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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sarah Jaffe
“Young people feel a kind of pressure that they cannot explain and they feel that promises were broken. People realize that material betterment is no longer the single most important source of meaning in life.”
we’re all exhausted, burned out, overworked, underpaid, and have no work-life balance (or just no life). At the same time, we’ve been told that work itself is supposed to bring us fulfillment, pleasure, meaning, even joy. We’re supposed to work for the love of it, and how dare we ask questions about the way our work is making other people rich while we struggle to pay rent and barely see our friends.
It’s become especially important that we believe that the work itself is something to love. If we recalled why we work in the first place—to pay the bills—we might wonder why we’re working so much for so little.
Neoliberalism encourages us to think that everything we want and need must be found with a price tag attached.13
The victors remade the state to subject everything to competition; to enforce private property rights; and to protect the right of individuals to accumulate. Public services were sold off to private profiteers. Citizens became customers. Freedom was there, the neoliberals argued, you just had to purchase it.
This dynamic is always individualizing—your situation in life must be the result of choices that you made, and thus no one else has any reason to sympathize, let alone to help, if you fall. Privatization, as Fisher noted, has brought with it the privatization of stress, the proliferation of depression, and a rise in anxiety.
If we fail to love our work, it becomes another form of individual shame.
Turning our love away from other people and onto the workplace serves to undermine solidarity.
If workers have a one-on-one love relationship with the job, then the solution for its failure to love you back is to move on or to try harder. It is not to organize with your coworkers to demand better. Collective action is unthinkable; the only answer is to work harder on yourself or to leave.23
Coercion
The compulsion to be happy at work, in other words, is always a demand for emotional work from the worker. Work, after all, has no feelings. Capitalism cannot love.
The perceived low status of these workers helps to foster such invisibility: immigrant women, for example, are easily made invisible on the job because our society already considers them socially invisible, erasing their skills by claiming that what they do simply comes naturally.
“To be made invisible is the first step toward being considered nonhuman.”
LOVE HAS BEEN WOMEN’S WORK FOR MOST OF HISTORY; EQUALLY, FOR most of history, we have presumed that the artist is a man.
Women are muses (or the wives who clean up the mess) in this narrative; rarely do they get to be artists themselves.
the drive to create things for pure enjoyment is perhaps one of the most deeply human things we do.
I am not arguing that we should strive to be miserable at work—quite the contrary, we should take any opportunity for happiness, pleasure, and connection that we get. I do believe, however, that our desire for happiness at work is one that has been constructed for us, and the world that constructed that desire is falling apart around us.
But a side effect of all this love for work has been that talking about love between people has lost its importance. To talk of love is to risk being seen as unserious, particularly if you are a woman. Instead, our personal relationships are to be squeezed in around the edges, fitted into busy schedules, or sacrificed entirely to the demands of the workplace.
People have tried to blame the Internet for our collective loneliness, but in fact it comes alongside the change in our working lives, the decline of unions and other institutions that gave people a sense of shared purpose and direction beyond just the job.
The movement of young people into political organizations—the Democratic Socialists of America, perhaps, or the Labour Party or other new left formations—represents not just a political awakening but a desire for that connection and purpose.
When our relationships fall apart, we still blame ourselves, rather than looking to all the social, institutional pressures that made it nearly impossible to continue them. Love is still just another form of alienated labor.15
It is, as Selma James wrote, a miracle that under patriarchy men and women manage to tolerate each other at all, let alone live together and love one another.
“I don’t want to ‘catch up for a coffee’ with anyone anymore.… I’m not interested in this minute city neoliberal forced way of interacting with other people in some kind of transaction where you catch up with people you’ve not seen for like eight weeks because everything’s so expensive and you don’t have any time.” What we need instead, she argued, was a way of living where we have space and time “to be able to relate to each other as human beings, which of course has revolutionary potential, which is why it’s dangerous.” Slowing down the rate of our connections, rather than collecting people
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THIS THIS THISSSSS
Creation, play, love: all these are human desires, perhaps even human needs, that have been enclosed, commodified, sold back to us.
What would we be able to create without the constraints of making a living?
love is too big and beautiful and grand and messy and human a thing to be wasted on a temporary fact of life like work.
