>One of the assumptions behind this type of reasoning - and maybe you agree
>with me - is that most people are privileged enough to be able to choose
>to do this to begin with.
I agree. And as you say, Hardt and Negri didn't come up with the idea.
> I don't know how things are in Australia right
>now, but the 800,000 in the USA who recently barely got an extension on
>their unemployment benefits, for example, might regard choosing to "down
>shift" as a joke. I would.
In Australia, it is becoming increasingly difficult to stay on benefits. People on the dole are subject to increasingly rigorous harassment and obligations. The joke is that its becoming a full time job to be unemployed.
However the very fact that the state finds it necessary to expend an increasing effort trying to enforce the protestant work ethic suggests to me that this ethic is becoming outdated. It looks very much as if this is one of those historical realignments in consciousness brought about by a change in material circumstances. The efforts of the ruling class to force people to hold on to their old and outmoded work ethic is going to be in vain.
>The "zero work" strand of the ultra-left has been around a lot longer than
>Hardt and Negri.
Of course, but the point is that now this attitude, or the essentials of it, which seriously threatens the basis of power of the ruling class, is becoming popular. The ghost of the dead work ethic is haunting the ruling class. ;-) They can desperately try to resuscitate the corpse, but its gone.
> The far left-communist (who might take Marx's
>son-in-law Paul LaFargue's The Right to Be Lazy as their inspiration) and
>even anarchist adherents (generally take Bob Black - Abolition of Work as
>some sort of guiding light) to this ascetic, voluntary vow of poverty
>often malign those of us who disagree with this approach as "workerists."
>"Workerists" who live the kind of lifestyle I have right now have "down
>shifted" not because we choose to live ascetically out of a broad range of
>lifestyle options available to us, but because our options right now are
>such that we've got little choice.
I think calling people "workerist" is crap, obviously. Anyhow, the whole point of it is to make work voluntary, not to say that work is bad. Those who think that no-one will work unless they are compelled can't see any distinction but there is. BTW, not just a matter of refusing a job, there's also rebellion in avoiding work while you are on the job too, "sabotage" in the IWW tradition.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas