Idlers of the World, Unite!

Oddly enough, the conversations on Antiwork sometimes make me think of Confucius. At a glance, Confucius’ ideal social order seems to conform to the sensibilities of American employers. He prescribes a rationalized hierarchy of relations between fathers and children, and rulers and subjects, in which it is the obligation of those lower on the totem pole to show due deference and loyalty to their betters.

But Confucius’ emphasis on the respect and loyalty owed to those who command comes with a corresponding duty of noblesse oblige. The privilege of presiding over a nation — or an organization — must be earned with impeccable moral conduct and benevolence. An unprincipled, rapacious, or cruel leader (whether of a nation or a firm) engenders the conditions of his ruin by losing the trust and arousing the animosity of the people beneath him. The sage’s feelings about a people’s right to revolt are somewhat ambiguous — he speaks of rebellion more as a regrettable consequence of misrule than as a legitimate political option — but he is clear that people who serve bad leaders should resign and go elsewhere. (This would make Confucius one of the earliest recorded advocates of workplace walkouts.) A ruler justifies his position by taking responsibility for the welfare of his people.

This flouting of all notions of responsibility and reciprocity — that’s the reason for so much of the anger that finds expression and an audience on Antiwork. These people aren’t just blowing off steam because their boss is a stickler for details, or because their supervisor wouldn’t see things their way in an argument. Antiwork is a mood, and that mood is moral outrage. It’s about the demand for devotion and commitment from people (or an abstract concept of a person, reified in the corporate entity) who have no intention of returning your loyalty, and make no secret that they consider you disposable. It’s about knowing that the political system has been hijacked to serve the interests of the rentiers who are callously taking advantage of you every time you clock in. It’s about living paycheck to paycheck with a full-time job while management can afford to buy houses, send their kids to private schools, take overseas vacations, and plan to retire instead of just working until they die — all while treating you like dirt.

“Unless social inequalities have a true and moral basis…government of the people is an impossibility,” says the Confucius’ Doctrine of the Mean. It later reiterates: “If the people in inferior positions do not have confidence in those above them, government of the people is an impossibility.”

For all it’s done to capture the zeitgeist, Antiwork is not an organized movement. But does it have the potential to become one? Should it become one?

As somebody still smarting a bit from Occupy Wall Street’s failure, I’m glad to see that Antiwork has so far not taken any steps towards “going public.” As things currently stand, it would fail. The ideological divide between its utopian and pragmatist blocs (which can be hard to see beneath all the memes and personal story posts) could very well lead to a schism. The board’s “official” anarcho-communist ideology is rather outré by the standards of the American mainstream; the venal jabberers of cable news would have a field day interviewing any of Antiwork’s most probable spokespeople. Moreover, the community’s animus towards social conservatives (also easy to overlook if one doesn’t comb through threads) would alienate more of the working class than it probably realizes.

If Antiwork is to be a force for change, probably the best thing it can do is stay the course. It doesn’t need to become an activist brand, at least not right now, maybe not ever. In its doomed, quixotic crusade for economic justice, Occupy led its believers against the fortified and mostly faceless malefactors of finance capital. The enthusiastic millennials who threw their support behind Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns pinned their populist hopes on a single man who was just as remote from their lives as the vampire squid financiers who created a lost generation and made off with billions of dollars. But Antiwork’s virtue is its immediacy. Few people directly interact with Wall Street firms or politicians. Way more people have jobs. It’s easier to make an employer or a recruiter sweat than to threaten a distant billionaire; coordinating with one’s coworkers against management is more likely to yield immediate results than voting for a maverick politician in a national election and hoping for a good outcome. (Provided, of course, that one goes about organizing their workplace the right way, and Antiwork is full of helpful information about how and how not to confront one’s bosses.)

As things stand, Antiwork is most potentially useful as a vehicle of stochastic resistance, a public record and a nexus of workers’ exasperation with a political system in thrall to corporate patrons, and with a business milieu that has been generating record profits while squeezing them harder and harder. It’s an enormous digital wall on which DOMINUS EST NON GRATUS ANUS RODENTUM is painted in towering letters, rewritten, and undersigned a hundred thousandfold — a message that doesn’t necessarily incite a revolution, but can effectuate the transformations in attitudes and behavior that compel history to lope a step forward. To the underpaid and alienated worker, a daily glance at Antiwork’s top posts is a reminder that they’re not alone, that power exists in numbers, and that a boss can only tyrannize them if they consent to it. The board encourages people not to settle for less, not to trust corporate employers to deal with them in good faith, and to communicate and organize with other workers if they’re serious about change. In other words, Antiwork is helping to foster class consciousness, something which both of America’s political parties have been doing their damnedest to suppress (absent their anodyne, obligatory rhetoric about the importance of a “strong middle class”).

Ever since the Great Recession, the United States’ economic and political elite have been playing whack-a-mole with economic justice movements, either stymying them (in the case of Sanders’ presidential campaigns), letting them run their course and implode on themselves (Occupy), or co-opting and defanging them (the Democratic Socialists of America). No honest effort has been made to address the runaway economic divide, stagnant or shrinking wages, systemic corporate malfeasance, the narrowing of the middle class, or the rise of the precariat. Whatever becomes of Antiwork and its ethos, the outrage that inspired it has been boiling for too long to be assuaged by pizza parties, gift cards, and platitudes.