Anarchist labor

Labor is movement the binds together diverse people and things through the act of construction. This may be construction of a good, a tool, an affect or an occasion. The key point is that the identity of the participants become bound together through the collective development of an other thing. The thing forms a focal point that destabilizes and restabilizes the movements and habits of the workers involved.

An act of unalienated labor is akin to a ritual. There is no necessary unity between workers involved in a task. Labor takes the chaos of the world, manifested through the particular lives of a collection of workers, and puts that chaos towards the construction of a thing. The type of thing varies tremendously, but its qualities will serve as marks of the particular characteristics of the workers involved.

This is easy to see in some cases. For instance, in a project requiring the efforts of skilled tradespeople, we can see the influence of a particular worker on the overall structure.

In other projects, that influence is felt in more indirect ways, through the politics of workplace organization, the deployment of certain technologies and techniques over others, the price of goods, the overall flexibility of the firm or general economy, etc. We see the influence of the worker in the social character of the goods and services produced.

In firms governed by a logic of mechanical reproduction and elevation of a uniform logic, we can easily locate the individual contribution of employees- that very uniformity exists as an expression of the discipline and disciplining of the workforce, such that they reduce experimentation and error to a minimum. The particular contribution of the worker in this case is self-denial and obedience, ideally. In actuality their presence is felt also through the minor rebellions of poor service and casual low-level sabotage (say, a fast-food worker pissing in a mixing pot or spitting on an order) and high turnover rates.

In any instance, work should be seen as a system of workers' aggregated desire if we are to understand its immanent dynamics at the point of production.

Labor can become a site for meaning and values production if we take this position.