“Nothing but Joy”: The Welfare Rights Movement’s Antiwork Freedom Dream

Abstract

Based on the welfare rights movement’s archival record, this article depicts welfare activists as inventive public intellectuals who developed bold and sophisticated antiwork “freedom dreams.” Informed by both their experiences in the low wage labor force, as well as the historic lineage of chattel slavery, welfare rights movement participants challenged the widespread assumption that improving wage work can remedy poverty, and argued against ideological adherence to the work ethic. As perhaps the largest, most visible antiwork social movement to date, the welfare rights movement holds crucial importance in deepening our empirical understanding of antiwork politics, the pursuit of income decoupled from work, and the motivation of its advocates. Additionally, this analysis situates antiwork politics as an overlooked component of the rich and variegated legacy of the Black radical tradition.

Keywords:

• antiwork
• black radical tradition
• critical theory
• public policy
• real utopias
• social movements
• welfare

Notes

1 National Welfare Rights Organization songbook, Guida West Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Box 27, Folder 13. Smith College.

2 George F. E. Rudé, Ideology & Popular Protest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, 1989 ed. (New York: International Publishers Co, 1971); Rick Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1978); Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, New ed. (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003); Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 1st ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (London: Verso, 2010).

3 Special thanks to Michelle O’Brian who read innumerable drafts of this project and pointed out that what I was really describing in the WRM was a “freedom dream.”

4 Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 8.

5 Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Urbana, IL: Chicago Springfield University of Illinois Press, 2017); Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, Reprint ed. (New York: WW Norton, 2020).

6 Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Vintage ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 13.

7 This claim can be supported by examining the challenges millions of working people in the U.S. face paying for basics such as rent, food, childcare, or covering an unexpected emergency. David Cooper, Zane Mokhiber, and Ben Zipperer, “Raising the Federal Minimum Wage to $15 by 2025 Would Lift the Pay of 32 Million Workers: A Demographic Breakdown of Affected Workers and the Impact on Poverty, Wages, and Inequality,” Economic Policy Institute (blog), March 9, 2021, https://www.epi.org/publication/raising-the-federal-minimum-wage-to-15-by-2025-would-lift-the-pay-of-32-million-workers/ (accessed December 13, 2021). Jeanna Smialek, “Many Adults Would Struggle to Find $400, the Fed Finds.” The New York Times, May 23, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/business/economy/fed-400-dollar-survey.html; Alicia Adamczyk, “Full-Time Minimum Wage Workers Can’t Afford Rent Anywhere in the US, According to a New Report,” CNBC, July 14, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/14/full-time-minimum-wage-workers-cant-afford-rent-anywhere-in-the-us.html.

8 Piven and Cloward, Poor People’s Movements; Guida West, The National Welfare Rights Movement: The Social Protest of Poor Women (New York: Praeger, 1981); Martha F. Davis, Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, 1960–1973, New ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Jacqueline Pope, Biting the Hand That Feeds Them: Organizing Women on Welfare at the Grass Roots Level (New York: Praeger, 1989).

9 Nick Kotz, A Passion for Equality: George A. Wiley and the Movement, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 1977); Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty, Annotated ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006); Felicia Ann Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Lawrence Neil Bailis, Bread or Justice: Grassroots Organizing in the Welfare Rights Movement (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1974).

10 Premilla Nadasen, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2004); West, The National Welfare Rights Movement.

11 Edward V. Sparer, “The Right to Welfare,” in The Rights of Americans: What They Are–What They Should Be, eds. Norman Dorsen and American Civil Liberties Union, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971). Davis, Brutal Need; Elizabeth Bussiere, (Dis)Entitling the Poor: The Warren Court, Welfare Rights, and the American Political Tradition, New ed. (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2001).

12 Anne M. Valk, “‘Mother Power’: The Movement for Welfare Rights in Washington, D.C., 1966–1972,” Journal of Women’s History 11, no. 4 (2000): 34–58, doi:10.1353/jowh.2000.0014; Premilla Nadasen, “Expanding the Boundaries of the Women’s Movement: Black Feminism and the Struggle for Welfare Rights,” Feminist Studies 28, no. 2 (2002): 271–301, doi:10.2307/3178742; Ellen Reese and Garnett Newcombe, “Income Rights, Mothers’ Rights, or Workers’ Rights? Collective Action Frames, Organizational Ideologies, and the American Welfare Rights Movement,” Social Problems 50, no. 2 (2003): 294–318, doi:10.1525/sp.2003.50.2.294; Georgina Denton, “‘Neither Guns nor Bombs – Neither the State nor God – Will Stop Us from Fighting for Our Children’: Motherhood and Protest in 1960s and 1970s America,” The Sixties 5, no. 2 (2012): 205–28, doi:10.1080/17541328.2012.712012; Mary E. Triece, “Credible Workers and Deserving Mothers: Crafting the ‘Mother Tongue’ in Welfare Rights Activism, 1967–1972,” Communication Studies 63, no. 1 (2012): 1–17; Holloway Sparks, “When Dissident Citizens Are Militant Mamas: Intersectional Gender and Agonistic Struggle in Welfare Rights Activism,” Politics & Gender 12, no. 4 (2016): 623–47, doi:10.1017/S1743923X16000143. For an initial critique of these claims see Wilson Sherwin and Frances Fox Piven, “The Radical Feminist Legacy of the National Welfare Rights Organization,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 47, no. 3–4 (2019): 135–53, doi:10.1353/wsq.2019.0060.

13 Felicia Kornbluh, “The Goals of the National Welfare Rights Movement: Why We Need Them Thirty Years Later,” Feminist Studies 24, no. 1 (1998): 65–78, doi:10.2307/3178619.

14 Kornbluh, “The Goals of the National Welfare Rights Movement,” 67.

15 Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone Books, 2017).

16 I rely on the terminology “working class,” despite its contradiction in this context, with the recognition that the working class has always included people who are outside of employment. Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996).

17 Edward Granter, Critical Social Theory and the End of Work (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009); Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); David Frayne, The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work (London: Zed Books, 2015); David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018); Alastair Hemmens, The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought: From Charles Fourier to Guy Debord, 1st ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

18 Roland Simon, Fondements critiques d’une théorie de la révolution: au-delà de l’affirmation du prolétariat (Paris: Senonevero, 2001), 252. Translation author’s own.

19 Even Paul Lafargue, in his famously scathing criticism of the work ethic under capitalism and a key text in the antiwork tradition, proposes three-hour work days as his remedy, rather than eschewing any effortful activity entirely. Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy, and Other Studies (London: Forgotten Books, 2012).

20 Ideologically this shares a great deal with, and contemporary antiwork advocates have much to learn from, disability rights activists who have for far too long been arguing in siloed isolation against the morality of a productivist society, especially when 1 in 4 adults in the U.S. have a disability, “Disability Impacts All of Us,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/disabilityandhealth/infographic-disability-impacts-all.html. Branka Magas Coulson and Hilary Wainwright, “The Housewife and Her Labour under Capitalism—A Critique,” New Left Review no. 89 (1975): 51–71; Lourdes Beneria, “Conceptualizing the Labor Force: The Underestimation of Women's Economic Activities,” Journal of Development Studies 17, no. 3 (1981): 10–28.

21 Philippe Van Parijs, Arguing for Basic Income: Ethical Foundations for a Radical Reform (London: Verso, 1992); Philippe Van Parijs, “Basic Income: A Simple and Powerful Idea for the Twenty-First Century,” Politics & Society 32, no. 1 (2004): 7–39, doi:10.1177/0032329203261095; Bruce Ackerman, Anne Alstott, and Philippe van Parijs, Redesigning Distribution: Basic Income and Stakeholder Grants as Cornerstones for an Egalitarian Capitalism (London: Verso, 2006).

22 See for example, Mariame Kaba, We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022).

23 Simon, Fondements critiques d’une théorie de la révolution, 252.

24 Weeks, The Problem with Work, 124.

25 Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (London: Verso, 2008).

26 Graeber, Bullshit Jobs; Tamara Keith, “Just How Many Jobs Would The Keystone Pipeline Create?” NPR, December 14, 2011, https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2011/12/14/143719155/just-how-many-jobs-would-the-keystone-pipeline-create.

27 A few rare exceptions to this include: Jacques Rancière, Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (London: Verso Books, 2012) which examines instances of resistance to work articulated throughout French working class cultural artifacts in the mid 19th century. Michael Seidman, Workers against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona during the Popular Fronts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) argues for viewing incidents of sabotage and shirking by radicals in France and Spain in the 1930s as “guerilla warfare against work,” a claim Jamie Woodcock, Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centers (Pluto Press, 2016) updates on a much smaller scale to present day UK. Kathi Weeks's The Problem with Work identifies the Wages for Housework movement, as well as the Welfare Rights Movement, as examples of an antiwork movement. Italy’s Autonomia has also been (sparsely) written about through this lens: Patrick Cuninghame, “Autonomia in the 1970s: The Refusal of Work, the Party and Power,” Cultural Studies Review 11, no. 2 (2005): 77–94.

28 Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996), 17.

29 Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, xiv. A number of scholars emphasize that a major impediment to social movement scholarship is scholars’ entrenched, preconceived notions of what counts as resistance and who might be undertaking it. Aldon Morris, “Social Movement Theory: Lessons from the Sociology of WEB Du Bois.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 24, no. 2 (2019): 125–36. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People’s Movements. Also Kelley, Race Rebels. This problem is especially compounded by the reach of traditional work values. (See Weeks, The Problem with Work, 247.)

30 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “After Labor,” Critical Historical Studies 7, no. 1 (2020): 87, doi:10.1086/708007.

31 Simon, Fondements critiques d’une théorie de la révolution.

32 David Calnitsky, Jonathan P. Latner, and Evelyn L. Forget, “Life after Work: The Impact of Basic Income on Nonemployment Activities,” Social Science History 43, no. 4 (2019): 657–77, doi:10.1017/ssh.2019.35; Ingrid Robeyns, “Introduction: Revisiting the Feminism and Basic Income Debate,” Basic Income Studies 3, no. 3 (2008), doi:10.2202/1932-0183.1137; Sherwin and Piven, “The Radical Feminist Legacy of the National Welfare Rights Organization.”

33 A very partial list of texts that explore and expand the black radical tradition include Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism, Revised and Updated Third Edition: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021); David Scott, “On the Very Idea of a Black Radical Tradition,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17, no. 1 (2013): 1–6; Chandan Reddy, “Neoliberalism Then and Now,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 25, no. 1 (2019): 150–55, doi:10.1215/10642684-7275362; Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, eds., Futures of Black Radicalism (London: Verso, 2017). Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments; Kelley, Freedom Dreams; Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013).

34 Mathew Forstater, “From Civil Rights to Economic Security: Bayard Rustin and the African-American Struggle for Full Employment, 1945–1978,” International Journal of Political Economy 36, no. 3 (2007): 63–74.

35 Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives; Joshua Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, 1st ed. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).

36 Michael Watts, “1968 and All That…,” Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 2 (2001): 161, doi:10.1191/030913201678580467.

37 Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives; Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire; Watts, “1968 and All That…” share this analysis.

38 Archives themselves are far from perfect records of the past, as they themselves are sites of exclusion and silence Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14, doi:10.1215/-12-2-1; Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Clare Hemmings, Considering Emma Goldman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

39 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 2001).

40 The National Advisory Commission on Civil, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 8th Printing ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968).

41 Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013); David P. Stein, “‘This Nation Has Never Honestly Dealt with the Question of a Peacetime Economy’: Coretta Scott King and the Struggle for a Nonviolent Economy in the 1970s,” Souls 18, no. 1 (2016): 80–105, doi:10.1080/10999949.2016.1162570.

42 A. Philip Randolph Institute, A ‘Freedom Budget’ for All Americans: Budgeting Our Resources, 1966–1975, to Achieve Freedom from Want (New York: A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1966), 10.

43 Blanc and Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans.

44 “Goals of the National Welfare Rights Organization,” NWRO Papers, Box 2083, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.

45 I argue in the manuscript length version of this article (Wilson Sherwin, “Rich in Needs: The Forgotten Radical Politics of the Welfare Rights Movement” (PhD diss., CUNY Graduate Center, 2019)) that one of the major problems with existing literature on the movement is that scholars focus on statements made at the very beginning of the movement, ignoring the progressive development towards a sharper, more radical analysis which emerges as the movement gained members and influence. Additionally, existing scholarship rarely considers the target audience for particular articulations, overemphasizing statements made for journalists, or politicians as the true perceptions of members, rather than considering strategic motivations for highlighting certain issues in particular situations. Here I focus on statements made during the height of the movement’s power and radicalism, and primarily but not exclusively intended for internal movement audiences.

46 William Whitaker, “The Determinants of Social Movement Success: A Study of the National Welfare Rights Organization” (PhD Thesis, Brandeis University, 1970), 243, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/36108099_The_determinants_of_social_movement_success_a_study_of_the_National_Welfare_Rights_Organization.

47 West Papers Box 27, Folder 14.

48 Karl Marx, made similar arguments about poverty being constitutive of the working class experience. Marx argues that despite the enormous value produced by laborers, the result of capitalist accumulation for the working class is “pauperism.” For Marx, “pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It forms part of the faux frais of capitalist production.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin, 1992), 797. in other words, for Marx, as well as the NWRO, poverty is an inevitable biproduct of capitalism.

49 “The NWRO Adequate Income Program $7500 NOW!” NWRO Papers, Box 2083, Folder “NWRO Publications.”

50 I am not suggesting that members of the NWRO were secretly Marxist, rather than their analysis of waged labor echoes key elements of Marxian analysis. This may suggest that Marx’s analysis so aptly encapsulates the working class’ experience of work that across different continents and centuries, people of different races and genders come to similar observations about the nature of work under capitalism. The conceptual parallels also indicated that the fundamental radicalism of the NWRO has been vastly underestimated or overlooked by scholars in the intervening years.

51 NWRO Papers, Box 2083, Folder “NWRO Publications.”

52 Simon, Fondements critiques d'une theorie de la revolution. This logic will be familiar to readers from the work of carceral state abolitionists such as Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2011); Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, eds., Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011); William Widmer/Redux, “The Case for Abolition,” The Marshall Project, June 19, 2019, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/06/19/the-case-for-abolition; https://abolitionjournal.org/.

53 Kornbluh identifies guaranteed income programs as “a kind of anti-New Deal and anti-War on Poverty, a response to the problems of male under-employment, persistent poverty, and black rage that differed from anything the United States had yet tried.” Felicia Kornbluh, “Is Work the Only Thing That Pays-The Guaranteed Income and Other Alternative Anti-Poverty Policies in Historical Perspective,” Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy 4 (2009): 61. A similar perspective was articulated by radicals in the 1970s, outside academia see for example Zerowork 1975, specifically Paolo Carpignano, “US Class Composition in the Sixties,” Zerowork 1 (1975), http://libcom.org/library/us-class-composition-sixties-paolo-carpignano-zerowork. Also Jeremy Brecher, Strike!, (PM Press, 2014).

54 For more on FAP see Felicia Kornbluh, “Is Work the Only Thing That Pays - The Guaranteed Income and Other Alternative Anti-Poverty Policies in Historical Perspective,” Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy 4 (2009): 61; Daniel P. Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1973); Brian Steensland, The Failed Welfare Revolution America’s Struggle over Guaranteed Income Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Jill Quadagno, “Race, Class, and Gender in the U.S. Welfare State: Nixon’s Failed Family Assistance Plan,” American Sociological Review 55, no. 1 (1990): 11–28.

55 Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights.

56 Welfare Fighter Dec 1969: 2. West Papers, Box 25, Folder “Publications.”

57 “5500 UP the Nixon Plan” West Papers, Box 25, Folder 13.

58 West Papers Box 25, Folder 13.

59 Welfare activists were plenty aware of the ways their gender, and particularly their motherhood, in addition to their race and class, rendered them especially vulnerable to exploitation in the labor market. However, as Piven and I have argued elsewhere (“The Radical Feminist Legacy of the National Welfare Rights Organization”) the movement generally did not seek to improve women’s chances in the labor market or to seek remuneration for housework, but rather provide all poor people with the freedom to eschew employment. The persistent argument that welfare activists sought a gendered division of labor, encouraging work for men, and childrearing in the home for women (see Sherwin and Piven, “The Radical Feminist Legacy of the National Welfare Rights Organization” for a summary and retort of these arguments) is not born out in the archival record.

60 With the exception of our article, Sherwin and Piven, “The Radical Feminist Legacy of the National Welfare Rights Organization,” scholarship examining the NWRO’s alternative to FAP has overlooked this profound analytic intervention entirely. For example, Kornbluh summarizes this groundbreaking document and recounts only, “in an April 1970 version of the NWRO Guaranteed Adequate Income plan, the activists offered a list of principles that they saw as essential to national welfare reform, beginning with adequate income as a ‘national goal’ and a timetable for reaching a basic income level of $5,500 per year. They sought the addition of emergency grants and regular cost of living increases to the ‘flat’ guaranteed income in FAP” (The Battle for Welfare Rights, 153). The powerful critiques of wage work contained within it are ignored entirely by the scholarly record.

61 West Papers, Box 27, Folder 14.

62 Weeks, The Problem with Work, 10.

63 Ibid.

64 Herbert J. Gans, “Positive Functions of the Undeserving Poor: Uses of the Underclass in America,” Politics & Society 22, no. 3 (September 1, 1994): 269–83, doi:10.1177/0032329294022003002.

65 Richard Cloward comments given at the 1968 Congressional Hearing on Income Maintenance Programs.

66 “WIN: Training for What?,” Piven Papers, Box 53, Folder 11.

67 West, The National Welfare Rights Movement; Nadasen, Welfare Warriors; Sherwin and Piven, “The Radical Feminist Legacy of the National Welfare Rights Organization.”

68 “WIN: Training for What?,” Piven Papers, Box 53, Folder 11, Smith College.

69 Denton, “Neither Guns nor Bombs – Neither the State nor God – Will Stop Us from Fighting for Our Children”; Premilla Nadasen, “Expanding the Boundaries of the Women’s Movement”; Reese and Newcombe, “Income Rights, Mothers’ Rights, or Workers’ Rights?”; Triece, “Credible Workers and Deserving Mothers”; Sparks, “When Dissident Citizens Are Militant Mamas.”

70 Kelley, Race Rebels.

71 The Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3/4 (2014): 274.

72 West, The National Welfare Rights Movement.

73 This framing—centering on unpaid gendered labor rather than race—was adopted by the Wages for Housework movement, which looked to the welfare rights movement for inspiration. Mariarosa Dalla Costa for example wrote, “women refuse the myth of liberation through work. For we have worked enough. We have chopped billions of tons of cotton, washed billions of dishes, scrubbed billions of floors, typed billions of words, wired billions of radio sets, and washed billions of diapers by hand and in machines.” Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Women and the Subversion of the Community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader, trans. Richard Braude, ed. Camille Barbagallo (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019), 42. Existing scholarship on the WRM has compared the movement with Wages for Housework (Nadasen, Welfare Warriors); however, a central component of both movements was not the enshrining of and remuneration for gendered division of labor, but rather the refusal of work.

74 West, The National Welfare Rights Movement; Orleck, Storming Caesars Palace; Nadasen, Welfare Warriors; Allison Puglisi, “Identity, Power, and the California Welfare-Rights Struggle, 1963–1975,” Humanities 6, no. 2 (June 2017): 14, doi:10.3390/h6020014.

75 “NOW! National Welfare Leaders Newsletter,” June 6, 1968 West Papers, Box 25, Folder 10.

76 NWRO Papers, Box 2068, Folder “Welfare Fighter.”

77 “The Adequate Income Bill” West Papers Box 25, Folder 13.

78 West Papers, Box 27, Folder 13.

79 Sparer, “The Right to Welfare”; Davis, Brutal Need.

80 “Everybody's Got a Right to Live,” Smithsonian Folk Ways Recordings, https://folkways.si.edu/jimmy-collier-and-frederick-douglass-kirkpatrick/everybodys-got-a-right-to-live/american-folk-struggle-protest/music/album/smithsonian. For example, Kerran Sanger argues “songs offered a compelling means by which activists could communicate among themselves and disseminate a positive self-definition, and provide answers to questions,” Kerran L. Sanger, When the Spirit Says Sing!: The Role of Freedom Songs in the Civil Rights Movement, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 8.

81 Kelley, Freedom Dreams.

82 West, The National Welfare Rights Movement; Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 121.

83 West Papers, Box 25, Folder 10.

84 West Papers, Box 25, Folder 13.

85 West Papers, Box 27, Folder 14.

86 Again, here the NWRO parallels Marx’s critiques of wage work when he insists the wage relation is entered into by the working class involuntarily and therefore a form of “economic bondage,” Karl Marx, Capital, 723. Arguments as to the unfreedom inherent to the proletarian condition appear throughout Marx’s work. In one example Marx writes, “The Roman slave was held in chains; the wage laborer is bound to his owner by invisible threads. The appearance of independence is maintained by a constant change in the person of the individual employer, and by the legal fiction of the contract,” 719.

87 Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, 4.

88 Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, 141.

89 Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, 4.

90 “WIN: Training for What?,” Piven Papers, Box 53, Folder 11.

91 Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 18.

92 Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, xv.

93 Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 9–10.

94 James Scott’s insights on the role of strategic concealment of subversive behavior and ideas are enormously influential as well, although I would argue these are less “hidden” transcripts than overlooked and misinterpreted ones. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Princeton, NJ: Yale University Press, 1987).

95 Piven, telephone conversation, May 18, 2018.

96 “Miscellaneous publications 1969–72,” West Papers, Box 27, Folder 13.

97 Quoted in Whitaker, “The Determinants of Social Movement Success,” 190.

98 Nelson Blackstock, Cointelpro: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom (New York: Pathfinder, 1988); Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990); Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972 (New York: Free Press, 1991); Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire.

99 Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords: A Radical History (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Blackstock, Cointelpro.

100 See for example, Pope, Biting the Hand That Feeds Them, 99; or Nadasen’s claim that organizers were more wedded to employment as the solution to poverty than recipient activists. Nadasen, Welfare Warriors, 138.

101 “Abolitionist” projects of all varieties face these challenges, I am hopeful the increased visibility of political projects emphasizing police and prison abolition, as well as “family abolition” may assist scholars in further developing the conceptual frameworks necessary to understand antiwork politics. Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (London: Verso, 2019); Michelle Esther O'Brien, “To abolish the family: The working-class family and gender liberation in capitalist development.” Endnotes 5 (2020): 361-417.

102 Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol, eds., Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We Need to Learn (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005), https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7758/9781610443043.

103 Sherwin and Piven, “The Radical Feminist Legacy of the National Welfare Rights Organization.”

104 Daniel E. Slotnik, “Parents and Caregivers Reported Mental Health Issues More Often than Others during the Pandemic, a C.D.C. Study Says,” The New York Times, June 17, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/health/cdc-parenting-mental-health-pandemic.html.

105 “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, 2021,” AFL-CIO, May 4, 2021 https://aflcio.org/reports/death-job-toll-neglect-2021 (accessed December 10, 2021); Tiana N. Rogers, Charles, R. Rogers, Elizabeth VanSant-Webb, Lily Y. Gu, Bin Yan, and Fares Qeadan, “Racial Disparities in COVID-19 Mortality among Essential Workers in the United States,” World Medical & Health Policy 12 no. 3 (2020): 311-27, doi:10.1002/wmh3.358.

106 Justine Coleman, “Texas Lt. Governor on Reopening State: ‘There Are More Important Things than Living.’” The Hill, April 21, 2020, https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/493879-texas-lt-governor-on-reopening-state-there-are-more-important-things.

107 Memes, one of the main vehicles of antiwork outcry on Reddit and the internet at large, may well be viewed for new generations as holding a similar significance as protest songs: a medium through which people can speak truths they struggle to otherwise articulate, bringing people together and sowing the seeds for a powerful sense of shared experience and vision.

108 Farhad Manjoo, “Even with a Dream Job, You Can Be Antiwork,” The New York Times, October 22, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/opinion/work-resignations-covid.html; Emma Goldberg, “Public Displays of Resignation: Saying ‘I Quit’ Loud and Proud,” The New York Times, December 4, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/04/business/public-resignation-quitting.html; John Herrman, “Quitting Your Job Never Looked So Fun,” The New York Times, October 29, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/29/style/quit-your-job.html.

109 Jennifer Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

110 I borrow gratuitously here from Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009). “We must dream and enact new and better pleasures other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”

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Wilson Sherwin

Born and raised in New York City, Wilson Sherwin, PhD (she/her), has worked as an electrician, a nanny, a translator, and a documentary film producer. She is currently a sociologist who writes and teaches about social movements, labor and public policy.