Own your own time

"But I also know that I get to do what I want to do and that's rare in our world...In our society, I feel like what has happened is...business has taken ownership of people's time. So people don't feel like they own their own time. And that is criminal...That from 8 til 6, or whatever--and now beyond that given the devices--that they just don't own their own time. And I feel really strongly that...I believe in the idea that people own their own time. And even my staff--it's their time and I feel like that's really, really important."

-Ian MacKaye (co-founder, Dischord Records) in conversation with Steve Albini (owner, Electrical Audio)

The relationship between artists and society

"The way that society tends to classify us scares me. I am a historian. I don’t want to be just a historian, but society puts us into a discipline. Yes, disciplines us: you’re a historian, you’re a businessman, you’re an engineer. You’re this or you’re that. The first thing someone asks you at a party is, “What do you do?” That means, “How are you categorized?” The problem is that people begin to think that’s all they are. They’re professionals in something. You hear the word professionalism being used often. People say, “You have to be professional.” Whenever I hear the word, I get a little scared, because that limits human beings to working within the confines set by their profession." 

-Howard Zinn, Artists in Times of War

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

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

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

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

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.
---
Exerpted from "The Service Industry," in Work: Capitalism. Economics. Resistance.

Seeds of the New

A talk by Nowtopia author Chris Carlsson

"My whole work life, for years, was always characterized by the fact that I was doing something for money but I wasn't that--I was something else, usually quite a few other things. And I think that's a pretty characteristic experience for a lot of people in the last 20 to the 30 years. It's that our lives are split, in a really profound way, between how we survive in a capitalist world and what we do to feel fully engaged as human beings."
Listen HERE for a recording of a presentation by Chris Carlsson from Setember 1st, 2006, at Bluestockings in New York. Chris is discussing the book he was writing at the time, tentatively titled "The Seeds of the New," which was released by AK Press under the title "Nowtopia" in 2008. The talk was recorded by Stevphen Shukaitis.

"Redemptive Moments Without Disaster"

"We devote much of our lives to achieving certainty, safety, and comfort, but with them often comes ennui and a sense of meaninglessness; the meaning is in the struggle, or can be, and one of the complex questions for those who need not struggle for basic survival is how to engage passionately with goals and needs that keep such drive alive...Much in the marketplace urges us toward safety, comfort, and luxury--they can be bought--but purpose and meaning are less commidifiable phenomena, and a quest for them often sends seekers against the current of their society."

-Rebecca Solnit, from her latest book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

Intellectual Work and Economic Survival

By Ellen Willis


On the crudest level, the lives of American intellectuals and artists are defined by one basic problem: how to reconcile intellectual or creative autonomy with making a living. They must either get someone to support their work--whether by selling it on the open market, or by getting the backing of some public or private institution--or find something to do that somebody is willing to pay for that will still leave them time to do their "real work." How hard it is to accomplish this at any given time, and what kinds of opportunities are available, not only affect the individual person struggling for a workable life, but the state of the culture itself. This tension between intellectual work and economic survival is thoroughly mundane and generally taken for granted by those who negotiate it every day; but to look at the history of the past thirty years or so is to be struck by the degree to which the social, cultural, and political trajectory of American life is bound up with this most ordinary of conflicts.
---
Exerpted from "The Writer's Voice: Intellectual Work in the Culture of Austerity," in Post-Work: The Wages of Cybernation (Routledge, 1998).

Survival vs. The Fullness of Life

"Strategies for continually overturning the dominance of survival over our lives, for making our projects and desires determine how we deal with survival to the greatest extent possible--for example, when one needs to take a job, using it against the institution of work and the economy through theft, giving things away, sabotage, using it as a free school to pick up skills for one's own projects, always seeing it as a temporary means to ends of one's own and being prepared to quit as soon as one's desire requires it."

-Wolfi Landstreicher, from Play Fiercely! Our Lives Are At Stake!

The Decline and Fall of Work

"The obligation to produce alienates the passion for creation...In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create...The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on people want to live, not just survive."

-Raoul Vaneigem, "The Revolution of Everyday Life"

The Real Arts of Survival

"Even in the everyday world of the present, an anxiety to survive manifests itself in cars and clothes for far more rugged occasions than those at hand, as though to express some sense of the toughness of things and of readiness to face them. But real difficulties, the real arts of survival seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what's called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next."

-Rebecca Solnit, "A Field Guide to Getting Lost"