EcoGathering

The physical spaces we inhabit both shape and reflect how we spend our time and what our overculture values. We infrequently immerse ourselves in lush landscapes, taking time to wander off path, stopping to notice an oak gall or to observe that you can only find butterflies around the weedy goldenrod growing in the ditch. Far more often, we drive past at 60 miles an hour, completely encased in plastic and metal. We don’t let sprouting acorns planted by squirrels grow to maturity. Instead we mow them and all the other “weeds” down, then budget massive amounts of time and resources into cultivating trees and ornamental bushes offsite to then transplant them. But the living world doesn’t work on the impatient timescales of the dominant contemporary economy. Beings, ecosystems, and all their interconnected relationships take time to form, time to grow to maturity, and time to recover when damaged. We humans don’t take the time to understand ecosystems, to engage with them and to humbly ask what they need. If we want to contribute to a more resilient, emergent abundance, we must examine how we all relate to time — goldenrod and oak trees included.

By some estimates, contemporary humans, on average, spend about 1/3 of their lifetimes “working”. (Actual proportions of time spent “working” vs. sleeping vs. engaged in leisure pursuits vary widely based on culture, economic system, ability, need/wealth, gender, — and also based on what we actually count as “work.”) Without question, it's evident that work makes up a significant portion of the human experience. In a clever capitalist catch-22, we spend so much of our time and energy working, that we never really get the chance to explore the question of what really is work, anyways? Where did it come from, and who does it serve? Is there inherent value to work? And why do we spend so much of our precious time living doing it?

In the 20th and early 21st centuries, we've tended to narrowly define work as the labor we perform in exchange for wages or other monetary earnings. This construction is broad in that it covers a wide range of roles across all aspects of society, necessary or essential, productive or value-adding, non-essential and incidental to profit generation, and questionable or degenerative. But it is also narrow in that it excludes the typically unpaid labor required to meet the demands of daily living. This oft-unpaid work (known variously as carework or social reproductive labor) has been disproportionately assigned to women in recent centuries. (Indeed, the persistent non- or under-compensation of this work is a powerful means of upholding the patriarchy, but we'll get to that later in our Exploitation session). For now, suffice it to say that what is or could be considered work varies widely. So, we will begin this cycle by unpacking a familiar term, exploring our perceptions of work, and evaluating definitions provided to us by physicists, ancient Greeks, and modern society.

Our exploration of work questions the differences between jobs, care, creation, production, and more. There is no question that in order to stay alive work needs to get done. It takes energy to grow photosynthetic leaves, forage for food, to hunt for prey, to sow seeds to harvest, to shop at the grocery store, or to make enough money to eat out at a restaurant. There are plenty of arrangements for doing the work of sustenance and subsistence. Most critters alive are responsible for procuring the energy to do work to stay alive themselves, or in collaboration with a group. But, in our modern human societies, many people are able to meet their needs by using someone else's energy without reciprocation. This is (or runs a very high risk of) exploitation.

We have already explored the processes of Primitive Accumulation and Enclosure that established capitalism and coerced people into meeting their material needs through wages rather than subsistence. This rift separated (or introduced a middle-step to) the work done for meeting materials needs. Indeed, the work done for wages is sometimes referred to as alienated labor. And under Capitalism, the alienated labor of workers is a key component to making profits, which mean that labor must be compensated at less than its true value. Because laborers receive less than the full value of their work, members of the working class who must work for another person or entity to earn wages so they can pay for the necessities are typically working in an inherently exploitative arrangement. (Degrees of exploitation vary tremendously, of course.) Additionally, capitalism relies upon – and is continually subsidized by – unpaid work in the so-called "informal economy" (or non-monetary economy). Think here of the work associated with maintaining a car for commuting, shopping for "work appropriate clothing," making and packing meals, and even the maternal labor of gestating the next generation of exploitable laborers. In this EcoGathering, we will explore the often invisibilized micro and macro examples of exploitation that result when the work we do to meet our material needs is exploited, and separated, or alienated, from the work we spend most of our lives doing.