Before you go any further, I'm not American, in fact I'm South African, and if I must have a political branding, call me a centrist or a humanitarian. Anyways, on to the post.
John Adams, 2nd president of the USA wrote the following in a letter to his wife:
“The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”
I'm not here to dicuss how good a job he did as president or his party politics or whatever, but just this message. To me it always seemed like he knew, even back then, that a stable society, government, and education system would eventually pave the way for people to work less and less on necessities and pursue passion and art more and more as time went on.
I'm not saying that's necessarily the way things are, I know just as well as the rest of you that the system right now is broken, that politicians are corrupt, and people in power are usually there at the expense of the masses and that they like to stay there. I'm also not proposing any solution to that problem.
I'm just posing the question, is it not possible to reach a place of antiwork through change in laws? Through open discussion? Through transparent and accountable administration?
I get that antiwork in the sense of doing absolutely nothing necessitates that one must have no responsibilities at all, but then one also has no quality of life. To enjoy qualities of the modern world, someone has to work. If I want water and electricity but I don't want to bring those to my home with my own power, somebody has to do it. Even if I do it myself, unless I gather materials and build from scratch, someone, somewhere up that chain needs to be working for us to have anything and be able to not work.
That's where I like John Adams proposal, it acknowledges that somebody will always have to work, but that over time there should be less and less work, that it should get easier and easier. It hilights how they could be right now if not for people's greed and exploitation.
But personally I cannot see antiwork going hand in hand with anarchism, as then there'd be a lot more work necessary to remain safe and alive. Am I alone in this idea? Have I erred? What do you all think?