WANTED: AN ANTI-WORK MOVEMENT.

• Author: Jaffe, Sarah

In revealing the very human frailties of our bodies and how much we depend on other people's labor to survive, the coronavirus pandemic has made it impossible to ignore the very old truth that, at the end of the day, many of us work to meet our other needs, not because work is meaningful or enjoyable on its own.

It is because of this revelation of the grimness and misery of so much of our wage labor that there has been a rush to place huge significance on the "Great Resignation," with commentators often overstating the degree to which workers are part of something which could be called an "anti-work movement." It feels true in our bones, these days, that work sucks, and that we would mostly prefer to be doing something else.

As Alice Herman shows in her interviews with workers who quit their jobs on page 40 of this issue, though, most of these workers aren't necessarily interested in joining a collective struggle to end wage labor as we know it. Instead, they're quitting jobs where conditions have grown unbearable in a relatively tightened labor market and are seeking new jobs. The Great Resignation is, as labor scholar Rebecca Kolins Givan recently noted on my podcast Belabored, "largely the great job turnover."

Just because some people who can quit their jobs have done so, it does not follow that there will be a massive change in the relations of power at work. To actually change those relations will require conflict on a larger scale.

And yet, as Herman's article also shows, some of these workers are indeed asking bigger questions about the "American financial, capitalistic machine." While the Great Resignation and the phenomenon called "Strike-tober," which I covered in my last column, are hardly large enough or organized enough to be called a general strike, the time does seem ripe for the rise of a real anti-work movement. But what would such a thing look like?

In his new book, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization, political philosopher Rodrigo Nunes argues for an ecological view of movements. Rather than imagining that every organized movement of workers should look like a labor union or a political party, or be a relatively structureless horizontal network, Nunes suggests that there are many different shapes and forms political organizing can take. These differently shaped groups, parties, clusters, and networks will influence one another as they act.

In other words, no one way works on its own. "It...