Meaningful work: an appeal to the young

By Scott Nappolos

An article about choosing meaning in employment. 

From the time I was a child, I was told to follow my dreams and do something I truly loved. Granted I rarely met an adult who was passionate about their work, but they seemed sincere in their desire for others to take that path. The advice of course usually had a piece of bitterness attached to it. As I came of age, the terrain didn’t look pretty. Most of my personal passions were deserts for employment. Nor did I really know anyone who was living the dream, so to speak, at work. My path began from leaving that advice behind.

Society is littered with talk of meaningful work. The creative class, jobs that means something, doing something with one’s life, work that matters, helping people; we’re inundated with phrases, words, and images that describe our poverty and the future that we are supposed to aspire to.

It’s actually worse for people who commit themselves to making radical change in society. A confluence of pressures pushes down on them year after year through family wondering when they will grow up, friends perpetually moving on to something better, and a gnawing sense of wasted potential. Why bother with the endless meetings, the mindless work, and for what?

Unless you’re born into a situation where work is unnecessary, nearly everyone experiences the modern workplace. Service work in particular serves as a stark reminder of reality and alternatives. The unending drudgery of task after task slinging fatty coffee that literally poisons people’s health, selling useless items created on the backs of abused workers elsewhere, cardboard boxes rolling down the line that just keep coming and coming, forcing a smile when we are cursed at or harassed; Nearly everyone has been forced to participate in the bitterness of having our time stolen. It’s perhaps harder to bare for those who know the widest extent of the misery of humanity and understand how preventable it all is.

The sense of meaninglessness in jobs is a strong current in society. Tv shows, films, music, and other forms of pop culture repeat the comedy, frustration, and depression of spending one’s time on tasks that seem pointless. This isn’t to say that people’s jobs don’t make a difference. Many things we do keep society running and contributes to the social good. The meaninglessness of work in today’s society arises out of the reflection of workers that their time is not really benefiting the people they serve or advancing them as people. As a healthcare worker I can see both sides of this. Obviously healthcare is crucial for societies. At the same time any hospital worker can recognize how it is that the healthcare system not only harms people, but also in general contributes to people staying sick. Meaning is something deeper than just keeping the gears moving and helping our fellow human beings. Meaning is about where we are headed and who we are. This is where youth get squeezed and falter.

Modern capitalism with its base of debt makes everything seem possible. The compulsion to put food on the table is softened by easy credit. We can go back to school, live on credit cards, travel to cheap places, and find means to delay work enough to get by. Young people accumulate useless degrees and insane debts while deferring the future and often slipping into the delusions of jobs that simply do not exist. Choosing what to do with our lives takes on the characteristic of other more banal decisions. We are shopping for an ethical product. Validation stands at the core of this, and plays off the fear of a wasted life, idle efforts, and ending up trapped chasing false ideals. What to tell worried parents who watched their child squander what chances they had for material success? It is better to say that one is employed fighting poverty, educating the youth, or some other remix of Mother Theresa, Gandhi, or perhaps Bono.

The problem is that there is no escape. Professors spend decades moving town to town as itinerant adjuncts teaching the most bland classes, writing mechanical essays in desperation to stay published, and constantly struggling for something more stable. Even at it’s best, University life leaves less time for liberatory thought and action than the part time service worker. Union organizers spend seventy or eighty hour weeks at the service of hostile bureaucracies, and too often find themselves in the position of pimping the Democratic party and selling backroom deals with management to disillusioned workers. NGO staff share the same fate, bending to the will of the funders and forced to represent the interests of the powerful under false flags of social change. Self-employment and cooperatives turn activist efforts into business efforts, and consume more time than any capitalist could ever demand from a job. Good people find themselves lost there, tired of all the worn appearances that hide a rotten structure, yearning to escape too their work and get back to something more authentic.

We need to question and even condemn the pressure on youth to find meaningful work. As long as we live in capitalism, its deep wells will poison all the streams flowing into our cities. With capitalist work, even the most holy pursuit will end up in mindlessness, subservience to stupid management, and in fighting the current trying to make some good out of a hostile situation that constantly tries to undo our efforts. This isn’t to say that some don’t enjoy their jobs. Some do. Yet on the balance, the vast majority can’t find employment that will engage them, and those who do generally must sacrifice the rest of their lives for the privilege. The real question to be raised isn’t whether you should enjoy your job or not, but whether you should dedicate your life to work. Or better, what is the relation of living to working?

This logic should be turned on its head. It’s not what we’re employed doing that should define, validate, or give meaning to our lives; it’s our life itself that does. How much brighter does the future look to liberate oneself from the oppressive concept of boundless sacrifice to meaningful jobs? Why shouldn’t youth seek to maximize their lives against this work? There are other roads open to us. We can work, as we must, but can struggle to find the most time for ourselves and our causes. Better we write, protest, organize, and gather in our workplaces on time off, than to cement that relationship into employment or worse into our identities.

Our lives are defined by what we do, not who writes our paychecks. A political life is an attempt to regain a meaningful life. It is a task for all of society, and not monopolized by a special class employed as professional politicians, bureaucrats, and humanitarians. Meaning is not at work, but in the beauty of daily living, in struggling for a better world, and whatever path your desires take you towards. Our joy is not found in simply imposing our will onto the world, but in the happiness that can only be found in fighting for a more just and beautiful world around us. Dedicating oneself to the struggles of others changes you. Within, we must fight to constantly overcome ourselves against the current, a process that can be deeply enriching. The commitment and work of liberation makes all of society our classroom, our workplaces gymnasiums, and our neighborhoods galleries...

* * *

Originally published on Libcom,org. Read the article in its entirety HERE.

In the Name of Love

“Do what you love” is the mantra for today’s worker. Why should we assert our class interests if, according to DWYL elites like Steve Jobs, there’s no such thing as work? 

by Miya Tokumitsu 

There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem is that it leads not to salvation, but to the devaluation of actual work, including the very work it pretends to elevate — and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers. Superficially, DWYL is an uplifting piece of advice, urging us to ponder what it is we most enjoy doing and then turn that activity into a wage-generating enterprise. But why should our pleasure be for profit? Who is the audience for this dictum? Who is not? By keeping us focused on ourselves and our individual happiness, DWYL distracts us from the working conditions of others while validating our own choices and relieving us from obligations to all who labor, whether or not they love it. It is the secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation, but an act of self-love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace... 
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Excerpted from The Jacobin Magazine

The problem is capitalism

"Capitalism is a problem because it allows those with resources to use them without regard for the needs of others. That disregard leads to the destruction of communities, to millions of people around the world not having access to the basic things they need to live healthy lives, and to environmental degradation. Capitalism is one of the most important forces responsible for the fact that people do not have time to do what they love...

But how do we un-do capitalism, a system that has been developing and growing for more than five-hundred years? By this point, capitalism has become a central part of the fabric of most of the societies we inhabit. How can we dismantle the capitalist home we live in when our activities every day effectively shore it up?...No matter how anti-capitalist you are, if you live in a society dominated by capitalism you probably need to work for a wage. Most of us spend many of our waking hours doing paid work and much of our leisure time shopping or otherwise consuming commercial culture. Capitalism even structures our intimate interactions with people. We often express love by buying things for people. We may judge people by the products they use.

When capitalism comes to dominate society, when all other ways of meeting our needs come to be devalued and pushed out, when governments operate to serve the interests of privately owned capital rather than the needs of people, we have a serious problem. That problem is capitalism."

-Cynthia Kaufman, Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope

Grad School & Survival

by Matt Dineen

After the sixth day in a row working my wage job at a Philadelphia coffeeshop it was time to put things into perspective. Because we live in a society that tends to define us by what we do for money, I struggled to remind myself that this was not all that I was doing with my life. And of course I understood that intellectually, but by that last closing shift my body solely identified as a barista; not only what I do, but also who I am. Pointing this out is not to demean this labor, or others who work in the caffeinated service industry, but as a reminder that we are all much more than the tasks we perform for money. We are all multidimensional creatures and our desires exceed what we do to survive.

At recent reunions and weddings, people that I haven't seen in years ask me what I am up to now. I tell them where I live first and then proceed to talk about Goddard. This program is a more accurate reflection of the kind of life I want to be living. But I am also not just a grad student. I tell them about the anarchist bookstore where I have been active the past four years, but feel obligated to add that we're all volunteers. These are our multidimensional lives.

My first semester at Goddard began two months after I started a job I hated. I was a driver for a corporate catering company, delivering food to offices around Philadelphia. In an attempt to balance school and work, and to makes sense of that whole experience, I kept a journal documenting my hours on the clock; my time in uniform, taking orders, and entering spaces where, given my politics, I never should have been allowed. When I first returned from the residency I tried convincing myself this was just field research, as a coping mechanism, or perhaps a mechanism of empowerment. But that quickly faded and the job began to take its toll, on my spirit and my studies. The reality was clear: I was only working in order to pay the bills, in order to survive.

How do we balance Goddard and survival? The imperative to sell my labor, whether it's through delivering lunch to a business meeting at JP Morgan's office or in the more relaxed and palatable environment of the hip café, is in dialectical relationship with my study plan. It would be an oversimplification to suggest that the two are just at odds, or that my time on the clock necessarily subtracts from my school work. That experience with the catering company, for example, was exhausting and comprising, no doubt, but it also provided rich material to write about and analyze. And the Zen time I have washing dishes at my current occupation is often the incubation site of some of my best ideas. It is a complex, sometimes complementary relationship.

A prevailing challenge, though, is maintaining focus in a social construction of reality that does not recognize low-residency education. After our week on campus ends and we return to our everyday lives outside of Goddard, we must swim against the prevailing current of production and consumption, of business-as-usual, conference calls, and law students studying for the bar exam together. Every morning that I wake up and prioritize my interdisciplinary graduate work, transforming corner tables at neighborhood coffeeshops into a mobile office, is a small act of resistance. I look up and the clock is ticking. It's noon and I have to be at my job in one hour. I need to make that money. Have I gotten anything done yet? This is the balance we face every day.

After my shift at the catering job, I would feel emboldened to seize the rest of the day. I felt more conscious of this time off the clock, to read Marx and write with a sense of urgency. My experience at the cafe is different. After a six hour shift my coworker and I will go to the bar around the corner and continue conversations that we began earlier while we prepared sandwiches and espresso drinks, this time more candidly, over a pitcher of lager. We'll order another round and further explore the politics of online dating or the efficacy of celebrating the death of an imperialist former prime minister. On the clock, we are baristas, but also DJ's creating an atmosphere that reflects our mood or that provides a soundtrack to closing up shop. We are also free to feed ourselves, concocting elaborate meals when our boss isn't around. Sometimes we are DIY bartenders, throwing cans of beer from the basement on ice an hour before closing time, or mixing some fancy sparkling lemonade with the remains of a bottle of tequila hidden in the backroom.

Which is all to say: it's not that bad. But not-that-bad can be stifling, even oppressive. It can limit our potential to actualize our dreams. It numbs us because it begins to seamlessly fit into everything else. It feels like it makes sense even though we may never freely choose such an arrangement otherwise. The challenge is to be conscious of utilizing one's time off the clock and to make sure that the not-that-bad job doesn't take up too much space, that it doesn't seep too deeply into everything else. Because it is not the priority right now. This is easy to forget.

What if we didn't have to work while we were in school? This is the reality for some. The capitalist work discipline shapes us to be dependent on a structured schedule so that we don't know what to do with such abundant “free time.” I have heard other students say that people who do not have a full or part time job have a hard time with their Goddard work. So it is it, then, not merely economic imperatives that prevent us from putting all of our time and energy into our graduate studies?

On the cusp of my final semester, I think ahead to my post-Goddard life. 2014 is a big, wide-open question mark for me. There are, however, two things that I know: I will graduate from the IMA program in February, and I will stop working at the coffeeshop. I'm ready for new challenges. I'm ready to start over again. The not-that-bad job I'm working this year extends to describe my experience these past four and a half years living in Philadelphia. I have chosen to stay in my comfort zone, to avoid risk-taking—with the exception of selling my soul for the catering gig. My life now doesn't look much different from the year I lived in Madison, fresh out of college, almost one decade ago. 

I want something more; something different. I'm not sure what this will look like and that is okay, as I choose to embrace the unknown, the infinite uncertainties of the future.

After six days in a row closing the cafe last week—navigating leaky refrigerators, lack of air conditioning, and passive aggressive notes—I found myself in my hometown having breakfast with my dad and stepmother. They asked me about school and I told them about this remaining timeline ahead. My stepmother proceeded to ask what, exactly, was my degree going to be in, and then, what does that mean exactly. That same question that my grandmother sternly confronted me with at the beginning of this semester: “Well, what do you do with that? I mean, what kind of job will you get?” I fumbled, muttering something incoherent about nonprofits, and, um...teaching someday. Maybe. Eventually.

I...don't...know.

And then, just in time, our breakfast arrived and I changed the subject to their recent membership in the town's re-emerging Odd Fellows society. The fellows, apparently, have no idea how to run an organization. I filled my mouth with raspberry-butter-covered French toast and pretended that I was on summer vacation. Everything is just fine.

The uncertainty of our post-Goddard, interdisciplinary futures is, I believe, one of the greatest virtues of this education. Since the market collapse five years ago, there are no certainties, no guarantees. In choosing this nontraditional route, we are recognizing the frailties of the system. Those who continue funneling themselves through the standard professional and trade schools, pursuing nursing, education, journalism, etc. degrees with hopes of economic security and stability, are increasingly being squeezed out, crushed by the new reality of austerity, job freezes, and mass layoffs. This of course, affects everyone—besides the “one percent”—in myriad ways, but those of us who are not buying into the pyramid scheme anymore are at least attempting to carve out a way around it. We will have more potential to adapt, to be flexible, and open to alternative arrangements and experiences.

What will I do, exactly? That remains to be seen. But I am hopeful.

I am hopeful despite the fact that seriously looking ahead to that moment, post-Goddard, also invokes the unsavory topic of debt. Like the question of how we support ourselves, and as a corollary—how we balance school and work, the issue of the debt that we are accruing to attain this education is one whispered about at the residencies during meals, but never directly addressed by students outside of workshops on navigating the bureaucracies of debt and aid. I believe that a radical approach to debt is necessary, one that goes beyond individualistic approaches to a very systemic problem. And of course, debt and survival are inextricably linked. So why can't we even begin to have a serious conversation about this?

Next year, after graduation, I will be expected to start repaying my student loans. I will no longer have my overpayment checks at the beginning of the semester to help me get by and, perhaps, will start to feel the pressure to secure a job which pays a living wage. Not that there would be anything wrong with that.

Over the past decade I think some of the choices I have made have perpetuated self-exploitation under the guise of resistance to compromise. I think this new era of my life, in which I will hold a masters degree, I should add to my list of ways not comprise my beliefs: never work a minimum wage job ever again. That won't include volunteer work however—our voluntary laboring outside of the market in an effort to sculpt meaning and purpose, to supplement our livelihood in dynamic and fulfilling ways, with activities that we are truly passionate about. But, as my mom likes to point out, volunteering doesn't pay the bills. And there will still be bills.

I feel grateful that I will be confronted with the consolidation of massive amounts of student loan debt just as the debt resistance movement is growing and becoming more sophisticated and strategic. The resources that Strike Debt, for example, has started to put together will prove to be invaluable tools and a reminder that I too “am not a loan.” 

It might be seen as a distasteful comparison, but I am thinking about military veterans returning from overseas, alienated by the vast bureaucracies holding their futures captive as they attempt to re-acclimate to being back home, out of duty. The comparison is not that of higher education and the military industrial complex—although there is a relationship between those institutions—but that of the emerging debt resistance movement and the groups that do veteran advocacy work, including Iraq Veterans Against the War. Again, instead of approaching a systemic problem through an individualistic lens, the institutions responsible for suffering and exploitation are held accountable, thus empowering individuals through collective action.

I think this is how change happens.

That's what Howard Zinn taught me when I was in high school. First, through his masterpiece, A People's History of the United States, and then in person, the evening that he visited the program I was in my senior called School Within a School (SWS). Howard and his wife Rosslyn used to stay on Cape Cod in the summer, in Wellfleet, where their son Jeff directed a local seasonal theater company. In September 1998, three months before President Clinton began a bombing campaign against a sovereign country in the Middle East called Iraq, Howard came to my high school one Thursday evening to speak to our group. He told us about his own experiences as a bombardier in World War II and in the Civil Rights and antiwar movements in the 1950s and '60s. After his talk in our high school auditorium we were able to ask him questions. I nervously raised my hand and asked, “What is your advice for young people like us who want to change the world?” In his response he reminded us that throughout history change has only happened when people have come together, when they were organized in groups fighting for what they knew was right. You can't make the world a better place all by yourself.

I need to keep reminding myself this. Another option after Goddard is to start a business, but not alone. Instead of just applying for jobs and attempting to establish some sort of career with a salary and benefits, I could get together with a small group of other people and put these politics of collectivity and direct democracy into action, beyond merely studying what other people are doing. Starting a worker-owned cooperative is one of the more realistic and practical options out there that is truly appealing to me and where I am at with my life right now.

Back at the coffeeshop, I don't understand why anyone would want to be a boss. Washing dishes in the back, I think about how we could run this place ourselves, horizontally, without anyone in charge. We would all be a lot more invested in the cafe and more accountable to it and each other. But do we really need another cafe? I have one friend in Philly that I have talked with about potentially starting a co-op of some sort in the near future and I think that, ironically, a worker-owned collective could be a pretty successful marketing pitch, like how the new vegan cafes and restaurants in the city have created a substantial customer base around ethical eating. Philly definitely needs more democratic workplaces. I'm excited about the potential of making that happen.

But there is also a chance that I won't even stay in the city after this year. Despite a number of important friendships and other social ties, there isn't anything that is keeping me anchored there, nothing to prevent me from moving wherever I want or traveling indefinitely. So, again, we will see.

No matter what happens, I know that this experience at Goddard will be worth it, despite the debt I will be saddled with at the end. Perhaps I will one day move to Vermont and work for the college. I guess anything is possible. For now, I continue to balance work and school, a part-time day job that is not-that-bad and a low-residency program that holds the potential to encapsulate my wildest dreams and to catapult me somewhere that I can't even begin to imagine yet. Hopefully into a world beyond bosses and day jobs and capitalism itself, but, as Howard reminds us, I can't do it alone.

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Matt Dineen is a writer and activist based in Philadelphia where he staffs at the Wooden Shoe, an anarchist bookstore. He is also a graduate student in Goddard College's Individualized MA program.

How often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult?

"The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need -- the principal horror of such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is profoundly cruel."

-Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic"

Degentrification

"Can artists figure out how to show and be seen in the midst of this economic moment? I believe that if they are really creative they can. It's a moment filled with opportunity for people who can think for themselves. There are holes in the cultural fabric, and no one seems to be in tight control. Even the horrifying lack of jobs means that the yuppie road that some were blindly, socially obliged to follow is no longer a realistic option for many who were once invited. This means having to piece together 'a living' through an eclectic combination of one's abilities, dreams, relationships, visions, will, and skill. Not a great setup for most, but very enriching for all if people can take advantage of the moment to create new paths."

-Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind, 2012

Anarchic Ethics

By Cindy Milstein

One of my sisters, who is also a good and insightful friend to me, asked me this evening, “What’s standing in your way of writing?” Her paid job is helping folks who are labeled “mentally ill” to figure out their own aims and then support them in achieving those aspirations; her question to me is the crux of what she does for others, although the “writing” is particular to me (I’m having trouble doing it, especially in the way I want to). I also know that my sister isn’t doing this for money, although she — like me and everyone else under capitalism — must do something for money, to then purportedly exchange that money for our lives. She really cares; she really values that process of self-discovery, even when it’s ever so slow or painful.

It would be easy to answer, as I did in my head when she asked me: “capitalism.” While she was reminding me of all the other unpaid things I’m doing besides writing that are good for myself and others, that are about giving back to the world — from innumerable hours put in voluntarily, joyfully, at Interference Archive or the Institute for Anarchist Studies, along the spectrum over the past few months to the untold hours put in voluntarily, stressfully, for my two seriously ill parents — I kept repeating silently in my mind, “but where does all my time go?” I heard her say something like “just stop doing whatever you’re doing at 3:00 p.m. each day and write for a half hour or maybe an hour,” yet I only half heard it, and soon I almost wasn’t hearing anything she was offering as comforting advice. “Capitalism.” I apologized to her that I was drifting into anxiety, and that the multitasking mess of “to-dos” dancing jigs in my now-mushy brain seemed to be hindering my ability to take sound in. “Capitalism.”

Yes, there is all the time that capitalism steals from me, giving me so much less of it to fill with what I love and care about. What I really want to do. That’s almost too easy an answer, though clearly a monstrous part of it.

It has less to do with time, even though time constantly escapes me, or my wagework to-do lists, sitting cozily by my unpaid to-do lists. I haven’t been able to write recently because I haven’t been able to think — think clearly. Emotional overload has sat like a damper on me. I am physically here in the world, but what’s inside me is a different self than usual, not my self, and yet I’m not sure whose self either. A seeming fog-without-end is standing in my way, surrounding me in a space of immobilizing aloneness and loss, trepidation and terror — immobilizing, that is, in terms of doing anything that isn’t sort of auto-pilot activities. It’s exceedingly difficult to create.

That’s the more nuanced portion of my “capitalism” mantra when my sister was trying to be a good friend. Capitalism steals our imagination, our ability to envision — partially, poorly, but snapshots nonetheless — life outside and beyond it.
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Read this essay in its entirety at Cindy Milstein wonderful blog: Outside the Circle.

Get in touch with your rage.

We live in a culture where most of us have to sell our labor to survive; in which the creativity and passion of cultural producers is drained by stifling wage jobs; in which the political imagination of activists is safely chanelled into a non-profit industrial complex that is committed to prevent the rocking of a boat that really needs to be sunk. Beautiful abstract painters forced to serve food to the wealthy and entitled. Fierce community organizers resigned to data entry and carpal tunnel syndrome. We live in a culture in which most of us have almost no control over our own lives. But every day, within the cracks of capitalist misery, people are taking control back. Here, in the shadows, we can see the myriad ways in which new worlds are being envisioned and put into practice--despite the vast constraints of the current society. 

-Matt Dineen

Fruits of a Gift

"For some years now I myself have tried to make my way as a poet, a translator, and a sort of 'scholar without an institution.' Inevitably the money question comes up; labors such as mine are notoriously non-remunerative, and the landlord is not interested in your book of translations the day the rent falls due...Every modern artist who has chosen to labor with a gift must sooner or later wonder how he or she is to survive in a society dominated by market exchange. And if the fruits of a gift are gifts themselves, how is the artist to nourish himself [sic], spiritually as well as materially, in an age whose values are market values and whose commerce consists almost exclusively in the purchase and sale of commodities?"

-Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property

reImagining Work Conference

An All-Generation Conversation that reworks our imagination to find new ways of living, surviving and growing our souls expanding the definition of "work" helping us find what we need to move forward...

October 28-30, 2011

SAVE THE DATE!

The old economy is failing. A new economy is sprouting like shoots after a forest fire. This transition to new ways of understanding and organizing work is as significant as the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture 11,000 years ago and from agriculture to industry a few hundred years ago.

From Detroit, Michigan, where industrial jobs are gone forever, to points across the globe, there are exciting and moving stories of invention and reinvention.

In October 2011 in Detroit, a groundbreaking conference will gather thinkers and doers from the worlds of activism, community organizing, labor, crafts, media, entrepreneurship, the arts, academe, and ‘green’—in a 3-day collaborative discussion. You will come away inspired by people with whom you can collaborate in this profound economic and spiritual transformation.

REImagining Work
October 28-30, 2011
FocusHOPE
1400 Oakman Boulevard
Detroit, Michigan 48238

For more information and to register: http://www.reimaginingwork.org/
Also visit: http://www.boggscenter.org/

Contact:
Diane Reeder
dreeder@reimaginingwork.org
313.350.9091

Beyond Daily Humilitations: The Struggle for Meaningful Work Amidst the Capitalist Crisis

“…work, is, by it’s very nature, about violence – to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations."
-Studs Terkel

Is it possible to find meaningful work, to make an honest living amidst the current capitalist crisis? Millions of recent college graduates are confronted with this dilemma, along with so many others who have been laid off from their jobs and those drowning in debt from health care bills, student loans and credit cards. As unemployment rates continue along a record-setting trajectory the cost of living shows no sign of declining. What does this mean for those of us looking for work or trying to create a better life?

So-called expert analysis and commentary on the dismal state of economic affairs has saturated corporate media as non/working people struggle to make sense of it all and to feed themselves and their families. But one does not need to hold a PhD in economics to be able to accurately comment on and analyze the world in which we have found ourselves. In fact, the collective experiences of people navigating the ruins of the twisted free market fantasy are more revealing and honest. These stories must be shared with each other in order to dig ourselves out of this mess and to work together in creating something better.

My own story is not unique, but I think it is worth telling. My recent experience in job-hunting and eventual employment, like those of millions of other unemployed or low-wage workers, must be looked at within the context of the crippling structures of capitalist society and its latest permutations. In sharing this I hope to make more sense of what has happened, both to me personally and in the world I have found myself.

to be continued...

-Matt Dineen 

Less Work, More Living

Working fewer hours could save our economy, save our sanity, and help save our planet.

By Juliet Schor

Millions of Americans have lost control over the basic rhythm of their daily lives. They work too much, eat too quickly, socialize too little, drive and sit in traffic for too many hours, don’t get enough sleep, and feel harried too much of the time. It’s a way of life that undermines basic sources of wealth and well-being—such as strong family and community ties, a deep sense of meaning, and physical health.

Earn less, spend less, emit and degrade less. That's the formula. The more time a person has, the better his or her quality of life, and the easier it is to live sustainably.Imagining a world in which jobs take up much less of our time may seem utopian, especially now, when a scarcity mentality dominates the economic conversation. People who are employed often find it difficult to scale back their jobs. Costs of medical care, education, and child care are rising. It may be hard to find new sources of income when U.S. companies have been laying people off at a dizzying rate.

But fewer work hours for people with jobs is a key step toward solving the unemployment crisis—while giving Americans healthier lives. Fewer hours means more jobs are available to people who need them. Living on less pay usually means consuming less, making more of the things one needs at home, and living lighter, whether by design or by accident.

Today, driven both by necessity and the deliberate choice to live simply, more Americans are shifting toward fewer work hours. It’s a trend that, if done correctly, could get us out of our current economic crisis and away from unsustainable economic growth.
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From the Fall 2011 issue of YES! Magazine. Read the rest of the article at yesmagazine.org

Juliet Schor is professor of sociology at Boston College and the author of the national bestseller The Overspent American.

Deprioritizing Work

"I'm glad I got to try out different worlds. I think it's good to do if you can, to find out what fits you. To challenge the way you grew up, no matter which way it was. And to challenge what is expected of you from your family, from patriarchy, from the capitalist, racist, individualist world. Part of becoming adult is taking on these challenges from a place of love rather than just reaction against.

I learned to cook because it felt better than working more hours a day in order to afford restaurants. I drank in alleys and rooftops because it was more fun than working more hours a day so I could afford bars. And when I deprioritized work, I prioritized other things - writing, healing, learning to look at my community and to try and understand what it needed and where I could be most effective."
-Cindy Crabb in Doris, #28
dorisdorisdoris.com

Survival Postures: A Community Experiment in Learning How to Live

Survival Postures is the latest project from Cleveland-based organizer/visionary Kate Sopko. It is "about practicing a culture that can take care of itself, re-linking culture and survival deep within our own bodies." More info at: survivalpostures.weebly.com

This winter in Cleveland, Ohio, 17 people took part in a group experiment. Each chose a task essential to their survival or well-being that they didn't know how to do. Then, over the course of February, they learned how to do it. How to build a cook stove out of soup cans, how to process wool and weave with it, how to sew homemade menstrual pads... Their Survival Postures were exhibited at a community dinner held at SPACES Gallery on March 20.

This site documents their projects, and our larger experience of working together to re-learn a myriad of lost practical skills. We invite anyone who likes what you see here to consider doing a Survival Posture of your own, and to use this forum to share what you learn with others. Contact stewardsoflostlands@gmail.com with your projects.

PROJECT BACKGROUND:

Survival Postures takes a cue from feminist performance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who, since the late 1960's has used her art to make visible a hidden, stigmatized world of maintenance work that shores up our whole society. She once said that her work is a conscious attempt to re-link cultural practice with how we practice our own survival, saying that "Art begins at the same level as basic survival systems."

Lately in Cleveland, we've seen a huge growth in interest in re-localizing the work that provides for our community's basic needs (for example, there's been an exponential increase in urban farming). Many of us are volunteering to do the hands-on work of growing, processing and distributing food; salvaging and reusing building materials; remediating soil on polluted urban lots; and supporting local production of things like clothing, energy and shelter.

In doing so, it's become pretty clear that as an overall culture, we are very much in infancy when it comes to being actors in our own survival. Many basic skills are no longer in our vocabulary, and we rarely flex the muscles that make us producers (rather than consumers) of what we need. At this moment of cultural atrophy, re-learning practical skills will take practice, and in that practice, we will have to allow ourselves to be tentative, uncomfortable and inexperienced.
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http://survivalpostures.weebly.com/

The Service Industry: Turning workers into little entrepreneurs

Service workers who refuse to identify with their jobs often do so in the name of a "true calling" that they pursue outside of work hours with this same enterprising spirit. As art, adventure, and social life are all absorbed into the logic of productive investment, it becomes easy to look at your time at work as a capital outlay that enables you to pursue your dreams off the clock, like a new business owner paying rent on her storefront in hopes of future success. The flexible, temporary nature of service employment encourages this attitude; if additional free time is "more valuable" than extra wages, we have the freedom to work less, and if not, we can try to work more. In this way, the mentality of self-employment is extended to individuals who might otherwise contest employment itself...A worker's personal quirks and secrets, previously the only territory beyond the reach of the market, become commodities to be sold like any other. In this regard, the service industry represents a front in the total colonization of our social lives.
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Exerpted from "The Service Industry," in Work: Capitalism. Economics. Resistance.

The Embrace of 360 Degrees

by Matt Dineen

Life really does come full circle sometimes. I guess this is no surprise since our lives are not single linear journeys of constant progress. We are on a continuum that ebbs and flows and our personal histories often have the pesky tendency to repeat themselves. Our current selves are an amalgamation of all of our ups and downs, and the journey we’re on is a complex one.
On the cusp of 30, I feel like I’m 15 again. Half a lifetime ago I spent the summer washing dishes at Nonnie’s Country Kitchen in Orleans, MA—my first job. I was paid under the table, in cash, to scrape the remains of chocolate chip pancakes larger than my face, scrub lipstick stains off coffee mugs, and listen to the classic rock station that the sexist cook would sing along to all morning. It feels like yesterday.

Actually, it was yesterday.

I arrived at my new job to discover an envelope in the back room with my name scrawled in full-caps: MATT. It contained a (small) pile of 20 dollar bills for my previous week of labor. After counting the bills, I stuffed the envelope in my backpack, grabbed a glass of ice water, and squeezed into a fresh pair of bright-yellow dishwashing gloves. Something was different though.

Instead of elderly retirees filling Nonnie’s counter (and inhaling her second-hand Lucky Strike smoke), there were tables full of people gazing into laptop computers, sipping lattes and eating pasta salad. Instead of AC/DC and Van Halen on the transistor radio in the back, Modest Mouse and Arcade Fire were playing on an iPod through the surround-sound speakers of the café. Everything has changed. But as I stood in front of the industrial sink scrubbing lipstick off a coffee mug it hit me that, actually, everything has stayed the same. In one week, I will be a 30 year old dishwasher with a college degree.

How has my life reverted to this, 15 years later?

It would be pretty easy to wake up on the morning of my 30th birthday in despair that my life is not going anywhere; paralyzed by an internalized classism, making me feel like an utter failure of a human being. Luckily, I have dedicated a lot of my time since school to analyzing, rejecting, and documenting alternatives to the dominant culture that defines people by what they do for money, first and foremost. I have spent more than half of a decade now interviewing activists and artists about the dilemma of following their passions, doing what they truly love, while surviving in a cutthroat capitalist society. So I have thought about this stuff a lot.

Over the years, when people I meet ask me, “What do you do?” the answer is always complicated. “Well,” I’ll reply. “It depends what you mean.” We are all so much more than our wage jobs. We are complex, multidimensional creatures. And this should be celebrated.

As I approach 30, I think back to that requisite thought exercise throughout many of our childhoods: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Is this it? Am I grown up now? At one point, I wanted to be a professional baseball player. Apparently I told my mother (who was 29 when she had me) that I would become rich as a Major League star and buy her a house. She lovingly reminds me of this broken promise every now and then. Sorry mom!

It has been essential for me to talk to people who have spent their lives redefining what success means—prioritizing happiness and community over the accumulation of wealth and power. This is also true of the aging process.

In my mid- to late-20’s it was really inspiring to talk to people in their 30’s who were truly embracing getting older. Actually, I have found that if you ask people who have passed the 30 year milestone, almost across the board they will talk about how much better life is than in their 20’s. So why is it then that many twenty-somethings in our society are so scared of this moment?

I wear a pin on my jacket that reads: “Growing up is awesome!” The person that created (and gave me) this pin explained that it was in response to the popular subcultural slogan: “Growing up is giving up.”

In a culture that fetishizes youth and perpetuates “glory days” mythology, that teaches us to fear and misunderstand the natural cycles of life, embracing one’s 30’s is a radical act.

The vision I have for my 30’s is to actualize all of the things that I talked about doing in my 20’s. I want to take inspiration from, and further cultivate, the best aspects of my youthful past. Simultaneously, I want to learn from the mistakes I’ve made, the low points of my personal continuum. This is not to say that it will be easy or that history won’t continue to occasionally repeat itself. My life will inevitably come full circle once again, but I am hopefully for what the next 360 degrees holds for me. Turning 30 is awesome. I am not giving up.

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Matt Dineen lives in Philadelphia, where he turned 30 on April 7, 2011. This essay is part of his 360 Months project, which features 30 essays by 30 different people about turning 30. Contact him at: passionsandsurvival(at)gmail(dot)com

The Return of Honest Living

A couple years ago now, I shared a similar project to this called Honest Living by Isabell Moore. The mission was to explore various strategies and issues for activists around "striving towards an 'honest' living in a 'dishonest' world." After a break to focus on teaching, Honest Living has returned!

Check out the new post on academia and public workers. I look forward to reading more from this important project.

Collective Impact

Growing up next door to each other and being just one month apart, I have known Tyler Gumpright my entire life. Recently he began participating in a project with some buddies from college called Collective Impact. The first post explains:

I'm launching a hub that will allow us to motivate, encourage, and advise one another. It will be a forum for shared experience, thought, and innovation. As much as we are willing to contribute them, our collective energies can make a significant impact not only in each other's lives, but throughout society.


I recognize tremendous untapped potential in every one of us. Inevitably, it is sometimes wasted. It is lost to distractions; television, Angry Birds, facebook, football/hockey season, etc. We have all spent several hours in the past week on these. Distraction, procrastination, and laziness sap so much unproductive time. I know that every one of us still has lofty hopes for ourselves.


Sadly, those hopes often just remain hopes, never coming to fruition, never even recorded. As we settle into adulthood, we are in danger of comfortable complacency. We have not become the heroes we hoped to become when we were young. Life is alright, though, and we make enough to pay all the bills (usually) and splurge on fun once in a while. We become homeowners. Family men. Account holders. Office Zombies. These are not all bad things, but they sap so much of our attention that little is left for our dreams.

What was the last truly remarkable project that you pursued wholeheartedly? Can you easily think of three things you did in the past year that you are most proud of? Aren't you capable of so much more?

Here's to actualizing our biggest dreams despite the challenges of the current society. Check it out yourself at: collectiveimpact.blogspot.com

Permanent Autonomous Zone: A conversation with zine writers Erick Lyle and Jeff Miller

by Matt Dineen

What if our lives were filled with moments of liberation from the everyday? Is it possible to carve out spaces that challenge the dominant logic of the market, where we can pursue meaningful work and actualize our dreams? This most daunting task must begin with conversations between co-conspirators.

 At the end of this past summer, I had the pleasure of sharing such a conversation with two writers who were on a tour together with their recently-published books. Erick Lyle and Jeff Miller both come out of the underground zine community and had just released anthologies of their past work, Lyle’s SCAM and Miller’s Ghost Pine. The morning after their reading at the Wooden Shoe anarchist bookstore in Philadelphia, I escaped my stifling wage job—still on the clock—to interview them in a park in West Philly.

Do you guys want to start by talking about the tour you’re on? You did an event here in Philly last night. You’re heading to Baltimore tonight. Can you talk about the idea behind the tour and also your books that have come out recently?Jeff Miller: Originally, the tour was my idea. I’ve been doing a lot of promotional events for the book in Canada and I kind of wanted to break out a little bit. I also feel like there’s not enough cross-border, cross-pollination of zines. Erick came up to Canada in 2008 and we did a couple shows and that went really well. I just thought it would be nice to meet some people in the States, try to sell some books, tell some stories, and travel around a little bit.

Erick Lyle: Yeah, it’s neighborly to get together like this—fostering international camaraderie. Jeff’s anthology came out pretty much the same time as mine. We’ve been pen pals for almost 10 years, so the timing was pretty good. I probably wouldn’t have gone on this trip, honestly, but since Jeff was gonna do it—it just seemed like a good idea. Like, “Oh that would be fun to team up on this.” And the timing was great because I have the SCAM anthology out now as well.

I think what’s cool about this tour is that we’ve read with a lot of different folks, and it’s been all over the map. Like in New York we read with Cristy Road and Mike Taylor who have made zines for years, but also with this guy Colin who does a blog about how he’s gonna eat pizza in every pizzeria in New York City. Or with this woman Eleanor Whitney who writes about art and design, and also food. We are reading with China Martins tonight who has done a zine for years about being a mom. So I think what pulls it all together, what it all has in common, is that it is the underground press; it is indie press. And we’re reading in indie stores, and that this is about supporting underground and independent alternatives. That it’s a vital thing to do, and that there is a community that exists outside of the mainstream that’s trying to continue this tradition of independent stores.

So like last night, we read here in Philly at the Wooden Shoe which is a place that’s been carrying my zine for like 20 years. They’ve got a great new space. It’s better than ever, so it’s nice to see that. Just trying to be a part of that all the time is really important to me. We’re going to Red Emma’s in Baltimore which is a worker-owned place. So that’s pretty cool.

And it’s interesting because Jeff works at a bookstore in Canada. I have worked at a bookstore before, and I’ve seen the corporate tour where the author comes and there’s 2 people. And our shows have been pretty packed, I would say. There is a vitality in the independent scene. It is a real deal. So it’s cool to see that. We’ve put a lot of work into this over the years and work’s coming back to us too. We’re enriching it together.

JM: I feel like one of the best things about being independent is that you’re resourceful enough and economic enough to get around and there’s a community of people that will help you get around and come out and support. And yeah, it feels really good to know that more people came out last night at the Wooden Shoe than come out when we do an event at the kind of corporate bookstore where I work in Canada. There, some best-selling author will read and there’s like 3 people, 4 people. So, like Erick was saying, it is a real demonstration of independent community, and not necessarily just a zine community. I think we’re really blessed to have a lot of overlap with music communities and activist scenes. People love to come out and hear stories. Our lives are so under-represented by current media and current literature that when independent voices come along, people respond strongly and it’s really amazing.

Well Jeff, you mentioned that you’ll be going back to Montreal to work at this bookstore. I was wondering if you could both talk about life after this tour in terms of how you’re supporting yourselves while continuing to create your art and everything?

EL: Well, I recently moved to New York City—I guess it’s been about a year—and, theoretically, it’s the most expensive city in the entire country. Although I moved from San Francisco and I feel that San Francisco is even more expensive in a certain way. So, it’s a hustle. But I don’t know, for me, it’s a lot of tried and true methods; like I steal all my groceries. New York is full of plentiful, dumpstered food. I was just talking about this with a friend at this cafe here. He was like, “Yeah man, last time I was in New York I dumpstered a bike and a bag of weed.” [Laughs] People are so rich they’re like, “I got a bike at home. I’m just gonna throw this one away. I don’t feel like riding it today.” [Laughs] So there’s plenty of excess, and that’s what we’ve been living off all these years. There’s plenty of copy scams to get the zines printed. We go on tour and sell the zines. So that’s a profit. But I don’t know. It’s the same old thing: scraping by, selling writing here and there.

The stuff that’s in this new issue of SCAM was originally freelance journalism that was printed in a newspaper and I wanted to re-present it to the punk scene. It was in the San Francisco Bay Guardian so I knew people weren’t gonna know about it. The usual SCAM readers weren’t gonna see that so I wanted to get it out to the bigger punk scene.

But it’s the same old scam, basically. Making it happen in any way. I just live in such a way that my priority is time, more than money. And that’s always been what SCAM magazine is about to me: the idea that you’re taking your life back, to devote it to the things that you want to do. That’s its own kind of work but it feels meaningful to me. I basically just spend all my time writing and doing things as much as I can for the creative stuff I want to do. And I’m always broke because of it, but I feel pretty good about it.

Oh also, the government of Canada pays me to not write zines. [Laughs]

JM: I don’t understand. [Laughs] Yeah, as far as money goes, it’s always been a struggle. But I feel like when you start monetizing the things that you care about, that’s when everything goes wrong, basically. If I were to say, “I’m gonna put, like, 50 hours into this zine and after I scam the copies I better make 10 dollars an hour.” If that’s your goal then you’re kind of doomed from the start. It’s just not gonna work out for you. So, I don’t know. It’s like Erick was saying, just living cheap and trying to keep as much time free as possible. I have a bunch of friends who are writers in Montreal and some of them have tried to find jobs where they can make enough money so that in the summer they have time to write or whatever. But I’ve always felt like that’s sort of a bad idea. The key, really, is to find a way to live on nothing. It gives you endurance as a writer if you’re scraping by somehow.

But yeah, in the 13 years of doing Ghost Pine it hasn’t been too much of a struggle. When you decide you want to do something you just have to fuckin’ do it and make it happen, despite all the obstacles that get thrown in your path. And maybe now it’s a lot easier just because I know the ins and outs of it through trial and error. And I’m more confident in myself, knowing that I can do it, pull it off and get better. So my advice would be just to accept being poor, strive on, and make whatever you need to make...
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The remainder of this conversation is published on Toward Freedom.

Matt Dineen lives and conspires in Philadelphia where he is part of the Wooden Shoe collective. He is also a publicist for radical activists and artists with Aid & Abet booking. You can write to him at: mattdineen@aidandabet.org and see things that he’s written and collected at: http://passionsandsurvival.blogspot.com

For more information about Erick Lyle and SCAM check out: http://microcosmpublishing.com/catalog/zines/3124/
For more information about Jeff Miller and Ghost Pine check out: http://ghostpine.wordpress.com/

The Big Life Challenges Facing the 20-Something Generation

People in their 20s are taking longer to start careers and get married. What's going on?

By Aliza Bartfield


People in their 20s are taking a perplexingly long time to grow up these days -- at least that's the story we're hearing in the media. According to this narrative, young people are stuck in a phase of arrested development, moving in with their parents more often and committing to jobs and marriages later. Most recently, the notion that young people refuse to grow up is the premise for a widely discussed New York Times magazine cover story, “What Is It About 20-Somethings?”

The title alone is enough to put a 20-something-year-old on the defensive. In the piece, "growing up" is defined by five goals: finishing school, leaving home, financial independence, getting married and having kids. Apparently, we're taking much longer than the previous generation to fulfill these goals, and therefore are failing to enter true adulthood.

While author Robin Marantz Henig concedes in the piece that these milestones can be fulfilled out of order and some never fulfilled at all, she nevertheless insists that 20-somethings are taking too long to grow up. We are “slouching toward adulthood at an uneven pace,” she claims, and this seems to be cause for concern.

The article explores a theory put forth by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a psychology professor who believes that those of us in our 20s are forming a new stage of life. He chooses the term “Emerging Adulthood” for the fickle time between student life and independent adulthood. It’s a unique stage, according to Arnett, that requires careful examination. For 10 years, he has been advocating for Emerging Adulthood to be recognized as an official developmental stage.

Henig explains this would necessitate new social accommodations; attitude shifts and programs to prevent what might otherwise devolve into years of aimless meandering. Proposed solutions include expanding post-graduate options like the Peace Corps or City Year. (Although a year or two of service work may leave one rich in experience, the meager education award of under $6,000 is barely enough to pay for one semester of college. This doesn’t seem like an optimal step toward financial freedom in our 20s.)

The classification of these years as a stage suggests we are less evolved on an emotional level, and maybe even in our mental abilities, than those who are older or went through this time in prior generations. Even if that's true, doesn’t everyone progress emotionally over time? If, instead, we see the odd behavior young people exhibit as the result of economic, cultural and social changes we may have a better shot at some pragmatic solutions.
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Read the rest of the article on Alternet.org