When we spoke on the phone recently, Gluesenkamp Perez offered a vision of neighborliness and communal self-sufficiency inspired, she told me, by the writer Wendell Berry. “You don’t need a planning commission if you don’t covet your neighbor’s land,” as she put it. The line distills her view that people deserve control over their communities, their work, and their hours. Top-down bureaucratic meddling isn’t necessary in high-trust communities, which can only exist when the government secures broadly shared prosperity.
“Work is fun—pleasurable even—exploitation is the problem,” Gluesenkamp Perez told me. Her aim is to design systems “where exploitation is harder and where it’s easier to hold value in things that are valuable in themselves, like land.” Freedom, in her account, isn’t the license to consume without limits, but the capacity to decide what matters and to practice the competence that makes those decisions stick.
In May I wrote a piece entitle “Work: Alienation or Soulcraft”, which was a riff on Matthew Crawford’s Shopclass as Soulcraft. The problem of work since the Industrial Revolution has been a problem of alienation and exploitation. Hasn’t it always been so? Yes and no. At least not in the way we tend to stereotype so much of the premodern past, anyway. And there’s an argument that can be made drawing on Hegel’s master slave dynamic why work, even the work of a serf or slave, can be liberating in ways that are incomprehensible to the war-obsessed and otherwise indolent Master.
I don’t want to get into the weeds here of explaining an idea that at first blush seems so counter-intuitive, but I think the basic structure of Hegel’s argument is something we will be confronting again as the machines will, at the very least, profoundly disrupt whatever ideas we currently hold about work and human dignity and making meaning. How will humans handle indolence? Not well. They’ll become war-obsessed if they haven’t something more productive to do. People whose work makes meaning don’t feel a need to make war.
But it’s become clearer and clearer to me that the future of work is the future of politics—any politics that really matter, anyway. People like Gluesenkamp Perez, Berry, and Crawford get that in a way that most of the culture’s so-called creative class in the information economy don’t. We want to be in our bodies, we want to be connected to the material world in a spiritual way, and that’s something that’s not possible in the simulacral world slowly encasing us as the Techno-Capitalist Matrix consolidates its grip.
Quartz ends her article with these grafs—
The question of how to make politics real again won’t be answered at WelcomeFest or on MSNBC panels. This is why the center keeps misreading Gluesenkamp Perez as one of its own, the progressive commentariat keeps her at a distance, and the press keeps filing stories about her under labels that are increasingly irrelevant. Every time she talks about work, ownership, or stolen time, she exposes the hollowness of the stage they’re still performing on.
Gluesenkamp Perez isn’t a strategy memo for Democrats or a fresh marketing lane for moderates. She’s a reminder that millions have already moved on without waiting for permission from the old order. The longer the parties pretend otherwise, the more obvious their irrelevance will become.
As disturbing as are the events in L.A. the past week, when push comes to shove it’s all Baudrillardean spectacle and the hollow stage of the global theater. Everyone is performing their parts for the cameras. I’m not saying that some people’s lives aren’t affected in very real ways. I’m not saying that the cabal around Trump aren’t dangerous fanatics, and I’m not saying that the protests aren’t necessary and important. But none of it seems to be grappling with the underlying disease for which all this is symptomatic. Conservative/Liberal, Action/Reaction are all part of the same collapsing system, and any substantive, durable remedy has to come from outside of it.
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