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Title: Articles from “Machete” #5 Author: Various Authors Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: anti-globalization, anti-work Source: Personal communication with the translator
taken lightly
Today, very few people truly live. Very few people experience the
vitality of their becoming in the present moment. Very few people reach
out to grasp the energy of their desire in order to create that
becoming...
Instead, they work.
I may dream of a world through which unique beings gracefully wend their
way, every move, every passage through the streets, the gardens, the
wilds, a dance, a game , a voyage in an endless adventure. But this
daydream itself is belied by reality as my wandering mind is shocked
back into my lurching body just in time to avoid crashing into some
other distracted sleepwalker. Such a graceless, joyless world, this
world of work. Not the world of a dance or an elegant game or a voyage
into the unknown, but of bouncing atoms and grinding gears and lock-step
marches toward death. Not lives created joyfully in complicity and
conflict, with spontaneous intent, but survival acted out habitually, in
roles already set, where somnambulists thoughtlessly fall into place,
gears in a machine whose purpose eludes them.
But all that really matters is that it works...
that you work...
that I work...
And so my revolution — any anarchist revolution — any revolution that
intends to take back life here and now — requires the destruction of
work... immediately!
No revolution to date has managed to eradicate work, because even the
revolutionaries most hostile to work have failed to imagine a revolution
free from its logic... Working against work, their efforts are doomed.
So it is necessary to know what work is and how its logic operates.
“Those who do not work shall not eat.” This hellish christian motto sums
up the work ethic perfectly. Small-minded and small-hearted, pathetic
and miserly, it is the feeble morality of the shopkeeper frightened of
the clever thief or daring robber. It is the threat of the police — the
slave driver’s whip of our times... And it is easy to reject this
self-serving ethic of grasping, narrow-minded bigots. Far more difficult
is seeing through to work’s logic, beyond the bigots, to their
masters...
The logic of work remains hidden, veiled, operating undercover, because
it functions through alienated activity. When you and I act out of
habit, without thinking for ourselves, repeating the same banal motions,
we are sleepwalkers, somnambulists... When you and I sell our activity
for a cause we do not know, we are slaves... somnambulant slaves...
zombies... This is alienation, where the aims, the goals, the products
of our activities are strangers to us. And this is why the logic of work
remains well-hidden, operating undercover through the judgments of the
work ethic.
And perhaps this is also why the enemies of work have mostly just
attacked the work ethic. In this limited attack, all that is opposed to
work is leisure, the time of idleness, of inconsequential activity. The
battle is then merely quantitative — a reduction of work-hours, an
increase in leisure time — a withering away of work, perhaps even to
zerowork... but still within the framework of the world of work and its
logic.
The logic of work can be summed up in this way: All activity of
consequence must have a goal, an end. And so every activity is to be
judged and valued in terms of its end product. This product takes
precedence over the creative process, causing the non-existent future to
dominate the present. Immediate satisfaction in the joy of creating has
no value, only success or failure count... and counting is what value’s
all about. Winners or losers, but not a free creator in the lot. It
should come as no surprise that in the world of this logic, efficiency
is valued for itself. Regardless of the end, what works most efficiently
to bring it about successfully is what counts... penny by penny...
dollar by dollar... And this is why you have to work... This is why I
have to work... Or be counted among the worthless... the zeroes in
society’s accounting book.
Always aimed toward ends, final goals, products, life in the present
disappears. The aimless, end-less becoming of each unique individual is
sacrificed to the goal of production and social reproduction. The flux
of interweaving relationships is dammed up and channeled into roles
which are nothing more than gears in the social machine. This is
alienation, the theft of my activity, the theft of your activity, the
theft of my life and of your life. Not even the products we make are
ours. Not even the successes are ours. Only the failures, above all, the
failure to live...
Within work’s logic, revolution is a task with an aim... a goal... to
produce the perfectly functioning society. It has a beginning and an
end. It succeeds or fails, is won or lost. But always... it comes to an
end. Within this logic, there is only revolutionary work or
revolutionary idleness. Anti-work revolutionaries can embrace the task
of activists or militants, defeating themselves from the beginning by
working for the end of work... Or they can idly wait for an abstract
History or an equally abstract “objective” or “essential” revolutionary
subject to make the revolution in their place... Once again defeating
themselves... choosing to let their lives slip through their hands
waiting for their savior to appear. Failing to escape the logic of work,
every revolution to date has failed... even the ones that were
victorious... especially the ones that were victorious. They have failed
from the beginning, because within the logic of winners and losers, of
success and failure, the revolution has already ceased, because the past
has fixed the future, guaranteeing the defeat. And so with their victory
these revolutions ended and the “liberated” people... went back to
work...
So why not break completely with the logic of work? Why not conceive of
activity that is of consequence, not because of its end product, but
because of what it is here and now? Why not embrace resolute
playfulness? To conceive of revolution in this way is to conceive of it
in a way that is fundamentally different, absolutely other than the ways
that it has generally been conceived by revolutionaries... Revolution
not as a task, but as a form of play, as a game, but only in the
broadest sense... As an exploration, an experiment... with no beginning
and no end... Rather an endless opening out into new explorations, new
experiments, new adventures. A kind of alchemy or magic of continual
transformation... Putting our lives at stake in each moment for the
sheer joy of living... Here there can be no failure... Here there can be
no defeat... because there is no aim, no goal, no end... just the
ongoing adventure of conflict and complicity, destruction and creation,
that is life lived to the full.
This past September 24, in the United States, thousands of men and women
went to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to protest against the G20 summit,
which was devoted to giving new rules to an economic system whose
devastation is visible to everyone. Along with truncheons, fire-hoses
and rubber bullets, the government presided over by the 2009 Nobel Peace
Prize winner used “the Scream”, that is, LRAD — the sonic cannon for
dispersing crowds used up to now only in war operations — against the
demonstrators,
Has the message gotten through?
In Genoa Italy, in July 2001, hundreds of thousands of women and men
converged from all corners of the planet to protest against the Earth’s
Masters, each demonstrating their rage in the face of a social
organization based on profit and privilege in their own way. The
reaction of the state, the Italian state in this instance, was
unforgettable: indiscriminate butchery. The demonstrators were beaten
bloody in the streets and tortured in the barracks. One of them was shot
down on the street in front of the whole world. This past October 7, the
Italian justice system absolved the police chief and others responsible
for the bloodbath. Two days later, on October 9, the same Italian
justice system sentenced ten demonstrators to punishments ranging from
six to fifteen years in prison. The state’s lackey’s who break bones and
heads are kindly protected; free individuals who break windows are
harshly punished.
Has the message gotten through?
This past October 8, in Athens, Greece, the newly elected leftist
government ordered a huge raid in the Exarchia neighborhood, which led
to the detention of more than eighty people. Exarchia was the initial
hotbed of the generalized uprising that broke out last December
following the murder of a young student by the police. For some weeks,
fires of rage burned throughout Greece, heating up many spirits chilled
by the social winter. The first thought of the new leftist government
has been to strike at the heart of revolt, launching four hundred
officers against it.
Has the message gotten through?
Yes, it has gotten through. Pittsburgh is like Fallujah, Genoa is on the
way to Abu Ghraib, Athens is near to Gaza. There is no elsewhere in the
one-way world of authority and merchandise. In less than a month, the
state sent out its warning several times, clear and unequivocal: order
must reign undisturbed; whoever dares to challenge it will be suppressed
without mercy.
During the Vietnam war, one of the favorite slogans of the
anti-militarist movement was Bring the War Home. Besides being a parody
of the more pacifistic “Bring the boys home”, it also had a precise
meaning: the war overseas had divided the country to the point that the
moment had come to trigger off a war at home. Today, the institutions
have brought the war home. The streets are filling with soldiers,
divided between patrols and road blocks.
If we don’t want to remain victims or become accomplices of this war of
extermination of every form of freedom, the only thing left to us is to
take up the challenge.
Abandoning forever the days of politics in order to begin the days of
rage