Monday, January 10, 2022

Working was pointless at best and 'degrading, humiliating and exploitative' at worst, says Reddit moderator behind the influential 'antiwork'

sjones@insider.com (Stephen Jones)
© Provided by Business Insider The reasons driving the Great Resignation transcend much more than simply a desire to work less. SrdjanPav/Getty Images

The moderator of a viral, "anti-work" Reddit thread said most work is pointless, and humiliating.
Doreen Ford is a moderator of r/antiwork, which has gained 1.4 million users since October 2020.
"There's a lot of positions that just don't make any sense," Ford told the FT.

A moderator of a viral "anti-work" Reddit thread has said she left traditional employment because much of her work was "degrading, humiliating and exploitative."

The thread – r/antiwork – has nearly 1.6 million members and is part of a movement towards the "antiwork" rejection of the traditional idea of a nine-to-five job in favor of more leisure and fulfilment.


"I think there's a lot of positions that just don't make any sense, that do not have to exist," Doreen Ford, a moderator of the channel, told the FT.

"You're just pushing around papers for no good reason. It doesn't really help anybody," she said.

Ford, 30, spent 10 years working in retail, but left her job in 2017 after her grandmother advised her to follow her passion for dogs.

She now walks dogs part time and has never been happier, she told the FT.

"Usually, at best, [working was] pointless," said Ford. "And at worst it was degrading, humiliating and exploitative."

She added: "Most of us are just normal people. We have jobs that we don't like, which is the whole point of why we're in the movement to begin with."

The thread, whose the full name is "Antiwork: Unemployment for all, not just the rich!", was started in 2013.

For years its membership numbered in the low thousands, before growing exponentially since the onset of the pandemic, which fueled a reassessment of work and its value and prompted a "Great Resignation" of resignations.

The Reddit thread now receives an average of 1,500 posts a day, in which members – so-called "Idlers" – share accounts of bad bosses and encourage each other to quit, similar to the Tang ping movement in China.

 
© Subreddit Stats Membership of r/antiwork has grown exponentially since the beginning of the pandemic. Subreddit Stats

Insider's Hilary Hoffower reported how Gen Z and millennial workers were leading the way by trading in bad jobs for careers that offer greater purpose and meaning — while many older workers are choosing to switch to self-employment or early retirement.

A record 4.5 million Americans quit their job in November.

The reasons driving the great resignation transcend much more than simply a desire to work less.

Kentuckians, whose state is at the epicenter of America's Great Resignation, outlined fears over the Omicron variant, a dearth of accessible childcare and social inequalities as among the reasons to Insider's Juliana Kaplan, Hillary Hoffower, and Madison Hoff.

The Right To Be Lazy - The People
www.slp.org/pdf/others/lazy_pl.pdf · PDF file
The Right To Be Lazy BEING A REPUDIATION OF THE “RIGHT TO WORK” OF 1848 By Paul Lafargue Translated and adapted from the French by Dr. Harriet Lothrop. Published by the

By work we mean what Bob Black says in his classic essay, The Abolition of Work, “Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick.” In other words, we are against the notion that people should be structurally limited and optioned out of a better, more peaceful and playful life by the powers that be.
About - Abolish Work
abolishwork.com/about/

The Abolition of Work - The Anarchist Library

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work

2020-11-28 · Bob Black The Abolition of Work No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from



















The Right to Be Greedy: Theses on the Practical Necessity of Demanding Everything


Publication date 1974The Right To Be Greedy: Theses On The Practical Necessity Of Demanding Everything is a book published in 1974 by an American Situationist collective called "For Ourselves: Council for Generalized Self-Management". 

Post-left anarchist Bob Black describes it in its preface as an "audacious attempt to synthesize a collectivist social vision of left-wing origin with an individualistic (for lack of a better word) ethic usually articulated on the right".

Its authors say that "[t]he positive conception of egoism, the perspective of communist egoism, is the very heart and unity of our theoretical and practical coherence". It is highly influenced by the work of Max Stirner. A reprinting of the work in the eighties was done by Loompanics Unlimited with the involvement of Bob Black who also wrote the preface to it.

Most libertarians think of themselves as in some sense egoists. If they believe in rights, they believe these rights belong to them as individuals. If not, they nonetheless look to themselves and others as so many individuals possessed of power to be reckoned with. Either way, they assume that the opposite of egoism is altruism. The altruists, Christian or Maoist, agree. A cozy accomodation; and, I submit, a suspicious one. What if this antagonistic intedependence, this reciprocal reliance reflects and conceals an accord? Could egoism be altruism's loyal opposition? Yes, according to the authors of this text. What's more, they insist that an egoism which knows itself and refuses every limit to its own realization is communism.

Contents:
Preface by Bob Black
1. Wealth
2. Individualism and Collectivism
3. The Dialectic of Egoism
4. The Resonance of Egoisms
5. Communist Society
6. Radical Subjectivity
7. Pleasure
8. Sexuality
9. Authority
10. Morality
11. Revolution
Appendix: Preamble to The Founding Agreements of For Ourselves: Council for Generalized Self-Management


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