The Burden of Labor, or How Not to Work

The reason for writing the article is watching the movie Videocracy, in which the Italian guy Ricardo wants to work in a TV show and despises his work at the factory. Moreover, in the film, it is the work at the plant that is shown as suitable and meaningful, as opposed to the television show conveyor. The author of the article aims to clarify why alienated labor in a factory seemed to be better than creative work on television. Modern creative work is not such a pleasant activity as the hero of the film dreams of. As an example, the article presents the work of freelancers - modern workers, deprived of any social guarantees and not insured against non-payment. The question is posed of how intellectual work, which has always been thought of as unalienated, creative and conducive to development, turned into a new version of total exploitation. For a possible answer to this difficult question, the author appeals to the early Soviet school of management, especially to Aleksei Gastev and his works on the organization of labor. It is believed that, unlike Taylor and Ford, it was the Soviet school that humanized the work, that is, made it a fundamental project in human life. And indeed it is. Labor in the context of Gastev's works is supposed to be an initiative and conscious process that allows labor operations to be carried out consciously rather than mechanically. The article examines in detail the concept of "labor culture", the creation of which Gastev pays special attention to. In addition, the main points are highlighted on which the anthropologization of labor activity within the Soviet school of management is based: body culture and body discipline, attention to labor tools, time management. However, what should have relieved the worker's fate will eventually turn into a new burden: for example, capitalism adapts to use self-criticism to its advantage, and now the employee needs not only the ability to work mechanically, machine-like, but to work like a human being, it means to use all his/her competencies at work. Thereby, all the time becomes working time, because the worker thinks about work even during non-working hours. Gastev turns out to be a very modern author because in part he was the one who invented this modernity. In the article, besides the texts of Gastev, the texts of Paulo Virno, Yoel Regev, Bruno Latour and Reza Negarestani are used. Labor as the last essential project can be overcome, since not only labor makes a person human. Labor at the plant, which seems to be humane, is only a form of nostalgia for the time when work was not total; therefore, there is no way back. The conclusion is made about further research, for example, on the texts of Negarestani, especially in connection with his Inhumanism project as a constant revision of anthropological grounds.

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