Happy Work Day!

[reprinted, with permission, from WOID: a journal of visual language.

WOID XVII-39. Happy Work Day!

Today for most, and for me, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, we celebrate Work Day. Yesterday we celebrated Labor Day by taking off from Work. Labor under Capitalism is the absence of Work as surely as Vanilla is the absence of Chocolate. That’s pretty much how Marx saw it circa May 1st, 1875, in a letter to the leaders of the German socialist movement. It’s not how the supporters of the American version of Labor Day see, or saw it: every year since 1882, the dialectical antithesis of Work has been hot-dogs, hanging, and maybe reading an editorial in the New York Times about how Labor is weak because this year, like last year and every year before, the workers spend their time off not working instead of parading down the street.

Marx’s letter – the Critique of the Gotha Programme – wasn’t published until 1891, the year the Second International officially declared May 1st the true Labor Day: the day when Work and Labor were one again as they will be, come the revolution when we’ll all go off to Labor every morning, whistling because we own the means of production. Mayday celebrations were rehearsals for the Great Revolution, based on Fourier’s utopian idea that building barricades is a perfect instance of Unsalaried Unalienated Labor – work, in other terms, but work you do for the hell of it, because it’s fun. Marx was suspicious that the socialists wouldn’t really get it. He was right, but that’s another story.

Or maybe it’s the same old story. I’m home today because I have to finish up my syllabi. Tomorrow I’ll be going back to Work, and my students will be going back to Labor. I’ll walk into the classroom happy to be talking about the stuff I love, and my students will come in terrified of being punished, of getting bad grades, of not getting a good job which would allow them to stay home and eat hot dogs on the first monday in September. Chances are we’ll spend the whole term at cross purposes, me trying to work and the students, administrators, guards and secretarial, the librarian and the assistant librarians all laboring under the delusion that work and Work are the same old thing.

And I’m sitting here, thinking I’d better stop this writing and put my syllabi together, and it’s feeling more and more like it’s not Work at all, it’s just a job.