Antiwork Timeline (Part One)

The history of how long it took us to realize that work sucks

The past two weeks had wildly conflicting takes on AI. Anti and pro. One crucial commonality they both share though: antiwork. No doubt informed by my personal rage and resentment working onsite as a healthscare healthcare worker during peak COVID, I have found a stable target of ire, as have many globally. And the news only acts as low-performance fuel for us.

But how did it take us so long to get here? Before, antiwork sentiments were associated with bohemians, hobos, people at the outskirts of society. Now an entire generation is punching out. And, like many youth trends, older people are jumping on this bandwagon as well.

Let’s look at how the bandwagon was built.

1830s

From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, in Paris, a counterculture arose in reaction to the bourgeoisie: the bohemians. Before the Industrial Revolution, artists had the Church and royalty as patrons. Now, they were free to build furniture, wallpaper, and ceramics in whatever style they wanted. The catch though: the middle class marketplace decided their fate. What’s ironic, then, about the birth of bohemianism (and arguably antiwork) is that it was fueled by the indignity of having to work for a lower class of people than before. Many future subcultures, of course, would glorify the lower and working classes (though they would of course still despise the bourgeoisie).

Though poets like Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud would come to best symbolize (no pun intended) the creative output of bohemian Paris for future generations, the most lasting, fascinating document of the time is Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème, (which would become the opera La Boheme by Puccini) a collection of his stories of Parisian artists that dropped out of middle class life to take drugs, have drunken sex, find God and follow their muse. For the first time in history, due to the cataclysmic changes of industry, a group of people questioned the value of labor and rebelled.

1910s

For many decades, the 1910s was considered the golden age of Greenwich Village. Figures like Theodore Dreiser, Emma Goldman, Max Eastman, Sinclair Lewis and Margaret Sanger represented a revolutionary, sexually liberated time. Speaking of revolution, socialism was very popular at this time, with many Village bohemians supporting the striking workers.

Walt Whitman, who was a Village bohemian in the 1850s, paved the way with poems that glorified the working man and everyday life. But Whitman was one to praise, not lash out. It’s not until the 1910s that you see such widespread support for Marx in the Village. This was no doubt because of the success of the 1912 Bread and Roses strike, the first major victory of the union movement, organized by the radical Industrial Workers of the World union.

1920s

There was a massive paradigm shift in the Village in the ‘20s. The 1910s were a time of radical social activism. But after the horrors of World War I, a sense of disillusionment settled in, leading Gertrude Stein to call writers like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald members of the Lost Generation. Nothing seemed to matter and old values (especially Victorian values) seemed irrelevant. Many Village writers like ee cummings were expatriates, drinking and carousing all over the world, more to numb the aching void than to celebrate anything in particular. We will see this oscillation again later (the idealistic ‘60s versus the cynical ‘70s, the indifferent ‘90s leading to the Obama-era enthusiasm and sincerity of the ‘00s).

We also see the two halves of antiwork begin to form here: like the 1910s, many in the antiwork movement are pro-union activists. But, like the 1920s writers and thinkers, many are also lost and disillusioned, not subscribing to a particular belief system, but rather apathetically sucking on their vapes and doomscrolling.

1930s

The Great Depression led to a Red Wave of Communist sympathy in the Village. As it grew in popularity, so did folk music, leading to the first wave of Greenwich Village folk, with Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie using storytelling and the local color of Louisiana and Oklahama, respectively, as weapons in the struggle.

Glamorous Hollywood could not be expected to contribute much to the sentiment of the Marxist moment. All the same, the gangster emerged as the antiwork antihero. Openly disregarding wage labor and domestic life, the gangster dressed in extravagant clothes and was surrounded by even more extravagant molls.

1940s

There was no greater push-back for antiwork sentiment than World War II. Women at home worked while their husbands fought abroad. Even the aforementioned Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, disgusted by the atrocities of Stalinist Russia, sang anti-Hitler songs. The Hollywood gangster was replaced by the noir detective, a cynical worker who took cases that the police long stopped working on. It was in this decade that the US emerged as a superpower and the American Dream became more vivid for the whole world.

1950s

It can be said that the widespread popularity of cars in the ‘50s, when the average worker could afford a car, was as responsible for the cultural revolutions of youth as the smart phone was decades later. The Beat generation would drive all over, looking for kicks and/or God. Anything but the stifling economic materialism of the time. Beatniks all around the world smoked marijuana and drove aimlessly like their heroes Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On the Road. Scruffy beatniks were not the only ones who shunned the 9 to 5 life.

So did teenage delinquents in the US and the UK (the latter type were called Teddy Boys).

The word ‘teenager’ was created in the 1950’s due to the tremendous population of those in this age category and because teenagers started gaining more independence and freedoms. Teenagers were able to buy more things like food, clothes and music because of an increase in spending money, as well as use cars  more often than before, increasing freedom. Teenagers were also becoming more independent in the type of music they preferred to listen to, no more listening to what their parents liked, teens flocked to the new music of the decade, which was rock and roll. Of course, this newly found independence would often result in conflict between the parents and the teens. The media played on these emotions and often portrayed teenagers as juvenile delinquents. Peers easily influence teenagers, often at that stage in life what peers think and do becomes more important than what parents think and say.

Teenage delinquents lived for danger and excitement, forming gangs because they hated school (and of course work). No wonder “Summertime Blues” and “Get a Job” were such big hits at this time

Further Reading:

The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village, John Strausbaugh

Teenagers And Teenpics: Juvenilization Of American Movies, Thomas Doherty