Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  The movement of young people into political organizations—the Democratic Socialists of America, perhaps, or the Labour Party or other new left formations—represents not just a political awakening but a desire for that connection and purpose. We spend so much time at work; there are dating apps to streamline the process of finding a mate (at least for a night). Yet for so many of us, the couple form and the job wind up bearing the weight of all of our hopes and dreams and needs for human contact, and they were never meant to bear that weight. We need human relationships that extend beyond the romantic or the transactional.12

  Love as a concept has a long and complicated political history. It is, as Samhita Mukhopadhyay, executive editor at Teen Vogue, reminded us, “more than just a chemical or emotional feeling; it is a social and cultural force.” It was also understood for a long time to be the opposite of work. Love was for the home, for the family, for the couple; the workplace was where you earned what you needed to sustain that love. Love was also presumed to be more important for women than for men; the home was women’s sphere, the workplace men’s.13

  In reality those lines were always blurred; plenty of women always worked, for one thing, even from the very beginnings of industrial capitalism, and plenty of bosses wanted to extend their control into the home. Antonio Gramsci noted that “the new type of man demanded by the rationalisation of production and work cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitably regulated and until it too has been rationalised.” Industrialists, he argued, were constantly struggling to regulate the “animality” in humans, to bring the things that made us other than robots under stricter control, and that included introducing discipline into one’s off-work romantic relationships. Henry Ford famously sent investigators into the homes of his workers to make sure they were upstanding, straight, and monogamous, and therefore deserving of higher wages.14

  As the workplace has changed, our ideas about love have also changed. The feminist revolution known as the second wave notably demanded access to career-track work for women, seeing it not only as a path to financial independence, but to something more interesting to do with one’s day than clean the house and feed the children. And love, as sociologist Andrew Cherlin has documented, has undergone a transformation from married monogamy to something more open, flexible, and often, of course, not heterosexual at all. Yet the way we talk about partnership—even the word “partner,” increasingly popular as a gender-neutral term, but also one oddly reminiscent of the workplace, the boardroom, the law firm—still reflects the origins of the family as a complementary institution to the job. When our relationships fall apart, we still blame ourselves, rather than looking to all the social, institutional pressures that made it nearly impossible to continue them. Love is still just another form of alienated labor.15

  WHAT IF IT WERE OTHERWISE?

  It is, as Selma James wrote, a miracle that under patriarchy men and women manage to tolerate each other at all, let alone live together and love one another. Despite all of the roadblocks thrown up by the way we live our lives today, we still try, and that is itself a beautiful thing. What if, as James suggested, we tried to make a world that served that impulse rather than profit? How, as Kathi Weeks asked, might we understand our obligations to those we love “outside of the currency of work”?16

  The greatest pleasures of my life, the most meaningful memories, remain those of the times spent with people I love—commiserating about breakups over a meal; laughing and crying together; dancing till our knees and hips hurt and we no longer care how silly we look; sprawled on a couch at four o’clock in the morning casually touching one another’s skin as we catch up on the past month’s little victories and heartbreaks. When political tragedy came, I curled up in someone’s arms; when victories happened, we cheered and cried some spare happy tears and I hugged a woman I didn’t even like that much (nor she me), because in that moment what we had done was bigger than us.

  When my father died and I was in a state of robotic shock, it was people who knew what that pain felt like who reached out to me and told me that what I was feeling was all right, that it was more important than work (and I was blessed with editors and the team at Type Media Center who understood, too, that some things mean work stops). And it was a series of small kindnesses I have tried to pay forward in the time since, when other friends lost loved ones.

  I wrote much of this book recovering from that loss and then in what seemed to be a pattern of cracking further pieces off: heartbreak seemed to become a habit that I had gotten into, something I was getting good at. I learned to like how I looked with dark circles under my eyes, and who could tell if they were caused by lack of sleep due to love or to work? Could I?

  Heartbreak felt like its own kind of exuberance. I was gloriously wasting time, losing sleep, not working. Taking time to grieve luxuriously is a pleasure I allowed myself too rarely and in fragments; mostly, I tried to work, but when I let the emotions take over, listened to the rattling in my chest, allowed the feelings to stop me from doing what I was doing, briefly, I felt alive again. In the vacantness of grief I placed more pain because I could not find pleasure.

  And in the finishing of this book I am trying to settle a bet with myself, it seems. Trying to love things more than my work even as I stare down a deadline and imagine the published version in my hands. I dream of someone reading these words and feeling cracked open themselves. I dream of reaching past the walls that our careers put up between us and everyone else. I dream of connection. I write in order to connect, to drop breadcrumbs on a path that I hope brings us somewhere better. I write this conclusion and I think of the first person to whom I’ll send it.

  Work will never love us back. But other people will.

  CONCURRENT POLITICAL AND ECOLOGICAL CRISES CAN SEEM OVER-WHELMING, impossible, but they have also done something else for us: they have created the possibility of imagining ourselves in a different world. If it was previously easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, we have now glimpsed both, and must now begin to think up something new.

  And the ways of relating to one another that bring us joy can also be key to creating the necessary change. Nadia Idle of the podcast #ACFM (the AC standing for Acid Communism or Acid Corbynism) said on an episode about urbanism, “I don’t want to ‘catch up for a coffee’ with anyone anymore.… I’m not interested in this minute city neoliberal forced way of interacting with other people in some kind of transaction where you catch up with people you’ve not seen for like eight weeks because everything’s so expensive and you don’t have any time.” What we need instead, she argued, was a way of living where we have space and time “to be able to relate to each other as human beings, which of course has revolutionary potential, which is why it’s dangerous.” Slowing down the rate of our connections, rather than collecting people like they’re business cards or stamps, and making those connections deeper and more meaningful, luxuriating in them, is itself a step toward liberation.17

  Instead of turning our desires to the objects we can buy with the proceeds from our endless work, what if we turned our desires back onto one another? Instead of, as Kipnis wrote, “routing desire into consumption,” spending time with other people has potential to disrupt the entire economic system. The process of organizing, on the job and off it, is, after all, a process of connection. The first hesitant hello, the chat in the break room, the careful email from a non-work email address, are all ways of bridging the artificially created gaps between us to articulate a common interest, to gesture toward the power we can have together. A union is only meaningful if the workers in it believe and act like a union, if they are willing to take risks to have one another’s backs, if they believe in the oldest of labor maxims: “An injury to one is an injury to all.”18

  We might still create beautiful things together in a world beyond work, as William Morris argued, but as gifts, presents, adornments that we took pleasure in the making of as well as the use and display
of—things to be kept and treasured rather than tossed with the season. If we lingered over our human connections, we might find out what we have in common rather than what keeps us divided.19

  I think of the freed Black women, formerly enslaved, that Tera Hunter described in To ’Joy My Freedom, “playfully constructing new identities that overturned notions of racial inferiority.” Those women, though they worked and worked hard, also demanded space to make their freedom meaningful. “Black women were determined to make freedom mean the opportunity to find pleasure and relaxation with friends, family, and neighbors,” Hunter wrote. They balanced the need to make a living against “needs for emotional sustenance, personal growth, and collective cultural expressions.”20

  Those cultural expressions—dance and song, pretty clothes—were ways to express something that had been brutally repressed for so long. And while they can be, and are, also work in this society, they meant something more, and still do, when they break through the dreariness of our routines. It is true that there is no outside to capitalism, but it is also true that there are moments in our lives where we can see, briefly, beyond it. Our desires, as Mark Fisher wrote, are still mostly nameless. “Our desire is for the future—for an escape from the impasses of the flatlands of capital’s endless repetitions—and it comes from the future—from the very future in which new perceptions, desires, cognitions are once again possible.” Those desires can be terrifying when everything about our current lives says they cannot be fulfilled. But they are also the ground from which we can grow something new.21

  To reclaim that sense of exuberance, that space in which to find the connections that matter, we need something more than slight improvements in our individual workplaces or even massive overhauls of labor laws, though we need both of those things desperately. But beyond that, we need a politics of time. A political understanding that our lives are ours to do with what we will.22

  Society will always make demands of us, and a world that we built to value the relationships we have with others would perhaps make even more of them. But it would be a world where we shouldered those burdens equitably, distributed the work—pleasant and less so—better, and had much, much more leisure time to spend as we like. It would be a world where taking care of one another was not a responsibility sloughed off on one part of the population or one gender, and it would be a world where we had plenty of time to take care of ourselves.23

  In a capitalist society, the things we create are never really ours, neither to keep nor to share. Artists are the image society gives us of freedom, but capitalism has made art into a luxury that few can afford. The little bits of us, art critic Ben Davis noted, that manage to find expression, “our creative lives, like our love lives, bear the burden of representing the good part of our existence, of standing in for the richness of an unalienated world we lack; without the prospect of companionship or of creative fulfillment there’s just the unending abyss of working for someone else in return for being able to survive another day to do it again.” But with all that pulling on those bits they so easily tear. Our creativity, like our love, is not truly free.24

  Creation, play, love: all these are human desires, perhaps even human needs, that have been enclosed, commodified, sold back to us. While we have to do our jobs for a living, it makes sense to make demands for better conditions; but alongside those demands we should always be making demands to reclaim our time. What would we be able to create without the constraints of making a living? As Marx wrote so long ago (and not that long ago at all), “The realm of freedom really begins only where labor determined by necessity and external expediency ends.”25

  Part of the joy is the risk.

  This is what being alive is. It’s your heart pounding in your chest because of a text, the up-and-down swing that you get from connection and then loneliness. The work itself only matters as a way to connect. All of the labors of love, stripped of the capitalist impulse to make money, fame, and power, are really at bottom attempts to connect to other people. They are attempts to be bigger and better than our lonely little selves—even the most solitary artist’s creations are in a way a request to be seen, to be known. Stripped of the need to fight to survive, how much more connection could we create? How much more could we try to know each other?

  ONE OF THE THINGS THAT THE MANY SOCIAL MOVEMENTS OF THE PAST decade or so have in common is a reclamation of public space in which to be with other people: the occupied squares of Spain and Greece; the occupied universities of the British student movement; Occupy Wall Street; Tahrir Square in Egypt; the protests of 2020, exuberantly reclaiming public space after months of lockdown to shout “Black lives matter!”

  Those spaces were spaces of debate and of action, yes, but they were also spaces of care. The “food” and “comfort” committees at Occupy made sure not just that people’s basic needs were met but that they felt good in the space. There was singing and dancing, a library for borrowing books, visiting lecturers to share their knowledge. Protest movements, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in Dancing in the Streets, keep reinventing the spirit of carnival, of festivals of collective joy, and of overturning, for a while, the existing society’s power relations: “The media often deride the carnival spirit of such protests, as if it were a self-indulgent distraction from the serious political point,” she wrote. “But seasoned organizers know that gratification cannot be deferred until after ‘the revolution.’”26

  In the wake of Occupy, many turned toward electoral politics, getting “serious” about change. Yet even in the midst of that seriousness, the utopian space reappeared. The teachers’ strikes that rippled across the United States after 2012 created anew the spaces of connection. In West Virginia, the teachers flooded together to the capitol, brandishing homemade signs and wearing matching red. The picket lines in Los Angeles and Chicago featured dance routines and new songs. University lecturers in Britain on strike create “the university we all want to exist: ‘rampant collegiality, teaching on topics of importance with no bureaucratic overhead, staff-student solidarity, our children tagging along.’” The strike itself is a means of reclaiming time from work, a way to demonstrate the workers’ importance by refusing labor and halting business as usual, but also a way to stake one’s claim to one’s time and one’s creations. In the midst of the strike, utopia is briefly visible. And the mass strike, as Rosa Luxemburg wrote, has the potential to turn the world upside down.27

  The protesters in 2020 brought masks and hand sanitizer, little acts of harm reduction for activists in a pandemic. They sang and danced and reclaimed zones free of police in Seattle and Minneapolis, where they organized to take care of one another, giving out food and medical supplies and allowing one another to relax in places where no one would stop them and demand to know what they were doing there. The Seattle protesters evoked the spirit of the Paris Commune, or indeed, of the Seattle General Strike of 1919, where the working classes ran the city in their own interest; they built, in one protester’s words, “a discussion space; a café space called ‘the decolonial café.’ A community garden, informational tents, and informational sessions with free literature, nightly film screenings and a band stand with nightly performances from different bands.” In a protest during a respiratory pandemic, when the rallying cry had been another Black man’s plea of “I can’t breathe,” the protests cleared space in which Black people could exhale. The protesters calling for the abolition of police and prisons, organizer Mariame Kaba wrote, “have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation.”28

  These moments and spaces are insufficient, perhaps, to completely overhaul the system. Yet as Fisher wrote, the alternative visions that we create in these spaces “are not only ‘political’ in the narrow sense—they are also emotional.” Fisher envisioned a politics that he called “Acid Communism,” not because psychedelics, either, are going to make political change, but as a way of returning to the social liberation p
olitics of the 1960s. They can help us create a politics of pleasure, of desire, of joy, of “a new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving: this is the promise of acid communism.”29

  Fisher wanted to meld the artistic critique and the social critique: to create a world of plenty (the “communism” part) for all. In the age of climate crisis it may seem impossible to imagine anything other than scarcity, but in the streets around the world the youth climate strikers have been showing us another way. They gather with their tight-knit teenage friends, drawing our memories to that time in our lives where we’d just begun to create our own little wolfpack of people outside our nuclear families, our gangs, whom we trusted with our scariest whispered secrets, and they turn their fears into ringing chants that shame the adults who have created this broken society. The student strikers know that another world is possible because they are creating it already. They are making it real every time they take back their time, every time they refuse to do the hope labor expected of them because the world that they are supposed to grow up into has failed them utterly.30

  Imagining love alone as capable of change is idealism, it’s true. I cherish a tote bag gifted to me by the Art + Feminism organization that reads, “We need love but we also need a fucking game plan.” Or, in Angela Davis’s more eloquent words, “Love alone is impotent, yet without it, no revolutionary process could ever be truly authentic.” Solidarity is a process of love, blended with power and directed, as my colleague and dearest of friends Melissa Gira Grant and I once argued. The utopian spaces we create in our protests and our strikes may be temporary; solidarity doesn’t mean you have to like every person you’re fighting alongside. But in those moments where you stand shoulder to shoulder, you do love one another.31