Thinking about enclosure, industrialization, colonialism, slavery, and “nobody wants to work anymore”
At least for me, the recency and contingency of near-universal wage labor were not things I thought about. Everyone has a job, right? Everyone has to work. But for most of human history, that wasn’t true, and getting here from there took incredible violence. Almost everyone is descended from people who were dispossessed of their land by force, who were enslaved, who had strangers show up at their door and tell them “your land is ours now, work for me or I’ll torture you to death”, or more than one of the above. The aftermath of that violence seems to be the void where generational memory should be of how, once, there was a different way.
But instead, people descended from the dispossessed, enslaved and colonized are themselves decrying how no one wants to work anymore, except when their mouth is occupied with the boots of the more privileged.
What if no one worked anymore? Would it be a disaster? If not, why did we work in the first place? What was all that violence for? “No one wants to work anymore” means “I’m repressing something and wish to continue doing so.” The continued labor is the continued repression. No one wants to do the emotional work anymore, which is also why there’s more and more questioning of the mystification of the origins of the United States and other settler colonialist states.
Of course people are still working. Of course people still worship the flag, too. But it only takes a little bit less wage work, if only the amount that isn’t being done because COVID killed a lot of people and ghosts can’t fill out an I-9, and a little bit more questioning of race, class and gender hierarchies, to provoke panic. No one defunded the police, no one is telling kids they have to be transgender, but the terror underneath those beliefs is the terror that what was repressed will be unearthed.
Hopefully we finish the job while we still have some time on this planet.
