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Antiwork

Pro-work positions as a result of financial abuse: what can we do?

You've surely read, or heard, or even seen this scenario a few times already: someone in a household doesn't want to work, do anything at all in the house, and asks everyone else to work for money and in the house, takes their money. But this person also constantly berates the rest of the household for being lazy. This is often a guy being like a patriarch in his own little world. They rely on a variety of abuses (emotional, physical, sexual), but here i'm focusing on financial abuse. To get what they want, they need people under their orders to spontaneously do as much efforts as they can. Similarly to capitalism, they put forward an ideology that tries to justify the social order they attempt to create. With such an ideology, people under their influence question their basic perceptions, learn to ignore what their body tells them about being…


You've surely read, or heard, or even seen this scenario a few times already: someone in a household doesn't want to work, do anything at all in the house, and asks everyone else to work for money and in the house, takes their money. But this person also constantly berates the rest of the household for being lazy. This is often a guy being like a patriarch in his own little world. They rely on a variety of abuses (emotional, physical, sexual), but here i'm focusing on financial abuse.

To get what they want, they need people under their orders to spontaneously do as much efforts as they can. Similarly to capitalism, they put forward an ideology that tries to justify the social order they attempt to create. With such an ideology, people under their influence question their basic perceptions, learn to ignore what their body tells them about being unwell, stifle their emotions…

They're not very inventive though, they just reuse elements of capitalism's ideology often. So stuff about the value of hard work, everything being the “personal responsibility” of the subordinated, hierarchy-minded “respect”, “merit”, and so on. They might also constantly get into a new pseudo-entrepreneurial scam. Of course, the more positive side of liberalism, that is respecting the individual, and freedom, is removed.

Now, if you lurk say /r/TwoXChromosomes, you might come to notice something in what people who used to be in that situation say. They end up focusing a lot on this type of abuser not working a real job, or none at all. They don't really reject pro-work attitudes and self-exploitation. No, they criticize financial abusers for not subjecting themselves to the same discipline.

And that's a big issue I think. In the case of feminism, this gives way to a form of feminism that's pretty much what Catherine Rottenberg calls neoliberal feminism, and you can find a lot of it on the sub I mentioned in this paragraph. Meanwhile, there already exists feminist analyses of exploitation in households on the basis of sexism, but they're little known. The result is also that it merges with ableist and classist ideologies, and end up treating financial abusers, disabled people, and people who got laid off for no fault of their own, as being the same, especially if they're also men (thereby agreeing with hegemonic masculinity, and yes women can push it too).

The big question is therefore, from an anarchist and anti-work perspective: how can we prevent victims of financial abuse from using neoliberalism as their solution to financial abuse? Or, restated in a more positive way: what is the alternative we can give to victims of financial abuse?

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