There is a scene of A story from the Bronx (1993) that goes viral again every few months. In it Lorenzo, a humble bus driver played by Robert De Nirohe confronts Sonny, a mafia boss. Sonny has begun using Lorenzo’s nine-year-old son Calogero as an errand boy, and the outraged father demands that the mobster leave the boy alone. Later, he explains to his son that bravery is not allowing oneself to be corrupted by the luxuries that surround criminals, but rather “getting up early every day and living off a job.” “The worker is the real tough guy,” says De Niro’s character in what could be the formulation hollywood of the expression “poor but honest.” The film takes place in the sixties and, precisely with that scene, it illustrates a worker pride very typical of those times, during which work also provided an identity and meaning for the workers’ lives.
However, a few minutes later, when several years have passed, we see Calogero perfectly integrated into Sonny’s band. The father’s efforts were unsuccessful: the boy chose the easy way. “The son doesn’t want to be a tough guy who gets up early, he doesn’t want to be exploited. Is this necessarily bad? It is because the alternative is the mafia, but the motivations that drive it are not; Something similar happens with neoliberalism,” explains Jorge Moruno, sociologist and author of I don’t have time, geographies of precariousness.
Since in July 2020 people began to talk about the Great Renunciation There has been much discussion about why the conventional world of work no longer offers incentives for young people. Like Calogero, more and more young people are choosing alternatives (not necessarily criminal) to what until a few years ago was the path that opened the doors of the longed for and never completely delimited middle class. In these cases, will is usually confused with necessity and when precariousness and uncertainty lurk, all alternatives seem desirable: from the most achievable (examinations or self-employment as freelance that exploits a talent or artistic vocation) to the most crazy ones (trusting those who promise that you can escape the system through dubious investments).
The problem is not entirely new. For example, the sociologist Richard Sennet already warned in his essay The corrosion of character (Anagrama, 1998) on how labor flexibility imposed by capitalism at the end of the 20th century. XX was impacting the character of those who worked under its conditions. But if this corrosion was already noticeable twenty years ago, it is now much more serious because the precariousness that causes it and that, in many cases, exhausts the psychic strength of employees in sustaining their mere survival, has advanced a lot. In parallel, novels and conversation about it have also proliferated. Remedios Zafra has analyzed the effects of precariousness on workers in cultural industries, David Graeber defended that a good part of the jobs that occupy us are made up of useless tasks, Mark Fisher denounced the bureaucratization of all occupations, Elena Medel or Bibiana Collado They have written about the exhausted lives of working class women and Beatriz Serrano from Madrid or the American Anna Wiener from Silicon Valley have written about the almost inhuman dynamics of offices. Do we talk more about work than ever? Maybe not, because work has always been the area of conflict and politics. But strategies have changed: if decades ago similar situations of exploitation and dispossession were addressed through unionism and collective struggle, ours is the time of discouragement, more or less imaginative individual alternatives and “every man for himself.”
But is there any nice way to make a living?
“Right now, many workers who saw themselves as middle class are beginning to understand that their relationship with power implies that they are also workers. The video game programmer might have more in common with the Uber driver than he thought,” Sarah Jaffe writes in her essay Work: an unrequited lovejust published by Captain Swing. No sector is spared, not even those that offer better salaries: today companies consume so much time and energy from their workers that they arrive exhausted at the end of the day, with the strength, at most, to write one of those small complaints on social networks. social messages that are so successful during the week: “My plants have dried up because I didn’t water them”, “my boss has written to me again at dawn” or “another night when I don’t prepare tomorrow’s container”. They are the little pills that concentrate the disenchantment of what has been called the tired generation.
“Vocation is another ideological invention to convince you of a Stockholm Syndrome: we will tell you to let yourself be exploited in what you enjoy and you will love to be exploited. Does it stop being a yoke if you put it on yourself?”
When exhaustion reaches unbearable limits, mental health problems or original solutions appear, such as that Great Renunciation of which little remains today or different fantasies that are only supposedly anti-system. Sociologist Mariano Urraco, professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, explains that we are going through a social context in which “getting up early, in quotes, doesn’t matter a little, because the cards are dealt no matter what time you get up,” so “It is legitimate for young people to question and problematize these types of values related to self-denial and hard work and for each one to look for alternative solutions or escape routes from the discourse of “you have to make an effort,” which no longer works.”
“Many sociologists have talked about the current system being like a ghost station through which trains no longer pass; Many people continue to buy tickets, continue to sacrifice, continue to work hard, continue studying until a very old age, but in reality the trains do not pass,” adds Urraco.
And what do those who have had enough of waiting in vain, those for whom the discomfort (chaining precarious jobs or not achieving any) is already unbearable, do? Trying to escape from self-employment. “The goal is to regain control over our lives, at a time when everything is a maelstrom of uncertainty. This is what makes people fantasize, dream or get brutally involved with the study of competitive examinations or with other alternatives such as moving to the countryside and, suddenly, becoming a neo-rural. Fundamentally, it is done to feel that one has control over one’s life, something that working for others no longer allows,” responds the sociologist, who insists: “Here it is not about nostalgia for times gone by, it is that It is proven that a good part of young people would love to have stable, linear, predictable lives, jobs for life like those of their parents… and hence the success of the oppositions.”
MM is a 24-year-old philosopher and political scientist who opposes the high school teaching body (and prefers to use her initials so that her statements cannot influence the process). “I inherit a profession. Both of my parents are teachers and it is a job that is close to me and with which I am already, literally, familiar. I think it is the path that is best compatible with my life, with what life really is, what there is after work,” he comments. Of course, he is aware that many undesirable dynamics are also reproduced (and imposed) in the public sector: “I will try to do the best with what my circumstances allow me, but I keep thinking that it is also salaried work. None of them would dignify me. We have education designed for the productive model in which we live. It is not a separate sphere, there are no immaculate places and I know what being a teacher entails,” she acknowledges.
M. is also not entirely optimistic regarding the most common channels or fantasies through which dissatisfaction is conveyed. He does not even consider that the recent awakening of this malaise “is a good sign.” “This consensus of dissatisfaction makes me dizzy, given that in most cases, grouping a fed-up mass under the same motto that something has to change, hiding in that mass different sectors and interests… it has not turned out very well.” In his opinion, unfortunately, all options and escape routes constitute a trap: “The vocation is another ideological invention to convince you of a Stockholm Syndrome: we will tell you to let yourself be exploited in what you enjoy and you will love to be exploited.” . Are we escaping if what we exercise are new forms of self-exploitation under the false idea that at least we are the ones in control? Does it stop being a yoke if you put it on yourself? The common trap for all is the unsustainable and incompatible productive model with life under which we live. A model that ranges from the most prestigious options to Onlyfans or the problem of gambling addiction and betting houses,” reflects the young woman.
But what exactly do we want?
In your Praise of idlenesspublished in 1932, the philosopher and mathematician Betrand Russel warned that, until then, workers, businessmen and rulers had been “fools.” “But there is no reason to remain foolish forever,” he added. The nonsense he refers to is the eight-hour work day and, if the British man was optimistic, it is because he considered that in the future it would be possible, thanks to technology, to “democratize free time” by implementing a work day of only four hours. . “In a world where no one is forced to work more than four hours a day there will be happiness and joy in life, instead of worn-out nerves, fatigue and dyspepsia. The work required will be enough to make leisure something delicious, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their free time, they will not only want passive and insipid distractions,” defended the thinker. Like him or the economist Milton Keynes, who in the same decade predicted that the fifteen-hour work week would be established around 2030, many intellectuals have come to the conclusion that technological progress would lead to societies in which free time would leave of being scarce.
However, although the digitalization of the world, with its associated increase in productivity, continues to advance, just the opposite is happening. “This phase in which we are in the neoliberal turn is not a turn, it is part of the route. The merchandise production system is also the recent effort to accelerate everything. I don’t think there will be a turning back, and I don’t think it will be the last season either: there will be more seasons and again there will be more discomfort and more mental health problems…” explains Urraco.
M., in line with many people his age, only sees one option: “wanting the abolition of salaried work” which, he clarifies, “is not wanting to stop doing things.” And in the meantime? “We will continue looking for alternatives or solutions from an individualistic point of view, because, if sociologists like Sennet have shown anything, it is that bonds and identities are much stronger and collectivist when they are based, precisely, on a stable job than when they are based on more occasional issues such as consumption patterns,” concludes Urraco. So, without a collective response, phenomena like that of the cryptobrosinvestments that promise “financial freedom” and self-exploitation will only continue to grow and reinforce what they present themselves as lifesavers.
