Beyond Work: Life, Death, and Reproduction and the Postwork Society

In their "Manifesto against Labour" the German group Krisis states, "A corpse rules society—the corpse of labour."¹ Work as well as the way we engage with it has become barely effective. We engage with work almost the same way we have been doing since biblical times. In Genesis 3:19 God says to Adam and Eve, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground." In Thessalonians 3:10, the apostle Paul writes "this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat."² These two passages demonstrate the deep-rooted relationship between work and reproduction. Although there are many differences between the Old and New Testaments, the idea that one must work to live is not one of them. Since biblical times, work is seen as the only way to live until the day we die. Therefore, to live means to work.

Even if this idea is not new, it endured and even strengthened in the modern industrial age. Today we don't know whether we work to live or live to work. As Kathi Weeks puts it, "What is perplexing is less the acceptance of the present reality that one must work to live than the willingness to live for work."³ Neoliberalism and its entrepreneurial narrative have erased the difference between work and nonwork, between life and work.

Work still has an ethical and moral predominance in our everyday lives, even while working conditions are deteriorating and the number of jobs and wages have been declining for decades. We still conceive and organize our existence around work, considering it an ethical and moral compass and a synonym of what life means to us. However, the objective conditions of neoliberal capitalism in its permanent crisis demonstrate the need to abandon it. This is why the younger generations have ethically moved work from the center of their lives while being more welcoming to lifestyles that do not match with modern work ethics. For instance, we see this in the later success of crime TV shows that depict an alternative form of life that dismantles the relationship between life and work common to the above-cited biblical passages. To take one example, the Argentine miniseries Historia de un Clan (The Story of a Clan) tells how the Puccio crime family kidnapped and murdered wealthy entrepreneurs during the last Argentine dictatorship. At one point two kidnappers—Alejandro and Maguila—start thinking about what they would do if they no longer needed to work:

Maguila:

I would take a nap naked all day long, I would watch TV and sleep with whoever I want. I was born without an angel and a profession. … It's better not to do anything. Sometimes I think whoever invented doing things is an imbecile.

Alejandro:

But people need to do something. If you don't, you'll go crazy.

Maguila:

That's where you're wrong. You'll go crazy anyway. … There's no way out. You finish school, and then you have to go to work. Do you understand that after finishing school you have to go to work till the day you die? As reward, for all your effort and all the work done, now you die. Is everybody crazy or what? Whoever invented life is an asshole.⁴

What we see here is a questioning of the metaphysical relationship between survival, work, life, and death that organizes our Western capitalist existence. At the same time, we see that another form of life is desired but without identifying an alternative. As Hannah Arendt suggested, the metaphysics, the institutions, and the political organization inherited by Western societies is becoming its worst nightmare: we live in a world that creates "workers without work: nothing could be worse."⁵ This means that the ongoing problem with work is that we need to cope with it while the inherited idea of work is in crisis. To put it another way, while work is disappearing we live in an inertia that forces us to continue following a form of...