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Antiwork

Landlordism ≠ Ending ‘Work’

Kia ora koutou, Just wanted to write a little piece about the post that was removed earlier. It received, in my mind, a concerning amount of traction (last count it had 15,000 upvotes). Hope this post helps explain my, and many other leftists, point of view. The premise of this sub is: “for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.” I think there may be a bit confusion around what 'work' is in this group. In my mind, work ≠ labour. Personally, I love work. Researching stuff around this is 'work' to me. Work ought to be creative, fun, and explorative. What we have to do in this current mode of production, is labour. Specifically, we provide labour power for the…


Kia ora koutou,

Just wanted to write a little piece about the post that was removed earlier. It received, in my mind, a concerning amount of traction (last count it had 15,000 upvotes). Hope this post helps explain my, and many other leftists, point of view.

The premise of this sub is: “for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.”

I think there may be a bit confusion around what 'work' is in this group. In my mind, work ≠ labour. Personally, I love work. Researching stuff around this is 'work' to me. Work ought to be creative, fun, and explorative. What we have to do in this current mode of production, is labour. Specifically, we provide labour power for the capitalist class in order to for them to extract surplus value (profit). I imagine most people in this group mean they want to end being exploited by the ruling class, not necessarily ending 'work'. However, this is also accounted for in leftist ideology, and it is totally fine to not 'work' as well. Paul Lafargue's 'The Right to Be Lazy & Other Studies' is great for this, and even though he wasn't a leftist, Bertrand Russell's 'In Praise of Idleness' speaks to this quite well too.

Now, what we definitely ought not to be doing, as a leftist movement, is inviting landlordism as means of ending either 'work' or 'labour'. Landlordism, as we know it today, is a symptom of capitalism; the latter begets the former. Engels talks about this quite a bit in 'The Housing Question' :

“No matter how much the landlord may overreach the tenant it is still only a transfer of already existing, previously produced value, and the total sum of values possessed by the landlord and the tenant together remains the same after as it was before. The worker is always cheated of a part of the product of his labour, whether that labour is paid for by the capitalist below, above, or at its value.”.

Exploitative labour has to exist for landlordism to exist, and is antithetical to this group's mission statement. Landlords are only a variety of capitalists: If you become a landlord, you are perpetuating exploitation, no matter the reason. In order to abolish exploitative labour and private landlordism, we must abolish capitalism. Thanks comrades, hope it was helpful.

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