So…we've all experienced gatekeeping on here at some point, if not recently, in the past, and a recent top level post got me thinking about how to explain this to this sub. So, that said, I figured I would discuss a bit about anti work from the capitalist side of things, and explain where I come from on things. “But but…you can't be anti work without also being anti capitalist!” Uh…wrong. It really depends on your ideology. Let's define terms. My definition of being “anti work” is roughly the same as what the leftist definition is, being anti wage slavery. I'm against coercive forms of work. That doesn't mean I'm necessarily against all work, or that I dont understand that some work needs to be done. I certainly do. If anything, pragmatic considerations are a huge reason I'm still on the “capitalist” side of things. So…let's define anti work as…
From Work to Creation
There’s no other way to rid yourself of work besides giving back to individual creativity a confidence that has been, up to the present, stingily doled out to it, if not refused to it. From Work to Creation In order that creation might supplant work, an economy which will take its last dying profits from the healing of the earth and the production of sustainable energy will have to supplant the economy of denaturation. The gradual passage from the factories to the workshops of creation will have, at least, the advantage of putting in doubt the old prejudice that saw freeness as merely an incongruous and abnormal gift, as an imperfection in the form of the process of exchanges, as the immoral retribution of those who do nothing. Then we will reencounter the assimilation of pleasure into a compensation for services rendered, into the recompense of the gods, into the…
Many in the sub of late have discussed, at no short length, the issue of gatekeeping. Their idea of gatekeeping, though, can often be a bit exaggerated. Let me get the first point out of the way. When someone says “Anti-work doesn't mean some minor change to work, it means a radical shift in how labor is performed and how it's organized”, whether they're gatekeeping depends on one simple fact: When they say “Anti-work”, are they talking about the sub itself, or about the actual political position of anti-work philosophy? The fact is, even if many of those on this sub are not themselves anti-work in the sense of the philosophy, anti-work did not originate here as an idea. This space is a product of anti-work theory, not its parent, and so long as the space is to be defined by that political theory it nominally is about a specific…