by eating
and socializing, much to the chagrin of emerging industrialists.
As Eric Wolf writes in his classic <i>Europe and the People
Without History</i>, in European economies on the eve of
industrialization, as long as industrial work was merely
supplementary to the central work of keeping a farm, and had to
compete with far more attractive recreational activities, such
as holidays and family life, the organizers of industrial
production would be searching for ways to “subdue the refractory
tempers of work-people accustomed to irregular paroxysms of
diligence,” in the words of one industrialist in <a href="tel:1835" value="+661835" target="_blank">1835</a>. The
working-class life of balancing subsistence with leisure, which
so irked the bourgeoisie, incorporated just enough production
for capitalists as was necessary to satisfy a boss or tax man or
to keep the wolf from the door, and no more.</p>
<p>The first attack on that independent working life was to create
a system of measurement of labor based on time. The clock and
the accompanying constant consciousness of time, and then the
dedication of large portions of that now-measured time purely to
a distinct activity called “work,” are elements of everyday
existence that most of us can hardly fathom living without. Yet
workers fought long and hard against this imposition of the time
measurement of labor, and against the way in which designated
work hours ripped apart the fabric of daily household life,
which had blended conversation and community with economic
activities.</p>
<p>In other words, the working classes of Europe and North America
a few centuries ago lived in a state of rough sufficiency,
despite their poverty. They refused to work simply in order to
obtain more. They preferred to honor “Saint Monday” with
leisure. Only when they lost this battle against the measurement
of time and the standardization of labor did workers turn from a
fight against time to a fight <i>over</i> or <i>for</i>
time—that is, to a fight for shorter working hours.</p>
<p>Once self-directed labor had been replaced by industrial
regimes and time discipline had been imposed, workers still held
onto the value of leisure, making shorter hours a key demand at
least as important as higher pay; Paul Lafargue’s anti-work
manifesto <i>The Right To Be Lazy</i>, published in <a href="tel:1883" value="+661883" target="_blank">1883</a>, was
a bestseller, reprinted many times and eagerly read throughout
the global labor movement. The fight for shorter hours in Europe
and North America lasted, by most reckonings, until the Second
World War. Historian Benjamin Hunnicutt has devoted much of his
career to describing labor’s fight for shorter hours in the
United States, describing a series of working-class visions of a
life with greater purposes than either work or consumption: a
religious vision of the divine destiny for humans, a secular
vision of active citizenship, and ideas of self-improvement. As
a result of that persistent struggle, for more than a century
after the invention of industrial work time, work hours in the
West declined steadily.</p>
<p>That fight for time, however, came to an end decades ago. Now
those with jobs demand higher wages instead, and perhaps even
overtime work, while the many unemployed and underemployed fight
to work at all. Today the dominant idea of a working-class
agenda is to fight to be allowed to sell one’s time.</p>
<p>In the seventy years since organized labor gave up on shorter
hours, not only did the length of the U.S. work week bottom out,
then begin a steady climb that still continues, but labor force
participation rates also rose. Women work for pay at
ever-increasing levels; the elderly work until death. Ever-more
hours work are siphoned from households, drawing in ever-more
people. Multiple economic realities, as well as complex gender
dynamics and drives toward women’s economic independence, have
propelled more members of the working class into the paid
workforce. Yet beyond that, we seem to have missed the fact that
the motivating proletarian hope for a better world, formerly
defined by maximizing free time and leisure, has been
increasingly replaced by a vision of ever-expanding personal
consumption.</p>
<p>In a curious circle, the workday once again seems less distinct
from the rest of life, without a clear division between what we
owe our employer and what belongs to us and our families; we
live more and more in a world without demarcated work and
leisure. But unlike Thompson’s loitering, sauntering, idle
cottagers, who might choose to weave when pushed to it, who
spent their days in self-direction and self-determination and
resented the hours lost to paid work, this new, unbounded world
is turned upside down. It is one in which all time is potential
work time, and vacations are viewed as a theft from the boss.</p>
<p>Networks such as Take Back Our Time and movements such as
voluntary simplicity have tried—without much broad appeal or
success—to resurrect alternative understandings of prosperity.
While undoubtedly some workers have continued to value time over
money, the public discourse of “simplicity” has not attracted
them or incorporated them. As the social movement that created
and sustained a resistance to time discipline for centuries, and
continued to fight for time once their fight against time was
lost, the absence of labor from the simplicity forum is a
striking and fatal flaw.</p>
<p>Labor historians—at least the few who have studied the struggle
over work time—have noted a few key points worth recalling.
First, no drop in work hours has been won without a fight by the
working class. The leisure society that was promised into the
1970s never arrived, precisely because organized labor had
abandoned the fight for shorter hours several decades earlier.
Voluntary simplicity movements, whatever their name—work-life
balance, life downsizing, slackerdom, the DIY movement—have
never succeeded in reducing work hours on a social level. As a
hodgepodge of individual actions, they fail to address the
economic and social imperatives to work.</p>
<p>Professionals, in particular, have failed as a class to hold
the line on work intensity or work volume, and academics writing
about labor provide a prime example. With seemingly no personal
experience of their own of either individual or communal work
resistance or of a leisure ethic, researchers in labor history
have been almost blind to the rejection of work, and have shaped
the labor literature accordingly.</p>
<p>Those activities that the few working-class studies researchers
examining the topic call “work resistance”—including
drunkenness, absenteeism, loafing, and hoboism—could be
considered proletarian forms of voluntary simplicity. Certainly
capitalists have historically taken this grassroots
working-class leisure ethic as a very serious threat indeed.
Cultural wars against alcohol and laziness, legal sanctions
against vagrancy, and the psychological training of children
into obedience and work discipline through mass enforced
schooling all reflect the intensity of the attack on proletarian
resistance to work.</p>
<p>These maneuvers historically depended on even more basic
punishments and tools, such as economic structures that
threatened starvation and disaster for those who would not work.
In earlier centuries, when the fight over time was more
explicit, Western capitalists designed low pay levels to force
workers into working more hours. In later years and in other
parts of the globe, a variety of other strategies have been
employed to extract work from the unwilling, including requiring
taxes or fees from subsistence households in order to force
people into participation in the cash economy, and dispossessing
people of their means of subsistence or production in order to
drive people into employment by others. Yet amidst all this
enforcement of labor, workers maintained their own vision of
leisure and independent time. This vision animated organized
labor and drove the successful trajectory of decreasing work
hours until the fateful mid-twentieth century moment when unions
gave up the fight for time.</p>
<p>But why did organized labor stop fighting for shorter hours? No
one seems to know. Clearly this choice coincided with other
deeply conservative union developments, including purges of
leftists from the ranks. A desire for free time was even painted
as an effeminate demand of the weak and women. Whatever the
causes, however, it is clear that since organized labor ceased
its push for shorter hours, work hours leveled off and then
began lengthening, despite ever-increasing worker productivity.
If work time is to be reduced again, history shows that it is
workers themselves who will have to accomplish this.</p>
<p>Students of the erosion of public life have focused in recent
years on the cultural “commons”—the elements of social life that
we (often unthinkingly) share, from cuisine to language to
street fashion. But little has been done to connect either the
concepts of the cultural commons or public life with the leisure
ethic and the fight against work—a connection central to both
spheres.</p>
<p>Without vital public spheres and cultures, leisure is
unattractive; if and when we become individuals without an
imperative to go to work, and if we are simultaneously without a
community to be part of, we have “time on our hands,” time to be
filled, time to be “killed,” time to be “passed.” We need to
“stay busy.” When work so fills our lives and our society that
we go to work even on days off to be in the company of others;
when we do not take vacation days because we do not know what to
do with ourselves outside work; when schoolchildren eagerly
anticipate returning to their hated schools because time hangs
so heavily on them in the summers; then there is no doubt that
work reduction cannot be instituted individually. An alternate,
collective, social world must co-exist with our work worlds, to
provide an alternate home, an alternate web of connections, an
alternate identity, an alternate constellation of values,
activities, and purposes, even alternate markings of time.</p>
<p>Circularly, the commons and the public sphere require adequate
leisure. To restore a social world independent of the market and
the workplace, and to keep the commons vital, we need the
leisure time to inhabit the commons. We also need our
communities to have time to be there with us—hanging on the
porch chatting, shooting hoops at the rec center, jamming in the
basement. In other words, we need both a vital cultural commons
beyond the world of paid labor and we need a leisure ethic, a
constant challenge to the very concept and valorization of work.
A leisure ethic and the public commons depend on each other. And
for both of these, collectivity is key. With the communal
revalorization of leisure, by pushing back against the constant
attempts of capital to encroach on work-free time and the
unmonetized forms of everyday life and community, we take up the
most foundational struggle, the struggle against work itself.</p>
<p>I’ve already noted that academic professionals, notorious for
their own ever-rising standards of work hours and productivity,
have failed to appreciate the importance of work resistance, not
merely as a weapon of class rebellion, but as an essential
element of sustainability for the planet. Similarly, they have
failed to appreciate the necessity of an ongoing community
outside the workplace to advance an alternative to a world
consumed by work. Rarely experiencing membership in such an
external community themselves, they cannot imagine its
centrality to breaking the stranglehold of laboring.</p>
<p>Activists for the commons, however, as well as proponents of
voluntary simplicity, have zeroed in on the construction and
maintenance of a shared social world and cultural commons as
vital to the planetary future. Yet they have met with little
notable popular success. Lacking a confrontational energy, they
have failed to fundamentally reject work and work-time as we
know it. This rejection has historically come successfully from
only one source—the working classes.</p>
<p>The organized labor movement of the moment, fighting rearguard
actions against neoliberalism, appears unable to mount such a
cultural critique of work. Likewise, simplicity advocates seem
entirely unaware of the working-class traditions of leisure, and
uninterested in tapping them, failing to promote their vision
outside their world of white professionals. Yet aside from
unions, which, given a chance, might well surprise simplicity
campaigners, working-class culture at large provides a wide
wellspring of alternate conceptions of time, leisure, and the
good life.</p>
<p>Surveying the last few centuries, it seems that there exists an
undefined but discernible critical threshold. When relatively
uncolonized spaces of everyday life and subsistence, rather than
marketplace activity, prevail among the working classes,
cultivating in working people a reality and a vision of
self-determined life, capitalists must constantly use physical
or economic force to draw workers into laboring. The lure of
money and success alone failed to create a willing or
self-motivated workforce in those historical circumstances. When
the uncolonized spaces of everyday life shrank or were beaten
back so much that they could no longer provide an independent
foundation for self-determination, work filled the vacuum. The
commons fell on the defensive, framed more as a missed
opportunity for profit than a source of life itself. Only a
powerful impetus for shorter work hours can reconstruct and
defend the space necessary for the resurrection of a
self-determined everyday life.</p>
<p>Movements for shorter work hours have met with ferocious
opposition from capitalists not only because they threaten the
primacy of the culture of work, but because they threaten the
very source of profit. Even reform-minded campaigns for reduced
hours are a direct attack on the basic mechanism of extraction
from the working classes. Although pushes for higher wages
attack profit as well, their focus on more money rather than
time preserves the culture of work, and has therefore proven
more palatable to capitalists. More leisure, in contrast, moves
workers outside work into a world of economic and social
self-determination, and is absolutely anathema.</p>
<p>True leisure does require some money, and more equally
distributed money. First, leisure requires freedom from want.
Starvation, homelessness, or cold, as well as the fear of these
privations, preempt any possibility of more than momentary
leisure. Second, the current levels of extreme inequality drive
consumption and credit card debt, make public and communal
efforts towards sustainability less likely to succeed, and
reduce social support for environmentally motivated
decision-making. Because adequate money and new patterns of
distribution are essential to leisure, it is clear yet again
that workers must lead the way to the largely immaterial joys of
life, whether they are storytelling or music or friendships or
napping in the sun.</p>
<p>We need to supplant endless consumption and production for the
maw of the market, which, left unaltered, will ravage the earth
to a degree presently unimaginable. But moralistic campaigns of
individual voluntary simplicity will not suffice. Instead, we
need to build, or rebuild, a shared culture of leisure. Whether
that agenda is framed as a rational plea for a steady-state
economy or as an apocalyptic battle against the cancerous
imperative of growth, it must address the reality that the
planet requires both a new economic system and a drastic
reduction of material production, which means a drastic
reduction in work.</p>
<p>The working class is perhaps the last remaining reservoir of a
culture of leisure. The task ahead is to breathe new life into
both the past and present proletarian values of slacking,
napping, and lazing. Only laborers, and the refusal to labor,
can achieve radical leisure and a future for the planet.</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><span>Eva Swidler</span> is an
environmental political economist and social historian. She
teaches at Goddard College and the Curtis Institute of Music.</p><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><span><font color="#888888">
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