Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism (Outspoken by Pluto)

Office work becomes an empty parody of real human social life. A dried-up husk of having to pretend to laugh, having to pretend to care, engage in small talk and business talk indefinitely. Futures postponed; emails answered.

Denaturalising makes visible that something is a historically contingent set of power-relations, rather than a ‘natural’, unchanging permanent state of affairs.

The self-exploitation that characterises the experience of contemporary capitalist work is not just a source of individual misery but a means of guaranteeing profit.

Developing power is about winning power, with the goal not merely being heard, of making the case, but of winning power to transform the world, not to merely tinker round its edges.

Even without the technical know-how of exactly how something was made or brought to the consumer, how much effort it requires, it is possible to reorient our knowledge of the world; to look at a building and wonder who built it, and under which conditions. When we do this, we can see everything around us as a product of human effort, of world-makin

Addressing the problem of work must involve raising the floor rather than making it easier for a tiny number to puncture the ceiling.

When we think about work in these terms, the problem of women’s work isn’t just a lack of access to certain (prestigious) careers but the problem of the stickiness of particular associations – women as subservient, caring, unskilled; men as strong, skilled and uncaring.

The drudgery, not just of formal work but also of endless, even unfinishable self-improvement, means that exhaustion is not acute but chronic.

While this balance between the side and the main gig can and does shift across different periods of capitalism, what is really significant to this moment is not just the amount of time spent on side gigs, or hustles, or second jobs, but that hobbies and interests are approached as something that could be or even should be monetised. This is the job

One reason for the social undervaluation of particular work is the association of that work with women – the fact that it is understood to be women’s work.