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/344/ Don't Do The Work ft. Ben Hickman (Patreon)

Published:
2023-05-30 14:51:55
Imported:
2026-06
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On work stoppages and work-doings.

Ben Hickman, published poet and senior lecturer in English at the University of Kent, joins us to discuss his project on different understandings of work, or rather, The Work. 

What is The Work and why is it so pernicious? Ben wrote a piece for Compact regarding how the American poet and radical professor Audre Lorde transformed the way we think about work. We talk through the differences between work and The Work, how it impacted radical activism, and how middle class work became all about self-exploration. 

Ben talks through a new book project on work and how it is understood culturally through figures such as Jackson Pollock, among others. Plus, what is happening with industrial relations on UK campuses, and how has radical politics unfolded in the Labour Party over the last few years? 

Reading:

Stop Doing The Work, Ben Hickman, Compact

“Atlantis Buried Outside”: Muriel Rukeyser, Myth, and the Crises of War, Ben Hickman, Criticism, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 2015)

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Comments

Davka Smolah Collective

Bunga Bois really leaning in to having adopted the old What's Left audience.

David

Man, I really appreciated this episode. I've offered some hesitancy in some left groups on going all in on work from home and some caution around what it means for atomization and unionizing efforts and I have been met with consistent and absolutely unhinged rage. I'm glad I'm not alone.

Richard R

Lorde on "the work" could very easily be seen as a conversation with Jacoby, and for that matter, with Lenin. The question they fix themselves to is how to create subjects who are capable of actually incisive critique. Or, how do we make revolutionary subjects? The problem still remains since Lorde views conflict and debate as sort of irrelevant to the development of these subjects. A communist should argue with their friends because the truth is political. By removing the element of intra-communal agonism, Lorde reinforces the hyper-individual while reifying existing social conflict into transcendent truths.

Ran Heilbrunn

The part on Arendt sounds very fuzzy. The Arendtian moment of recent decades is no doubt related to the retreat of Marxism, and Arendt herself clearly misinterpreted Marx’s theory of labor. But it seems to me that Hickman’s arguments are actually deeply consistent with hers. Arendt’s concept of labor roughly corresponds to the notion of housework (the private, repetitive maintenance of our bodily existence), and her concept of work roughly corresponds to the old category of craftsmanship. Her point is that under conditions of modern mass society – meaning the industrialization of production and the rise of consumerism – the distinction between these notions disappeared, and the category of work was essentially subsumed under the category of labor. When Hickman is saying that “we’re getting closer and closer to wage work becoming more and more like housework” he is saying the exact same thing. The atomization of the collective aspect of work, the erosion of the boundary between the private and the public – these are precisely the things that she talked about. The anti-socialist aspect of her argument is that she thinks that Marx and the workers movements are complicit in this process of the degradation of work vis-à-vis labor, whereas a Marxist would say that this is an outcome of Marxism’s defeat.

Daniel L

Great ep! And brilliant summation of many academics attitude to unions

tacitus kilgore

I shared Ben and Phil's frustrations with the transformation of professional, middle class unions into "vehicles for their members' personal hobbies" along Lordean lines but I feel that this is a relatively good problem to have. When it comes to the defanging of unions in the West, this is only part of the story. Here in Philadelphia, the stop-and-frisk candidate for the Democrats won our mayoral primary with the backing of the building trades, who stand to gain if development goes forward on a basketball arena in the middle of the city. The union for our blue collar civil service workers which covers everyone from trash collectors to library clerks endorsed a local grocery store owner who is also a supporter of stop-and-frisk policing. The defeat of the teachers' and service sector union backed candidate also jeopardizes the gains made in those industries in the past few years, such as scheduling reforms in the service sector and the general power of the teachers' union as Parker makes a push for year-round schools in a city where most public schools have no air conditioning and only private and charter schools have the money to adapt to these changes. Meanwhile, the political director for our local electricians union, also a city councilor in a neighboring suburb, has threatened to bus the inhabitants of a large homeless encampment to a nearby college campus, mimicking Republican governors' similar stunts in an attempt to own the libs. To me, a corrupt middle class union that has generally the right stance on policing and incarceration would be a blessing compared to my reality, even if they have a frustrating idea of what constitutes anti-racism and don't do much for their members' interests in the workplace (something which is also the case with Philly's conservative unions). I think that these phenomena ultimately represent two sides of the same coin of unions in the west being assimilated into the governance structure through a bargain with labor that can slowly be chipped away at. It seems that unions with a more liberal disposition tend to be narrowly focused on members' pet issues, and generally ineffective at functioning to the benefit of their members' interests while conservative unions focus on their members' material interests even to the detriment of labor more broadly. In both cases, unions no longer represent a vehicle toward a better future, nor are they connected with a more broadly solidaristic worldview for most of their members. Participation is low in general, and that often empowers self-interested or incapable members to have an outsize role in the union's operations. I think that more conservative blue collar unions are at times more threatening to the left's broader goals, because they often represent the interests of people within a given industry who are invested in a nasty status quo. Their membership in a union does not translate to a feeling of broader solidarity with the largely non-unionized working class, much less with the most downtrodden segments of society. However, I feel that they also present unique opportunities for rank and file organizing because the old guard is increasingly unaccustomed to any actual challenge to their power, unlike the energetic radical liberals who have more recently taken over academic unions. Perhaps disillusioned academics would have more success taking their radicalism to the public sector, construction, or somewhere else where nobody has even heard of Robin Diangelo. But then again, probably not.

jkjkjkj

I think george is clearly right: for politics to be of use they have to be boring. Turning politics into infotainment as has been done over the past 20-30 years in the US has made the population immeasurably less Informed, more aggressive and has made debate and political reconciliation useless in terms of clarifying issues in detail and substance. People don’t understand politics outside of charicatures of bullet points and it allows media conglomerates to shape public opinion. And as regards the working class, it is effectively impossible to argue that they understand their interests in detail outside of vague generalities they don’t understand. Call it classist or disrespectful or whatever pleases you but the fact remains that much of the working class is genuinely uninformed as to how to make their interests actionable and so long as educated elites have the political canny to roll ideas out and message them properly, working class voters will continue to sign onto whatever sounds good because they can’t actually interrogate the issues in depth. There is much condescending amongst liberal elites towards the perceived interests of working class voters, but working class voters don’t do themselves any favors in terms of their ability to actually put forward a positive program