Loving work is embracing our submission

I met N. at a app dating. We walked around Alicante looking for a pizzeria and talked about our occupations. N. studies Fine Arts and works in a outlet of sports clothing. He tells me that his work is a little tedious, but that he puts music on his headphones and the hours go by. And then he continues with bewilderment: her colleagues are delighted with the company. She has green and feminist values, she gives them a discount throughout the store and rewards them with a bonus if they work at a good pace. A cocktail of green ethics, competition and consumerist blackmail makes a low-paid job that consists of stacking shoe boxes for sports and being in shape to stack shoe boxes charming. I couldn't imagine getting to know such a display of seduction in a single afternoon.

Paul Lafargue wrote in The right to laziness that all the miseries of capitalist societies had a single cause, and that cause is the love of work. Lafargue is not referring to greed or envy, but to the unleashed passion that workers themselves feel for our occupations. He thus located the source of our fatigue in the sphere of social reproduction, a change of perspective that allows us to question work from attachment and its libidinal economy: how have we learned to love it? Who made it so attractive, so strangely uplifting? Why do our jobs dazzle us with a rhetoric of a good life when they only prevent it, saturating with their demands all the time, all the affections, all the capacities that we have?

in his book Frozen intimacies, sociologist Eva Illouz tells us about the Hawthorne experiments, developed by Elton Mayo in Chicago in the 1920s. Their results revealed that productivity did not increase so much with an improvement in the material conditions of the workplace, but rather by paying attention to the operators. They showed that caring for an emotional bond between worker and company was a key to success and exploitation as sophisticated as it was unknown. From that moment on, she values ​​Illouz, the business style and the management began to revolutionize, and companies dedicated themselves to investing in the dark arts of seduction: they were filled with psychologists and coaches ontological, they made their environment a sinisterly friendly space, they raised the flags of humanitarian aid. What Mayo discovered in the 1920s, the film SA monsters taught us in 2001: joyful passions generate much more energy than fear.

It doesn't matter what job you have, skilled or unskilled, manual or intellectual, sedentary or nomadic. It doesn't matter if you carry boxes or teach algebra, work will always try to seduce you, confusing itself with your life, with your creed, with your values, with your desires. The key to servitude now is not in governing the body with various disciplines, as in times of industrial capitalism, but in governing the souls, that is, governing desire. It is about involving the subject fully in the conduct that he must follow, as the thinkers Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot explain, about relativizing the iron border between leisure and business in favor of capital. The love of work that Lafargue denounced, in short, is a contemporary version of what La Boétie called voluntary servitude: to love work is to embrace our submission.

We are facing a new culture of emotions in which being motivated is synonymous with high performance

If we pay attention to what the sociologist Renyi Hong explains in Passionate Work, this gibberish of enthusiasm has two essential features. The first is an ideological trap: we must be happy and live well despite economic difficulties. The second involves recognizing that passion for work is not a mere feeling, but an affective structure: contemporary forms of work have become both more desirable and more exploitative, so that we are asked to follow our dreams precisely to combat the problems of the economy. Passion for work is mobilized as a shield, a means of attenuating the psychic drain of economic uncertainty and lack of income. Thus, work stops being a space for the exercise of virtue (“work gives dignity”) to be read in terms of psychological compensation (“don't complain, you work what you like”): it offers us more glamor and less salary. , disguises precariousness with the garb of adventure, calls flexibility to absolute availability. The personal fulfillment it promises is a veiled demand not to stop working, to become emotionally dependent on our occupation. We are facing a new culture of emotions where being motivated is synonymous with both high performance and the absence of any critical questioning.

What I mean, N. explains to me with a piece of pizza in her hand, is that sometimes we have to protect ourselves from what we want, as the artist Jenny Holzer claimed in her illuminated posters. Or that, at least, we have to be aware of how we desire, of what we give when we love: since we have to sell our soul to pay the rent and carbohydrates, let's sell it a little dearly. If the learning of our hearts about the vocation and its fanfares have led us to be subjected in the name of freedom and passion, dissidence consists of asking ourselves if we can love differently, if we can transform the way we desire in order to boycott culture. of professional emotions.

A cocktail of green ethics, competition and consumerist blackmail is capable of making a poorly paid job charming

And the truth, fortunately, is that we are not alone in this learning of heartbreak. Where it seemed necessary to work 10 or even 12 hours, the La Canadiane strike showed us, in 1919 in Barcelona, ​​that it was enough to work eight, and today we understand that 32 a week is enough. Where it seemed that women had to dedicate themselves to the home, and that theirs was not work but the due tribute of their love, the feminist strikes that began in Argentina in 2016 criticized the sexual division of labor and made visible that silent majority that he breaks his back at home and doesn't get paid. In the second half of 2021, some twenty-five million Americans left their jobs: they wanted a life with less reputation and more mental health, she told herself. The phenomenon was baptized as the Great Renunciation, and although it lasted very little, it aspired to inaugurate what The New York Times called “the era of anti-ambition.” The strikes in France last spring against the pension reform rose up to vindicate that life lies elsewhere, beyond meritocracy. These are all stories of heartbreak, but good heartbreak: they teach us to fall out of love with work. They remind us that our toxic relationship with our job is not unconditional, they encourage us to live and love differently. Because it's not love, no. What we feel is called obsession.

Only when the proletariat falls out of love and says “I don't want it,” will all capitalist miseries disappear, Lafargue promises us. Only by falling out of love with work can we direct our desire to invent a good life. I have not seen N. again, I think he now lives in Bilbao. The pizzeria closed last week due to lack of staff.

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