In The Conquest of Bread – the introductory reading to anarchism prefered to most – there’s this claim made, condemning the inefficiency of domestic labour and slavery:
It is a fact that between twelve and two o’clock there are more than twenty million Americans and as many Englishmen who eat roast beef or mutton, boiled pork, potatoes, and a seasonable vegetable. And at the lowest figure eight million fires burn during two or three hours to roast this meat and cook these vegetables; eight million women spend their time to prepare this meal, that perhaps consists at most of ten different dishes.
“Fifty fires burn,” wrote an American woman the other day, “where one would suffice!” Dine at home, at your own table, with your children, if you like; but only think yourself, why should these fifty women waste their whole morning to prepare a few cups of coffee and a simple meal!
Kropotkin makes this type of claim in the rest of the chapter: that there are millions of house workers and handmaids who collectively spend millions of hours into cleaning plates and boots, into boiling water and cooking meals – and that technological progress and cleaning collectives would reduce them greatly. In fact, there’s a similar argument in line with the rest of the book: that there is excess heat in factories and freezing cold in houses, that wheat is thrown into the market while peasants starve, that the cities are polluted grey hives while the fields are being depopulated. A great part of the book’s argument is this: that capitalism produces this great inefficiency, that there’s a great lack of optimization and a good number of collectives suffer from it, that if only we could redirect the surpluses where there are lackings and organize collective committees to reduce collective work hours, then we could live comfortably at low work hours.
There are millions of work hours spend improductively, work hours that could be reduced and optimized, work hours whose sole purpose is the alienate the worker, tire them, repress them, etc, the same way that the collective millions of hours spend in household work were and are used to domesticate the woman. And it is true that Capital reproduces itself in its commodity production and commercialization, in the divide between work and play, and that the collective billions of daily hours spent working are a bulwark against the destruction of capitalism.
But is the optimization of work the solution? Are heat pipelines from factories to the city, carts that bring shoes to be collectively brushed, central communal kitchens that cook for a whole street… the solution? We must decide how to shape our lifestyles in resistance to capitalism.
In this mode of production (the production and distribution of all for all) a lot of the hustles and problems of individualized, cellular production would be resolved, yes, but the consequences of that must be known: that we now work for “the collective”, “the people”.
I’m no opponent to collectivized satisfaction of desires (in fact I find cooking for a group of friends or a popular event to be very enjoyable), but we have to acknowledge that the establishment of collective satisfaction of desires as normalcy brings about an implicit duty to the collective. It’s not the hard, depression-inducing slavery of the marxist-leninist “you must work hard for the establishment of a communist society and the industrialization of the People’s State”, nor the social-material effects of the moralist liberal “you must give something to society if you expect to benefit from it”, but it is a duty to society nonetheless.
I don’t think (and sure don’t hope so) that anarcho-cops will show up at my house because I have not participated in the daily Community Dinner for three months or because I have not gone to the Communal Street Cleaning Service for three weeks, but it can lead to it. There’s this well-known anarchist argument for replacing the penal and justice system with “social ostracization”, I am fearful that labour will be made compulsory on this matter. The duty to society (and society at large) is something to be criticized, and all arguments made in favour or defense of the “good” collective or society draw from liberal-capitalistic sources. I can get my food from my own little garden (now that every square inch of a city is a garden), i can get my heat source from burning garden waste; my lifestyle can be unoptimized and I sure hope that I wouldn’t be reprimanded for it.
Even in this apparent utopia we should have to criticize and revolt against it: you want me to work 5 hours 4 days a week, but I will work 0 hours a week. Having time to play still separates work from play. You want the maximum self-development of everyone. I want to be lazy, not because I have the right to, but because I find it enjoyable, and I combat the moral prenotion that being lazy is wrong, as much as I defy the one that compels us to develop ourselves. I have based my affair in nothing, and no moral compulsion will drive me to waste myself or my time. I will acknowledge no laws, even if they are communally agreed.
You say anarchism is the desire to be free from oppression without oppressing anyone. Make it so. Acknowledge that the creative nothing that breaks all shackles and duties has nothing to do with the organization of society. It does not let themself be arranged.
PS: Good luck building your heat pipelines and automatized workplaces under the upcoming ecological collapse.