Saidiya Hartman talks about the right not to work on the Millenials are Killing Capitalism-podcast
"In the immediate aftermath of slavery, modalities of subsistence, which would enable people to not work are criminalized. And we have the incredible privatization of woods, of lakes, of all of these avenues of subsistence. This is part of the violence that has been necessary to produce a working class everywhere in the world. No one volunteers to sign up for wage labor. Subsistence has to become impossible and immiseration drives you to the market to trade your skin, to trade your height as you quoted earlier.
The right not to work is a right that is not tolerated under a capitalist regime. It doesn't even matter that you might wind up being unhoused, unfed. That fact of not working makes you vulnerable to forms of state harassment, police harassment, and targeting.
In Wayward Lives I have this quote from the Grundrisse where Marx is quoting some (?) 18th-century (?) plantation owner talking about the idleness of the ex-slaves. Now that they are no longer enslaved, they don't want to work and they certainly don't want to work for you. This is what we also see in those (?) for freed men. How do you then transform the formerly enslaved into an acquisitive, dutiful working class? For me, the beautiful character of Black anarchy is that it's always said "no" to these forms of command and conscription. There have been forms of mutual aid societies, forms of collective organizing, forms of simply getting by by sharing your place with ten other friends, so maybe one of you works every two weeks.
In that there is an understanding that there is no gold pot at the end of the rainbow of wage labor. That even though there is the threat of punishment and arrest and even imprisonment, that is often the consequence of such action, it represents an astute understanding of the operational logic of racial capitalism, and what it's intended to do is to extract, exploit, accumulate at your expense. No matter how hard you work, you'll ultimately not be going to make enough money to sustain your survival. Every other vehicle of social organisation, the newspaper, movies, the governing ideology, is about the moral responsibility to do so, to step up, to be an actualized person. To resist all that and to say no, well, that's a great thing."
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