Signs of the Great Refusal

Front matter

| Tedd Siegel

Signs of the Great Retusal |

The Coming Struggle for a Postwork Society

Contents

Foreword - 17 Preface - 23 Introduction:

From the Great Resignation to the Great Refusal - 29 Part I: Energizing a Politics of Refusal Prologue: The Refusal of Work-as-We-Know-It - 49 Signs of the Great Refusal - 71

Rethinking Usefulness (Amid the Collapsing Fantasies of Capitalist Realism) - 91

Foreword

I am honored to be called upon to be an early reader of Tedd Siegel’s Signs of the Great Refusal: The Coming Struggle for a Postwork Society. The author was my university colleague at the outset of this project, which he says has roots dating back to 2016, marking the election of Donald J. Trump to the us presidency and the beginning of Siegel’s collaboration on a long-form blog site dedicated to analyzing our current “dark times.” Back then, he was in an administrative staff role working at the university research/industry interface defined by such terms as “tech transfer,’ “commercialization,’ and “innovation,” while I was in a campuswide academic administrative role. We connected personally through our common background in the study of the humanities and professionally on a number of university tasks that seemed to me to emanate from a world very different from anything my humanistic training had prepared me for. Our onduty conversations were taut, Excel spreadsheet-mediated discussions of business issues, such as federal contracts or space policy at the university’s Silicon Valley sites or research support policies, but our off-duty talk engaged a far more diverse set of topics and values than those at work: for example, the legacy of AIDS activism and activist art; the strengths and shortcomings of Jürgen Habermas's social theory; the quirky pedagogy of Georg Lukacs’s “students” Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, who were among Siegel’s teachers during his graduate studies at the New School for Social Research. It was all “Critical Path Method” on one side of the door, and Kritische Theorie on the other.

Reading Signs of the Great Refusal, I can now more fully grasp that for quite a while, Siegel has kept his analytic eye trained on precisely this deep chasm I am describing between the value production to which our shared work in office had to be directed and the values that informed our talk when we left the office. Notably, Siegel is very skeptical about any therapeutic healing of work through humanistic values, arguing rather for recovery from work as it now functions for vast numbers of people. Nor does he envision spicing up work’s meaningfulness with a few pinches of spirituality and aesthetics. So-called reflexive or creative or self-directed work is, in his view, just more of the same brew so long as a single sort of value continues to be the goal and organizing principle of work in contemporary society: surplus value extracted in the interest of profit.

Siegel is withering in his critique of such exercises in rebranding contemporary work. These have latterly taken on a bad aroma, particularly since the disruptions experienced by millions of workers during the covip-19 pandemic and their massive “exit” from their workplaces in response to the organizational disintegration they had witnessed. Yet at the same time, it should not be lost how strongly Siegel’s critical argument is grounded not only in a negative judgment of actually existing work today, but also in positive normative beliefs oriented toward the future: Contemporary workers, individually and collectively, are worthy of richer, freer existences grounded in autonomous decisions about how to value their lives and those of others (including nonhuman lives), and to achieve this autonomy we must liberate ourselves from the immiserating order of alienated labor. The first formulation has its legacy in the Enlightenment and especially Kant; the latter, of course, in Marx.

I wont summarize here Siegel’s argument against work; he does that thoroughly in his introductory chapter and expounds it in a prismatic treatment throughout the book’s various chap-

FOREWORD ters and topics. But I will underscore some notable features of his approach and material. First, I want to point out that Signs of the Great Refusal is—I would say, in the best sense — a “bookish” book. That is, it traverses a remarkable range of reference points in recent publications, both academic and extra-academic. Like Kafkas “K? searching for the door that will lead outside the Castle, Siegel picks up the items of his bibliography like keys to the apparently sealed chamber of work, hoping that one or more will help him turn the massive lock. (K. does eventually find an open door, but Kafka didn't finish the novel, so we dort know if this ever resolved K’s predicament.)

One of the rewards of reading Siegel's work is, in fact, receiving a cogent précis of writings offering context for his critique. His books come from a scrappy range of genres and publication venues, including Marxist theory and leftist publications, academic studies, and texts of a more popular hortatory mode. His goals and standards of discrimination regarding these texts are not always the professional ones of the university scholar, but rather those of a “mobilized” erudition critically sifting for hints, indices, and conceptual tools in the service of making the still-obscure goal of the refusal of work more tangible.

In passing, I will observe that I do not think it ancillary to Siegel's approach that as an activist and theorist he comes out of, and to some extent also addresses his work to, an independent intellectual milieu that especially became visible to me in the first decade of the 2000s. At that time, a certain counter-public sphere emerged for theoretical and critical writing that was not dependent on institutions of higher education or academic presses, as was especially evident in new publications venues, including the blog scene and in independent presses, such as Zero and Repeater Books. Though some of the original energy associated with this extra-academic discourse network has ebbed, it inspired a number of experiments both in and outside the academy in short-form, public-facing, and open-access publication that continues today.

As I read Signs of the Great Refusal, I found myself thinking about how, precisely, to characterize the mode or genre of this book. In many respects it is manifestly a work of theory and critique. Yet it is also an unconventional journey across an archipelago of discourses that are not necessarily themselves in direct communication. Rather, they are connected by Siegel's far from self-evident intellectual itinerary, traversing leftist critiques of neoliberal ideology, Marx’s value theory, arguments from and with Hannah Arendt, questions of mental health and illness, criticisms of mindfulness and neuroscience, conceptions of the public sphere and its deformation or decline, and Italian autonomist post-Fordist theories about technoscience, immaterial labor, and virtuosity (with an occasional one-liner about Plato thrown in for good measure).

For reasons I will soon explain, however, it was Ernst Bloch who kept coming to mind as I read the book. This is certainly not on stylistic grounds; Siegel’s firm dedication to a vernacular treatment of even abstruse theoretical discourse has nothing of the expressionist philosophical prose Bloch was wont to write. Nor is it even that Siegel’s basic argument about a collective, transformative exit from work might be considered by many, even on the left, to be “utopian” — a term that Bloch did much to rehabilitate from its often negative connotations in the Marxist tradition. It is rather because of a metaphor that Bloch adopted for a certain mode of discourse he took as a philosophical model for his own thought and writing: colportage.

Historically, the colporteur was a distributor of religious pamphlets, Bibles, and popular books to a rural population whose literacy was increasing. Colportage is a portmanteau word evoking a picture of a rider on a horse with a miscellany of books hung around its neck (French, cou) for travel. For Bloch, the image was appealing for its connection with a plebian public, for such literature’s role in stimulating the popular imagination with new and sometimes fantastical (i.e., “utopian”) content, and for its adumbration of a kind of publicness that could circulate around and beyond the metropolitan centers of power.

But it also appealed to Bloch for the sheer incongruous variety of the colporteur’s wares, in which religious texts might share a discursive space with salacious novels, fantastic adventure sto-

FOREWORD ries, or stories of travel to distant and exotic parts. He found this discursive promiscuousness salutary and generative, taking inspiration for his own montage-like juxtapositions of philosophy, folktales, political commentaries, literary and musical observations, and whatever else might be material to his prospecting for the utopian moment among the richness of human thought and culture.

I think I perceive a similar impulse in Siegel’s wanderings through his own labyrinth of books. He draws us into the confusions of our contemporary situation and carries us deeper into them with many a surprising argumentative turn. Yet in the end, his reading and our reading of him can only take us so far. When we put our books down, we remain in this current world from which, he believes, we must keep seeking the exit. Will we come out together on the other side? Siegel keeps our eyes trained on a still-dim horizon; a horizon, he states, that will only open truly when work-as-we-know-it no longer holds us in its thrall.

Tyrus Miller Irvine, California, 2023

Preface

Almost anywhere one chooses to look, there is evidence that long-standing expectations surrounding the experience of work and the structure of wage-based society are breaking down. Included in this are expectations around social benefits, job stability and the availability of full-time work, collaborative management cultures, worker-friendly regulatory regimes, and the role of automation and technology in job roles, work performance, and surveillance. The covip-19 pandemic has served to “rend the veil” of corporate pr, so that beneath the continued rhetoric of partnership and teamwork, one can see clearly the dull glint of underlying structures of domination and coercion. But the issues with work and wage-based society actually go far deeper, and precede pandemic-era disputes over work rules, work/life balance, and mass resignations by years, if not decades.

This book is about these deeper issues surrounding the collapse of wage-based society, its division of social labor, and the revocation of its implicit “social contract; namely, that “if you are prepared to work hard, you can expect to make a living that will support a decent life for yourself and those closest to you.” As a blanket reappraisal, it also involves beginning to imagine the transition to a postwork society, where the conditions of work and social experience generally have been radically transformed. In this respect, Signs of the Great Refusal should be understood as aligned with present international debates and explorations found under the headings of postwork theory, the antiwork movement, and degrowth economics.

But where others strive to envision the particulars of this world-to-come, elaborating an array of specific postwork imaginaries, or emphasizing generative policies to bring about new and transitional forms, I have chosen to remain focused on prospects for active resistance or refusal. In my view, it’s important to try to think about postwork as a political struggle, even if the chances of this materializing must be rated as being rather dim. Signs of the Great Refusal thus concerns the status of the postwork political imaginary, as a necessary condition for a politics of refusal that would be capable of deploying successful strategies and tactics. Social and political conditions that we find unacceptable generally tend to generate a will to negation, and along with it a change in consciousness. But what really matters is whether the various “signs” of this refusal can grow into a mass movement for change, or what, following Herbert Marcuse, one might call a form of “the Great Refusal.”

In an article on “postwork” for The Guardian, British journalist Andy Beckett writes that work “increasingly forms our routines and psyches, squeezing out other influences” and does so to such an extent that “the things we rely on to give life meaning, like religion, party politics, and community fade away.’ And yet it is also true, he does not fail to point out, that work is not working, for ever-more people, and in ever-more ways. And Beckett goes on to count the ways: as subsistence (i.e., the problem of the working poor); as a source of social mobility and self-worth (college graduates making you a latte); as precarious; as pointless, and even socially damaging; as incredibly stressful, and thus bad for your health; as poorly distributed (people have too much or too little); and finally, as something endangered,

1 Andy Beckett, “Post-Work: The Radical Idea of a World without Jobs,’ The Guardian, January 19, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/ jan/19/post-work-the-radical-idea-of-a-world-without-jobs.

PREFACE and maybe facing extinction as the result of increasing automation. Signs of the Great Refusal explores the issue of “postwork,” for example, by questioning the priority of the so-called work ethic, asserting the value of nonwork activity, and by theorizing the end of work in and through the trajectory of advanced technological capitalist society.

The growing body of literature on the problem of work today tends to present readers with what I consider to be an unacceptable either/or: either it encourages people to lean in and further commodify themselves as successful human capitals, embracing some version of the prosperity gospel, or it offers palliative care for the commodified, neoliberal self (capitalist spirituality’s projects of self-optimization, recovery, and wellness). In response, this book is offered as a kind of an intervention in insufficiently radicalized mainstream debates about the future of work. Signs of the Great Refusal is thus meant to be synergistic with various other titles that might be described as “leftist critiques of work with a practical intent.” In the spirit of Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work (2011), therefore, the objective here is also to contribute to overcoming “inattention to work within political theory,’ and thereby to challenge the privatization of work, promote the understanding of work as a social relation, and to encourage a cross-class politics of refusal of work-as-we-know-it. The framing hypothesis of the book is that if there is a chance that something like “the Great Resignation” could turn out to be a form of “the Great Refusal,” it is necessary to first overcome various capitalist realist dogmas about work, and to recognize and to understand the trajectory of wage-based society in the post-Fordist, digital age.

The interrelated provocations of several books have continually inspired and informed my efforts to think about the postwork political imaginary as a condition for a politics of refusal, including three in particular: Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2009), Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination (1993), and Peter Fleming’s Resisting Work: The Corporatization of Life and Its Discontents (2014). Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism lays down a kind of a gauntlet, showing how and why we have great difficulty imagining alternatives to capitalist society because of the totalizing way that the satisfaction of human need has been fundamentally restructured and preformatted by the prevailing social logic of capitalism. Postone’s theoretical account of how abstract labor as a form of social domination continually weaves and maintains capitalist social relations shows precisely how this operates and came into being, and why framing resistance only in terms of an everyday understanding of class antagonism misses something intractable and pernicious about capitalist social relations in the post-Fordist, neoliberal era. Finally, Fleming’s exploration of whether and in what way it is possible to “wake up” from the structural fantasies of capitalist realist ideology opens the space of a practical, social, and political response. His description of how the control society’s reliance on internal self-policing, via market incentives and coercion, becomes undermined by the logic of late capitalism, causing the appearance of “cracks” sets the stage for my initial consideration of autonomist-Marxist approaches to resistance found in the work of John Holloway, Bifo Berardi, and André Gorz, ideas that are also taken up again in chapter 17.

Most of the chapters included in this book were written over a two-year period starting in late 2019. But the origins of this project, as with so many things, reside in a very personal response to trauma. The sensibility of this book was actually forged out of two powerful shocks. The first of these was the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States. In the ensuing surprise and disbelief, my friend Steve Heikkila and I cofounded a new political blog site called In Dark Times (indarktimes.com), which was dedicated to overcoming liberal postpolitics/antipolitics, something we saw as being necessary for an effective, broad-based resistance to the rising tide of white nationalist authoritarianism in us society. The articles posted on indarktimes.com thus chronicled a deliberate process of political self-radicalization. It was hoped that our effort to give various radical/leftist ideas a serious hearing might be useful for others who also aspired to join the ranks of the “dissident professional-managerial class (PMC)?

PREFACE

As for the second trauma, some months before millions of people started loudly bemoaning their pandemic working conditions, I had found myself already at home on a medical leave from a senior management position, beginning my recovery from chronic prsp/anxiety, and counting down the days until I could officially begin my early retirement. As one might imagine, an important part of this process was to try to understand how I had ended up so burned out and despairing. Beyond the specifics of my own experience, I wanted to understand what it was about work itself that had become so untenable. I knew that I was far from alone in feeling forced to tap out early, despite a whole raft of potential implications and consequences. Thinking about all of this also made me want to situate this experience of work, and myself, in a much more precise way. I wanted to achieve a clearer understanding of despair over work as a sort of a generational happening, as something unique to this moment in us history and enterprise, and I especially wanted to try to understand it properly as a specific sort of a class position, one replete with both blinders and action potentials.

Finally, the trajectory of this book also reflects a determination on my part to try to make the most of a highly eclectic resume. I spent the first half of my twenties participating in and witnessing community and street activism as part of the gay rights movement and the politics of HIv/ArDs across the 1980s. In my later twenties to my mid-thirties, I was a PhD student in philosophy at the New School for Social Research, undertaking a dissertation project in moral and political philosophy under the late Agnes Heller. Instead of finishing and pursuing an academic career, however, I ended up in Silicon Valley, where for twenty years I worked as a program manager in enterprise software, semiconductor, and optical telecom, and then as a manager of university/Silicon Valley research and educational partnerships (Nasa, other federal agencies, and private industry). The diverse set of these experiences are all represented here, resulting in a philosophical polemic that might be described, however awkwardly, as “de-fetishizing, work-related, activist theory.” By weaving together current affairs, political and social theory, and aspects of personal narrative, Signs of the Great Refusal aims to introduce a selected set of notions derived from autonomist Marxism to the increasingly disaffected, younger generations of the professional-managerial class among others.

The overall arc of this book represents a sincere effort (however misguided it may be) to offer a different sort of narrative about “the future of work” to the generation of the professional classes in the United States now coming of age, one I hope is bristling with heretofore unfamiliar, radical ideas. I say “misguided,” because I recognize that it has always been intrinsic to the outlook of those of us in the professional classes to assume, out of an overabundance of confidence, that there is nothing we don't already know, or, barring this, that among the small number of things we dont know, there is nothing that is terribly important. With the recent shattering of liberalism’s core social and political assumptions, however, I think it is safe to say that this class confidence has all but completely evaporated. The immediate effect is a painful and disorienting loss of compass, but there may yet be a silver lining: there are at least some signs of a new willingness to challenge all manner of well-worn dogmas or received ideas that now only serve highly entrenched interests (e.g., those of corporate, governmental, and media elites).

From the Great Resignation to the Great Refusal

Quitting is, in some ways, the sad resort of an individualized working class. Unorganized, you can quit. —Jacob Rosenberg, Mother Jones, February 2022

It started in the spring of 2021, growing in intensity across the summer and fall. After an initial wave of pandemic-related layoffs and widespread uncertainty that caused many people to just hunker down, there was a sudden jump in the “monthly quit rate,” reflecting what came to be known as “the Great Resignation” The rate had never exceeded 2.4 percent at any point over the last twenty years, but it suddenly climbed above 3 percent. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 4 million people who quit in July, 4.2 million in August, 4.4 million in September, and then 4.5 million in November 2021.'

1 Twenty-year quit rate numbers are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and are graphed on the Economic Policy Institute website (Total Hires, Layoffs, and Quits, 2000-2022), https://www.epi.org/indicators/jolts/. The 4 million quits figure for July 2022 is taken from Ian Cook, “Who Is Driving the Great Resignation?;” Harvard Business Review, September 2021, https://hbr.org/2021/09/who-is-driving-the-great-resignation. The EPI figure is consistent with this reporting. The 4.4 million for September 2021 is

How, then, to account for a tight labor market during a period of recession and high unemployment? In the corporate media, and among the economic intelligentsia, words such as “puzzling” and “mysterious” came up again and again in attempts to explain it.? Initially, some suggested that it was just pent-up “quit demand” from the pandemic, and wasn't really a thing. Others tried to make some sort of a skills-gap argument, as had been made in relation to labor market disruptions after the 2008 crash. Some claimed that the change resolved to the decision, on the part of some frontline workers in the early days of the pandemic, to find new jobs that would allow them to work from home, and to have some schedule flexibility to care for children and other family members. Among conservative outtaken from Nelson Lichtenstein, “Are We Witnessing a ‘General Strike’ in Our Own Time?,” The Washington Post, November 18, 2021, https://www. washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/11/18/are-we-witnessing-general-strike-our-own-time/. The Epi figure for this month is a bit lower, at 4.25 million. Finally, the 4.5 million figure for November 2021 is from Jacob Rosenberg, “Workers Got Fed Up. Bosses Got Scared. This is How the Big Quit Happened. And What it Means,” Mother Jones, January-February 2022, https:// www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/01/record-quits-great-resignation-labor-workers-pandemic/. EPI’s graph also tracks with this figure.

2 “We haven't seen anything quite like the situation we have today”: Daniel Zhao, labor economist with Glassdoor, quoted in Hannah Cox, “What Is The Great Resignation of 2021? (If You Don’t Know, You'll Want To Read This); FEE Stories, July 8, 2021, https://fee.org/articles/what-is-the-great-resignation-of-2021-if-you-dont-know-you-ll-want-to-read-this. Also,

“A variety of reasons have been offered for this situation’: Tim Smart, “Study: Gen Z, Millennials Driving “The Great Resignation,” US News & World Report, August 26, 2021, https://www.usnews.com/news/economy/ articles/2021-08-26/study-gen-z-millennials-driving-the-great-resignation. Or: “The emergence of what looks like labor shortages even though employment is still [...] below pre-pandemic levels and even further below its previous trend — remains somewhat mysterious”: Paul Krugman, “Is the Great Resignation a Great Rethink? Seattle Times, November 7, 2021, https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/is-the-great-resignation-a-great-rethink/. “It’s hard to know what to make of the enormous churn now taking place in the American workplace”: Nelson Lichtenstein, “Are We Witnessing a ‘General Strike’ in Our Own Time?” The Washington Post, November 18, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/11/18/ are-we-witnessing-general-strike-our-own-time/.

lets, “blame” for the quit rate was placed at the feet of extended unemployment benefits, government assistance to families, and student loan deferrals, which they said had encouraged laziness.

For still other analysts, the story became about trying to understand what was going on in the most affected sectors of the economy, specifically low-paid, frontline service industry jobs in hospitality and leisure, retail and food services, health care, and teaching. The narratives in these cases had more to do with creating a sense of mystery where there really wasn’t one, by asking, for example, mostly rhetorically, “why nobody wants to work anymore.’ The real mystery here, however, was why it was so hard to grasp what was going on with essential workers burned out under pandemic conditions with little or no incentives, something that ought to have been well within the capabilities of behavioral economics.

In The Guardian, as with other leftist outlets that tend to focus more on the conditions of unionized workers, the story was all about “Striketober,’ since there was an uptick in strikerelated activity at companies such as John Deere, Kellogg, and Kaiser Permanente, along with actions by Hollywood production employees and some food production workers. Angered during the pandemic after years of seeing scant improvement in pay and benefits, many unionized workers went on record that they wanted something back, given that they had continued to show up, and companies were raking in record profits. By contrast, Fortune ran a story that August that reacted to survey data showing that many younger employees were planning to change jobs in the coming year.* Relying on “a new study from Adobe” that confirmed that it was GenZ that was actually leading the

3 Steven Greenhouse, “Striketober Is Showing Workers’ Rising Power — but Will It Lead to Lasting Change?,” The Guardian, October 21, 2021, https:// www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/23/striketober-unions-strikes-workers-lasting-change.

4 Rachel King, “What’s Fueling “The Great Resignation among Younger Generations?,” Fortune Daily, August 26, 2021, https://fortune. com/2021/08/26/pandemic-burnout-career-changes-great-resignation-adobe/.

charge, the Fortune article enthusiastically followed Adobe's lead, and tried to suggest that employee burnout was the result of corporate slowness to adopt the state-of-the art digital collaboration tools that younger employees had come to expect. Harvard Business Review ran an article in September 2021 that identified the greatest increase in resignations among mid-level millennials, and actually raised the possibility that employees might have reached the break point by the confluence of pandemic changes to the pattern of social labor and things such as hiring freezes, increased workloads, childcare and eldercare, and other causes that made them want to rethink their life goals. The article ended by suggesting to employers how they might be able to manage it all through targeted interventions and tailored retention programs.°

In November, an opinion piece in the Seattle Times, “Is the Great Resignation a Great Rethink?,” tried to solve the mystery of labor shortages amid high unemployment: “The experience of the pandemic may have led many workers to explore opportunities they wouldn't have looked at previously.’ The article concluded that the pandemic had “forced low-wage workers out of their rut? and that their example then became a “quit multiplier” for other workers.° Anthony Klotz, who actually coined the term “the Great Resignation,” pithily referred to this additional X factor in The Washington Post as “pandemic epiphany?” Echoing this further in The New York Times in February 2022, Norene Malone described how “the meaning of work’ for so-called inessential workers seems to have gotten lost somewhere

5 Ian Cook, “Who Is Driving the Great Resignation? Harvard Business Review, September 15, 2021, https://hbr.org/2021/09/who-is-driving-the-great-resignation.

6 Paul Krugman, “Is the Great Resignation a Great Rethink?? Seattle Times, November 7, 2021, https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/is-the-great-resignation-a-great-rethink/.

7 “Transcript: The Great Resignation with Molly M. Anderson, Anthony C. Klotz, PhD & Elaine Welteroth,” The Washington Post, September 24, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/24/ transcript-great-resignation-with-molly-m-anderson-anthony-c-klotz-phd-elaine-welteroth/.

between Slack and Zoom?” She then pointed out that there are really two kinds of stories being told about work right now. There is the labor market story, which concerns the quit rate and has to do with people “trading up” in a tight market. There is also the story about how professional people are quitting because they are miserable and burned out, something worsened by the pandemic, but actually decades in the making, and having to do with ever-increasing productivity coupled with stagnant wages, longer and longer hours, and so on.

Reflecting on the similarity of the attitudes of both nonunion and unionized employees, some observers began raising the suggestion that the Great Resignation might actually amount to a kind of a wildcat strike. This thesis was offered in two slightly different ways, one in The Washington Post and one in Mother Jones. Historian Nelson Lichtenstein argued in a Washington Post article that there is a valid parallel to be drawn with Reconstruction-era claims that freed slaves were lazy, and refused to work, when in fact they were protesting unacceptable working conditions that denied them the dignity of family life.” Today's fast-food workers, hotel chambermaids, and nursing home employees are not enslaved, Lichtenstein said, but they perform labor under a system that has become radically debased and, as such, unable to sustain working-class families. Hours are episodic, job security is nonexistent, benefits are paltry, and prospects for advancement are nil. Since they can quit, they are doing so in droves. These contemporary nonunion “wage slaves,’ he says, are seeking their own emancipation.

In Mother Jones, Jacob Rosenberg shares Lichtenstein’s basic premise: “Large scale patterns of worker strikes tend to come as a postscript to shattering events.” But Rosenberg compares

8 Noreen Malone, “The Age of Anti-Ambition,” New York Times Magazine, February 15, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/magazine/anti-ambition-age.html.

9 Nelson Lichtenstein, “Are We Witnessing a ‘General Strike’ in Our Own Time?” The Washington Post, November 18, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/11/18/are-we-witnessing-general-strike-our-own-time/.

the Great Resignation to labor agitation after World War II rather than to the period of Civil War Reconstruction.” After the war, he says, there was a pent-up need for workers to “get something back after their contributions to the war effort, and the corporate sector's huge war-time profits.” Workers who were left wondering “why they had to sacrifice so much, or why some people got so much while they worked for scraps; Rosenberg said, joined unions and went on strike. Today, by contrast, with stagnant wages, a threadbare safety net, and low unionization, he says, something else happened — a lot of people up and quit. If we want to characterize the Great Resignation in general terms, therefore, Rosenberg suggests, it makes sense to see the entire hodgepodge of elements (organized labor action, early retirements, walkouts, burnout, generational change) as a resistance to the status quo — as what he calls a “wildcat year of enough.” Workers are pissed off and burned out. Millions of people decided, either by choice or by pressure, that they were done.