Learning Not to Labor

Abstract

In autonomist history and theory, the refusal of work is frequently invoked but seldom expanded upon in a significant manner. From the celebration of laziness to mass industrial strikes, work refusal takes many forms. This essay develops an expanded autonomist conception of work refusal, understanding work refusal as a compositional practice and arguing for analyzing it through the forms of collectivity and social relations that it creates. Based on this analysis, a form of “zerowork training,” or a pedagogy of learning not to labor, is proposed as a process through which antagonism and refusal can be further socialized. Learning not to labor sits at the junction of the refusal of work and the re-fusing of the social energies of such refusal back into supporting the continued affective existence and capacities of other forms of life and ways of being together, as practice and as a form of embodied critique.

Key Words:

• Affect
• Art Strike
• Cultural Labor
• Refusal
• Work

Notes

1. I will be approaching this task through a framework of what semiseriously could be called “Brooklyn Autonomia,” or the conjunction of influences and traditions that comes together through Autonomedia and the Midnight Notes Collective.

2. Simon During (2010) suggests that literary production and culture, once divorced from the spiritual realm, provides tactics for escape from the domination of work. This is backed up by Henri Lefebvre's (1997) declaration that he became interested in thinking about work refusal not because of a political tradition but rather after reading a science fiction novel, City by Clifford Simiak.

3. This dynamic can be seen at work in the film Made in Dagenham, in which male workers deride and dismiss the validity and importance of striking female Ford workers based on the assumption that ultimately their incomes are not necessary for social reproduction but are merely additional to the necessary wages of the male workers.

4. For more on Stilinović's work, see Engqvist et al. (2012) and, more generally, Vidokle (2011).

5. According to Allen Ruff (1997, 194), in 1917 the U.S. Postal Service banned the sending of Lafargue's text, along with many others, including Marx's Wage Labor and Capital.