what’s equally distrusting about the labor crisis, which COVID has only clarified, is, beyond exacerbating the economic instability of the working-class, it has revealed that so much of the working-class cannot imagine themselves outside of work, beyond labor, without capitalism.
this is not a critique of the working-class. it is a critique of how Capitalism—much like Lukács foretold—structures our self-making. how is that we’ve come to understand labor as a natural entity so much so that without it we don’t know what to do with unregulated time?
how has Capitalism kept us attuned to the time of labor and, therefore, times of idleness become anxiety inducing in and of themselves—that is, irrespective of COVID?

I’ve been intrigued by how this quarantine disclosed desires for labor, desires to return to work.
and, of course, this is given in Marxism’s theory of alienation, once it is perfected by psychoanalysis and black marxism: how might capitalism structure consumerist desire for surplus-value to guarantee a sadomasochistic desire for labor power?
how might the desire for surplus value unfold only in the worker’s alienation from their labor power? how might an alienation from labor power metaphorise an alienation of one from self, where the self under capitalism is made whole through the commodity (s/v, money, capital)?
what afropessimism allows for us to think about is how when one has no self to be alienated from, that is when one is a Slave, a phenomenology of proletarianization (alienation-lack-desire) not only fails to come online; it brings the Slave and worker to irreconcilable difference
the Slave does not want democraticization of the means of production; the Slave wants production to end.

what might it mean to end production—socialist or otherwise? what might it mean to refuse labor?

it might mean cultivating the desire to do nothing. a politics of lethargy.
for more on politics of lethargy read:
_Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval_ by Saidiya Hartman; particularly “A Chronicle of Need and Want” and “1900. The Tenderloin. 241 West 41st Street”

“Gramsci’s Black Marx” by Frank B. Wilderson III
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