Work?

  

         We have created a society, a structure that demands we sell ourselves to someone or something in order to gain sustenance to survive. Work becomes the term used for normality, the desired state to find comfort. In order to have a decent life we look for our slave master, we accept our slavery, or we could find ourselves homeless, destitute. In most cases this work enriches others rather than ourselves and our family. The more we look for and accept work as a means of survival the stronger the power of our slave masters. Until we realise this, we hand a heritage of slavery to our children and our grandchildren. Work is dressed up as good and honourable, the right thing to do, when in fact all it does is strengthen the links on our chains, binds us to an unjust, unequal and insane structure that will, in the end, if allowed to continue, destroy us all and our planet.

 

The following from Act for Freedom Now:

      Let’s destroy work, let’s destroy the economy!

         Let’s destroy work, let’s destroy the economy! We are not concerned with the political problems of those who see unemployment as a danger to democracy and order. We do not feel any nostalgia for lost professionalism. We don’t want better wages or the continuation of subsidies. Nor are we for the abolition of work, the discovery of alternative ways of life, or the reduction to the minimum in order to live happily. We want the destruction of a system that makes us beg for the minimum necessary so as not to starve to death.
        We want the destruction of work and this society, of what we do during the day and its continuation that extends until night, a perpetual circle that never seems to end. We refuse to remain prisoners in this prison without bars or walls, but whose objective is exactly the same: resignation to what they tell us to accept, to the bosses’ orders and to the police that protect them and protect what we need to destroy.
        We want the destruction of the rule that makes us continue like this, prisoners of a job that takes all: our time, our energy, our creativity. The destruction of work is above all the destruction of survival, a step into the unknown. Destroying work means attacking, attacking that on which work is based and that which it produces. The attack does not affect profit indirectly, as a strike does, but hits the structure directly, either the means of production or the end product. And the object to be destroyed, although it is property, is also work, because it is something that results from work.

 

 

 

We do not want to be destroyed by capitalism, so capitalism will have to be destroyed by us.

 

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WHY WORK?

       It is practically universal, almost all of those who have to do it, hate it, if not at first, in time they begin to hate it, as it eventually grinds them down. Usually those who don't have to do it, the rich and privileged of this society, will praise it, and denigrate those among the poor who don't do it, whether it is by their own desire or otherwise. I am of course talking about work.

      It was Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law, and author of  "The right to be lazy" who wrote:

        ...not to demand the Right to Work which is but the right to misery, but to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day, the earth, the old earth, trembling with joy would feel a new universe leaping within her.

         Why do we do it? An interesting article from Void Mirror:

     All must work! Declares the cabinet of millionaires. 'Workers not shirkers!, they implore. 'Strivers not skivers!' The divide and rule rhetoric trying to pit those in work against those without is as relentless as it is transparent. But what's so good about work anyway?  

      Junge Linke's short piece skewers how attempts to mobilise resentment of claimants and the unemployed undermine even those in work who aren't claiming benefits. What I'd like to focus on is two perspectives on what an explicitly anti-work politics might look like.

Read the full article HERE:

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DOES WORK REALLY WORK???

            An extract from an interesting article called Does Work Really Work. by, L. Susuan Brown, the full article can be found at THE ANARCHIST LIBRARY.  It would be interesting to know your opinions on this one.

           One of the first questions people often ask when they are introduced to one another in our society is “what do you do?” This is more than just polite small talk — it is an indication of the immense importance work has for us. Work gives us a place in the world, it is our identity, it defines us, and, ultimately, it confines us. Witness the psychic dislocation when we lose our jobs, when we are fired, laid off, forced to retire or when We fail to get the job we applied for in the first place. An unemployed person is defined not in positive but in negative terms: to be unemployed is to lack work. To lack work is to be socialIy and economically marginalized, To answer “nothing” to the question “what do you do?” is emotionally difficult and socially unacceptable. Most unemployed people would rather answer such a question with vague replies like “I’m between contracts” or “I have a few resumes out and the prospects look promising” than admit outright that they do not work. For to not work in our society is to lack social significance — it is to be a nothing, because nothing is what you do.

          Those who do work (and they are becoming less numerous as our economies slowly disintegrate) are something — they are teachers, nurses, doctors, factory workers, machinists, dental assistants, coaches, librarians, secretaries, bus drivers and so on. They have identities defined by what they do. They are considered normal productive members of our society. Legally their work is considered to be subject to an employment contract, which if not explicitly laid out at the beginning of employment is implicitly understood to be part of the relationship between employee and employer. The employment contract is based on the idea that it is possible for a fair exchange to occur between an employee who trades her/his skills and labour for wages supplied by the employer. Such an idea presupposes that a person’s skills and labour are not inseparable from them, but are rather separate attributes that can be treated like property to be bought and sold. The employment contract assumes that a machinist or an exotic dancer, for instance, have the capacity to separate out from themselves the particular elements that are required by the employer and are then able to enter into an agreement with the employer to exchange only those attributes for money. The machinist is able to sell technical skills while the exotic dancer is able to sell sexual appeal, and, according to the employment contract, they both do so without selling themselves as people. Political scientists and economists refer to such attributes as “property in the person,” and speak about a person’s ability to contract out labour power in the form of property in the person.

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