Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch seventeenth-century philosopher. And really, Spinoza and Marx can be seen to address gaps in the other’s thinking. Marx has a much more historical sense of how economics shapes social relations, and what Spinoza can offer is a deeper sense of how imagination and emotion form ideology.

One of the things Spinoza foregrounds is that active component, where ideology is not just something that people passively endure and accept but something that people actively strive for. It’s not just that people are still attached to work as its material benefits decline, but in some sense the attachment to work as a measure of one’s worth and standing has actually increased as the material benefits decline. So work is seen as fueling a certain sense of identity, even as it ceases to provide the basic necessities of existence. You see people doubling down on work because work is the only way they can understand how to improve their existence.

Negative solidarity is a sense of indignation or injustice aimed not at capitalism, corporations, or the conditions of work in general, but at those who seem to be not working or those who work in better conditions. In the United States there is a popular bumper sticker which reads, “Keep working, millions on welfare depend on you.” 

It’s strange because welfare since the [Bill] Clinton era has been so stripped back that the idea of someone being able to not work and live comfortably is pure fiction. Yet this idea that there are people out there not working, or benefiting from my work, persists. We also see this when teachers go on strike. They are seen as relatively comfortable workers because they have job protections and more time off, but the response is not “Why can’t I have those things?” but just a resentment that they have these perks. This is a solidarity that can only operate downwards, a race to the bottom.

Yeah, this situation is reinforced when only a small percentage of the workforce has unions and collective bargaining; it is seen more as an elite thing instead of something all workers should have. The worker is no longer this collective figure but has been transformed into a highly individualistic one. One works as an individual and competes to be better, to work harder. Workers have gone from a collective to individuals, and in doing so they’ve lost their real opposition to capital.

One of the things Spinoza stresses is that we try as much as possible to think about things which increase our power. So the question is then: What do we do when we are in a situation of relative powerlessness, unable to control the conditions under which one works or the changing nature of work and so on? It seems like one answer is to make our ability to endure those conditions into a point of stoic pride. “Look how much I’ve put up with, and doesn’t this show how powerful I am?” In some sense, it tries to make powerlessness into a kind of power. The effect of this is that having to work two jobs to survive is no longer seen as a problem with the economic system, but rather it shows my merit.

I think popular culture has to reflect our existing concerns and worries, but for it to capture our imagination, it also has to warp those concerns at the same time. Take the television show Breaking Bad, for example. The show begins when a high school chemistry teacher learns that he has inoperable cancer and becomes incredibly worried that the cost of his health care and the loss of his salary are going to leave his family destitute. So he hatches this plan to manufacture and sell crystal meth.

There we see a reflection of a very real anxiety: that work doesn’t provide for my existence  or cover health care. Yet at the same time, there is also this fantasy element where he becomes really good at cooking meth; he’s able to destroy his competition, and it’s this fantasy that I can be so good at my job that I can take away all my fears and anxieties. Work is the source of our fears, but work is also the condition of overcoming our fears. Putting pop culture together with the theory can show the limitations of pop culture and also sometimes the limitations of the theories as well.

We’re caught in a vicious cycle where what we imagine is in some sense dependent on how we live, and how we act is how act is dependent on how we imagine. As I said, I think pursuing individual work as a way to overcome the limitations of work reveals a real constraint in the imagination. But during the pandemic, the state did things that have been declared impossible by any neoliberal logic. It severed existence from work: for a short time, it gave people cheques to live, not dependent on work.

This had a transformative effect. People are limited in what they do, and what they think is possible. But sometimes all it takes is someone else doing something, and then suddenly that thing becomes possible. We’ve seen this in the United States in a wave of labor action in labor organizing in places like Starbucks and Amazon, which have an almost contagious effect.

Part of the Spinozist in me says you have to recognize all the ways you are determined by material constraints and limits on the imagination before you can think about all the ways in which you’re free. Part of the problem with beginning from an assumption of freedom is you end up saying if people put up with this situation, they must like it for some reason.

That’s an important question. I think reducing work time would necessarily have the positive impact of creating new ways for people to think about their identities and place in the world other than through work. One of the things you have to take seriously about people’s investment in work, given that they are working so much, is that their free time is usually dedicated to what Marx calls the basic “animal functions” of sleeping, eating, etc. You create a sense in which people go to work because their friends are there; everything they understand about sociality comes from work. The more people work, the more they will begin to identify with work.

So reducing the working week or working days would free people from this cycle. If people have time to do something other than buy groceries and do their laundry just to return to work the next day, they can produce another sense of themselves outside the confines of work. Imagination functions like a wedge, a small point of entry for another way of thinking; if acted upon, it can then push for more. For example, the reduced workweek would give people more time to engage in politics, to demand less work still. One thing that limits political possibilities is work itself.