Anti-work is the critique that work, as currently organized under capitalism, is a tool of domination — over bodies, minds, and the Earth. The anti-work position rejects the premise that labor in its current form is natural, inevitable, or good.
The tradition runs through figures such as Paul Lafargue, who argued for the right to be lazy as a genuinely human position, and through the Italian autonomist tradition, which examined how capital extracts value from the totality of human life, not just formal employment. In the anarchist tradition, Alfredo Bonanno developed a sharp version of this critique, connecting the refusal of work to the refusal of authority and the state.
For people living under settler-colonial conditions, anti-work carries an additional dimension: the colonial project required the transformation of Indigenous relationships to land and time into waged labor alongside military conquest. The refusal of work, in this context, is also a refusal of that transformation — a form of anti-colonial resistance. Regenerative land practice, mutual aid, and direct action are expressions of a different relationship to the Earth and to each other.
Anti-work is not primarily about individual withdrawal from the labor market. It is an analysis of work as a structural relation, and a commitment to building life outside its compulsions.
Related terms
- Total Liberation — the broader political project anti-work participates in