Work Won’t Love You Back

If donors are a specific class of people expecting the organisations they fund to fit a certain idea of what ‘works’, what do the workers think? The expectation to work long hours for little money isn’t just imposed from the top – the culture of ‘movement’ work also tends toward self-sacrifice. The assumption that ‘activists’ are a different type of person, more committed than the rest of the world, replicates the old division between the volunteer service worker and those they served. The professionalisation of the non-profit sector has now made it more acceptable a workplace for men, but it has also made it relentlessly middle-class. The influx of men has added a new inflection to the tradition of feminine self-sacrifice already embedded into the history of the NGO sector: the ‘cowboy mentality’ that comes from political and labour organising, that values the toughest work, the biggest commitment, as a mark of dedication to the cause. Work-life balance is something that these workers choose to give up, missing the way that their choices quickly become job requirements – something that only shows up later, when they want to take time off. Both gendered tendencies produce burnout, and those who do burn out are judged as insufficiently committed or insufficiently radical. Those who have moved up in the organisation through such a style of work then impose it on others.⁴⁵

The neoliberal era’s expansion of the sports industry seems to both reflect and be reflected in its political conversations. Pro athletes are sponsored by companies ranging from Wheaties to Nike to Visa; politicians, meanwhile, use sporting metaphors for everything they possibly can. That sports are not, in fact, anything like real life doesn’t seem to matter. They still demonstrate to us the values that our society has chosen to uplift. Competition is the lifeblood of capitalism, we are told, and therefore competitive sports are the best place to teach us how to operate in a dog-eat-dog world. Yet, as William Davies noted in The Happiness Industry, all this competition leads to depression, in athletes as well as in the broader society – studies found depression higher in participants in intensely competitive sports. Particularly, we might assume, when someone’s entire future is riding on an ability to keep playing a sport. Because, of course, when a few can win – and win big, Michael Jordan or David Beckham-style – we have something to aspire to, but when we don’t win, we’re told it’s our own fault.³³

We cannot simply go back to a time before neoliberalism: the return to the Fordist bargain and to the factory is not a thing that anyone should be wishing for, even if it were possible to turn back the clock. That model of capitalism destroyed the planet in order to provide benefits for a relative few, and neoliberalism simply sped up the process. Capitalist hegemony is collapsing before our eyes. The positive ideals of freedom, choice, and fulfilling work are increasingly unsellable to a public that can now see the realities behind those pipe dreams. The exposure of capitalism’s cruelty makes the command to love our jobs a brutal joke. We are, to steal a term from the feminist movement of the 1960s, having our consciousness raised. Capitalist realism has had a thousand growing cracks put in it since the 2008 financial crisis, and at any moment now it could shatter entirely.³

And all this breakdown is happening in a moment of deep ecological crisis. As Alyssa Battistoni, a fellow at Harvard’s Center for the Environment, wrote, ‘to put it bluntly, we’re confronted with the fact that human activity has transformed the entire planet in ways that are now threatening the way we inhabit it – some of us far more than others.’ As Jason W. Moore argues, it is capitalism that created climate change, not simply human existence, and that means that powerful capitalist countries – and capitalists within those countries – bear the most responsibility for the current crisis. We cannot, Battistoni pointed out, move forward ‘without tackling environmentalism’s old stumbling blocks: consumption and jobs.’ Public-sector cutbacks increase private consumption, she wrote – personal cars rather than trains, private yards, rather than public parks, bottled water if the tap water is bad – and our culture of work itself contributes to the problem. A 2019 report from UK think tank Autonomy posed the question, ‘Rather than discussing how to maximise economic performance (all too often a code for forcing the vast majority of the population to work long hours to the benefit of capital owners), the climate crisis forces us to change the conversation and raise the question: provided current levels of carbon intensity of our economies and current levels of productivity, how much work can we afford?’ Massive reductions in working time are not only desirable, as work is increasingly miserable – they are necessary.⁴