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WORK
"It has become an article of the creed of modern morality that all labour is
good in itself; a convenient belief to those who live on the wealth of others"
William Morris, Useful Work vs Useless Toil 1885
Let’s face it, work as we know and loathe it today, sucks. Anybody who has
worked for a wage or a salary will confirm that. Work, for the vast majority of
us, is forced labour. And it feels like it too! Whether you’re working on a
casual or temporary basis and suffer all the insecurity that involves or are
‘lucky’ enough to have a permanent position where job security tightens like a
noose around your neck, it’s pretty much the same. Work offers it all: physical
and nervous exhaustion, illness and, more often than not, mind-numbing boredom.
You can add the feeling of being shafted for the benefit of someone else’s
profit to the list.
Work eats up our lives. It dominates every aspect of our existence. When we’re
not at the job we’re travelling to or from it, preparing or recovering from it,
trying to forget about it or attempting to escape from it in what is laughably
called our ‘leisure’ time. Work is a truly offensive four-letter word too
horrifying to contemplate. We sacrifice the best part of our waking lives to
work in order to survive in order to work. It’s a kind of drug, numbing us,
clouding our minds with the wage packet and all the ‘benefits’ of consumerism it
brings. Apart from the basic fact that if you don’t work and would rather not
accept the pittance of state benefits you don’t eat, wage slaves are dragooned
into ‘gainful employment’ by ideologies designed to persuade us of the personal
and social necessity of ‘having a job’.
Of course there is resistance to work, refusal to work, revolts against work, if
largely unreported. Its an interesting fact that in 2002 in Britain, there were
33m working days lost to stress, 60 times more than the 550,000 lost to strikes.
That is more than the number of days work lost to industrial action in the
supposedly dark days of the late 1970s, a period of ‘industrial chaos’ that led
to Thatcher’s rise. A generation of political battle, legislation and public
policy to destroy the trade union movement and suppress industrial conflict has
been spectacularly subverted. Well, what did they expect?
ANCIENT IDEAS ALIVE TODAY
"If work were so pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves" - Mark Twain
The western model of civilisation is riddled with the idea that progress derives
from a privileged and leisured class supported by a toiling, managed and
controlled under-class. Ancient Greek civilization, the model for modern
democracies, depended entirely on a captive population of helots, or slaves, to
maintain it’s aristocrats, thinkers, poets, artists and soldiers in luxury and
leisure. Across the ancient world, slavery and many forms of bonded labour were
the ‘norm’ and many of the so-called great civilisations were built on the toil
and misery of millions of powerless and despised workers.
An identifiable ideology of work began to take shape with the decline of slavery
and the emergence of feudalism. Many medieval peasant uprisings and heretical
movements proclaimed the poverty of Christ and tried to reclaim the ‘common
bounty’ of the earth from the priests and nobles who had stolen it. They
proclaimed earthly utopias where the power of church and nobility to enforce
work through taxation would be ended by sharing out the wealth of both amongst
the poor. This new ideology of equality and equity was deeply threatening to
both Church and State. In response, the idea of work as a divinely ordained and
spiritual activity began to be preached from the pulpits. Those who worked
gained a new status in a divine hierarchy that had nobles and priests at the
top, sturdy yeomen in the middle, peasant below. The free spirits who resisted
domestication, ‘the sturdy beggars’ of our history books, were vilified and
persecuted by draconian laws against vagrancy and vagabondage. Individuals who
had not been integrated into the economy were portrayed as lazy and ungodly
outlaws and forced into what would eventually become the embryonic working
class.
The ideas of the Reformation contained within them the source of our current
problem. Work was divinely ordained but the reward of work, wealth and status,
would set us free to perform God’s good works. Members of the ‘new’ religions,
like Calvinism, dedicated themselves to working hard and accumulating wealth,
mute witness to the favour God had bestowed upon them. This single-minded,
methodical and disciplined ideology was highly useful to the emerging capitalist
classes who were, in many countries, the religious classes as well. It also
provided a theory of society that persuaded people that it was better to be
‘free’ (by which they meant a wage slave at the mercy of the master who needs
labour) than the benighted serf of medieval times. As a result capitalism
fundamentally changed the nature of work.
SURPLUS VALUE & THE CREATION OF TYRANNY
The universal conversion of life into labour is the capitalist means of
domination
For two hundred years industrial capitalism consolidated it’s grip on society
(though not without considerable and violent working class resistance). It’s
almost impossible now to realize that virtually everything produced by society
(except those requiring collective effort like mining, brewing or baking) was
owned by those who produced it, who were able to control the value of their
labour through the price they were prepared to sell it for. The ‘success’ of the
factory system meant that capitalism had a means to create vast numbers of jobs
but at the price of workers surrendering this power and with it, freedom itself.
New laws were passed which restricted the ability of people to work on a
temporary or casual basis. Existence without means of visible support became a
crime as the industrial masters sought to discipline free peasants and artisans
into docile factory armies. To the stick of social stigma, the workhouse and
prison for those who refused to work, the bosses added the carrot of permanent
employment for the loyal and humble worker, wage differentials for skilled and
semi-skilled labour, a mythic social prestige for the ‘kings of labour’ (miners,
steelworkers and the like). The ‘job for life’ became our dream and was offered
in periods of healthy capitalism then withheld when recession or the need to
restructure capitalism arrived. Wage labour became ‘normal’. Unemployment became
a moral not social problem and those without work weren’t lucky but ‘victims’,
poor unfortunates who deserved to be ‘helped’. This ideology persists despite
the best efforts of people like ourselves to get across the basic fact that
unemployment is created by capitalism and no-one else. Large numbers of people
continue to blame themselves for their unemployed state, for their poverty and
lack of any human worth, an attitude the state sees no reason to change.
The work ethic was further reinforced by encouraging workers to identify
themselves with their work. Miner’s villages, working men’s clubs, factory
leagues, trades unions, the occupational pension; they were all a kind of tribal
loyalty to ourselves and our master that divided workers from each other as much
as it united them. This tribalism was reinforced by craft and trade unionism
that encouraged skilled workers to regard themselves as a special case and to
practice mutual aid and solidarity only within their own trade.
This deliberate attempt to create a homogeneous working class whose (apparent)
self-interest was deeply entwined with that of the ruling class, through certain
institutions like social democratic governments, the church and trade unions,
reached a peak in corporatist states like Franco’s Spain and Peron’s Argentina
in the 1950s-1970s. But towards the end of this period it went into reverse.
Capitalism needed to increase demand for its products following the massive
contraction of credit (which funds most purchasing in the West) in the 1970s due
to the oil-related hyper-inflation and credit squeeze. It did so by using the
relative weakness of the working class at the time and the opening of factories
in low-wage countries to massively expand the range of goods available. At the
same time it promoted the idea of the consumer as an individual, somebody whose
identity, status and sense of self-worth was determined by the things that they
bought and displayed, whether on the body, the road or in the home.
This process, which has created an apparently fixated, mass consumption society
defined primarily not by demographics but by patterns of consumption also
destroyed the homogeneity, identity and solidarity of the working class. Of
course, this process was not started everywhere at the same time. May
corporatist states such as Japan, South Korea and Malaysia still exist though
some of their ruling elites complain about the increasing fragmentation of
society and alienation of the citizen from anything other than consumption. At
the same time, the commodification of society has not spread throughout every
society and sometimes does not reach into every community. There are still many
places where people may wear the no-longer fashionable tee-shirt or
locally-produced fake trainers and still riot when the ruling class turn the
screws too tight! But capitalism continues to try and spread its message about
the personal value of work and consumption to the individual, rather than to
society or within a social context, stealthily undermining the ideas and power
of community and mutuality.
Work in its present state is, then, an entirely artificial condition. It is not
freely chosen, is not a universal and integrated part of family and society,
provides neither intellectual nor spiritual fulfilment for most people and is
extremely harmful to mind, body and spirit. Everything that was a good about
work – the sense of vocation, personal choice, creativity, fulfilment, the sense
of value of the individual-in-society – has been destroyed for all but a
relative handful of artists, craft workers and a few of the ‘professions’. For
the rest of us it has become meaningless drudgery from which only death releases
us. It is a prison without cages (except for those being worked by the
prison-industrial complex) whose governors are the ruling class and whose
warders are the bosses, teachers, social workers, employment agencies, police
and judicial systems.
WHY WORK TODAY IS A TERRIBLE
ORDEAL
“The tragedy is that those who work, work so much they are no longer human.
Those who don't work are reduced to a miserable existence amidst the spectacle
of plenty”.
How old are you when you first realise that having to work for a living is crap?
Maybe you’ve always known that work –as described by parents, teachers or
politicians – was not for you. Perhaps the utter futility and meaninglessness of
work, in personal terms, has come crashing into your life, or crept up on you
year by miserable year. Whichever and however you’ve got to here, you’re now,
perhaps, aware that most people hate work and spend their lives in a constant
struggle against its imposition. They battle to get beyond and out of being
‘only’ working class. They may succeed, but at what cost?
INDUSTRIALISATION & MECHANISATION
In an earlier period, when capitalism was not securely established, workers
battled against it in the hope of avoiding it altogether. Very largely they did
this by smashing machines and threatening their owners [others attempted to
create model communities – sometimes it was the same people]. Today the word
‘Luddite’ - used to describe these people - has become an insult, a way of
avoiding raising the question of work at all. It just shows how much we have
lost control over our own history. When it became clear that capitalism could
not be avoided, then our struggle became one of trying to minimise its impact on
our lives. The ‘standard’ eight-hour day, the weekend off, premium payments for
night and working anti-social hours were all a product of these struggles. If
capitalism is so endlessly productive and beneficial, why have these ‘rights’
largely disappeared, been reclaimed by capital? Is it because capitalism can
only make profit by driving down the cost of labour or exporting jobs to places
where labour costs a few pence per day? Industrialisation and mechanisation was
not introduced simply to increase production and profit, spreading this bounty
to the four corners of the world. It was introduced deliberately to control and
discipline workers (to the needs of the machine, the rhythms of production). New
technology does not liberate workers, it cages them, reducing their power to
resist the demands of capitalism and is always a response to the struggle of
workers either to free themselves from the power of the bosses or to seize a
greater share of the wealth they themselves create. What drives
industrialisation is not progress or profit-making but the need to dominate and
control a fiercely resisting working class and discipline them to the acceptance
and necessity of work.
TAYLORISM & FORDISM
This process began with the very first machines and factories built during the
Industrial Revolution. It provoked a hundred years of struggle against the
factory and against the fact that workers could no longer say when and where
they would work, the factory master did. This resistance was never defeated and,
in fact, intensified right up to the start of the Great War. This was the period
when the industrial working class challenged capitalism most strongly, the age
of the mass strike and working class insurrections against both state and
capital.
Capital’s response, once it conceded that it could no longer absolutely exploit
our living time, was to bring in technology so that the time it could get from
us could be used more effectively. The scientific approach to analysing work and
maximising productivity by controlling it was called ‘Taylorism’ and was one of
the main shackles placed on workers (along with factory work, employment
contracts and the conveyor belt). But Taylorism merely aroused fierce antagonism
and resistance within the industrial working class, especially the powerful
craft unions. In order to bypass these powerful obstacles to profit-making, new
technology was introduced to increase the productivity of workers and replace
craft working.
The greatest exponent of this trend was Henry Ford, who dramatically
demonstrated the concept of relative surplus value by doing what at the time –
the early 20th Century – was considered impossible. He paid workers 4 or 5 times
the ‘going rate’ (actually the bare minimum that could be screwed from the
bosses), yet still made a huge profit. By vastly increasing the production of
relative surplus value through the use of the assembly line, coupled with FW
Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ of the work process, he was able to vastly
improve the productivity of his plants. This was a true [capitalist] revolution
and its effects are still with us today.
This story is fairly well known. Less well known is what Ford and his like also
brought into existence, and that was the worker of the assembly lines, sometimes
known as the ‘mass worker’. Whereas before the capitalist had relied largely on
skilled workers to manage the production process – and in some countries and
industries this is still the case – the mass worker was a new type. During the
development of the working class, it discovered the secret of the production of
relative surplus value and learned to exploit this knowledge in its struggle for
a fairer share of the product of the national economies of the industrialised
world. This in part explains the powerful workerist movements of the
1940s-1980s.
At first capitalist states attempted to contain and demobilise working class
resistance by granting it a greater share of the social product, running up big
budget deficits in the process. In the UK we had prices and incomes policies and
at plant level many non-existent productivity deals were negotiated. But this
economic response to a new social reality failed to contain the working class.
In Western Europe, the most frightening aspect of the long campaigns against
Fordism during this period was not the ever-increasing wage demands – which
could, after all be accommodated within capitalism – but the rejection in many
places of the system of ‘factory discipline’ itself; though occupations,
strikes, sabotage, marches and riot. In France, Italy, US and the UK in the late
1960s and early 1970s we saw a period of more or less open class struggle.
Always at the centre of these struggles was this new ‘mass’ worker. All attempts
to contain this mass worker – who had discovered that the Fordist system could
be destroyed by collective action - failed. ‘Scientific management’ was no
answer to workers who collectively could impose their will on the productive
process. In Britain the attempt to buy off the workers ended with the
intervention of the IMF in 1976, severe recession, the period of defensive
struggle from 1978-1983 and the long-term demobilisation of the working class
following the Miners Strike of 1984-85. Monetarist policies of the 1980s were
re-introduced as within each nation state attempts were made to limit the share
of the social product going to labour.
Capital never solved this problem – instead it attempted to avoid it altogether
by moving to a new stage. First austerity policies were deliberately introduced
to break the ‘cycle’ of wage demands, inflation and more wage demands. This
brought about the biggest unemployment level since the 1930s. With the mass
worker now relatively subdued but still looking to the unions who were an
integral part of the imposition of the austerity measures, the stage was set for
a more long-term strategy. Capital became more mobile – that is it ran away from
an insurgent industrial working class to exploit a global proletariat –
globally. This necessitated changes in technology, especially communications
technology that was needed to monitor and control a productive process that was
now geographically disparate. But crucially it also needed an ideological
offensive to sell the new form of work to a new working class.
The result of this has been the intensification and lengthening of the working
week. The value we get for the work we do, which is itself a measure of the
value capital can extract from us by way of investment, has decreased steadily
over the last twenty years of so. The long campaigns of workers to reduce the
working week have been halted and reversed. Where capital has never conceded
shorter hours to workers – for instance in the fast-industrialising Majority
World – workers are often at their machine for 60-80 hours a week. This accounts
for the fact that though wages are absolutely higher than they were yesterday,
most people actually are or feel much poorer than before.
‘Work’ is now something we do throughout our lives. We are no longer ever away
from it – mobile phones and mobile computers bring ‘work’ to us when we are at
leisure, socialising – even when we are sleeping. Workers are now on ‘permanent
call. Even the unemployed are now engaged in the ‘work’ of ‘looking for work’.
And there is an even greater contradiction. Even as the productive capacity of
the economy has exploded hugely so that in the 1980s it was seriously suggested
by some unions that our problem in the 21st century would be filling the
‘leisure time’ that the new automated economy would bring, at the same time
‘work’ has become even more imposed on greater numbers and most ‘work’ is now
devoid of any genuine content at all.
WORK TODAY AND FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
“The right to work is the right to misery and denies the possibility of the
right not to work”
What is work? Is the purpose of work to create spiritual and material abundance
as the bosses would have us believe, an abundance we all share in according to
the contribution we make? Is the purpose of work, through the artificial and
mistaken idea of Progress, to end the need for work in favour of leisure for
all? Why are such questions important to anarchists? For anarchists, the
imposition of work – the socially-created need and compulsion to work – is a
prison we are desperately seeking to escape. We’re not afraid of work but seek
to work freely, doing the things that want and need to be done by our own choice
and in our own way or, as William Morris famously said, useful work, not useless
toil.
INTENSIFICATION & INSECURITY
“The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation”
During the 19th Century, workers struggled to defend their right to determine
how and when they would work. This was the great age of co-operatives, strikes
and political movements led by small artisans defending individual methods of
working against the factory system, of Proudhon’s revelation that Property (by
which he meant property above the means to sustain a productive life) was theft.
Increasingly trapped within the formal economy of jobs and factories as the 20th
Century progressed, workers without the independent means to live struggled to
control the amount of labour they would have to give to the system in order to
live. This was the age of the struggle for the eight-hour day, for weekends off,
holiday and sickness pay, of a decent wage and guaranteed employment.
The defeat of these struggles, and their containment within capitalism thanks to
liberal and union interventions on behalf of the bosses, has reduced the ability
of the working class to resist the intensification and casualisation of work,
while increasing our dependence on the bosses to obtain the means to live. For
some, working time has increased beyond the eight-hour shift into overtime and
additional part-time work. In many industries such long hours are compulsory. An
employee cannot refuse to do overtime work. In low wage industries workers get
overtime work as a favour from managements and union leaders. Companies evade
laws requiring premium pay for overtime by calling it 'overstay' or offering
‘hardship allowances' instead of overtime pay. Additionally there has been a
huge switch from long-term employment with its often-better pay and conditions
to sub-contracting and self-employment (although in many cases the newly
self-employed entrepreneur still works for just one company; Network Rail is a
case in point). The pressure of competitiveness, which compels bosses to
confront workers, has been off-loaded onto the small business sector where
weaker regulation allows greater and easier exploitation. Let’s look at an
example of how intensification is introduced into the workplace.
In 1974 at the Eicher factory in Faridabad 450 workers produced 80 tractors per
month. Supervisors then drove workers to make 150 tractors in a month. An
incentive scheme was introduced in 1978 and workers started producing 500
tractors a month, then 1000 in 1982 and 1500 per month in 1988. In 1989 a
re-engineering plan was implemented. The number of workers was halved, though
they still had to produce the same number of tractors, and the incentive scheme
was discarded. Eicher then used the latest “human resource development” scheme
to reduce the number of workers further and goaded them to produce 2000 tractors
monthly. At some time incentives were given when a tractor was assembled in 15
minutes. Now it is done in 10 minutes without incentives, and the management
wants it done in seven. The unions in the factory have fought the worker’s cause
and fought it well: their members are allowed to take all of nine minutes, not
seven, to assemble a tractor. Among industrial wage-workers, then, incentives
for increased production are often used to make workers supervise
intensification of their own bodies. Incentives are meant to lure workers to
give more than normal production. The increased levels of production become the
new norm - to be met without incentives. Management then begins a new cycle of
increasing work-load and intensity.
A major study from 1999 reported that “the root cause of job insecurity and work
intensification lies with the reduced staffing levels pursued by senior managers
in response to market pressures from competitors and dominant stakeholders” –
capitalists, in other words. That same study revealed that 60% of employees in
Britain claimed the pace of work and the effort required to do it had greatly
increased, resulting in poor general health in the workforce and tense family
relationships. Stress and ill-health are made worse by job insecurity. Of course
the two are used together to exploit workers more intensively: “if you want to
keep your job, worker harder” and “unless you work harder, you will lose your
job”. 30% of the workforce work longer than 48 hours a week, with 39% reporting
an increase in working hours. Between 2000 and 2002 alone, the number of men
working more that 60 hours per week rose from one in eight to one in six. The
number of women working long hours has doubled. 50% of workers report inadequate
or very inadequate staffing levels and as production and quality suffer,
performance appraisal systems are introduced, causing more stress and worry. A
major source of job insecurity (which speaks volumes) is the distrust employees
have of their bosses: few employees believe their managers have any loyalty
towards them. The longer we remain in a state of insecurity the more our
physical and mental well-being deteriorates.
FLEXIBILISATION & CASUALISATION
Flexibilisation is often presented as the creation of flexible working patterns
when it is, in fact, the imposition of a flexible attitude among workers as to
who controls our lives. It is also presented as both necessary (to the company’s
productivity) and beneficial (to workers) as if the two could ever be
compatible. We share in the company’s success only to the extent the bosses
allow, and not according to our effort in creating it. Many employees, when
asked, have no objection to flexible hours and working but it is the imposition
of flexibility that provokes so much discord and rancour. Interestingly (and not
surprisingly), those with interesting jobs are greatly in favour of flexible
working. For them it means time with their children and a reduction in childcare
costs. It means more leisure and quality time. They claim to be able to work
smarter and harder. Study after study show, however, that this choice is not
open to working class people in dead-end type jobs. Why well-paid and
well-rewarded professionals, for instance, need this kind of benefit from their
bosses to work hard is not explained. Nor is it explained why such freedom to
choose when and how to work has a reverse effect on the ‘lower orders’, for whom
long hours, poor pay and the threat of the sack seem to be the only way to get
them to work! The working class response to flexibilisation – a high labour
turnover, absenteeism, low commitment and poor performance – is matched by the
reduction in benefits, performance management techniques and rigorous monitoring
of work and working.
The same applies to casualisation, the process by which the power of employers
to give or withhold employment (and with it the means to live). Many bosses are
introducing ‘zero hour’ contracts, where there is no guarantee of work and you
are permanently on-call. This has the benefit (to the bosses) of the worker not
having any rights or protection under the law. The risk associated with the
uncertainties of unplanned economies, of having to pay idle workers for
instance, is transferred to the workers themselves. So much for the daring
entrepreneur who risks all to create wealth for the many! Many millions of jobs
have always been or are rapidly becoming casualised. The principles of the free
market, where value is entirely subjective, nothing is guaranteed and the devil
take the hindmost are being applied to the labour market. And yet, in a society
where life is work, doesn’t our failure to have and to hold onto employment
condemn us to failure as human beings? Read any tabloid newspaper, listen to any
right-wing politician or pundit and the answer is, yes.
MACDONALDISATION
“Workers and consumers are the miserable servants of machines and their endless
demands”.
McDonaldisation (the modern form of Taylorism, though management courses will
not mention either word) is a system of producing goods and services in which
the process is broken into its smallest part, systematically analysed,
re-engineered to maximise profit and replicated in each and every working
environment that produces those goods. Making things becomes a series of
entirely independent, discrete, controllable actions, eliminating independent
thought and creativity.
We become alienated from the process, required to perform a series of
meaningless tasks. Such alienation from the work produces depression, anger, an
unthinking and uncaring remoteness from other people.
Everywhere this process is used the bosses are happy with the amount produced
but appalled by its low quality. Their only solution is to tightly control and
quarantine workers: visit some of the industrial gulags of Indonesia, Malaya or
China, for instance. The labour turnover in these factories is evidence of the
determination of people to resist their exploitation. The bosses get rid of any
worker who shows signs of resistance or who are too demoralised to produce
efficiently. Their awareness is a disease that makes them unfit for work or to
be around other workers they might infect: with knowledge of, anger towards and
contempt for the bosses.
This system is also often known as Toyotism, after the Toyota, Japan factory
system introduced in the 1960s and 1970s. The level of control over workers has
been intensified by the introduction of individual work contracts and other
processes that impose obligations to produce on the individual while weakening
collective agreements and relationships – creating what is known in Europe as
the ‘diffuse factory’. What is new about Toyotism is "just-in-time" production
and prompt reaction to market requirements; the imposition of multi-jobbing on
workers employed on several machines, either simultaneously or sequentially;
quality control throughout the entire flow of production and real-time
information on the progress of production in the factory. Production is often
halted and work-teams, departments or even the whole factory called to account.
Anybody who shows a waged-worker's indifference to the company's productivity
requirements and decides not to join "quality control" groups etc, is
stigmatised and encouraged to leave.
The same system is applied to the commodities that are used in the process with
every stage of how they are produced and processed minutely regulated. A cow is
not a living creature but a sack of usable and unusable meat, fat and gristle.
How the useful is divided from the not-so useful is a science in itself.
Increasingly consumption and leisure are being ‘McDonaldised’. The places where
we seek pleasure are increasingly the same, we expect to be able to find the
same brand names throughout the world. We laugh at the same time and at the same
jokes. Culture is increasingly global but it also increasingly mass-manufactured
and distributed, designed for mass appeal, consumed not created, a thing that is
done to us, doled out in pieces to audiences that are happy to feed for awhile
instead of thinking.
COMMODIFICATION
Work used to be a purposeful and meaningful activity. There was spiritual
satisfaction in working and co-operating to meet the needs of ourselves, our
families, our people. People chose the work they did if they could and invested
much of their personality and abilities in the making and production of useful,
better or beautiful things. Today, the pre-eminence of consumption as a social
good and conferrer of social status on us as individuals has made the product
far more important than the producer (witness the social cachet of a Nike
trainer over the sweated Indonesian who made it). Work has ceased to have a
personal value for those who toil. In many cases it does not have a social value
to society (witness the amount we discard or the sheer quantity of junk goods we
produce). Large amounts of work is simply about the reproduction of capitalism
on a daily basis – think about the trillions of dollars traded on the stock
markets for instance and why it is being done. It matters only because this is
the means by which capitalism justifies itself and produces the means – money –
for its own continuation. The activity produces nothing, except money, whose
social value is zero. Work only matters in terms of what is produced – the
commodity - and the social and personal value of what is produced to the person
consuming it. If you don’t believe us, why are so many important jobs like
nursing rewarded so badly? Our labour, the portion of time we spend being
‘socially useful’ has become a commodity, whose value in the market is dictated
solely by the whims of millions of other individual desires to possess,
stimulated by the propaganda mills of capitalism, the advertising industry. Of
course, many people realise this but are themselves trapped by the artificial
need and desire to consume. We become our own gaoler! It is through consumption
that the majority channel their aspirations – to pleasure, to a sense of meaning
and personal identity. Our aspirations to freedom have been transferred from the
workplace to the rest of our lives but the commodification of personal life and
leisure has simply built more cares around our life. The refusal to work must be
accompanied by the refusal to consume (and vice versa), to participate in the
reproduction of everyday life through the production and consumption of useless
commodities via a commodified process: work.
ARGUMENTS AGAINST WORK
WAGE SLAVERY
“Labour only sustains life by stunting it. Tell me how much you work and I'll
tell you what you are”.
When wage-slavery began, and primarily men were drafted into the ranks of
wage-slaves, wage-work was portrayed by the merchant and industrial classes as
an emancipation from feudal bondage. Over the course of the 19th and 20th
Centuries, many women started doing piecework at home and some began leaving
home to take paid employment. Many reasons are suggested for this: war-created
need for additional labour, movements of female emancipation, greater social
aspiration and mobility, the decay of patriarchal culture. What is usually not
talked about is the reduction in the value of wages offered to men throughout
this period, which turned women into wage-workers. Women's opposition to
patriarchal norms and their compulsion to take up wage-work have led many people
argue that work outside the home is a liberating and rewarding experience for
women, one that allows them to fully develop their intellectual and human
potential, a liberation from domestic drudgery. But wage work in factories or
workshops, in clerical positions, in schools & laboratories, in production or in
retail stores involves regimentation, repetition, physical burdens and spiritual
turmoil that are hardly liberating, creative, or fulfilling.
For working class women and men work is neither joyful nor creative. Wage-work
is meaningless. Jobs are boring and repetitious, they provide no intellectual or
spiritual rewards and provide no satisfaction. The severe regimentation of
factory life, which now pervades all spheres of life, destroys vitality and
intelligence. It is not paid work but rather free moments away from jobs and
housework that give meaning to life. Labour, and how it is organised by the
bosses, underpins contemporary relationships among people on every level of
experience: whether in terms of the rewards it brings, the privileges it
confers, the discipline it demands, the repression it produces or the social
conflicts it generates.
COMPULSION AND DEGRADATION
“In a ton of work, there's not an ounce of love”
The early factory introduced no sweeping technological advances more important
than the abstraction, rationalization and objectification of labour, and its
embodiment in human beings. The factory was not born from a need to integrate
labour with modern machinery. It arose from a need to rationalise the labour
process, to intensify and exploit it more effectively. The initial goal of the
factory was to dominate labour and to destroy the worker’s independence from
capital.
And what of the post-Fordist future? Technologies already present will
restructure and stratify work, dividing labour power into a relatively
restricted upper level of the super-skilled, and a massive lower level of
ordinary doers and executors. It will continue to separate and divides labour
power hierarchically and spatially and break the framework of collective
bargaining. The process of accumulation will become more intense, and it is
possible there will be a long period of capitalism without opposition:
turbo-capitalism, marked by an unusual political stability. The post-Fordist
worker will be an individual who is atomised, flexibilised, increasingly
non-union, kept on low wages and inescapably in jobs that are always precarious.
The state will no longer guarantee to cover the material costs of the
reproduction of labour power and will further act to limit consumption. The
majority sector of the non-privileged will be forced to cut back on its standard
of living in order to survive. This may lead to resistance and the resurrection
of traditional forms of organisation and collective action. We certainly hope
so. For without it, the future for humanity as individual, thinking beings
prompted by internal desires and needs and not artificially-created compulsions
to work and consume (or not), is bleak indeed.
Anarchists desire to see humanity liberate itself from work, if by liberation we
mean self-government. As well as hierarchy, the workplace created by power
structures also helps to undermine our abilities. As Bob Black argues:
"You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are
you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation
for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant
moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all
their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by the family in the
beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy and
psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their
fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience
training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the
system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else.
Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to
hierarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it."
Historians and politicians ask us to accept that the productive advances
unleashed by the factory system were worth the price of our spiritual
degradation. The idea of ‘The End of History’ is built upon the notion that
humanity has lost the ability to create new social relations and will remain
largely content to remain – for ever – trapped in a liberal, bourgeois and
capitalist society of abundance. Capitalism’s aim, because it fears the
liberatory potential of the working class, is to continue the process of
degradation until we are unable to resist. It seeks to create essentially
inorganic beings, spiritually dead automatons. Insanity, irrationalism,
alienation, anomie, the inability to empathise, to be more than functionally
creative, the routinisation of exploration and adventure, these are symptoms of
a deep and invidious illness deep in humanity’s soul which capitalism has spread
amongst us.
This attempt to change the fundamental nature of humanity, and to enslave us,
does not just occur in the workplace but exists at all levels of modern
‘civilisation’. Mass production and the compulsion to work is made possible only
by vast bureaucracies, authoritarian ‘mega-machines’ of socialisation,
investigation, compulsion, control and sanction. Capitalism reduces the worker
to a mere machine operator, following the orders of his or her boss. And
entirely soulless mass-produced objects create mechanically deadened people. It
has created a constant process of alienated consumption, as workers try to find
the happiness associated with productive, creative, self-managed activity in a
place it does not exist – the shopping mall or retail precinct.
To reverse this, we must re-conquer everyday life by destroying the state.
Liberating technologies presuppose liberating institutions. The forms of
resistance are as widespread and diverse as the means of control. In the
factory, strikes, sabotage, work stoppages. In the community truancy, vandalism,
protest, direct action, arson. And there are also positive actions as well. Acts
of sabotage or work refusal (by phoning in sick, for instance) are rarely
individual acts but collective ones, approved of and assisted by fellow workers.
If the rule is silence, we communicate. If the command is speed up, we slow
down. Resistance creates zones of freedom that we can extend and make permanent,
creating within them the institutions – the claimant’s union, the rank-and-file
workers group, the direct action campaign – that are the seeds of future
liberation.
RESISTANCE IN THE WORKPLACE
Here’s just some of the wonderfully inventive ways workers have found to defy
the bosses and take back a little – in time, dignity and self-respect – that the
bosses try to steal using the need for money to live.
WORK TO RULE
Every industry is covered by a mass of rules, regulations and agreed working
practices, many of them archaic. If applied strictly they can make production
difficult if not impossible. Many of these rules exist in any case to protect
management in the event of industrial accidents. They are quite prepared to
close their eyes when these rules are broken in the interests of keeping
production going. Even a modest overtime ban can be effective, if applied
intelligently; it is particularly effective in industries with uneven work
patterns. Here’s just one example of a work to rule in practice – an effective
tactic with little chance the bosses can do anything about it except suffer:
When, under nationalisation, strikes [on the French railways] were forbidden,
their syndicalist fellow-workers urged the railmen to carry out the strict
letter of the law... One law tells the engine driver to make sure of the safety
of any bridge over which his train has to pass. If after personal examination,
he is still doubtful, then he must consult the other members of the train crew.
Of course trains run late! Another law for which French railwaymen developed a
sudden passion related to the ticket collectors. All tickets had to be carefully
examined on both sides. The law said nothing about city rush hours!
GO SLOW
This is a very effective tactic where various industrial processes depend one
upon the other and both supply and distribution are geared to continuous, steady
rates of production, such as in the automotive or food packing industries.
Here’s one example of a go-slow (which is an increasingly common tactic in the
sweatshop factories of the developing world) from Fords at Dagenham, at the time
one of the biggest car assemblers in the world: The company stated that the
headliners had repeatedly refused to fit more than 13 heads in any one shift,
saying that the management's request was unreasonable. Yet “they had in fact
fitted each headlining in less time than allowed, and spent the remainder of the
time between jobs sitting down. They took so long over each car that they
prevented other employees on the line from performing their operations thus
causing congestion and frequently leading to the lines being stopped and
sometimes other employees being sent home. Shop stewards however, supported by
the convener, had always maintained on these occasions that the employees
concerned were working normally and refused completely, in spite of numerous
appeals, to persuade their members to remove restrictions”.
GOOD WORK
One of the serious problems facing militants in general and workers in the
service industries in particular is that they can end up hurting the consumers
(mostly fellow workers) more than the boss. This isolates them from the general
mass of the population, which enables the authorities to whip up 'public
opinion' against the strikers. One way round this problem is to consider
techniques which selectively hurt the boss without affecting other workers - or
better still are to the advantage of the public. The 'good work' strike is a
general term which means that workers provide consumers with better service or
products than the employer intended. One good side-effect of the good work
strike is that it places the onus of stopping a service on the employer. Even if
‘good work’ leads to a lock-out of workers by the boss, service-users would
still blame the employer rather than the worker. And lock-outs can be avoided by
‘wildcat’ good working: suddenly, without notice, and for limited periods -
repeated at intervals until the bosses cave in. In New York City restaurant
workers, after losing a strike, won some of their demands by heeding the advice
of organisers to "pile up the plates, give 'em double helpings" and figure bills
on the lower side. You can imagine similar situations in other industries, for
instance postal workers behind a counter only accepting unstamped letters or
people working checkouts refusing to work the tills. Here’s a final example:
Lisbon bus and train workers gave free rides to all passengers. They were
protesting because the British-owned Lisbon Tramways Company had not raised
their wages. Today conductors and tram drivers arrived at work as usual, but the
conductors did not pick up their money satchels. On the whole the public seems
to be on the side of these take-no-fare strikers.
OPEN MOUTH
Sometimes telling people the simple truth about what goes on at work can put a
lot of pressure on the boss. Consumer industries (restaurants, packing plants,
hospitals and the like) are the most vulnerable. There is not a lot the bosses
can do about ‘open mouth’ action other than improving conditions. There is
nothing illegal about it, so the police cannot be called in. It also strikes at
the fraudulent practices which business for profit is based on. Commerce today
is founded on fraud. Capitalism's standards of honesty demand that the worker
lies to everybody except the boss. In the food industry workers, instead of
striking, or when on strike, can expose the way food is prepared for sale. In
restaurants, cooks can tell what kinds of food they are expected to cook, how
stale foods are treated so they can be served up. Dishwashers can expose how
'well' dishes are washed. Construction and factory workers can alert newspapers
and health and safety inspectors to the shoddy materials being used or cheating
on safety regulations. Workers in public transport can tell of faulty engines,
brakes, and repairs.
THE SICK IN
The sick-in is a way to strike without striking. The idea is to cripple your
workplace by having all or most of the workforce call in sick on the same day or
days. Unlike the formal walk-out, it can be used effectively by departments and
work areas instead of the whole workplace, and because its usually informal can
succeed even where no union exists to organise it. At certain times, just the
hint of ‘flu doing the rounds’ and the likelihood of it spreading to important
areas of work can work wonders with a stubborn boss or supervisor. Even workers
contacting the personnel office to see how much sick time they have available
can send a powerful message.
TAKING CHARGE OF WORK
Sometimes the way to get what you want is to take it. This requires better and
stronger organisation than any other direct action method but is also a powerful
weapon in the worker’s arsenal. When workers decide that they are going to do
what they want to do, instead of what the employers want them to do, there is
not a lot the employers can do about it. There have been many examples of this
taking place, from timber-felling in the USA, the heavy industries of Italy and
South America and the automotive factories of USA, Britain and Europe. Here’s an
example: A strong IWW Marine Transport Workers Union existed on trans-Atlantic
shipping out of the port of Boston. One of the main grievances of the workers on
these ships was the quality of the food served aboard ship. Acceptable menus
were decided upon and published by the Union. The cooks and stewards, being good
union members, refused to cook anything except what was on the menus - to the
satisfaction of everyone except the bosses. But because work is often made up of
a series of activities, involving different kinds of workers, it must be
carefully co-ordinated and there must be high levels of solidarity between
workers. This often requires there to be a strong union which can become just as
much a ‘manager’ of shit work as it is the protector of liberated work.
OCCUPATIONS AND SIT INS
Sit-Ins are relatively restricted and passive and are similar to ‘go-slows’ and
‘slow-downs’, only with a clear physical expression – people stop work and sit
down. Occupations are more positive actions, actually to take over a plant and
deny access to the management. The latter needs a high level of militancy and
solidarity, as well as good rank-and-file organisation. Unity of purpose is
essential for a successful Sit-In. While there is a fairly long record of
sit-ins in Britain there have been few large-scale factory occupations such as
are common in both France and Italy. Occupations require a high level of
militancy and organisation on the part of the workers concerned. It is doomed if
the factory remains isolated from the rest of organised labour, the working
class and community generally but in the right conditions, it can be dynamite.
What is needed is mass involvement. Workers should not be presented with a plan:
an effective occupation must be preceded by departmental and mass meetings to
plan the occupation, and lots of propaganda.
SABOTAGE
Workers and the work they do are a commodity, to be bought and sold like
everything else. And in the marketplace, a low price often means shoddy goods.
Why shouldn’t the same rule apply for workers? For low pay and bad working
conditions, inefficient work. Working class sabotage is used more often than you
would think. Although often used by frustrated individuals, it is most effective
- like all direct action tactics - when all or most of the workers on a job are
in on it. Here’s an example: When [the line] got over sixty, say, someone would
just accidentally drop a bolt in the line and as soon as it worked its way round
to the end, bang, the line would stop. Then there would be a delay and everybody
would take their break. The same sort of thing goes on in every industry:
neglecting to maintain or lubricate machinery at the correct intervals, punching
buttons on complicated electronic gear in the wrong order, putting pieces in the
wrong way, running machines at the wrong speeds or feeds, dropping foreign
bodies in gear boxes, 'technological indiscipline': each industry and trade has
its established practices, its own traditions.
THE STRIKE
Even the traditional unofficial walkout can be made much more effective than it
normally is. The participation of the ordinary worker is often limited to
attending the occasional mass meeting. They then stay at home, in isolation,
watching the progress of their own dispute on the TV. Bosses have got wise to
this tactic, and governments have begun to threaten unions with sequestration
and deny hardship benefits to striking workers. Workers have responded with
‘guerilla’ strikes, involving different workers and without any fixed pattern
minimise the cost of strikes to the workers yet maximise their disruptive
effect. There is the chessboard strike, where every other department stops. The
brushfire or articulated strike, which, over a period, rolls through every key
section of a works. The pay-book strike, where every worker whose payroll number
is odd goes on strike on certain days, with even numbers on strike on the other
days. And strikes where blue-collar workers down tools in the morning but return
after lunch, only to find that the white-collar workers and foremen are now out,
making all work impossible thus achieving a full day's stoppage for only half a
day's loss of pay.
INFORMAL RESISTANCE
One of the greatest unsung stories of the industrial working class is that of
resistance at the point of production. Work is so unpleasant that it is not
surprising it is resented. Informal resistance- in the form of piecework
ceilings, agreements among workers as to what constitutes a fair day's work and
the refusal by workers to participate in their own exploitation - is what makes
the difference between potential and actual production. Informal resistance and
its effect on ‘productivity’, explains the steady and massive expansion of
work-study, job evaluation, quality control, inspection, etc. Management also
tries to solve this problem by introducing 'workers participation', to motivate
their employees to identify with the interests of the company. In the long term
all these measures will fail, as the basic problem, boring, unpleasant and often
dangerous work, will not be removed.
WORK IN THE FREE SOCIETY
Freedom begins where work ends
The ideology of work has begun to be challenged by recent changes in capitalism
itself, by chronic mass unemployment and under-employment, the phenomenon of
temporary and casual work, short-term contracts and flexibility. The notion of a
job for life has become a thing of the past for most working people outside the
so-called professions. Work is transitory, fragmented and periods of
unemployment regarded as a natural condition. Many young working class people
have never experienced the ‘dignity’ that labour is supposed to bestow and those
who have never known the ‘world of work’ feel little guilt in not being part of
it. Work as the basis for the way capitalism integrates people into society in
order to control them is being undermined by chronic global economic crises
caused by the radical restructuring of national economies in the search for
profit (World Bank, WTO, Doha et al) and new technologies which are making
certain classes of workers entirely redundant.
Where does this leave libertarian revolutionaries and our vision of social
change? Will our arguments for a society without ‘employment’, without bosses
and wage labour, make more sense to working class people for whom work has
already become an unendurable means to an end, and for whom work has little
meaning? Is there the possibility that a weakening of workers’ identification
with their ‘occupation’ will bring about a weakening of their identification
with the status quo? Or maybe the atomisation of large sections of the working
class by the capitalism’s continuing development will cause a further decrease
in class consciousness? Whatever the consequences of the decline of the work
ethic and ideology, it is certain that wage labour will remain an alienated and
alienating experience for those who are forced to take part in it and the
exploitation inherent within work under capitalism will not go away.
The only solution is to reclaim for ourselves the right to work when we want to,
doing what we want to do, when we want to do it, or to not work at all! But this
emancipation from the crushing coils of wage slavery may meet an individual need
for freedom but does nothing to end the destructive and malign institution that
is capitalism today. After all, there are plenty more potential wage slaves
where you come from! No, liberation from work must be a collective, global act,
involving millions upon millions of toiling people, people who for a day, a
week, a month or however long it takes, refuse to work and begin destroying the
means by which capitalism makes us work.
This general and social strike is our aim, the refusal of work by all working
people, for all time. It will be, we hope, a gentle insurrection, a welling up
of anger and despair and the creation of a stubborn and unstoppable desire for
freedom. We will take our hands from the plough and the loom, rise up from our
desks, cast off our boots and overalls, walk out of the hotels and restaurants,
leave the factory and office, meeting with others to join in their refusal to
work as they celebrate ours.
And if this is a global act, how can the capitalist class resist us? We know how
to live with nothing, do they? The working people of the world get by with no
money and little food, without power and water for weeks on end, without
servants or holidays or chauffeurs. We don’t need them. They need us, to work.
And if we refuse to work, they have no power to compel us. And so, we mustn’t
strike for this or that, for 5% here or 10% there, things that be granted today
and taken back tomorrow. Our refusal to work must be for freedom from work, and
that alone, for freedom, once taken, can never be reclaimed.
Once capitalism has been destroyed, we can set about the exciting task of
fulfilling our individual potential and shaping this new community. Of course,
in a world that may have been disrupted by the process of revolutionary war, we
will first need to ensure that we can feed and shelter everyone. This need not
be the brutal task the counter-revolutionaries try to scare us with. In the
world there are more than enough buildings and food to provide for everyone.
What matters, of course, is to distribute these fairly, using newly seized
communications such as radio stations, roads and railways.
Capitalism creates a culture in which it is a virtue to work, to strive to outdo
or overcome, to contribute on society’s terms. We fight against the false logic
of capitalist thought, which uses concepts as 'Progress', 'Growth', and
'Development' to justify its compulsion of people (by open and more subtle
means) to work and work harder. The economic system is not something that should
hurtle out of control but must, like technology, be subordinated to human need.
This leads us to question the work ethic and the nature of work – so we wrote
this pamphlet. The revolution will fundamentally transform the nature of work.
Where we live and work will be considerably altered. We will re-organise
industry so that we only produce what is socially useful. We will introduce the
ecological management of production and consumption, balancing the needs of
society against the desires of its members. And in doing this we will massively
reduce the amount of work that must be done to sustain society, work that itself
will be freely chosen, increasing the time available to us for all the other
things that make living worthwhile.
VOLUNTARISM
Work will be a voluntary act, a personal choice to work or not to work, to work
now or later, to work hard or slowly or carefully, with our hands or our minds
or both. Because the meaning of work lies within the personal benefit to
ourselves and the social benefit to others, it must be freely chosen. Nothing in
society will compel us to do work we do not want to do in ways we find wrong or
alien to ourselves. Nor will there be any incentives to do this or that work.
There will, for instance, be no more prestige or status attached to one social
function compared to another and where a person can do the work, there will be
no artificial barrier (a union card, a qualification, a tribal affiliation, a
greased palm) to doing it. With this freedom comes a generalised responsibility
to ensure society maintains itself. If the free society is generally beneficial
to all, we will want to keep it going. We will need to develop a sense of what
needs to be done and whether and how we can contribute to that aim. In part that
will come, as it does now, from education and socialisation, the millions of
interactions we have with our fellow human beings that shape who we are and
define what we want to do with our lives. But the key part in all this will be
ourselves, our social conscience, our sense of what is best for both our society
and ourselves. The measure of our society and its worth to humanity will be the
extent to which what needs to be done is done, by free choice and without
compulsion and the pleasure humanity gets in the doing of it.
CO-OPERATION
As revolutionaries we argue for egalitarian structures accountable and
accessible to all. It seems most likely that these structures will emerge from
the workers and community councils that the working class create during the
Revolution. We also foresee that a federal structure will emerge globally to
co-ordinate such things as the production and distribution of resources,
determining the kinds of things that need to be done and how to get them done,
with decisions being taken at the lowest appropriate level: the individual
worker, the small craft shop, the neighbourhood, the town, industry or region
and so on. Agriculture and industry will be undertaken by communities that are
part of local and global networks distributing their produce.
PERSONAL CHOICE
pecific examples of changed social relations will serve to show what we mean by
social revolution. No human being will be prepared or compelled to do particular
kinds of work. People may choose to continue a tradition of particular kinds of
work, going into the same kinds of work as their peers (on the one hand) or may
choose an esoteric form of work they spend their whole life learning how to do.
Women will not have the maintenance of the home and child-rearing as their major
social function, because such tasks will be the responsibility of the whole
community. Children will do the work they can and want to do (and also have time
for education and leisure) as soon as they can.
It is a fundamental belief of anarchist communists that the working class
already have the skills needed to run society. Not everyone has all of these, of
course, and equality does not mean that we all take it in turns to perform heart
surgery! Some specialisation will be necessary. We will work as we want, so long
as the thing we are doing at the time meets our personal and social needs. If
you want to work long and hard at a particular task you are free to do so,
gaining the fulfilment such action brings. If you wish to work a bit here, then
play, then work again at something else, changing jobs as you like, travelling
to different places to do it, working with different people as your mood
determines, then do it.
The only lesson society will teach its members is that there are times to work
and to rest, to labour and to play, to work hard or a little, to do what needs
to be done sometimes and what we want to do a lot, to use our hands or our
brains or both as needed, to find the value in every activity and to have
enjoyed the doing and the not-doing in equal measure.
PRODUCTIVE WORK
Work will be more enjoyable because, unlike capitalism, it will have a point to
it and because we will work in ways that maximise fulfilment, not profit. Less
pleasant but none the less necessary tasks will be shared out entirely equally
and the rest of our time can be spent in enjoyable and creative pursuits. Of
course, fields will have to be ploughed, drains cleaned and domestic work
performed, but no one will be 'a farm labourer', a 'sewage worker' or 'a
housewife', because these task will be shared out equally and performed in
collectively run farms, workplaces, launderettes and crèches etc, and occupy the
minimum of time for each person (unless they like doing them!). In addition,
these tasks will no longer be performed for a boss, a council bureaucracy or a
husband, because we will not be answerable to any more powerful individual but
to our anarchist communist society, i.e. each other.
Don’t get us wrong: we are not stakhanovites who endlessly extol the pleasure
and virtues of toil! If the free society of the future can only be sustained by
long hours of drudgery and the self-abasement of the people to the god
‘production’, we want none of it. But we know, because it has been proven over
and over again, that the amount of necessary work that will be shared amongst
those people able to do it amounts to no more than 2-3 hours, leaving the rest
of the day for play, creativity, sex, idleness, socialising, recreation, study,
whatever we want.
THE PLEASURE OF WORK: THE WORK OF PLEASURE
The liberation of work can only come about with the liberation from work, from
the capitalist reduction of life to work
Most work under capitalism is mindless and pointless, unless you are a boss. All
activity after the Revolution will take place not for profit or the maintenance
of the status quo, as it does now, but for the fulfilment of the individual,
although never to the detriment of society. There will be no place for useless
work such as the production of consumer goods for profit or the maintenance of
social control because these 'normal' aspects of society will be irrelevant
after the Revolution. Each person will therefore have more time on their hands,
but this is fundamentally different to 'unemployment' because no one will be
'employed'. Productive activity is an important way of developing our
inner-powers and expressing ourselves, in other words being creative. As
Alexander Berkman argues:
"We do not live by bread alone. True, existence is not possible without
opportunity to satisfy our physical needs. But the gratification of these by no
means constitutes all of life. In a sensible society…….. [t]he feelings of human
sympathy, of justice and right would have a chance to develop, to be satisfied,
to broaden and grow."
Anarchists desire to change the nature of both work and life and create a
society based upon freedom in all aspects of life. In the free society, the
contribution a person makes to society or the social value of work will not be
measured in economic terms as it is under capitalism. It will not be measured at
all. What matters is that each individual feels that the work they do is
personally fulfilling. If it makes a positive contribution to society as well,
this is a bonus for us and you.
Work will become, primarily, the expression of a person's pleasure in what they
are doing and become like an art - an expression of their creativity and
individuality. Work as an art will become expressed in the workplace as well as
the work process, with workplaces transformed and integrated into the local
community and environment.
We hope that this short pamphlet about explains why anarchists want to abolish
work and seek to escape the imposition of work upon us and upon the toiling
millions of the earth. We also hope that it leads you to begin to question your
own involvement in the world of work and stimulate a desire to work for the
liberation of those millions. The future will decide upon the nature of work in
the future, of work as a creative, liberating, productive and fulfilling
activity. To us falls the task of breaking our chains. What our children make
from them is their work and the only work that will matter in the free society
of our future.
http://www.libcom.org/hosted/af/ace/work.html
I urge everybody with hepatitis to consider their health and give up work now.
Please forward this to all your friends.
Alan
"Can't you see we're still here,
Can't you see we're still here,
Singing loud; Singing clear,
We shall not go under,
We're still here."
Nemesis Peace Centre
http://www.veloceraptor.free-online.../protector.html
Abuse of Women and Children
http://theoriginalfirebird.blogspot.com/
Nemesis News
http://lordcerneabbas.blogspot.com/
Absolute Anarchy
http://lordcerneabbastoo.blogspot.com/
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