One of the things that happens during moments of crisis is that people look to existing institutions—whether governments, nonprofits, churches, or the like—for guidance on what to do. Some of these institutions do good work, at least some of the time; but often the expectation that for every challenge there exists some group ready to step in and make things right only serves to disempower people from acting to make change themselves. That is, we see the work to attend to the crisis as an add-on, an extracurricular, something that doesn’t seep into the day to day but often competes with it. It is necessary to counter that narrative, to weave instead a story that shows how everything we do in every part of our lives is an act of tearing down the old world and building a new one among the ruins. Here’s Dean Spade:
The false separation of politics and injustice from ordinary life—and the idea that activism is a kind of lifestyle accessory—is demobilizing to our movements, hides the root causes of injustice, and keeps us passive and complicit. Robust social movements offer an opposing view. We argue that all aspects of our lives—where and how we live and work, eat, entertain ourselves, get around, and get by are sites of injustice and potential resistance. At our best, social movements create vibrant social networks in which we not only do work in a group, but also have friendships, make art, have sex, mentor and parent kids, feed ourselves and each other, build radical land and housing experiments, and inspire each other about how we can cultivate liberation in all aspects of our lives. Activism and mutual aid shouldn’t feel like volunteering or like a hobby—it should feel like living in alignment with our hopes for the world and with our passions. It should enliven us.
Spade, Mutual Aid, page 27
This is among the reasons why I try to use the word “work” expansively, referring not only to waged work but also to creative work, care work, work in our homes and in our neighborhoods and in our hearts. Not because everything should be work (it should not), but because work in all its many forms is the means by which we weave and cultivate and nurture a different world. It is liberating, in that respect, even when—perhaps especially when—it’s difficult.
In Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, the leader of the anarchist movement writes:
A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
Le Guin, The Dispossessed, page 216
It is useless work that darkens the heart. But good work? Work that serves the living, that brings us into alignment with ourselves and with each other and with the earth? Good work lights us right up.