The cage of work

"Italy is a republic founded on work". For sure the half of the constituent assembly would have liked to say "republic of workers". It would have a completely different meaning. I am not thinking about the mitology of Stakanov, who reaches 20 times the daily productivity allowing the satisfaction of the quinquennial plan and the wealth of the sovietic state, but rather about the idea that the right-duty of work gives to everybody who participates in it a share of the responsibility of the management of the public affairs, that is the common good. But on the other hand, the idea of work is present in nearly all the ideologies. The christian ora et labora: you have to pray but even then there is nobody working in your place. In liberism the work is what gives value to some natural resource through a process of transformation, and legitimates the private property: at the extreme there is the myth of the self-made-man. The writing "work makes you free" was flagging (sarcastically ?) we know where. The first article of the italian constitution is a compromise, and alone it means really nothing: instead, in a wildly capitalist context, it sounds to me mocking and derisive. You, as a poor man, have to float among the mental categories that somebody packed for you, work hard all life long, pay the taxes, at least the amount necessary to guarantee that the superstructure survives itself: maybe someone will be rich but at least you will be dignified.

Ford River Rouge plant, Dearborn, Michigan. Congress Library, United States of America

In the meanwhile the fordist structure has determined our society, and even more the representation that we made of it, the idea that it gave us some kind of desiderable form of wealth, the shining floors, the antenna on the balcony instead of the toilet, the centralized heating system, the middle-power car with which you crowd arbitrarily chosen places on saturday evening and go out in the countryside on sunday afternoon, and then you demolish it with ecological subsidies after a five years life, maybe without support this model we are desperately grasped at will vanish, because all the rest is precarity, decomposition, half-peripherical abandoned plants with broken glasses, occupied by clandestine immigrants divorced men and political refugees.
This life structured into closed compartments might have increased the life expectancy but it never gave answers to something resembling deep needs. Half of the life productive, one fourth looked after by the parents, one fourth looked after by the sons. Schools not as places of culture and society, but as parkings. Other 50 square metres parkings with 70 years old people inside, who if the woman from Rumania or the Philipines is not there they only watch Rai 1 because noone considered meaningful explaining to them how to change channel, techological transitions are not for them, who go out only to come back wth plastic bags with other plastic bags inside. The day divided into three turns: 8 hours to sleep, 8 hours to work, 8 hours to take care about yourself. Then, of these, you spend 2 in an individual locomotion vehicle because of an antropological-urbainistic crisis, 2 to obtain and swallow food with enough natritional value but completely lacking social and relational one, 2 in front of a television for a crisis which is nothing but cultural... what remains then? The week at the seaside in the middle of the summer?

Traffic Jam during the rush hour, Shangai Source: Reuters

Or...?
Maybe the only thing that my father tried to teach me, interpreting this idea also with his activity, is that you don't live to work but you work to live. I am not so sure abouth the meaning of "live" in this context, but... I am intelligent enough to feel impossible to identify my purposes with the ones of an hypothetical profit-seeking company their owners and/or shareholders for which I might find myself working for. I have experienced so many genuine and disinterested personal relationships, and I have seen too many persons dedicating themselves sincerely to the common good, that I cannot perceive me as an entrepreneur of myself with tha aim of qualify and gain economical and contractual power in the "work market". Collecting money to substain a life style of which I don't feel the need is quite not interesting as perspective. Maybe the love for someone else might let you perceive all the rest as purely survival, but at the moment it think it does not.
Usually every speech it happens to me to hear about work puts me down, oppresses my personality, crushing it in a remote corner, while inconclusive rhetorics and minimal necessities struggle in front of me without outcome, like it was possible to deal with the issue without asking themselves on what this society is based; this society that we would like to require and guarantee work to everyone.