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Good Grief

Good Grief is a group exploration of our collective grief through the frameworks of Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief (The Wild Edge of Sorrow). Inspired by our EcoGathering on Grieving during the autumnal Composting series in 2024 and an increasing urgency to process the compounding loss we experience as the continuation of modernity relies on genocide, ecocide, omnicide and fascism’s impingement on our basic rights and liberties, we will hold space to tend to the complex and often unaddressed grief that accompanies these losses and expand our emotional capacity for collective grieving as a skill for navigating uncertain futures. 

Alienation and Exploitation of Labor

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.

Bullshitization of Work

In a time of crisis, there is so much work to do. Most of us exist in a state of alienation that amounts to having two full time jobs - the work for wages and the work for ourselves, leaving little left for (the work of) pursuing passions and participating in community. To add insult to injury, as many wage-labor jobs have been automated or accelerated by technology, there has been an increase in the amount of work we are doing that is decidedly not necessary. There is so much important work that isn't being done or isn't properly compensated because it is not profitable to capital. Folks are too overworked to have the time and energy to do it. Rather than redistributing the work that is essential to more people and reducing our working hours, or mobilizing around the many existential crises we face, we have all continued to work faster and longer to meet our needs and eke out some semblance of individual security in an uncertain world.

Why do are we doing so much unnecessary work? In part because it generates profit for someone, somewhere. In part, because few places have pro-social systems of wealth distribution or even adequate social safety nets. And in part because an un- or under-employed populous lacks the money to generate more economic activity as consumers. (So even as essential work is made more efficient, workers aren't given their time back, they are compelled to work increasingly less necessary jobs that grow the economy.)

In the words of David Fleming " are conditioned by the market economy; have to be competitive, and cannot forgo an immediate advantage from which would individually benefit in favor of a future (and larger) advantage from which everyone would benefit." In this EcoGathering, we will explore the many ways we continue to be exploited and alienated from our labor, as well as how we might recreate a culture that would allow us to slow down, and actually get the important work done.

Reclamation of Labor

There are plenty of examples of labor movements throughout history (spanning rights recognition, practical advocacy to improve wages and working conditions, and radical re-envisioning), from worker unions and cooperatives, fully automated luxury communism and neodecadence, social security and even insurance, to universal basic income, wages for housework, and expanding who is allowed to work for wages. In this unprecedented time, we might begin to consider how prefiguration and divestment from the myths of progress and efficiency might play a role in re-establishing forms of subsistence and work-life integration that heals the rift of alienation, meets our needs without exploitation, and values finding joy in the work that we all love and rely on. What diverse arrangements for getting the work done in a weird world can we imagine anew and return to?

Good Grief

Good Grief is a group exploration of our collective grief through the frameworks of Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief (The Wild Edge of Sorrow). Inspired by our EcoGathering on Grieving during the autumnal Composting series in 2024 and an increasing urgency to process the compounding loss we experience as the continuation of modernity relies on genocide, ecocide, omnicide and fascism’s impingement on our basic rights and liberties, we will hold space to tend to the complex and often unaddressed grief that accompanies these losses and expand our emotional capacity for collective grieving as a skill for navigating uncertain futures.

Work

Hard-Pressed Community Print Shop 12 VT Rt. 15, West Danville, Vermont

EcoGather's Vermont based facilitators of community learning are collaborating with Hard-Pressed Community Print shop in West Danville, Vermont to offer a series of EcoGatherings in the Northeast Kingdom. We're eager to share space, snacks, and substantial-talk – the opposite of small-talk –with folks who are craving conversation about who to live well in a time of endings. These casual, cozy events are an easy way to connect in community, practice co-learning, and get connected to EcoGather's globe-spanning cosmolocal network composed of beings and communities ready to courageously confront the collapse of both the natural systems that we depend upon and human systems that are hostile to life. We help each other make and sustain paradigm shifts.

Good Grief

Good Grief is a group exploration of our collective grief through the frameworks of Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief (The Wild Edge of Sorrow). Inspired by our EcoGathering on Grieving during the autumnal Composting series in 2024 and an increasing urgency to process the compounding loss we experience as the continuation of modernity relies on genocide, ecocide, omnicide and fascism’s impingement on our basic rights and liberties, we will hold space to tend to the complex and often unaddressed grief that accompanies these losses and expand our emotional capacity for collective grieving as a skill for navigating uncertain futures.

Good Grief

Good Grief is a group exploration of our collective grief through the frameworks of Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief (The Wild Edge of Sorrow). Inspired by our EcoGathering on Grieving during the autumnal Composting series in 2024 and an increasing urgency to process the compounding loss we experience as the continuation of modernity relies on genocide, ecocide, omnicide and fascism’s impingement on our basic rights and liberties, we will hold space to tend to the complex and often unaddressed grief that accompanies these losses and expand our emotional capacity for collective grieving as a skill for navigating uncertain futures.

Good Grief

Good Grief is a group exploration of our collective grief through the frameworks of Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief (The Wild Edge of Sorrow). Inspired by our EcoGathering on Grieving during the autumnal Composting series in 2024 and an increasing urgency to process the compounding loss we experience as the continuation of modernity relies on genocide, ecocide, omnicide and fascism’s impingement on our basic rights and liberties, we will hold space to tend to the complex and often unaddressed grief that accompanies these losses and expand our emotional capacity for collective grieving as a skill for navigating uncertain futures.

Language

Hard-Pressed Community Print Shop 12 VT Rt. 15, West Danville, Vermont

EcoGather's Vermont based facilitators of community learning are collaborating with Hard-Pressed Community Print shop in West Danville, Vermont to offer a series of EcoGatherings in the Northeast Kingdom. We're eager to share space, snacks, and substantial-talk – the opposite of small-talk –with folks who are craving conversation about who to live well in a time of endings. These casual, cozy events are an easy way to connect in community, practice co-learning, and get connected to EcoGather's globe-spanning cosmolocal network composed of beings and communities ready to courageously confront the collapse of both the natural systems that we depend upon and human systems that are hostile to life. We help each other make and sustain paradigm shifts.

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