The great resignation
A new and enigmatic term emerged during the first session of the AA Academy: the Great Resignation. But what exactly does it mean?
These last two months (May and June 2022) the AA Academy got off to a good start. The first three sessions all dealt with issues that Mark Fisher brought forward in his seminal Capitalist Realism, published in 2009. We discussed the lasting relevance of several concepts and assessments by Fisher, and we tried to apply some of his ideas to the present day situation. One of the terms that came up during this process was that of the so-called ‘Great Resignation.’
According to Wikipedia ‘the Great Resignation, also known as the “Big Quit” or the “Great Reshuffle”) is an ongoing economic trend in which employees have voluntarily resigned from their jobs en masse, beginning in early 2021.’ Apparently lots of workers that were fired during the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic did not return to their jobs when the economy got back on track. This happened primarily in the U.S., but also in many other western countries. Several potential causes have been proposed, such as the consideration that quite a lot of people found other jobs with better pay than their original ones, or that they actually came to like the freedom that remote work afforded them. Still this does not account for the big lack of available personnel that many sectors of the economy have to cope with. In particular restaurants and hotels have a hard time to find enough staff. So an alternative reason has also been suggested, which holds that huge amounts of people actually do not want to return to the labour market, out of dissatisfaction with the current system we all live in. It seems that predominantly young people, the Millennials and the members of Generation Z, are sensitive to this urge.
Huge amounts of people actually do not want to return to the labour market, out of dissatisfaction with the current system we all live in.
This notion was seized upon by the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi, who in an online discussion with Srecko Horvat and Ece Temelkuran for the Progressive International called the Great Resignation ‘interesting.’ When I asked him during a private call what he meant by this, he confirmed that in a sense the Great Resignation could be described as akin to a general strike, the difference being of course that a general strike (at least in its original meaning) was a collective phenomenon, whereas the Great Resignation in first instance is an individual choice. Nevertheless, eventually the effect might be much the same.
A protest for social or political goals, in which all participants cease all economic activity, such as working, attending school, shopping, etc.
We should dwell a little bit on this concept of the general strike. Again according to Wikipedia a general strike (in modern times) ‘refers to a protest for social or political goals, in which all participants cease all economic activity, such as working, attending school, shopping, going to the movies, etc. … General strikes may also include rallies, marches, boycotts, civil disobedience, non-payment of taxes, and other forms of direct or indirect action.’ Now this is really interesting! Because if the Great Resignation can really be compared to a general strike, we might suddenly have stumbled upon a whole new array of possible ways to put up a fight. And it neatly fits with the obvious fragmentation and individualization of contemporary society, which make it very hard for people to organize themselves in the old-fashioned way, either in trade unions or political parties. This has been extensively bemoaned by many on the left, since it was deemed to be virtually impossible to make people subscribe to a certain coherent mode of activism for a sustained period of time. But if the end result of the Great Resignation will be something that resembles the general strike of old, it may very well be that neoliberalism will finally bite its own tail.
We will continue the AA Academy after the summer break in September. The topic of a new series of sessions is yet to be announced, but you can put a word in if you add your name to our malinglist: academy@amsterdamalternative.nl. You might even want to help us organize the Academy! Finally, keep an eye on the agenda on the AA-website or in the next paper issue of Amsterdam Alternative for the dates.