I picked up The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne after cleansing my nonfiction palate with a thriller or three and it's so good. After I finish, I want to look up something more recent because this was published in 2015 and, obvs, some shit [COVID-19] has happened since then.
This bit particularly stood out to me. Here Frayne is quoting a 2004 edition of Bertrand Russel's 1935 In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays: …the 'spontaneous pleasure in the presence of children' vital for a healthy pedagogical relationship is difficult to sustain over long periods: 'it is utterly impossible for overworked teachers to preserve and instinctive liking for children… Fatigue, in the end, produces irritation, which is likely to express itself somehow, whatever theories the harassed teacher may have taught himself or herself to believe.'
I don't know what to say to that except "well, yeah." Teacher burnout is associated with worse academic achievement (2021) and negative effects of teacher burnout on student executive function and social-emotional outcomes (2023).
I have been obsessed with the idea of time regimes since I was first introduced to the concept when I read The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia; André Gorz's "politics of time," cited in The Refusal of Work, is a related concept about how we might rethink and resist inhumane time regimes. However (so far; I'm only ~30% through the book), neither Gorz nor Frayne has considered a disability politics of crip time - e.g., if everyone worked less, everyone could do their own domestic tasks and earn their living by working (emphases in original). … but that's not true, is it? Not everyone can do their own domestic tasks or earn their living by working. Some people cannot perform "economically productive" (i.e., paid) labor or perform the necessary tasks of domestic life or daily living independently for a variety of reasons (physical, mental health, and developmental/cognitive disabilities) and will require support even in the post-capitalist utopia.
My antennae were already up, then, when I got to this: Capitalism continues to seek profits by… spreading the economy into hitherto uncommodified areas of life. This feels subjectively true (e.g., chatbot "friends") but, since Frayne does not give examples (and the chatbot article I linked to was published 10 years after The Refusal of Work, so it doesn't count) and had previously failed to account for the existence of disabled people in his vision of a post-work world, I can't help but cynically wonder what he had in mind when he wrote that sentence: childcare? at-home hospice? sex work?