Working for Abolition Means Abolishing Work

What Is Work, Anyway? The Violent Origins of Wage Work

In order to examine the pitfalls of seeking solutions to society’s problems through wage work, it is crucial to emphasize that I am not referring to the deeply human, if highly abstract, transhistorical capacity to take nature and transform it to meet a variety of needs. Rather, I am addressing a particular social arrangement: wage work under capitalism. Or, in other words, a job: the highly undemocratic, coercive, and authoritarian institution through which people dispossessed of other means of survival sell the majority of their waking time on this planet for the ability (ideally, but certainly not always) to purchase shelter, food, and maybe a few other comforts.

Humans have been engaged in need satisfaction and recreation for as long as we can trace human history, but only for the last few hundred years, at most, have jobs dominated how we organize that activity. And that development was anything but natural or inevitable. In each place and era where capitalism developed, the imposition of jobs was predicated on enormous violence and coercion through which lands that previously allowed people to sustain themselves were stolen and enclosed. Put simply, having a job is an economic arrangement which relies on the worker having no ability to survive except by selling her labor power.

Although central to the insights of the first generations of anticapitalist thinkers, opposition to wage labor in general has been largely absent from leftist analyses for the past half century. In part, this is due to the successes of anticommunism in the US labor movement and the expulsion of organizers to the left of social democrats. What remained, sadly, was a conciliatory labor movement that fought hard to convince the American working class that collaboration with, rather than confronting and overthrowing, capital was the sole means toward progress. Many on the broader left have imbibed more of this logic than they care to admit, even forgetting another objective once existed.¹²Polish Economist Adam Przeworski reminds us: “Socialism was to be a society in which people individually would acquire control over their lives because their existence would no longer be an instrument of survival and people would collectively acquire control over shared resources and efforts because their allocation would be a subject of joined deliberation and rational choice. Socialism was not a movement for full employment but for the abolition of wage slavery: it was not a movement for efficiency but for collective rationality; it was not a movement for equality but for freedom.” Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy, reprint, Studies in Marxism and Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993), 243. But radicals of the past were clear that the core of an anticapitalist project is the understanding that capitalism must be transcended because of the violence it inflicts on people through work, and that this violence is central to the institution, rather than a reformable feature.

Marx, for example, described wage work under capitalism as a highly coercive and violent institution that brought about enormous harm for those forced to undertake it:

It is true that labor produces marvels for the rich, but it produces privation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machines, but it casts some of the workers back into barbarous forms of labor and turns others into machines… [The worker] does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working, he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working.¹³Karl Marx and Lucio Colletti, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, reprint (London: Penguin Classics, 1992), 325–26.

Whether tied to machines or narrowly exercising their minds, work is experienced as a deprivation. In such a view, even the remarkable riches created by workers’ efforts are, at least in part, disturbing indictments of a mortifying system. For Marx, a key element of labor under capitalism is that, despite its famously putative “double freedom,” wage labor is not a relationship a worker comes to with true volition but rather through the cruel compulsion of need. This is why the appearance of equality and freedom between workers and capitalists is such a socially dangerous illusion. Throughout his work, Marx underscores the falsehood of free participation in wage labor under capitalism: “His labor is therefore not voluntary but forced, it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needs outside itself. Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists it is shunned like the plague.”¹⁴Ibid.

Despite his ire at what work did to workers under capitalism—privation, physical, and mental harms alike—Marx’s vision of freedom was not the improvement of wage work. Better, more fulfilling jobs with higher pay appear in Marx’s oeuvre only to emphasize the futility of reforms for the working class, as they failed to challenge, and indeed only strengthened, the unequal system that created work’s many violences. For example, Marx writes, “We have thus seen that even the most favorable situation for the working class, namely, the most rapid growth of capital, however much it may improve the material life of the worker, does not abolish the antagonism between his interests and the interests of the capitalist.”¹⁵Karl Marx, Wage-Labor and Capital and Value, Price, and Profit (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 39. Elsewhere, Marx underscores the fraught logic of reforming or improving capitalism, stating bluntly, “The labor power of the wage laborer can exchange itself for capital only by increasing capital, by strengthening that very power whose slave it is.”¹⁶Ibid., 32 Improving work under capitalism, for Marx, meant increasing the capacity of capital to dominate, not reducing it. Just as carceral state abolitionists recognize the dangers of reforms as potential mechanisms through which institutions of oppression gain more legitimacy and power, Marx suggests anticapitalists can adopt a parallel mode of analysis regarding work.

Wage Slavery and the Possibility of Reforms

As the current abolitionist movement rightfully makes clear, the rhetorical gesture of equating things that are not slavery with its most severe chattel form is often analytically fraught and politically unhelpful. But for anticapitalists of Marx’s era and generations beyond, the use of the term “wage slavery” was not a hyperbolic metaphor but a way of underscoring the depth of the wage worker’s inherent unfreedom. It was also, crucially, a way to signal their objective: not reform, but abolition.

Lucy Parsons, a Black anarchist, was unequivocal that a revolutionary’s objective must be to “take the chances for everything in attempting to abolish the wage system.”¹⁷Lucy E. Parsons, Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality & Solidarity: Writings & Speeches, 1878–1937, Gale Aherns, ed. (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004), 8. Parsons, born enslaved in Texas and long partnered with a former slave, was one of many thinkers of her era who referred to wage work as “wage slavery.” In an evocative May Day speech, forty years after the Haymarket affair, she continued to underscore this powerful analysis: “Today we march, we send our greeting upon ocean’s waves, we send them continent to continent, we send our friends across the ocean and all climes and countries: we are with you. Our hearts throb. The working class throughout the world, proclaim the doom of capitalism and wage slavery.”¹⁸Ibid., 159

The murkiness which renders wage work under capitalism largely indistinguishable from the capacity for humans to care and create is one of many ideological obfuscations that make it difficult to criticize and challenge, lest we be accused of simply wanting to do nothing and contribute nothing to the collective project of human flourishing. But for a long lineage of anticapitalists, many of whom understood work under capitalism to be wage slavery, it was obvious that calling for the abolition of a coercive institution, one through which not just productivity but social needs are mediated, is not the same as refusing to do anything.

A basic principle of abolitionist approaches to the violence of the criminal justice system is to challenge the allure of reforms.¹⁹Mariame Kaba, “Police Reforms You Should Always Oppose,” Truthout, December 7, 2014, and Naomi Murakawa, “Police Reform Works—For the Police,” Department of African American Studies, Princeton University, October 26, 2020, https://aas.princeton.edu/news/police-reform-works-police. Abolitionists reject calls for reform for two main but intertwined reasons. First, they assert that reforms have been tried for centuries and have historically failed to remedy the key problems present in carceral institutions. New technologies, oversight efforts, staffing rearrangements, training programs, and wonkish policy fixes have all been tried extensively without ameliorating the key injustices of police and prisons.

Secondly, abolitionist critics of reform insist that reforms serve to legitimize the system writ large, implying that violence only exists at the fringes or as an outlier, rather than as a feature intrinsic to the institution itself. For example, focusing efforts on making chokeholds or other forms of “excessive force” illegal is understood by abolitionists as a mistaken focus of resistant energies, as these reforms subtly render both the police as such, and other types of force central to their violence, “legitimate.” Additionally, even when certain extremes like chokeholds are putatively illegal, they often persist without much consequence.

Much of what has been said of police and prison reforms can also be said of labor reforms: for hundreds of years following the advent of capitalism, reformers have attempted to improve the institution of wage work, rendering it safer and less onerous, by regulating hours, wages, the age of laborers, the physical environment in which work is performed, and other variables, all without undoing the actual violence, inequality, domination, theft, alienation, and exploitation at the heart of the institution.

Listening to the Grassroots: Welfare Rights Beyond Work

Academics traffic in ideas, and many of them have far too little direct experience with the institutions about which they write.²⁰Academics’ unique position as workers with what Stanley Aronowitz once called “the last good job” is a key reason why academics have failed to grapple with criticisms of wage work writ large, despite many of them identifying as anticapitalists. Thankfully, as historian and abolitionist Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us, “Abolishing the police is not the brainchild of some extreme left-wing think tank but a product of grassroots social movements fighting police violence and racially biased laws, while simultaneously trying to make their own communities safer.”²¹Robin D. G. Kelley, “What Abolition Looks Like, from the Panthers to the People,” Medium, October 26, 2020. Like carceral state abolition, many of the most insightful and mordant analyses of wage work, and insights into the constraints of reforming it to serve the needs of working class people, derive from the lived experience of working class people themselves. One of the strongest criticisms of wage work developed in the past century was articulated in the bold freedom dreams of the welfare rights movement.²²See my forthcoming article, “‘Nothing But Joy’: The Welfare Rights Movement’s Antiwork Freedom Dream” in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society.

Begun in the early 1960s as disparate, nationwide grassroots efforts by disaffected welfare recipients, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) amalgamated a nascent movement. By the late 1960s, and early ’70s, militant organizing efforts increased both the amount of benefits and the number of recipients, and made significant inroads into challenging the racist policies which rendered them vulnerable to the whims of local welfare departments.²³Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1978); Guida West, The National Welfare Rights Movement: The Social Protest of Poor Women (New York: Praeger, 1981); Premilla Nadasen, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2004). Buoyed by these successes, welfare recipients organized collectively and developed sophisticated analyses not just of workfare jobs but of the enveloping work regime at a time when welfare policies were increasingly shifting towards forcing recipients to work as a condition of benefits. In pamphlets, songs, policy proposals, and more, participants in the welfare rights movement developed a rigorous analysis of the problems with a society that coerces people, in their words, to either “work or starve.” In contrast to many other social movements at the time and since, welfare rights activists confronted the idealization of work and rejected its potential to be adequately reformed, decrying what they understood as the false reverence and unsubstantiated promises of wage work under capitalism.