If I shed a tear while listening to MP Marwah Rizqy explain that she was leaving political life at the end of her mandate because it does not allow her to reconcile her family life, I was not surprised either. measure. For all eternity, it has been up to women to adapt.
I had just finished two books that deal with the subject and told myself that Marxism would soon be resurrected due to a lack of workers to fit into a system that was still holding on thanks to their overtime. At least with kids you get hugs, not gratuitous insults about X.
The first essay is written by sociologist and researcher at the Institute for Socioeconomic Research and Information (IRIS) Julia Posca, Working less is not enough. It calls into question our entire system of capitalist production and its deleterious effects on humans and the planet they inhabit, through the angle of work and labor.
I wish I could have put it all together. I can’t do it.
The other, Free lazinessis a collective of texts giving a voice to women who resign from everything, from the infernal pace that they endure, that they inflict on themselves, that has been proposed to them as an emancipatory project: giving birth alone at home, building their own house with their bare hands, getting elected in a constituency, writing a book during the holidays while making their lessi (activism obliges) and cultivating a secret garden in which they constantly plant themselves on the notion of the elasticity of 24/7 in keeping a gratitude journal. I forgot! They also run marathons to relax.
I was expecting a book that advocates hot yoga and the transverse flute, rereading Nicole Bordeleau to microdose with hope on a beach in Tulum. I was fed up with the women who pick up all the debris of our society, plug the gaps, do community work, carevolunteering, planetary activism and all-out mental workload while some Instagrammable goddess (#Partnership #JeLaiPasPayé) presents them with an artificial ideal which will never be accessible to them except by giving in to debt. #VisaorMastercard.
Who am I outside of obligations? On this October day, I take the observation head-on: I don’t know. I only know myself as an exhausted adult.
The unreal reality
Neither today nor tomorrow will this happen for you who have just escaped domestic violence, who is struggling to repay lawyers, who is raising your children alone, who is experiencing depression, who is being fired when you return to work, who wins at the Human Rights Commission against your employer – a mental health organization… -, who takes care of your mother in a CHSLD, who rows, smiling. Well important, the smile.
This was the case of Geneviève Morand, who co-directed the collective Free laziness with Natalie-Ann Roy, also a victim of wage labor. The two women respond to each other in the first part of this anything but rosy book. Laziness is nowhere in this book; it resembles a collective fantasy of twenty intellectuals, like a miscarriage in the third trimester.
Geneviève was actually fired after suffering from depression. Natalie-Ann made a burnout of his burnout by being forced to defend herself from having broken down. Because what’s more, you’re guilty of falling apart. Look no further than the bankruptcy of our health and education system, and even politics. It is there, in full, in these pages where widespread exhaustion can no longer be ignored.
If only these young people in their thirties and forties were washed out and thrown away after use. There are also the old ones, no longer good for much either according to productivist standards where the lemonade doesn’t care about the lemon it has squeezed thoroughly. Next, next !
After the words “ burnout » or “exhausted”, I noticed that the word “performance” (and the taboo word “competition”) does not come far behind as a trace of LEAN method after brainwashing. And the documentary Broke! by Bianca Gervais has already raised the beginning of a reflection on the subject. We are the creaking cogs in a system much larger than our personal microclimate.
As philosopher of science and activist Vandana Shiva notes: “Women are the greatest productive force in the world; they make the greatest contribution to “care” on the planet. But the economy was set to be monetized and profit commercially. If you cook for your children or take care of your elderly parent, it’s not work! It’s not productive, it doesn’t contribute to the economy. It’s when you buy what you need and sell what you produce that growth takes place. This makes capital real and reality unreal. Corporations are “entities” and real people are non-persons. »
Repeat after her: reality is unreal. And AI will become real.
It’s not me, it doesn’t concern me individually. It’s something else: a steamroller, an emergency, systems that are crushing us. It’s systemic.
Work less? Utopia.
No, the four-day week will not save anyone, Julia Posca shows us in her essay. This will only delay the big break, “the question of work cannot be separated from production (and consumption) […]. The entire economy must be transformed: democratize it, produce for purposes useful to the community and put an end to consumerism.”
She emphasizes that to respect the planet’s carbon budget, the average number of hours worked in OECD countries (including us) should be 5 hours per week and not 32 hours…
And our silence is immense in the face of the implacable asphalt that will make us a siding.
Some choose self-employment and insecurity rather than salaried employment, because, as Posca points out, employees “most of the time cannot choose their working hours nor the way in which they carry out their work, nor, above all, determine the purpose of their work. of what they do. Suffice it to say that the salary buys the subordination of the employee.”
And sometimes, the only thing left for them to do is to let go of the circus and sing like the seal in Alaska:
“It makes no one laugh
When the children are grown up. »
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