A Gift from the Plague
The alleged commodity ‘labor power’ cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to that tag.
– Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
It’s bleak out there. This is what I hear from people when I tell them I’m looking for work, even as a freelance copyeditor/writer. To be honest, bleak is definitely the vibe. Between the intellectual property–laundering software they’ve marketed as “AI” and the loss of one publication after another, one wonders (I wonder) how I might declare bankruptcy on a skill no longer of value. But I guess that’s just another word for shame. Needless to say, I need work—badly. And because of that, I’ve been thinking about work.
Three months into the pandemic, I co-authored an essay with Joe Osmundson about the rhetoric of war against a virus1. We wanted readers to consider not the “fight” against Covid, but the instructive power of a social disease—even, perhaps, a plague’s moral judgment upon a society. As Covid-19 made clear, there was a lot to judge, and promising to wage a “war” against it fared as well as this country’s other wars against concepts, tactics, or inanimate objects. What if we instead considered how the pandemic encouraged people to care for one another? Free food distributions, neighborhood exchanges, working from home, and simply caring for one’s family members was instructive:
If we invert the metaphor of war into one of care, the questions we ask invert themselves as well: What must we do, for example, to care for our essential workers? What must we do to care for those most vulnerable in our society? In the immediate future, labor’s value must shift to reward those most at risk, who are doing the work that allows the rest of us to continue eating, to have hospitals waiting for us, and to have transit to reach them.
Other countries, of course, cared much better for their own; but it’s not nothing that the United States increased SNAP benefits, extended unemployment, sent out three stimulus checks, provided free testing and vaccines regardless of insurance, and, generally, gave its citizens the impression that it was more important to stay home than to risk infecting those around you. Of course, all of these socialist ideas are what drove Congress and the President to “end” the pandemic, or at least end the state of emergency that doomed all these programs to their temporary status from the beginning. But for a year or two, there was something we did learn from the plague: that being taken care of—that having a minimal sense of security, should you need it—makes it easier to go about your life.
In the United States, making it easier to go about your life means making it easier to work. If this is the metric, let’s highlight how work benefits from “socialist” policies. Reliable SNAP funds make it easier to plan one’s week, as well as to eat healthier food. This reduces stress and makes it easier to solve problems, think creatively, and organize one’s schedule for different tasks (since multitasking isn’t real). Extended unemployment benefits ensure that workers are able to find the job that’s right for them, reducing risk of turnover—thereby saving employers from having to “invest” in employees that leave shortly after being hired. Universal healthcare drastically reduces employer overhead, which makes it easier to offer more competitive salaries (and, in manufacturing, more profitable products or more competitive prices). At the same time, employees who are no longer engaged—or, in corpocratic parlance, “actively disengaged”—will find it easier to leave; they are not anchored to a company by their human tendency to not want to lose everything to debt when they get sick. And of course, simply paying people who don’t have full-time jobs a baseline income helps keep them off the streets—something that the ruling class, as many newspapers have made clear, finds “scary.”
Obviously, life is more than work. Life is leisure and learning. It is spiritual or ineffable connection. Life is fucking a lot and enjoying it, despite what psy-op trolls pretending to be gen-z teens are posting online (if you don’t know, don’t seek). Life is finding out something about your neighborhood you never knew. “Life is weather, life is meals,” as James Salter put it. And sure: life is work, in the vocational sense. But sometimes where you’re called isn’t where the money is—I know this for a fact.
There’s been a lot of noise—rightfully so—about immunocompromised and disabled persons being “left behind” by declaring a premature end to a pandemic that’s still killing people. But there’s been less noise2 about those left behind by the sudden, wrenching cessation of benefits—extra money for food, extended payments for those out of work, stimulus checks, utility funds, mortgage freezes, even tweaks to the tax code. Those who relied on these benefits are out in the cold, which to me says the plague didn’t teach “us” anything after all, and that this country is hurtling toward making the same mistakes it’s made, over and over, for the last forty years. The increasing violence against even perceiving an unhoused person seems to fortify the neoliberal attitude about the economic consequences of the pandemic: out of sight, off one’s conscience.
The proletariat is, then, at one and the same the product of the permanent crisis in capitalism and the instrument of those tendencies which drive capitalism towards crisis… For the active and practical side of class consciousness, its true essence, can only become visible in its authentic form when the historical process imperiously requires it to come into force, i.e. when an acute crisis in the economy drives it to action.
– György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness
The pandemic was a public health emergency, but it seems to me to have made its greatest impact upon the culture of work in this country. Ever since, “work” has changed. The delusions of the hustle are no longer credible. Employers “taking care” of workers is no longer credible. The entire apparatus of “work hard, get rewarded” is no longer credible. Because of this, one sees “quiet quitting,” and now some nonsense about “bare minimum Monday.” This memeification of setting boundaries is labor organizing in a typically contemporary (annoying) register. More troublingly, several industries are drastically understaffed because the positions they’re trying to fill aren’t of value to prospective employees. It’s simply “not worth it” to be a nurse, a teacher, a bus driver, a forensic analyst, no matter how badly society needs them. In other industries employees are unionizing and striking. Workers are organizing not only because they’ve reached a point of desperation, but because they had a glimpse, I think, of an alternative—a slower pace coupled with easier access to benefits. Ten years ago, the men who created the technologies that steal from us, sell our private information, “disrupt” facts, and dissolve our societal relationships were lauded in magazines for their vision, for their genius; today, most of them are not only publicly derided or harassed, but under some form of investigation. That’s a change to celebrate. Even the Biden Administration has, indirectly, concerned itself with work, having seemingly remembered that part of the federal government’s job is to dismantle or prevent monopolies.
Even more importantly, the shift in work during the pandemic opened a window for protest. It’s impossible to speculate, of course, but I sincerely doubt we’d have seen the same level of demonstrations during June of 2020 had people been at work, nor the same level of organized response, throughout city neighborhoods. Part of work’s function, in America, is to deplete one’s energy or interest as a citizen—to disengage you from politics as a pragmatic public activity (as distinguished from politics as entertainment via social media or television, which is another way that citizens are targeted and neutralized). This is why there’s no cap on overtime, nor any regulations protecting us from answering emails or responding to phone calls and texts from our employers after hours or on weekends. When that hold is no longer quite so firm, citizens remember who they are; they remember they have a voice.
This hold is what Elizabeth Anderson calls “private government.” We tell ourselves, she says in Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It), that “unregulated markets make us free, and that the only threat to our liberties is the state. We are told that in the market, all transactions are voluntary. We are told that, since workers freely enter and exit the labor contract, they are perfectly free under it.” Because most of this country’s civic framework is built on political philosophies that predate the industrial revolution, the ideas about liberty still bandied about by libertarians or neoliberals no longer apply to our reality. Not only did the model set forth by Adam Smith and John Locke and Thomas Paine fail to anticipate the industrial revolution’s effect on the power of each individual worker, it became a kind of Achilles’ heel: by basing the state largely in a philosophy of restraint, the “business man” became first a hero, then a tyrant. “Preindustrial egalitarians,” Anderson writes, “had no answer for the challenge of the Industrial Revolution. Their model of how to bring about a free society of equals through free markets via near-universal self-employment [e.g., as artisans] was shattered… Thus arose a symbiotic relationship between libertarianism and authoritarianism that blights our political discourse to this day.” This symbiosis is especially evident in the tech industry. One only need glance at Elon Musk, for example, to realize that libertarians don’t dislike government at all; it’s just that they want to be the government. This is why they believe that money is governance.
But why not quit? Isn’t this part of the contract? Well, Anderson says, “Quitting often imposes even greater costs on workers than being fired does, for it makes them ineligible for unemployment insurance. It is an odd kind of countervailing power that workers supposedly have to check their bosses’ power, when they typically suffer more from imposing it than they would suffer from the worst sanction bosses can impose on them. Threats, to be effective, need to be credible.” Indeed, losing one’s health insurance and disqualifying oneself from unemployment are sufficient to make one reconsider how “free” one is to leave a petty tyranny. (Similarly, I wonder how many of the “Love it or leave it” folks realize how expensive and difficult it is to leave the United States, which retains an enormous interest in keeping people—especially poor people and formerly incarcerated people—trapped behind its borders.)
What our little plague revealed, I think, is how deeply this idea of “private government” had anchored itself in everyone’s lives, even to the point of a kind of brainwashing (see corporate DEI initiatives). I also believe that the boundaries many in the United States are now establishing between their lives and their jobs is a direct result of this revelation. And it is a crucial revelation. Discussing Anderson’s ideas—as well as workplace surveillance—in the New York Review of Books, Zephyr Teachout reflected that
To make sense of the reality we are in, we need to be able to talk to one another without fear of our conversations being used against us… When everything we say is being listened to—especially by a smaller and more powerful cadre of employers—it can become easier not to speak. This is not unlike the political totalitarianism that Hannah Arendt warned against, where the state aims to disintegrate both the private and the public by submerging the private into the public and then controlling the public. The logical conclusion of workplace surveillance is that the private sphere ceases to exist at work, where visibility into the worker’s life is unrestrained.
Because “private government” is the more immediate government most Americans are subjected to, resisting its tyranny has a lot to teach us about resisting the tyrannies of our actual state. (You know, the thing that supposedly belongs to us—we the people or whatever.) In this sense, labor organizing is the foundation of political organizing, not the reverse. While a major labor overhaul is absolutely crucial—either via legislation or constitutional amendment—I don’t see any reason why Congress would sign any serious regulations into law, not even if protestors were to set fire to every federal building in the country. However, if the majority of the workforce was to unionize and seek a voice within their organizations, to network with other unions, and to threaten a general strike, “the people” would suddenly have a voice—the voice of the corporation, or the voice of money. After all, if boycotts and cancel culture have taught us anything it’s this: if money is speech, there’s nothing stopping those who don’t have it from speaking it nonetheless.
Thank you for reading! If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you’ve noticed this letter is now called Entertainment, Weakly. Since social media seems less and less reliable, I’m working toward making this a “weekly letter against feeling absolutely hopeless about entertainment, culture, and politics, and the way art touches all of them.” Please tell your friends if it seems like something they’d like to read. And, as ever, if you enjoyed reading this, you may be interested in my books, Image Control and Some Hell. Talk to you again soon <3
This essay was published in Joe’s wonderful book, Virology, which is a finalist for the NBCC Award and something you want to buy right now.
FWIW, I measure noise by how many tweets annoy me.