Transcript
This transcript is mostly provided by Reddit user u/PurpleFluffyToaster. Prolewiki edited each participant's role from the original for clarity purposes.
Jesse Watters, Fox News Anchor: ...over 1.6 million subscribers. Joining me now is the person who operates this "anti work" group Doreen Ford. Alright so Doreen why do you like the idea of being home not working but still getting paid by corporate America?
Doreen Ford, moderator of AntiWork: yeah so err well there's some misconceptions about the movement um so we're a movement where we want to reduce the amount of work that people feel like they are forced to do um and so we want still put in effort put in labour but we don't want to necessarily er be in a position where we feel trapped you know. You just quoted from office space were that person feels very trapped in their job. I think we're calling for a society where there's less of that but absolutely people still want to do things but they want to do things where they feels like they're rewarded and they feel like they're in a good spot and their life and their job respects them and stuff like that um you know there's very things on the um
Jesse Watters: [interrupting]: so Doreen you're not being forced to work this isn't slave labour. You've applied for a job. You've agreed to the terms and conditions of the employment and you know you can walk away from it any time you like and quit so I don't understand what this is about except maybe people are just being lazy? Are you encouraging people to be lazy?
Doreen Ford: so yeah so um I think laziness is a virtue in a society where people constantly want you to be productive 24-7 and it's good to have rest. That doesn't mean you should be resting all the time or not putting effort into things you care about but...
Jesse Watters [interrupting]: What do you think is a good work day? How many hours is a solid work day in your ideal society?
Doreen Ford: sure so I think people should work as much as they want. So I personally work I have a 20-25 hour work week which I think is fairly good so I would like less work hours...
Jesse Watters [interrupting]: And what do you do Doreen?
Doreen Ford: um I'm a dog walker.
Jesse Watters: A dog walker.
Doreen Ford: Yes
Jesse Watters: Ok and how old are you if you don't mind me asking.
Doreen Ford: Sure I'm 30
Jesse Watters: You're 30. Ok. And is there something you want to do maybe besides being a dog walker? Do you aspire to be anything more than a dog walker? or is that kind of your your pinnacle?
Doreen Ford: I love working with dogs. If I had to do this for the rest of my life I wouldn't be super complaining dogs are wonderful animals but I would love to teach er I would love to er um you know um work with people and stuff like that.
Jesse Watters [interrupting]: Teach? What would you teach Doreen.
Doreen Ford: err philosophy mostly. Discuss philosophy, critical thinking reason stuff like that.
Jesse Watters: Ok. [laughing sarcastically] Well I would love to take your class Doreen. I would just be taking notes the whole time. You know what a professor has a very similar schedule than what you're imagining so I think that might actually work perfectly for you. Listen I think that this might not be the perfect idea but who am I to judge? To each they're own they say. It's a free country.
Doreen Ford: sure yeah err...
Jesse Watters [interrupting]: Not everything free but it is a free country. Thank you so much we got to run. We got to pay the bills.
Rebuttal
This rebuttal is provided by prolewiki.org
Analysis
Looking at the interview written down allows us to see things that might have gone unnoticed in the live audio version (for example counting the number of arguments the host makes). Jesse Watters of course argues in bad faith, interrupting Doreen and switching to another point before she has any chance to reply. However we can also see that Ford was unprepared for the interview, as she focused on the last point brought up by the host and ignored all the easily-debunked attacks.
Watters panders to his audience unabashedly and tells them what FOX News knows to feed them and has groomed them into wanting: a dogmatic praise of capitalism as a net good without downsides, as exemplified by the use of terms such as corporate America or the terms and conditions of a job.
The subreddit in question was created by anarchists in 2013, and began growing very slowly until 2019, where it grew to around a 80k members in 2020, 213k members in 2021, and since October 2021, it grew rapidly until 1.6 million members.[1]
Counter-arguments
Watters opens with the idea that only corporate America is able to provide for people. It is in fact corporate America that got workers into this mess: inflation rising, wages stagnating, unemployment skyrocketing... these are real issues surrounding us at this moment that corporate America has no solution to. It is this problem that made the antiwork movement so popular.
The idea that one has applied for a job and so must accept whichever conditions are set is of course nonsense. In capitalism, there are only two choices: work for a capitalist, or starve to death. One agrees to the terms of a job as much as they agree not to die. This is the reality of capitalism and private property concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie. The parallel to slavery is interesting, as it was the global mode of production for millenia, and Engels has described the differences between the slave and the proletariat in Principles of communism. The slave is an investment and as such no matter how miserable his life is, he is guaranteed life. The proletarian works for a daily wage, and as such his individual survival is not guaranteed. If one individual worker dies, another will take his place in the company. It is much more cost-efficient for a property owner to hire a worker than to buy a slave!
Abolishing capitalism, unlike what Watters suggests, is anything but laziness. It is an uphill battle with the odds stacked against us. Communists are not encouraging people to be lazy, and we recognize the importance of labour towards survival as a society (the foundation of one of the pillars of marxism). Marxists-leninists agree with the antiwork community to the extent that workers are overworked and put in unsafe conditions in order to squeeze out as much suplus value from them. This does not have to be normal or accepted, and the solution is socialism. It is very likely that in advanced socialist economies, the work day would be shorter than it is currently. If your employer can get away with paying you 2000$ per month for 40 hours a week, he will never pay you that amount to work 20 hours. But in socialism, without the profit motive, this would not be a consideration at all.
This also answers Watters' next question, about how many hours of work a week is ideal. There is not one universal answer to this question. Some people need to be on call (emergency services for example), but could easily be divided into 4 teams that work 6 hours each. This requires profound structural change in order to keep up with the training and employment of emergency workers such a system would require, which is entirely possible and has been seen in places such as Cuba or the USSR. For office workers, it is doubtful they would work more than 4 hours a day -- for them, productivity has increased more than 2.5 times since 1970 yet the schedule remains the same. The rest of that day could be used for the collectivity (there is no one answer to this problem either, this is something each socialist state will come up with as needed to put that freed labour to good use).
Watters then seems to patronize Ford over being a dog walker. The answer here is that labour is necessary, and services are also labour. The reason antiwork exists is exactly because dog walkers exist: people work too long to take care of chores themselves, which includes walking their dogs, and so must hire other people for it. This is a collective task that actually frees people from their chores, and should be celebrated. More time freed means more time to give back to the collectivity. Alleksandra Kollontai talked about similar liberation in her essay Communism and the family.[2]
Finally, Watters' closing diatribe about college professors is so inane as to not be an argument that it does not warrant a response.