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Title: Manifesto against Labour Author: Krisis-Group Date: 31st of December, 1999 Language: en Topics: anti-work, marxist, not anarchist, labor, self-determination, autonomy, organization, economics Source: Retrieved on February 9th, 2015 from http://www.krisis.org/1999/manifesto-against-labour
A corpse rules society – the corpse of labour. All powers around the
globe formed an alliance to defend its rule: the Pope and the World
Bank, Tony Blair and Jörg Haider, trade unions and entrepreneurs, German
ecologists and French socialists. They don’t know but one slogan: jobs,
jobs, jobs!
Whoever still has not forgotten what reflection is all about, will
easily realise the implausibility of such an attitude. The society ruled
by labour does not experience any temporary crisis; it encounters its
absolute limit. In the wake of the micro-electronic revolution, wealth
production increasingly became independent from the actual expenditure
of human labour power to an extent quite recently only imaginable in
science fiction. No one can seriously maintain any longer that this
process can be halted or reversed. Selling the commodity labour power in
the 21st century is as promising as the sale of stagecoaches has proved
to be in the 20th century. However, whoever is not able to sell his or
her labour power in this society is considered to be “superfluous” and
will be disposed of on the social waste dump.
Those who do not work (labour) shall not eat! This cynical principle is
still in effect; all the more nowadays when it becomes hopelessly
obsolete. It is really an absurdity: Never before the society was that
much a labour society as it is now when labour itself is made
superfluous. On its deathbed labour turns out to be a totalitarian power
that does not tolerate any gods besides itself. Seeping through the
pores of everyday life into the psyche, labour controls both thought and
action. No expense or pain is spared to artificially prolong the
lifespan of the “labour idol”. The paranoid cry for jobs justifies the
devastation of natural resources on an intensified scale even if the
destructive effect for humanity was realised a long time ago. The very
last obstacles to the full commercialisation of any social relationship
may be cleared away uncritically, if only there is a chance for a few
miserable jobs to be created. “Any job is better than no job” became a
confession of faith, which is exacted from everybody nowadays.
The more it becomes obvious that the labour society is nearing its end,
the more forcefully this realisation is being repressed in public
awareness. The methods of repression may be different, but can be
reduced to a common denominator. The globally evident fact that labour
proves to be a self-destructive end-in-itself is stubbornly redefined
into the individual or collective failure of individuals, companies, or
even entire regions as if the world is under the control of a universal
idée fixe. The objective structural barrier of labour has to appear as
the subjective problem of those who were already ousted.
To some people unemployment is the result of exaggerated demands,
low-performance or missing flexibility, to others unemployment is due to
the incompetence, corruption, or greed of “their” politicians or
business executives, let alone the inclination of such “leaders” to
pursue policies of “treachery”. In the end all agree with Roman Herzog,
the ex-president of Germany, who said that “all over the country
everybody has to pull together” as if the problem was about the
motivation of, let us say, a football team or a political sect.
Everybody shall keep his or her nose to the grindstone even if the
grindstone got pulverised. The gloomy meta-message of such incentives
cannot be misunderstood: Those who fail in finding favour in the eyes of
the “labour idol” have to take the blame, can be written off and pushed
away.
Such a law on how and when to sacrifice humans is valid all over the
world. One country after the other gets broken under the wheel of
economic totalitarianism, thereby giving evidence for the one and only
“truth”: The country has violated the so-called “laws of the market
economy”. The logic of profitability will punish any country that does
not adapt itself to the blind working of total competition
unconditionally and without regard to the consequences. The great white
hope of today is the business rubbish of tomorrow. The raging economical
psychotics won’t get shaken in their bizarre worldview, though.
Meanwhile, three quarters of the global population were more or less
declared to be social litter. One capitalist centre after the other is
dashed to pieces. After the breakdown of the developing countries and
after the failure of the state capitalist squad of the global labour
society, the East Asian model pupils of market economy have vanished
into limbo. Even in Europe, social panic is spreading. However, the Don
Quichotes in politics and management even more grimly continue to
crusade in the name of the “labour idol”.
Everyone must be able to live from his work is the propounded principle.
Hence that one can live is subject to a condition and there is no right
where the qualification can not be fulfilled.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Foundations of Natural Law according to the
Principles of Scientific Theory, 1797
Should the successful sale of the commodity “labour power” become the
exception instead of the rule, a society devoted to the irrational
abstraction of labour is inevitably doomed to develop a tendency for
social apartheid. All factions of the comprehensive all-parties
consensus on labour, so to say the labour-camp, on the quiet accepted
this logic long ago and even took over a strictly supporting role. There
is no controversy on whether ever increasing sections of the population
shall be pushed to the margin and shall be excluded from social
participation; there is only controversy on how this social selection is
to be pushed through.
The neo-liberal faction trustfully leaves this dirty social-Darwinist
business to the “invisible hand” of the markets. This conception is
utilised to justify the dismantling of the welfare state, ostracising
those who can no longer keep abreast in the rat race of competition.
Only those who belong to the smirking brotherhood of globalisation
winners are awarded the quality of being a human. It goes without saying
that the capitalist end-in-itself may claim any natural resources of the
planet. When they can no longer be profitably mobilised, they have to
lie fallow even if entire populations go hungry.
The police, salvation sects, the Mafia, and charity organisations become
responsible for that annoying human litter. In the USA and most of the
central European countries, more people are imprisoned than in any
average military dictatorship. In Latin America, day after day an
ever-larger number of street urchins and other poor are hunted down by
free enterprise death-squads than dissidents were killed during the
worst periods of political repression. There is only one social function
left for the ostracised: to be the warning example. Their fate is meant
to goad on those who still participate in the rat race of fighting for
the leftovers. And even the losers have to be kept in hectic moving so
that they don’t hit on the idea to of rebelling against the outrageous
impositions they face.
Nevertheless, even at the price of self-annihilation, for most people
the brave new world of the totalitarian market economy will only provide
for a live in shadow as shadow-humans in a “shady” economy. As
low-wage-slaves and democratic serfs of the “service society, they will
have to fawn on the well-off winners of globalisation. The modern
“working poor” may shine the shoes of the last businessmen of the dying
labour society, may sell contaminated hamburgers to them, or may join
the Security Corps to guard their shopping malls. Those who left behind
their brain on the coat rack may dream of working their way up to the
position of a service industry millionaire.
In Anglo-Saxon countries this horror scenario is reality meanwhile as it
is in Third World countries and Eastern Europe; and Euroland is
determined to catch up in rapid strides. The relevant financial papers
make no secret of how they imagine the future of labour. The children in
Third World countries who wash windscreens at polluted crossroads are
depicted as the shining example of “entrepreneurial initiative” and
shall serve as a role model for the jobless in the respective local
“service desert”. “The role model for the future is the individual as
the entrepreneur of his own labour power, being provident and solely
responsible for all his own life” says the “Commission on future social
questions of the free states of Bavaria and Saxony”. In addition: “There
will be stronger demand for ordinary person-related services, if the
services rendered become cheaper, i.e. if the “service provider” will
earn lower wages”. In a society of human “self-respect”, such a
statement would trigger off social revolt. However, in a world of
domesticated workhorses, it will only engender a helpless nod.
The crook has destroyed working and taken away the worker’s wage even
so. Now he [the worker] shall labour without a wage while picturing to
himself the blessing of success and profit in his prison cell. [...] By
means of forced labour he shall be trained to perform moral labour as a
free personal act.
Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Die deutsche Arbeit (The German Labour), 1861
The anti-neoliberal faction of the socially all-embracing labour camp
cannot bring itself to the liking of such a perspective. On the other
hand, they are deeply convinced that a human being that has no job is
not a human being at all. Nostalgically fixated on the postwar era of
mass employment, they are bound to the idea of reviving the labour
society. The state administration shall fix what the markets are
incapable of. The purported normality of a labour society is to be
simulated by means of job programmes, municipally organised compulsory
labour for people on dole or welfare, subsidies, public debt, and other
policies of this sort. This half-hearted rehash of a state-regulated
labour camp has no chance at all, but remains to be the ideological
point of departure for broad stratums of the population who are already
on the brink of disaster. Doomed to fail, such steps put into practice
are anything else but emancipatory.
The ideological transformation of “scarce labour” (tight labour market)
into a prime civil right necessarily excludes all foreigners. The social
logic of selection then is not questioned, but redefined: The individual
struggle for survival shall be defused by means of ethnic-nationalistic
criteria. “Domestic treadmills only for native citizens” is the outcry
deep from the bottom of the people’s soul, who are suddenly able to
combine motivated by their perverse lust for labour. Right-wing populism
makes no secret of such sentiment. Its criticism of “rival society” only
amounts to ethnic cleansing within the shrinking zones of capitalist
wealth.
Whereas the moderate nationalism of social democrats or Greens is set on
treating the old-established immigrants like natives and can even
imagine naturalising those people should they be able to prove
themselves harmless and affable. Thereby the intensified exclusion of
refugees from the Eastern and African world can be legitimised in a
populist manner even better and without getting into a fuss. Of course,
the whole operation is well obscured by talking nineteen to the dozen
about humanity and civilisation. Manhunts for “illegal immigrants”
allegedly sneaking in domestic jobs shall not leave behind nasty
bloodstains or burn marks on German soil. Rather it is the business of
the border police, police forces in general, and the buffer states of
“Schengenland”, which dispose of the problem lawfully and best of all
far away from media coverage.
The state-run labour-simulation is violent and repressive by birth. It
stands for the absolute will to maintain the rule of the “labour idol”
by all means; even after its decease. This labour-bureaucratic
fanaticism will not grant peace to those who resorted to the very last
hideouts of a welfare state already fallen into ruins, i.e. to the
ousted, jobless, or non-competitive, let alone to those refusing to
labour for good reasons. Welfare workers and employment agents will haul
them before the official interrogation commissions, forcing them to
kow-tow before the throne of the ruling corpse.
Usually the accused is given the benefit of doubt, but here the burden
of proof is shifted. Should the ostracised not want to live on air and
Christian charity for their further lives, they have to accept
whatsoever dirty and slave work, or any other absurd “occupational
therapy” cooked up by job creation schemes, just to demonstrate their
unconditional readiness for labour. Whether such job has rhyme or
reason, not to mention any meaning, or is simply the realisation of pure
absurdity, does not matter at all. The main point is that the jobless
are kept moving to remind them incessantly of the one and only law
governing their existence on earth.
In the old days people worked to earn money. Nowadays the government
spares no expenses to simulate the labour-”paradise” lost for some
hundred thousand people by launching bizarre “job training schemes” or
setting up “training companies” in order to make them fit for “regular”
jobs they will never get. Ever newer and sillier steps are taken to keep
up the appearance that the idle running social treadmills can be kept in
full swing to the end of time. The more absurd the social constraint of
“labour” becomes, the more brutally it is hammered into the peoples’
head that they cannot even get a piece of bread for free.
In this respect “New Labour” and its imitators all over the world concur
with the neo-liberal scheme of social selection. In simulating jobs and
holding out beguiling prospects of a wonderful future for the labour
society, a firm moral legitimacy is created to crack down on the jobless
and labour objectors more fiercely. At the same time compulsory labour,
subsidised wages, and so-called “honorary citizen activity” bring down
labour cost, entailing a massively inflated low-wage sector and an
increase in other lousy jobs of that sort.
The so-called activating workfare does even not spare persons who suffer
from chronic disease or single mothers with little children. Recipients
of social benefits are released from this administrative stranglehold
only as soon as the nameplate is tied to their toe (i.e. in mortuary).
The only reason for such state-obtrusiveness is to discourage as many
people as possible from claiming benefits at all by displaying dreadful
instruments of torture – any miserable job must appear comparatively
pleasant.
Officially the paternalist state always only swings the whip out of love
and with the intention of sternly training its children, denounced as
“work-shy”, to be tough in the name of their better progress. In fact,
the pedagogical measures only have the goal to drum the wards out. What
else is the idea of conscripting unemployed people and forcing them to
go to the fields to harvest asparagus (in Germany)? It is meant to push
out the Polish seasonal workers, who accept slave wages only because the
exchange rate turns the pittance they get into an acceptable income at
home. Forced labourers are neither helped nor given any “vocational
perspective” with this measure. Even for the asparagus growers, the
disgruntled academics and reluctant skilled workers, favoured to them as
a present, are nothing but a nuisance. When, after a twelve-hour day,
the foolish idea of setting up a hot-dog stand as an act of desperation
suddenly appears in a more friendly light, the “aid to flexibility” has
its desired neo-British effect.
Any job is better than no job.
Bill Clinton, 1998
No job is as hard as no job.
A poster at the December 1998 rally, organised by initiatives for
unemployed people
Citizen work should be rewarded, not paid. [...] Whoever does honorary
citizen work clears himself of the stigma of being unemployed and being
a recipient of welfare benefits.
Ulrich Beck, The Soul of Democracy, 1997
The new fanaticism for labour with which this society reacts to the
death of its idol is the logical continuation and final stage of a long
history. Since the days of the Reformation, all the powers of Western
modernisation have preached the sacredness of work. Over the last 150
years, all social theories and political schools were possessed by the
idea of labour. Socialists and conservatives, democrats and fascists
fought each other to the death, but despite all deadly hatred, they
always paid homage to the labour idol together. “Push the idler aside”,
is a line from the German lyrics of the international working
(labouring) class anthem; “labour makes free” it resounds eerily from
the inscription above the gate in Auschwitz. The pluralist post-war
democracies all the more swore by the everlasting dictatorship of
labour. Even the constitution of the ultra-catholic state of Bavaria
lectures its citizens in the Lutheran tradition: “Labour is the source
of a people’s prosperity and is subject to the special protective
custody of the state”. At the end of the 20th century, all ideological
differences have vanished into thin air. What remains is the common
ground of a merciless dogma: Labour is the natural destiny of human
beings.
Today the reality of the labour society itself denies that dogma. The
disciples of the labour religion have always preached that a human
being, according to its supposed nature, is an “animal laborans”
(working creature/animal). Such an “animal” actually only assumes the
quality of being a human by subjecting matter to his will and in
realising himself in his products, as once did Prometheus. The modern
production process has always made a mockery of this myth of a world
conqueror and a demigod, but might have had a real substratum in the era
of inventor capitalists like Siemens or Edison and their skilled
workforce. Meanwhile, however, such airs and graces became completely
absurd.
Whoever asks about the content, meaning, and goal of his or her job,
will go crazy or becomes a disruptive element in the social machinery
designed to function as an end-in-itself. “Homo faber”, once full of
conceit as to his craft and trade, a type of human who took seriously
what he did in a parochial way, has become as old-fashioned as a
mechanical typewriter. The treadmill has to run at all cost, and “that’s
all there is to it”. Advertising departments and armies of entertainers,
company psychologists, image advisors and drug dealers are responsible
for creating meaning. Where there is continual babble about motivation
and creativity, there is not a trace left of either of them – save
self-deception. This is why talents such as autosuggestion,
self-projection and competence simulation rank among the most important
virtues of managers and skilled workers, media stars and accountants,
teachers and parking lot guards.
The crisis of the labour society has completely ridiculed the claim that
labour is an eternal necessity imposed on humanity by nature. For
centuries it was preached that homage has to be paid to the labour idol
just for the simple reason that needs can not be satisfied without
humans sweating blood: To satisfy needs, that is the whole point of the
human labour camp existence. If that were true, a critique of labour
would be as rational as a critique of gravity. So how can a true “law of
nature” enter into a state of crisis or even disappear? The floor
leaders of the society’s labour camp factions, from neo-liberal gluttons
for caviar to labour unionist beer bellies, find themselves running out
of arguments to prove the pseudo-nature of labour. Or how can they
explain that three-quarters of humanity are sinking in misery and
poverty only because the labour system no longer needs their labour?
It is not the curse of the Old Testament “In the sweat of your face you
shall eat your bread” that is to burden the ostracised any longer, but a
new and inexorable condemnation: “You shall not eat because your sweat
is superfluous and unmarketable”. That is supposed to be a law of
nature? This condemnation is nothing but an irrational social principle,
which assumes the appearance of a natural compulsion because it has
destroyed or subjugated any other form of social relations over the past
centuries and has declared itself to be absolute. It is the “natural
law” of a society that regards itself as very “rational”, but in truth
only follows the instrumental rationality of its labour idol for whose
“factual inevitabilities” (Sachzwänge) it is ready to sacrifice the last
remnant of its humanity.
Work, however base and mammonist, is always connected with nature. The
desire to do work leads more and more to the truth and to the laws and
prescriptions of nature, which are truths.
Thomas Carlyle, Working and not Despairing, 1843
Labour is in no way identical with humans transforming nature (matter)
and interacting with each other. As long as mankind exist, they will
build houses, produce clothing, food and many other things. They will
raise children, write books, discuss, cultivate gardens, and make music
and much more. This is banal and self-evident. However, the raising of
human activity as such, the pure “expenditure of labour power”, to an
abstract principle governing social relations without regard to its
content and independent of the needs and will of the participants, is
not self-evident.
In ancient agrarian societies, there were all sorts of domination and
personal dependencies, but not a dictatorship of the abstraction labour.
Activities in the transformation of nature and in social relations were
in no way self-determined, but were hardly subject to an abstract
“expenditure of labour power”. Rather, they were embedded in complex
rules of religious prescriptions and in social and cultural traditions
with mutual obligations. Every activity had its own time and scene;
simply there was no abstract general form of activity.
It fell to the modern commodity producing system as an end-in-itself
with its ceaseless transformation of human energy into money to bring
about a separated sphere of so-called labour “alienated” from all other
social relations and abstracted from all content. It is a sphere
demanding of its inmates unconditional surrender, life-to-rule,
dependent robotic activity severed from any other social context, and
obedience to an abstract “economic” instrumental rationality beyond
human needs. In this sphere detached from life, time ceases to be lived
and experienced time; rather time becomes a mere raw material to be
exploited optimally: “time is money”. Any second of life is charged to a
time account, every trip to the loo is an offence, and every gossip is a
crime against the production goal that has made itself independent.
Where labour is going on, only abstract energy may be spent. Life takes
place elsewhere – or nowhere, because labour beats the time round the
clock. Even children are drilled to obey Newtonian time to become
“effective” members of the workforce in their future life. Leave of
absence is granted merely to restore an individual’s “labour power”.
When having a meal, celebrating or making love, the second hand is
ticking at the back of one’s mind.
In the sphere of labour it does not matter what is being done, it is the
act of doing itself that counts. Above all, labour is an end-in-itself
especially in the respect that it is the raw material and substance of
monetary capital yields – the limitless dynamic of capital as
self-valorising value. Labour is nothing but the “liquid (motion)
aggregate” of this absurd end-in-itself. That’s why all products must be
produced as commodities – and not for any practical reason. Only in
commodity form products can “solidify” the abstraction money, whose
essence is the abstraction labour. Such is the mechanism of the
alienated social treadmill holding captive modern humanity.
For this reason, it doesn’t matter what is being produced as well as
what use is made of it – not to mention the indifference to social and
environmental consequences. Whether houses are built or landmines are
produced, whether books are printed or genetically modified tomatoes are
grown, whether people fall sick as a result, whether the air gets
polluted or “only” good taste goes to the dogs – all this is irrelevant
as long as, whatever it takes, commodities can be transformed into money
and money into fresh labour. The fact that any commodity demands a
concrete use, and should it be a destructive one, has no relevance for
the economic rationality for which the product is nothing but a carrier
of once expended labour, or “dead labour”.
The accumulation of “dead labour”, in other words “capital”,
materialising in the money form is the only “meaning” the modern
commodity producing system knows about. What is “dead labour”? A
metaphysical madness! Yes, but a metaphysics that has become concrete
reality, a “reified” madness that holds this society in its iron grip.
In perpetual buying and selling, people don’t interact as self-reliant
social beings, but only execute the presupposed end-in-itself as social
automatons.
The worker (lit. labourer) feels to be himself outside work and feels
outside himself when working. He is at home when he does not work. When
he works, he is not at home. As a result, his work is forced labour, not
voluntary labour. Forced labour is not the satisfaction of a need but
only a means for satisfying needs outside labour. Its foreignness
appears in that labour is avoided as a plague as soon as no physical or
other force exists.
Karl Marx, Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844
The political left has always eagerly venerated labour. It has stylised
labour to be the true nature of a human being and mystified it into the
supposed counter-principle of capital. Not labour was regarded as a
scandal, but its exploitation by capital. As a result, the programme of
all “working class parties” was always the “liberation of labour” and
not “liberation from labour”. Yet the social opposition of capital and
labour is only the opposition of different (albeit unequally powerful)
interests within the capitalist end-in-itself. Class struggle was the
form of battling out opposite interests on the common social ground and
reference system of the commodity-producing system. It was germane to
the inner dynamics of capital accumulation. Whether the struggle was for
higher wages, civil rights, better working conditions or more jobs, the
all-embracing social treadmill with its irrational principles was always
its implied presupposition.
From the standpoint of labour, the qualitative content of production
counts as little as it does from the standpoint of capital. The only
point of interest is selling labour power at best price. The idea of
determining aim and object of human activity by joint decision is beyond
the imagination of the treadmill inmates. If the hope ever existed that
such self-determination of social reproduction could be realised in the
forms of the commodity-producing system, the “workforce” has long
forgotten about this illusion. Only “employment” or “occupation” is a
matter of concern; the connotations of these terms speak volumes about
the end-in-itself character of the whole arrangement and the state of
mental immaturity of the participants comes to light.
What is being produced and to what end, and what might be the
consequences neither matters to the seller of the commodity labour power
nor to its buyer. The workers of nuclear power plants and chemical
factories protest the loudest when their ticking time bombs are
deactivated. The “employees” of Volkswagen, Ford or Toyota are the most
fanatical disciples of the automobile suicide programme, not merely
because they are compelled to sell themselves for a living wage, but
because they actually identify with their parochial existence.
Sociologists, unionists, pastors and other “professional theologians” of
the “social question” regard this as a proof for the ethical-moral value
of labour. “Labour shapes personality”, they say. Yes, the personalities
of zombies of the commodity production who can no longer imagine a life
outside of their dearly loved treadmills, for which they drill
themselves hard – day in, day out.
As the working class was hardly ever the antagonistic contradiction to
capital or the historical subject of human emancipation, capitalists and
managers hardly control society by means of the malevolence of some
“subjective will of exploitation”. No ruling caste in history has led
such a wretched life as a “bondman” as the harassed managers of
Microsoft, Daimler-Chrysler or Sony. Any medieval baron would have
deeply despised these people. While he was devoted to leisure and
squandered wealth orgiastically, the elite of the labour society does
not allow itself any pause. Outside the treadmills, they don’t know
anything else but to become childish. Leisure, delight in cognition,
realisation and discovery, as well as sensual pleasures, are as foreign
to them as to their human “resource”. They are only the slaves of the
labour idol, mere functional executives of the irrational social
end-in-itself.
The ruling idol knows how to enforce its “subjectless” (Marx) will by
means of the “silent (implied) compulsion” of competition to which even
the powerful must bow, especially if they manage hundreds of factories
and shift billions across the globe. If they don’t “do business”, they
will be scrapped as ruthlessly as the superfluous “labour force”. Kept
in the leading strings of intransigent systemic constraints they become
a public menace by this and not because of some conscious will to
exploit others. Least of all, are they allowed to ask about the meaning
and consequences of their restless action and can not afford emotions or
compassion. Therefore they call it realism when they devastate the
world, disfigure urban features, and only shrug their shoulders when
their fellow beings are impoverished in the midst of affluence.
More and more labour has the good conscience on its side: The
inclination for leisure is called “need of recovery” and begins to feel
ashamed of itself. “It is just for the sake of health”, they defend
themselves when caught at a country outing. It could happen to be in the
near future that succumbing to a “vita contemplativa” (i.e. to go for a
stroll together with friends to contemplate life) will lead to
self-contempt and a guilty conscience.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Leisure and Idleness, 1882
It is not possible to subject every sphere of social life or all
essential human activities to the rule of abstract (Newtonian) time,
even if the intrinsic logic of labour, inclusive of the transformation
of the latter into “money-substance”, insists on it. Consequently,
alongside the “separated” sphere of labour, so to say at the rear, the
sphere of home life, family life, and intimacy came into being.
It is a sphere that conveys the idea of femininity and comprises the
various activities of everyday life which can only rarely be transformed
into monetary remuneration: from cleaning, cooking, child rearing, and
the care for the elderly, to the “labour of love” provided by the ideal
housewife, who busies herself with “loving” care for her exhausted
breadwinner and refuels his emptiness with well measured doses of
emotion. That is why the sphere of intimacy, which is nothing but the
reverse side of the labour sphere, is idealised as the sanctuary of true
life by bourgeois ideology, even if in reality it is most often a
familiarity hell. In fact, it is not a sphere of better or true life,
but a parochial and reduced form of existence, a mere mirror-inversion
subject to the very same systemic constraints (i.e. labour). The sphere
of intimacy is an offshoot of the labour sphere, cut off and in its own
meanwhile, but bound to the overriding common reference system. Without
the social sphere of “female labour”, the labour society would actually
never have worked. The “female sphere” is the implied precondition of
the labour society and at the same time its specific result.
The same applies to the gender stereotypes being generalised in the
course of the developing commodity-producing system. It was no accident
that the image of the somewhat primitive, instinct-driven, irrational,
and emotional woman solidified only along with the image of the
civilised, rational and self-restrained male workaholic and became a
mass prejudice finally. It was also no accident that the self-drill of
the white man, who went into some sort of mental boot camp training to
cope with the exacting demands of labour and its pertinent human
resource management, coincided with a brutal witch-hunt that raged for
some centuries.
The modern understanding and appropriation of the world by means of
(natural) scientific thought, a way of thinking that was gaining ground
then, was contaminated by the social end-in-itself and its gender
attributes down to the roots. This way, the white man, in order to
ensure his smooth functioning, subjected himself to a self-exorcism of
all evil spirits, namely those frames of mind and emotional needs, which
are considered to be dysfunctional in the realms of labour.
In the 20th century, especially in the post-war democracies of Fordism,
women were increasingly recruited to the labour system, which only
resulted in some specific female schizophrenic mind. On the one hand,
the advance of women into the sphere of labour has not led to their
liberation, but subjected them to very same drill procedures for the
labour idol as already suffered by men. On the other hand, as the
systemic structure of “segregation” was left untouched, the separated
sphere of “female labour” continued to exist extrinsic to what is
officially deemed to be “labour”. This way, women were subjected to a
double-burden and exposed to conflicting social imperatives. Within the
sphere of labour – until now – they are predominantly confined to the
low-wage sector and subordinate jobs.
No system-conforming struggle for quota regulations or equal career
chances will change anything. The miserable bourgeois vision of a
“compatibility of career and family” leaves completely untouched the
separation of the spheres of the commodity-producing system and thereby
preserves the structure of gender segregation. For the majority of women
such an outlook on life is unbearable, a minority of fat cats, however,
may utilise the social conditions to attain a winner position within the
social apartheid system by delegating housework and child care to poorly
paid (and “obviously” feminine) domestic servants.
Due to the systemic constraints of the labour society and its total
usurpation of the individual in particular – entailing his or her
unconditional surrender to the systemic logic, and mobility and
obedience to the capitalist time regime – in society as a whole, the
sacred bourgeois sphere of so-called private life and “holy family” is
eroded and degraded more and more. The patriarchy is not abolished, but
runs wild in the unacknowledged crisis of the labour society. As the
commodity-producing system gradually collapses at present, women are
made responsible for survival in any respect, while the “masculine”
world indulges in the prolongation of the categories of the labour
society by means of simulation.
Mankind had to horribly mutilate itself to create its identical,
functional, male self, and some of it has to be redone in everybody’s
childhood
Max Horkheimer/Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
The identity of labour and bondman existence can be shown factually and
conceptually. Only a few centuries ago, people were quite aware of the
connection between labour and social constraints. In most European
languages, the term “labour” originally referred only to the activities
carried out by humans in bondage, i.e. bondmen, serfs, and slaves. In
Germanic speaking areas, the word described the drudgery of an orphaned
child fallen into serfdom. The Latin verb “laborare” meant “staggering
under a heavy burden” and conveyed the suffering and toil of slaves. The
Romance words “travail”, “trabajo”, etc., derive from the Latin
“tripalium”, a kind of yoke used for the torture and punishment of
slaves and other humans in bondage. A hint of that suffering is still
discernible in the German idiom “to bend under the yoke of labour”.
Thus “labour”, according to its root, is not a synonym for
self-determined human activity, but refers to an unfortunate social
fate. It is the activity of those who have lost their freedom. The
imposition of labour on all members of society is nothing but the
generalisation of a life in bondage; and the modern worship of labour is
merely the quasi-religious transfiguration of the actual social
conditions.
For the individuals, however, it was possible to repress the conjunction
between labour and bondage successfully and to internalise the social
impositions because in the developing commodity-producing system, the
generalisation of labour was accompanied by its reification: Most people
are no longer under the thumb of a personal master. Human
interdependence transformed into a social totality of abstract
domination – discernible everywhere, but proving elusive. Where everyone
has become a slave, everyone is simultaneously a master, that is to say
a slaver of his own person and his very own slave driver and warder. All
obey the opaque system idol, the “Big Brother” of capital valorisation,
who harnessed them to the “tripalium”.
The history of the modern age is the history of the enforcement of
labour, which brought devastation and horror to the planet in its trail.
The imposition to waste the most of one’s lifetime under abstract
systemic orders was not always as internalised as today. Rather, it took
several centuries of brute force and violence on a large scale to
literally torture people into the unconditional service of the labour
idol.
It did not start with some “innocent” market expansion meant to increase
“the wealth” of his or her majesty’s subjects, but with the insatiable
hunger for money of the absolutist apparatus of state to finance the
early modern military machinery. The development of urban merchant’s and
financial capital beyond traditional trade relations only accelerated
through this apparatus, which brought the whole society in a
bureaucratic stranglehold for the first time in history. Only this way
did money became a central social motive and the abstraction of labour a
central social constraint without regard to actual needs.
Most people didn’t voluntarily go over to production for anonymous
markets and thereby to a general cash economy, but were forced to do so
because the absolutist hunger for money led to the levy of pecuniary and
ever-increasing taxes, replacing traditional payment in kind. It was not
that people had to “earn money” for themselves, but for the militarised
early modern firearm-state, its logistics, and its bureaucracy. This way
the absurd end-in-itself of capital valorisation and thus of labour came
into the world.
Only after a short time revenue became insufficient. The absolutist
bureaucrats and finance capital administrators began to forcibly and
directly organise people as the material of a “social machinery” for the
transformation of labour into money. The traditional way of life and
existence of the population was vandalised as this population was
earmarked to be the human material for the valorisation machine put on
steam. Peasants and yeomen were driven from their fields by force of
arms to clear space for sheep farming, which produced the raw material
for the wool manufactories. Traditional rights like free hunting,
fishing, and wood gathering in the forests were abolished. When the
impoverished masses then marched through the land begging and stealing,
they were locked up in workhouses and manufactories and abused with
labour torture machines to beat the slave consciousness of a submissive
serf into them. The floating rumour that people gave up their
traditional life of their own accord to join the armies of labour on
account of the beguiling prospects of labour society is a downright lie.
The gradual transformation of their subjects into material for the
money-generating labour idol was not enough to satisfy the absolutist
monster states. They extended their claim to other continents. Europe’s
inner colonisation was accompanied by outer colonisation, first in the
Americas, then in parts of Africa. Here the whip masters of labour
finally cast aside all scruples. In an unprecedented crusade of looting,
destruction and genocide, they assaulted the newly “discovered” worlds –
the victims overseas were not even considered to be human beings.
However, the cannibalistic European powers of the dawning labour society
defined the subjugated foreign cultures as “savages” and cannibals.
This provided the justification to exterminate or enslave millions of
them. Slavery in the colonial plantations and raw materials “industry” –
to an extent exceeding ancient slaveholding by far, was one of the
founding crimes of the commodity-producing system. Here “extermination
by means of labour” was realised on a large scale for the first time.
This was the second foundation crime of the labour society. The white
man, already branded by the ravages of self-discipline, could compensate
for his repressed self-hatred and inferiority complex by taking it out
on the “savages”. Like “the woman”, indigenous people were deemed to be
primitive halflings ranking in between animals and humans. It was
Immanuel Kant’s keen conjecture that baboons could talk if they only
wanted and didn’t speak because they feared being dragged off to labour.
Such grotesque reasoning casts a revealing light on the Enlightenment.
The repressive labour ethos of the modern age, which in its original
Protestant version relied on God’s grace and since the Enlightenment on
“Natural Law”, was disguised as a “civilising mission”. Civilisation in
this sense means the voluntary submission to labour; and labour is male,
white and “Western”. The opposite, the non-human, amorphous, and
uncivilised nature, is female, coloured and “exotic”, and thus to be
kept in bondage. In a word, the “universality” of the labour society is
perfectly racist by its origin. The universal abstraction of labour can
always only define itself by demarcating itself from everything that
can’t be squared with its own categories.
The modern bourgeoisie, who ultimately inherited absolutism, is not a
descendant of the peaceful merchants who once travelled the old trading
routes. Rather it was the bunch of Condottieri, early modern mercenary
gangs, poorhouse overseers, penitentiary wards, the whole lot of farmers
general, slave drivers and other cut-throats of this sort, who prepared
the social hotbed for modern “entrepeneurship”. The bourgeois
revolutions of the 18th and 19th century had nothing to do with social
emancipation. They only restructured the balance of power within the
arising coercive system, separated the institutions of the labour
society from the antiquated dynastic interests and pressed ahead with
reification and depersonalization. It was the glorious French revolution
that histrionically proclaimed compulsory labour, enacted a law on the
“elimination of begging” and arranged for new labour penitentiaries
without delay.
This was the exact opposite of what was struggled for by rebellious
social movements of a different character flaring up on the fringes of
the bourgeois revolutions. Completely autonomous forms of resistance and
disobedience existed long before, but the official historiography of the
modern labour society cannot make sense of it. The producers of the old
agrarian societies, who never put up with feudal rule completely, were
simply not willing to come to terms with the prospect of forming the
working class of a system extrinsic to their life. An uninterrupted
chain of events, from the peasants’ revolts of the 15th and 16th
century, the Luddite uprisings in Britain, later on denounced as the
revolt of backwards fools, to the Silesian weavers’ rebellion in 1844,
gives evidence for the embittered resistance against labour. Over the
last centuries, the enforcement of the labour society and the sometimes
open and sometimes latent civil war were one and the same.
The old agrarian societies were anything but heaven on earth. However,
the majority experienced the enormous constraints of the dawning labour
society as a change to the worse and a “time of despair”. Despite of the
narrowness of their existence, people actually had something to lose.
What appears to be the darkness and plague of the misrepresented Middle
Ages to the erroneous awareness of the modern times is in reality the
horror of the history of modern age. The working hours of a modern
white-collar or factory “employee” are longer than the annual or daily
time spent on social reproduction by any pre-capitalist or
non-capitalist civilisation inside or outside Europe. Such traditional
production was not devoted to efficiency, but was characterised by a
culture of leisure and relative “slowness”. Apart from natural
disasters, those societies were able to provide for the basic material
needs of their members, in fact even better than it has been the case
for long periods of modern history or is the case in the horror slums of
the present world crisis. Furthermore, domination couldn’t get that deep
under the skin as in our thoroughly bureaucratised labour society.
This is why resistance against labour could only be smashed by military
force. Even now, the ideologists of the labour society resort to cant to
cover up that the civilisation of the pre-modern producers did not
peacefully “evolve” into a capitalist society, but was drowned in its
own blood. The mellow labour democrats of today preferably shift the
blame for all these atrocities onto the so-called “pre-democratic
conditions” of a past they have nothing to do with. They do not want to
see that the terrorist history of the modern age is quite revealing as
to nature of the contemporary labour society. The bureaucratic labour
administration and state-run registration-mania and control freakery in
industrial democracies has never been able to deny its absolutist and
colonial origins. By means of ongoing reification to create an
impersonal systemic context, the repressive human resource management,
carried out in the name of the labour idol, has even intensified and
meanwhile pervades all spheres of life. Due to today’s agony of labour,
the iron bureaucratic grip can be felt as it was felt in the early days
of the labour society. Labour administration turns out to be a coercive
system that has always organised social apartheid and seeks in vain to
banish the crisis by means of democratic state slavery. At the same
time, the evil colonial spirit returns to the countries at the periphery
of capitalist “wealth”, “national economies” that are already ruined by
the dozen. This time, the International Monetary Fund assumes the
position of an “official receiver” to bleed white the leftovers. After
the decease of its idol, the labour society, still hoping for
deliverance, falls back on the methods of its founding crimes, even
though it is already beyond salvation.
The barbarian is lazy and differs from the scholar by musing
apathetically, since practical culture means to busy oneself out of
habit and to feel a need for occupation.
Georg W. F. Hegel, General outlines of the Philosophy of Right, 1821
Actually one begins to feel [...] that this kind of labour is the best
police conceivable, because it keeps a tight rein on everybody hindering
effectively the evolution of sensibility, aspiration, and the desire for
independence. For labour consumes nerve power to an extraordinary
extent, depleting the latter as to contemplation, musing, dreaming,
concern, love, hatred.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Eulogists of Labour, 1881
The historical working class movement, which did not rise until long
after the fall of the old social revolts, did not longer struggle
against the impositions of labour but developed an over-identification
with the seemingly inevitable. The movement’s focus was on workers’
“rights” and the amelioration of living conditions within the reference
system of the labour society whose social constraints were largely
internalised. Instead of radically criticising the transformation of
human energy into money as an irrational end-in-itself, the workers’
movement took the “standpoint of labour” and understood capital
valorisation as a neutral given fact.
Thus the workers’ movement stepped into the shoes of absolutism,
Protestantism and bourgeois Enlightenment. The misfortune of labour was
converted into the false pride of labour, redefining the domestication
the fully-fledged working class had went through for the purposes of the
modern idol into a “human right”. The domesticated helots so to speak
ideologically turned the tables and developed a missionary fervour to
demand both the “right to work” and a general “obligation to work”. They
didn’t fight the bourgeois in their capacity as the executives of the
labour society but abused them, just the other way around, in the name
of labour, by calling them parasites. Without exception, all members of
the society should be forcibly recruited to the “armies of labour”.
The workers’ movement itself became the pacemaker of the capitalist
labour society, enforcing the last stages of reification within the
labour system’s development process and prevailing against the
narrow-minded bourgeois officials of the 19th and early 20th century. It
was a process quite similar to what had happened only 100 years before
when the bourgeoisie stepped into the shoes of absolutism. This was only
possible because the workers’ parties and trade unions, due to their
deification of labour, relied on the state machinery and its
institutions of repressive labour management in an affirmative way.
That’s why it never occurred to them to abolish the state-run
administration of human material and simultaneously the state itself.
Instead of that, they were eager to seize the systemic power by means of
what they called “the march through the institutions” (in Germany).
Thereby, like the bourgeoisie had done earlier, the workers’ movement
adopted the bureaucratic tradition of labour management and storekeeping
of human resources, once conjured up by absolutism.
However, the ideology of a social generalisation of labour required a
reconstruction of the political sphere. The system of estates with its
differentiation as to political “rights” (e.g. class system of
franchise), being in force when the labour system was just halfway
carried through, had to be replaced by the general democratic equality
of the finalised “labour state”. Furthermore, any unevenness in the
running of the valorisation machine, especially when felt as a harmful
impact by society as whole, had to be balanced by welfare state
intervention. In this respect, too, it was the workers’ movement who
brought forth the paradigm. Under the name “social democracy” it became
theever largest “bourgeois action group” in history, but got trapped in
its own snare though. In a democracy anything may be subject to
negotiation except for the intrinsic constraints of the labour society,
which constitute the axiomatic preconditions implied. What can be on
debate is confined to the modalities and the handling of those
constraints. There is always only a choice between Coca-Cola and Pepsi,
between pestilence and cholera, between impudence and dullness, between
Kohl and Schröder.
The “democracy” inherent in the labour society is the ever most
perfidious system of domination in history – a system of
self-oppression. That’s why such a democracy never organises its members
free decision on how the available resources shall be utilised, but is
only concerned with the constitution of the legal fabric forming the
reference system for the socially segregated labour monads compelled to
market themselves under the law of competition. Democracy is the exact
opposite of freedom. As a consequence, the “labouring humans” are
necessarily divided into administrators and subjects of administration,
employers and employees (in the true sense of the word), functional
elite and human material. The inner structures of political parties,
applying to labour parties in particular, are a true image of the
prevailing social dynamic. Leaders and followers, celebrities and
celebrators, nepotism-networks and opportunists: Those interrelated
terms are producing evidence of the essence of a social structure that
has nothing to do with free debate and free decision. It is a
constituent part of the logic of the system that the elite itself is
just a dependent functional element of the labour idol and its blind
resolutions.
Ever since the Nazis seized power, any political party is a labour party
and a capitalist party at the same time. In the “developing societies”
of the East and South, the labour parties mutated into parties of state
terrorism to enable catch-up modernisation; in Western countries they
became part of a system of “peoples’ parties” with exchangeable party
manifestos and media representatives. Class struggle is all over because
labour society’s time is up. As the labour society is passing away,
“classes” turn out to be mere functional categories of a common social
fetish system. Whenever social democrats, Greens, and post-communists
distinguish themselves by outlining exceptionally perfidious repression
schemes, they prove to be nothing but the legitimate heirs of the
workers’ movement, which never wanted anything else but labour at all
cost.
Labour has to wield the sceptre,
Serfdom shall be the idlers fate,
Labour has to rule the world as
Labour is the essence of the world.
Friedrich Stampfer, Der Arbeit Ehre (In Honour of Labour), 1903
For a short historical moment after the Second World War, it seemed that
the labour society, based on Fordistic industries, had consolidated into
a system of “eternal prosperity” pacifying the unbearable end-in-itself
by means of mass consumption and welfare state amenities. Apart from the
fact that this idea was always an idea of democratic helots – meant to
become reality only for a small minority of world population, it has
turned out to be foolish even in the capitalist centres. With the third
industrial revolution of microelectronics, the labour society reached
its absolute historical barrier.
That this barrier would be reached sooner or later was logically
foreseeable. From birth, the commodity-producing system suffers from a
fatal contradiction in terms. On the one hand, it lives on the massive
intake of human energy generated by the expenditure of pure labour power
– the more the better. On the other hand, the law of operational
competition enforces a permanent increase in productivity bringing about
the replacement of human labour power by scientific operational
industrial capital.
This contradiction in terms was in fact the underlying cause for all of
the earlier crises, among them the disastrous world economic crisis of
1929-33. Due to a mechanism of compensation, it was possible to get over
those crises time and again. After a certain incubation period, then
based on the higher level of productivity attained, the expansion of the
market to fresh groups of buyers led to an intake of more labour power
in absolute numbers than was previously rationalised away. Less labour
power had to be spent per product, but more goods were produced
absolutely to such an extent that this reduction was overcompensated. As
long as product innovations exceeded process innovations, it was
possible to transform the self-contradiction of the system into an
expansion process.
The striking historical example is the automobile. Due to the assembly
line and other techniques of “Taylorism” (“work-study expertise”), first
introduced in Henry Ford’s auto factory in Detroit, the necessary labour
time per auto was reduced to a fraction. Simultaneously, the working
process was enormously condensed, so that the human material was drained
many times over the previous level in ratio to the same labour time
interval. Above all, the car, up to then a luxury article for the upper
ten thousand, could be made available to mass consumption due to the
lower price.
This way the insatiable appetite of the labour idol for human energy was
satisfied on a higher level despite rationalised assembly line
production in the times of the second industrial revolution of
“Fordism”. At the same time, the auto is a case in point for the
destructive character of the highly developed mode of production and
consumption in the labour society. In the interest of the mass
production of cars and private car use on a huge scale, the landscape is
being buried under concrete and the environment is being polluted. And
people have resigned to the undeclared 3rd world war raging on the roads
and routes of this world – a war claiming millions of casualties,
wounded and maimed year in, year out – by just shrugging it off.
The mechanism of compensation becomes defunct in the course of the 3rd
industrial revolution of microelectronics. It is true that through
microelectronics many products were reduced in price and new products
were created (above all in the area of the media). However, for the
first time, the speed of process innovation is greater than the speed of
product innovation. More labour is rationalised away than can be
reabsorbed by expansion of markets. As a logical consequence of
rationalisation, electronic robotics replaces human energy or new
communication technology makes labour superfluous, respectively. Entire
sectors and departments of construction, production, marketing,
warehousing, distribution, and management vanish into thin air. For the
first time, the labour idol unintentionally confines itself to permanent
hunger rations, thereby bringing about its very own death.
As the democratic labour society is a mature end-in-itself system of
self-referential labour power expenditure, working like a feedback
circuit, it is impossible to switch over to a general reduction in
working hours within its forms. On the one hand, economic administrative
rationality requires that an ever-increasing number of people become
permanently “jobless” and cut off from the reproduction of their life as
inherent in the system. On the other hand, the constantly decreasing
number of “employees” is suffering from overworking and is subject to an
even more intense efficiency pressure. In the midst of wealth, poverty
and hunger are coming home to the capitalist centres. Production plants
are shut down, and large parts of arable land lie fallow. A great number
of homes and public buildings are vacant, whereas the number of homeless
persons is on the increase. Capitalism becomes a global minority event.
In its distress, the dying labour idol has become auto-cannibalistic. In
search of remaining labour “food”, capital breaks up the boundaries of
national economy and globalises by means of nomadic cut-throat
competition. Entire regions of the world are cut off from the global
flows of capital and commodities. In an unprecedented wave of mergers
and “hostile takeovers”, global players get ready for the final battle
of private entrepeneurship. The disorganised states and nations implode,
their populations, driven mad by the struggle for survival, attack each
other in ethnic gang wars.
The basic moral principle is the right of the person to his work. [...]
For me there is nothing more detestable than an idle life. None of us
has a right to that. Civilisation has no room for idlers.
Henry Ford
Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to
reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the
other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. [...] On the one side,
then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of
social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the
creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed
on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring
rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them
within the limits required to maintain the already created value as
value.
Karl Marx, Foundation of the Critique of Political Economy, 1857/8
Necessarily the crisis of labour entails the crisis of state and
politics. In principle, the modern state owes its career to the fact
that the commodity producing system is in need of an overarching
authority guaranteeing the general preconditions of competition, the
general legal foundations, and the preconditions for the valorisation
process – inclusive of a repression apparatus in case human material
defaults the systemic imperatives and becomes insubordinate. Organising
the masses in the form of bourgeois democracy, the state had to
increasingly take on socio-economic functions in the 20th century. Its
function is not limited to the provision of social services but
comprises public health, transportation, communication and postal
service, as well as infrastructures of all kind. The latter state-run or
state-supervised services are essential for the working of the labour
society, but cannot be organised as a private enterprise valorisation
process; “privatised” public services are most often nothing but state
consumption in disguise. The reason for that is that such infrastructure
must be available for the society as a whole on a permanent basis and
cannot follow the market cycles of supply and demand.
As the state is not a valorisation unit in its own and thus not able to
transform labour into money, it has to skim off money from the actual
valorisation process to finance its state functions. If the valorisation
of value comes to a standstill, the coffers of state empty. The state,
purported to be the social sovereign, proves to be completely dependent
on the blindly raging, fetishised economy specific to the labour
society. The state may pass as many bills as it wants, if the forces of
production (the general powers of humanity) outgrow the system of
labour, positive law, constituted and applicable only in relation to the
subjects of labour, leads nowhere.
As a result of the ever-increasing mass unemployment, revenues from the
taxation of earned income drain away. The social security net rips as
soon as the number of “superfluous” people constitutes a critical mass
that has to be fed by the redistribution of monetary yields generated
elsewhere in the capitalist system. However, with the rapid
concentration process of capital in crisis, exceeding the boundaries of
national economies, state revenues from the taxation of corporate
profits drain away as well. The compulsions thereby exerted by
transnational corporations on national economies, who are competing for
foreign investment, result in tax dumping, dismantling of the welfare
state, and the downgrading of environment protection standards. That is
why the democratic state mutates into a mere crisis administrator.
The more the state approaches financial emergency, the more it is
reduced to its repressive core. Infrastructures are cut down to
proportions just meeting the requirements of transnational capital. As
it was once the case in the colonies, social logistics are increasingly
restricted to a few economic centres while the rest of the territory
becomes wasteland. Whatever can be privatised is privatised, even if
more and more people are excluded from the most essential supplies.
When the valorisation of value concentrates on only a few world market
havens, a comprehensive supply system to satisfy the needs of the
population as a whole does not matter any longer. Whether there is train
service or postal service available is only relevant in respect to
trade, industry, and financial markets. Education becomes the privilege
of the globalisation winners. Intellectual, artistic, and theoretical
culture is weighed against the criterion of marketability and fades
away. A widening financing gap ruins public health service, giving rise
to a class system of medical care. Surreptitiously and gradually at the
beginning, eventually with callous candour, the law of social euthanasia
is promulgated: Because you are poor and superfluous, you will have to
die early.
In the fields of medicine, education, culture, and general
infrastructure, knowledge, skill, techniques and methods along with the
necessary equipment are available in abundance. However, pursuant to the
“subject to sufficient funds”-clause – the latter objectifying the
irrational law of the labour society – any of those capacities and
capabilities has to be kept under lock and key, or has to be demobilised
and scrapped. The same applies to the means of production in farming and
industry as soon as they turn out to be “unprofitable”. Apart from the
repressive labour simulation imposed on people by means of forced labour
and low-wage regime along with the cutback of social security payments,
the democratic state that already transformed into an apartheid system
has nothing on offer for his ex-labour subjects. At a more advanced
stage, the administration as such will disintegrate. The state apparatus
will degenerate into a corrupt “kleptocracy”, the armed forces into
Mafia-structured war gangs, and police forces into highwaymen.
No policy conceivable can stop this process or even reverse it. By its
essence politics is related to social organisation in the form of state.
When the foundations of the state-edifice crumble, politics and policies
become baseless. Day after day, the left-wing democratic formula of the
“political shaping” (politische Gestaltung) of living conditions makes a
fool of itself more and more. Apart from endless repression, the gradual
elimination of civilisation, and support for the “terror of economy”,
there is nothing left to “shape”. As the social end-in-itself specific
to the labour society is an axiomatic presupposition of Western
democracy, there is no basis for political-democratic regulation when
labour is in crisis. The end of labour is the end of politics.
The predominant social awareness deceives itself systematically about
the actual state of the labour society: Collapsing regions are
excommunicated ideologically, labour market statistics are distorted
unscrupulously, and forms of impoverishment are simulated away by the
media. Simulation is the central feature of crisis capitalism anyway.
This is also true for the economy itself.
If – at least in the countries at the heart of the Western world – it
seems that capital accumulation is possible without labour employed and
that money as a pure form is able to guarantee the further valorisation
of value out of itself, such appearance is owing to the simulation
process going on at financial markets. As a mirror image of labour
simulation by means of coercive measures imposed by the labour
administration authorities, a simulation of capital valorisation
developed from the speculative uncoupling of the credit system and
equity market from the actual economy.
Present-time labour employed is replaced by the tapping of future-time
labour that will never be employed in reality – capital accumulation
taking place in some fictitious future II so to speak. Monetary capital
that no longer can profitably be reinvested in active assets, and is
therefore unable to consume labour, has increasingly to resort to
financial markets.
Even the Fordistic boom of capital valorisation in the heydays of the
so-called “economic miracle” after World War II was not entirely
self-sustaining. As it was impossible to finance the basic preconditions
of labour society otherwise, the state turned to deficit spending to an
unprecedented extent. The credit volume raised exceeded revenue from
taxation by far. This means that the state pledged its future actual
revenue as a collateral security. On the one hand, this way an
investment opportunity for “superfluous” moneyed capital was created; it
was lent to the state on interest. The state settled interest payment by
raising fresh credit, thereby funnelling back the borrowed money into
economic circulation.
On the other hand, this implies that social security expenditure and
public spending on infrastructure was financed by way of credit. Hence,
in terms of capitalist logic, an “artificial” demand was created which
was not covered by productive labour power expenditure. By tapping its
own future, the labour society prolonged the lifetime of the Fordistic
boom beyond its actual span.
This simulative element, being in operation even in times of a seemingly
intact valorisation process, came up against limiting factors in line
with the amount of indebtedness of the state. “Public debt crisis” in
the capitalist centres as well as in Third World countries put an end to
the stimulation of economic growth by means of deficit spending and laid
the foundation for the triumphant advance of neo-liberal deregulation
policies. According to the liberal ideology, deregulation can only be
effected in line with a sweeping reduction of the public-sector share in
national product In reality costs and expenses arising from crisis
management, whether it is government spending on the repression
apparatus or national expenditure for the maintenance of the simulation
machinery, do compensate cost saving from deregulation and the reduction
of state functions. In many states, the public-sector share even
expanded as a result.
However, it was not possible to simulate the further accumulation of
capital by means of deficit spending any longer. Consequently, in the
eighties of last century, the additional creation of fictitious capital
shifted to the equity market. No longer dividend, the share in real
profit, is a matter of concern; rather it is stock price gains, the
speculative increase in value of the legal title up to an astronomical
magnitude, which counts. The ratio of real economy to speculative price
movements turned upside down. The speculative price advance no longer
anticipates real economic expansion but conversely, the bull market of
fictitious net profit generation simulates a real accumulation that no
longer exists.
Clinically dead, the labour idol is kept breathing artificially by means
of a seemingly self-induced expansion of financial markets. Industrial
corporations show profits that don’t come from operating income, i.e.
the production and sale of goods – a loss-making branch of business for
a long time – but from the “clever” speculation of their financial
departments in stocks and currency. The revenue items shown in the
budgets of public authorities are not yielded by taxation or public
borrowing, but by the keen participation of fiscal administrations in
the financial gambling markets. Families and one-person households whose
real income from wages or salaries is dropping dramatically, keep to
their spending spree habit by using stocks and prospective price gains
as a collateral for consumer credits. Once again, a new form of
artificial demand is created resulting in production and revenue “built
upon sandy ground”.
The speculative process is a dilatory tactic to defer the global
economic crisis. As the fictitious increase in the value of legal titles
is only the anticipation of future labour employed (to an astronomical
magnitude) that will never be employed, the lid will be taken off the
objectified swindle after a certain time of incubation. The breakdown of
the “emerging markets” in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe was
just a first foretaste. It is only a question of time until the
financial markets of the capitalist centres in the US, the EU (European
Union) and Japan will collapse.
These interrelations are completely distorted by the fetish-awareness of
the labour society, inclusive of traditional left-wing and right-wing
“critics of capitalism”. Fixated on the labour phantom, which was
ennobled to be the transhistorical and positive precondition of human
existence, they systematically confuse cause and effect. The speculative
expansion of financial markets, which is the cause for the temporary
deferment of crisis, is then just the other way around, detected to be
the cause of the crisis. The “evil speculators”, they say more or less
panic-stricken, will ruin the absolutely wonderful labour society by
gambling away “good” money of which they have more than enough just for
kicks, instead of bravely investing it in marvellous “jobs” so that a
labour maniac humanity may enjoy “full employment” self-indulgently.
It is beyond them that it is by no means speculation that brought
investment in real economy to a standstill, but that such investment
became unprofitable as a result of the 3rd industrial revolution. The
speculative take off of share prices is just a symptom of the inner
dynamics. Even according to capitalist logic, this money, seemingly
circulating in ever-increasing loads, is not “good” money any longer but
rather “hot air” inflating the speculative bubble. Any attempt to tap
this bubble by means of whatsoever tax (Tobin-tax, etc.) to divert money
flows to the ostensibly “correct” and real social treadmills will most
probably bring about the sudden burst of the bubble.
Instead of realising that we all become inexorably unprofitable and
therefore the criterion of profitability itself, together with the
immanent foundations of labour society, should be attacked as being
obsolete, one indulges in demonising the “speculators”. Right-wing
extremists, left-wing “subversive elements”, worthy trade unionists,
Keynesian nostalgics, social theologians, TV hosts, and all the other
apostles of “honest” labour unanimously cultivate such a cheap concept
of an enemy. Very few of them are aware of the fact that it is only a
small step from such reasoning to the re-mobilisation of the
anti-Semitic paranoia. To invoke the “creative power” of
national-blooded non-monetary capital to fight the “money-amassing”
Jewish-international monetary capital threatens to be the ultimate creed
of the intellectually dissolute left; as it has always been the creed of
the racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-American “job-creation-scheme” right.
As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great
well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its
measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use
value. [...] With that, production based on exchange value breaks down,
and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of
penury and antithesis.
Karl Marx, Foundation of the Critique of Political Economy, 1857/8
After centuries of domestication, the modern human being can not even
imagine a life without labour. As a social imperative, labour not only
dominates the sphere of the economy in the narrow sense, but also
pervades social existence as a whole, creeping into everyday life and
deep under the skin of everybody. “Free time”, a prison term in its
literal meaning, is spent to consume commodities in order to increase
(future) sales.
Beyond the internalised duty of commodity consumption as an
end-in-itself and even outside offices and factories, labour casts its
shadow on the modern individual. As soon as our contemporary rises from
the TV chair and becomes active, every action is transformed into an act
similar to labour. The joggers replace the time clock by the stopwatch,
the treadmill celebrates its post-modern rebirth in chrome-plated gyms,
and holidaymakers burn up the kilometres as if they had to emulate the
year’s work of a long-distance lorry driver. Even sexual intercourse is
orientated towards the standards of sexology and talk show boasting.
King Midas was quite aware of meeting his doom when anything he touched
turned into gold; his modern fellow sufferers, however, are far beyond
this stage. The demons for work (labour) even don’t realise any longer
that the particular sensual quality of any activity fades away and
becomes insignificant when adjusted to the patterns of labour. On the
contrary, our contemporaries quite generally only ascribe meaning,
validity and social significance to an activity if they can square it
with the indifference of the world of commodities. His labour’s subjects
don’t know what to make of a feeling like grief; the transformation of
grief into grieving-work, however, makes the emotional alien element a
known quantity one is able to gossip about with people of one’s own
kind. This way dreaming turns into dreaming-work, to concern oneself
with a beloved one turns into relationship-work, and care for children
into child raising work past caring. Whenever the modern human being
insists on the seriousness of his activities, he pays homage to the idol
by using the word “work” (labour).
The imperialism of labour then is reflected not only in colloquial
language. We are not only accustomed to using the term “work/labour”
inflationary, but also mix up two essentially different meanings of the
word. “Labour” no longer, as it would be correct, stands for the
capitalist form of activity carried out in the end-in-itself treadmills,
but became a synonym for any goal-directed human effort in general,
thereby covering up its historical tracks.
This lack of conceptual clarity paves the way for the widespread
“common-sense” critique of labour society, which argues just the wrong
way around by affirming the imperialism of labour in a positivist way.
As if labour would not control life through and through, the labour
society is accused of conceptualising “labour” too narrowly by only
validating marketable gainful employment as “true” labour in disregard
of morally decent do-it-yourself work or unpaid self-help (housework,
neighbourly help, etc.). An upgrading and broadening of the concept
labour shall eliminate the one-sided fixation along with the hierarchy
involved.
Such thinking is not at all aimed at emancipation from the prevailing
compulsions, but is only semantic patchwork. The apparent crisis of the
labour society shall be resolved by manipulation of social awareness in
elevating services, which are extrinsic to the capitalist sphere of
production and deemed to be inferior so far, to the nobility of “true”
labour. Yet the inferiority of these services is not merely the result
of a certain ideological view, but inherent in the very fabric of the
commodity-producing system and cannot be abolished by means of a nice
moral re-definition.
What can be regarded as “real” wealth has to be expressed in monetary
form in a society ruled by commodity production as an end-in-itself. The
concept of labour determined by this structure imperialistically rubs
off onto any other sphere, although only in a negative way in making
clear that basically everything is subjected to its rule. So the spheres
extrinsic to commodity production necessarily remain well within the
shadow of the capitalist production sphere because they don’t square
with economic administrative time logic even if – and strictly when –
their function is vital as it is the case with respect to “female
labour” in the spheres of “sweet” home, loving care, etc.
A moralising broadening of the labour concept instead of radical
criticism not only veils the social imperialism of the commodity
producing economy, but fits extremely well with the authoritarian crisis
management. The call for the full recognition of “housework” and other
menial services carried out in the so-called “3rd sector”, raised since
the 1970s of the last century, was focused on social benefits at the
beginning. The administration in crisis, however, has turned the table
and mobilises the moral impetus of such a claim straight against
financial hopes in making use of the infamous “subsidiarity principle”.
Singing the praise of “honorary posts” and “honorary citizen activity”
does not mean that citizens may poke about in the nearly empty public
coffers. Rather, it is meant to cover up the state’s retreat from the
field of social services, to conceal the forced labour schemes that are
already under way, and to mask the mean attempt to shift the burden of
crisis onto women. The public institutions retire from social
commitment, appealing kindly and free of charge to “all of us” from now
on to take “private” initiative in fighting one’s very own or other’s
misery and never demand financial aid. This way the definition juggle
with the still “sacred” concept of labour, widely misunderstood as an
emancipatory approach, clears the way for the abolition of wages by
retention of labour on the scorched earth of the market economy. The
steps taken by public institutions bear out that today social
emancipation cannot be achieved by means of a re-definition of labour,
but only by a conscious devaluation of the very concept.
Along with material prosperity, ordinary person-related services would
increase immaterial prosperity. The well-being of the customer will
improve if the “service provider” relieves him of cumbersome chores. At
the same time the well-being of the “service-provider” will improve
because the service rendered is likely to strengthen his self-esteem.
The rendering of an ordinary, person-related service is better for the
psyche [of the service provider] than the situation of being jobless.
Report of the “Commission on future social questions of the free states
of Bavaria and Saxony”, 1997
[...]Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by
working: the rest is yet all a hypothesis.
Thomas Carlyle, Working and not Despairing, 1843
However much the fundamental crisis of labour is repressed and made a
taboo, its influence on any social conflict is undeniable. The
transition from a society that was able to integrate the masses to a
system of selection and apartheid though did not lead to a new round of
the old class struggle between capital and labour. Rather the result was
a categorical crisis of the opposing interests as inherent in the system
as such. Even in the period of prosperity after World War II, the old
emphasis of class struggle was on the wane. The reason for that was not
that the “preordained” revolutionary subject (i.e. the working class)
had been integrated into society by means of manipulative wheelings and
dealings and the bribes of a questionable prosperity. On the contrary,
the emphasis faded because the logical identity of capital and labour as
functional categories of a common social fetish form became evident on
the stage of social development reached in the times of Fordism. The
desire to sell the commodity labour power at best price, as immanent in
the system, destroyed any transcendental perspective.
Up to the seventies of last century, the working class struggled for the
participation of ever larger sections of the population in the venomous
fruits of the labour society. Under the crisis conditions of the 3rd
Industrial Revolution however, even this impetus lost momentum. Only as
long as the labour society expanded, was it possible to stage the battle
of opposing interests on a large scale. When the common foundation falls
into ruins, it becomes more or less impossible to pursue the interests
as inherent in the system by means of joint action. De-solidarity
becomes a general phenomenon. Wage workers desert trade unions, senior
executives desert employers’ associations – everyone for himself, and
the capitalist system-god against everybody. Individualisation, so often
invoked, is nothing but another symptom of the crisis of labour society.
It is only on a micro-economic scale that interests may still be able to
combine. Inasmuch as it became somewhat of a privilege to organise one’s
very own life in accordance with the principles of business
administration, which, by the way, makes a mockery of the idea of social
emancipation, the representation of the interests of the commodity
labour power degenerated into tough lobbyism of ever smaller sections of
the society. Whoever is willing to accept the logic of labour has to
accept the logic of apartheid as well. The various trade unions focus on
ensuring that their ever smaller and very particular membership is able
to sell its skin at the cost of the members of other unions. Workers and
shop stewards no longer fight the executive management of their own
company, but the wage earners of competing enterprises and industrial
locations, no matter whether the rivals are based in the nearest
neighbourhood or in the Far East. Should the question arise who is going
to get the kick when the next internal company rationalisation becomes
due, the colleagues next door turn into foes.
The uncompromising de-solidarity is not restricted to the internal
conflicts in companies or the rivalry between various trade unions. As
all the functional categories of the labour society in crisis
fanatically insist on the logic immanent in the system, that is, that
the well-being of humans has to be a mere by-product or side effect of
capital valorisation, nowadays basically any conflict is governed by the
“St. Florian-principle”. (German saying/prayer: “Holy St. Florian,
please spare my home. Instead of that you may set on fire the homes in
my neighbourhood”. St. Florian is the patron saint of fire protection.)
All lobbyists know the rules and play the game. Any penny received by
the clients of a competing faction is a loss. Any cut in social security
payments to the detriment of others may improve one’s own prospect of a
further period of grace. Thus the old-age pensioner becomes the natural
adversary of all social security contributors, the sick person turns
into the enemy of health insurance policy holders, and the hatred of
“native citizens” is unleashed on immigrants.
This way the attempt to use opposing interests inherent in the system as
a leverage for social emancipation is irreversibly exhausted. The
traditional left has finally reached a dead end. A rebirth of radical
critique of capitalism depends on the categorical break with labour.
Only if the new aim of social emancipation is set beyond labour and its
derivatives (value, commodity, money, state, law as a social form,
nation, democracy, etc.), a high level of solidarity becomes possible
for society as a whole. Resistance against the logic of lobbyism and
individualisation then could point beyond the present social formation,
but only if the prevailing categories are referred to in a
non-positivist way.
Until now, the left shirks the categorical break with labour society.
Systemic constraints are played down to be mere ideology, the logic of
the crises is considered to be due to a political project of the “ruling
class”. The categorical break is replaced by “social-democratic” and
Keynesian nostalgia. The left does not strive for a new concrete
universality beyond abstract labour and money form, but frantically
holds on to the old form of abstract universality which they deem to be
the one and only basis for the battle of opposing interests as intrinsic
to the system. However, these attempts remain abstract and cannot
integrate any social mass movement simply because the left dodges
dealing with the preconditions and causes of the crisis of the labour
society.
This is particularly true of the call for a guaranteed citizen’s income.
Instead of combining concrete social action and resistance against
certain measures of the apartheid regime with a general programme
against labour, this demand produces a false universality of social
critique, which remains abstract, intrinsic to the system, and helpless
in every respect. The motive force behind the cut-throat competition
described above cannot be neutralised that way. The full swing of the
global labour treadmill to the end of time is ignorantly presupposed;
where should the money to finance a state-guaranteed income come from,
if not from the smooth running of the valorisation machine? Whoever
relies on such a “social dividend” (even this term speaks volumes) has
on the quiet to bank on a winner position of his “own” country in the
global free-market economy. Only the winner of the free-market world war
may be able to afford the feeding of millions of capitalistically
“superfluous” and penniless boarders for a short period; furthermore it
goes without saying that the holders of foreign passports are then
“naturally” excluded.
The do-it-yourself squad of reformism is ignorant of the capitalist
constitution of the money form in every respect. In the end, as it
becomes apparent that both the labour subject and the
commodity-consuming subject are doomed to perish, they only want to
rescue the latter one. Instead of calling into question the capitalist
way of life as such, they wish that despite crisis, the world is to be
buried under a vast column of fuming cars, ugly concrete piles, and
trashy commodities. Their main concern is that people may still be able
to enjoy the one and only miserable freedom modern humans can conceive
of: the freedom of choice in front of supermarket shelves.
Yet even this sad and reduced perspective is completely illusionary. Its
left-wing protagonists – and theoretical illiterates – have long
forgotten that capitalist commodity consumption has never been about the
satisfaction of needs, but is and has always been nothing but a function
and mere by-product of the valorisation process. When labour power
cannot be sold any longer, even essential needs are regarded as
outrageous luxury claims, which must be lowered to a minimum. That’s
why, under the circumstances of crisis, a citizen’s income-scheme will
suggest itself as a solution. As an instrument for the reduction of
government spending, it will become the cheap version of social
benefits, replacing the collapsing social insurance system. It was
Milton Friedman, the brain of neo-liberalism, who originally designed
the concept of a citizen’s income just for the reduction of public
expenditure. A disarmed left now takes up this concept as if it is a
lifeline. However, citizen’s income will become reality only as pittance
– or it will never be.
It has appeared, that from the inevitable laws of our nature some human
beings must suffer from want. These are the unhappy persons who, in the
great lottery of life, have drawn a blank.
Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798
The categorical break with labour will not find any existing,
objectively determinable social camp, as it was the case in respect to
traditional social action as inherent in the system. It is a break with
the false and misleading laws and the common-sense thinking of a “second
nature”, and by no means the only repeated and quasi-automatic execution
of the latter. Instead of that, the break requires a negating
consciousness, refusal and rebellion without being able to rely on the
backing of whatsoever “law of history”. No abstract-universal principle
can provide the point of departure, but only the repulsion of one’s very
own existence as a subject of labour and competition and the flat refuse
of a life to rule on an ever more miserable level.
For all its predominance, labour has never succeeded in completely
wiping out the disgust at the constraints brought about by this form of
social mediation. Apart from all the forms of regressive fundamentalism,
the competition complex at the heart of social Darwinism in particular,
a potential for protest and resistance does still exist. Anxiety and
uneasiness is widespread, but was repressed to the socio-psychic
subconscious and thereby silenced. For this reason, it is necessary to
clear space for intellectual and mental freedom to enable the thinking
of the unthinkable. The labour camp’s world monopoly of interpretation
must be contested. Theoretical reflection of labour can serve as a
catalyst. It is the task of theory to fiercely attack the ban on
thinking and to say loudly and clearly what nobody dares to think, but
many people sense: the labour society is nearing its end. And there is
definitely no reason to deplore its demise.
Only an explicitly formulated critique of labour along with a
corresponding theoretical debate could bring about a new public
awareness; the latter being the indispensable prerequisite for the
constitution of a social movement that puts labour critique into
practice. The interior controversies of the labour camp are exhausted
and become more and more absurd. That is why there is a dire need for a
re-determination of social conflict lines along which a social movement
against labour can form up.
It is necessary to describe in broad outline what are the possible goals
for a world beyond labour. However, it is not a canon of positivist
principles that feeds the programme against labour, rather it is the
power of negation. In the course of the enforcement of labour, the basic
means and social relations constituting life were alienated from humans.
The negation of labour society is only possible if humans re-appropriate
their capacity of social existence as social beings on an even higher
historical level. The opponents of labour will strive for the
constitution of global associations of free individuals who are ready to
wrest the means of production and existence from the labour idol’s hand
and its idle running valorisation machine in order to take charge of
social reproduction themselves. Only in struggling against the
monopolisation of all social resources and potentials for material
wealth withheld by the powers of alienation as objectified in market and
state, can social realms of emancipation be conquered.
This implies that private property must be attacked in a different way.
For the traditional left, private property was not the legal form
intrinsic to the commodity producing system, but merely an ominous and
subjective capitalist “control” over resources. That gave rise to the
absurd idea that private property could be overcome in terms of the
categories of the system itself. State property (“nationalisation”)
seemed to be the counter model of private property. The state, however,
is nothing but the outer cloak of forced community or, in other words,
the abstract generality of the socially atomised commodity producers.
Hence, state property is a form which itself is derived from private
property, no matter whether garnished with the adjective “socialist” or
not.
In the crisis of labour society, both private property and state
property become obsolete because any of them require a smoothly running
valorisation process. That is the reason why tangible assets
increasingly turn into dead assets. Industrial and legal institutions
jealously guard them and put them under lock and key to make sure that
the means of production decay rather than be made available for other
purposes. A takeover of the means of production by associations of free
individuals against the resistance of the state, its legal institutions,
and the repressive constraints exerted by them, implies that these means
of production will no longer be mobilised in the form of commodity
production for the anonymous markets.
Commodity production then will be replaced by open debate, mutual
agreement, and collective decision of all members of society on how
resources can be used wisely. It will become possible to establish the
institutional identity of producers and consumers, unheard-of and
unthinkable under the dictate of the capitalist end-in-itself. Market
and state, institutions (once) alienated from human society, will be
replaced by a graded system of councils, from town district level to the
global level, where associations of free individuals will decide about
the flow of resources in letting prevail sensual, social, and ecological
reason.
No longer will labour and “occupation” as and end-in-itself govern life,
but the organisation of the wise use of common (species) capacities
which will no longer be subjected to the control of the automatic
“invisible hand”, but will be conscious social action. The material
wealth produced will be appropriated according to needs and not
according to “solvency”. When labour vanishes, the abstract universality
of money and state will dissolve as well. A one-world society with no
need for borders will take the place of the separated nations – a world
where everybody can move freely and will be able to avail himself of
universal hospitality.
Critique of labour does not mean to coexist peacefully with the systemic
constraints and take refuge to some social niche-resort, but is in fact
a declaration of war on the prevailing order. The slogans of social
emancipation only can be: Let’s take what we need! We no longer bow
under the yoke of labour! We will no longer be down on our knees before
the democratic crisis administration! The basic prerequisite is that the
new forms of social organization (free associations, councils) are in
control of all the material and social means of social reproduction. In
that, our vision differs fundamentally from the limited goals of the
narrow-minded lobbyists of an “allotment garden” socialism.
The rule of labour brought about a split in human personality and mind.
It separates the economic subject from the citizen, the workhorse from
the party animal, abstract public life from abstract private life,
socially constituted maleness from socially constituted femaleness, and
it confronts the isolated individuals with their very own social species
capacities and social commonality as an extrinsic foreign power
dominating them. The opponents of labour are striving to overcome this
schizophrenia by means of a concrete re-appropriation of the social
context through conscious and self-reflecting human action.
Labour, by its very nature is unfree, unhuman, unsocial activity,
determined by private property and creating private property. Hence the
abolition of private property will become a reality only when it is
conceived as the abolition of labour.
Karl Marx, Draft of an Article on Friedrich List’s book: Das Nationale
System der Politischen Oekonomie, 1845
enthusiasts of labour
The opponents of labour will certainly be accused of being nothing but
dreamers. History has shown that a society that is not based on the
principles of labour, repression, free market competition, and egoism
cannot work, they will say. Do you, apologists of the prevailing order,
really want to claim that the capitalist commodity production has
brought about at least a passable life for the majority of the global
population? Do you call it “smooth working” if, due to the rapid growth
of the productive forces, billions of humans are ostracised and can
consider themselves lucky when they can survive on waste dumps? What
about those billions of other people who can only endure their harassed
life under the rule of labour in isolating themselves and numbing their
minds by exposing themselves to a constant stream of dreary
“entertainment” and fall mentally and physically sick in the end? What
about the fact that the world is made a desert currently just to breed
more money out of money? Well! That’s the way your marvellous labour
system “works”. To be honest with you, we really don’t want to cover
ourselves with the glory of such “exploits”!
Your conceit rests on your ignorance and the weakness of your memory. In
justification of your present and future crimes, you rely on the
disastrous state of the world as brought about by your earlier crimes.
It slipped your mind – actually you suppressed all memory of it – that
the state was obliged to commit mass murder to drum your false “law of
nature” into people until it became their second nature to consider it a
privilege to be employed under the orders of the system idol who drains
their life energy for the absurd end-in-itself.
It was necessary to eradicate all the institutions of social
self-organisation and self-determination constituting the old agrarian
societies before mankind was ripe to internalise the rule of labour and
selfishness. Maybe you did a thorough job. We are not over-optimistic.
We cannot know whether Pavlov’s dogs can escape from their conditioned
existence. It remains to be seen whether the decline of labour will lead
to a cure of labour-mania or to the end of civilisation.
You will argue that superseding private property and abolishing the
social constraint of earning money will result in inactivity and that
laziness will spread. So you confess that your entire “natural” system
is based on nothing but coercive force? Is this the reason why you dread
laziness as a mortal sin committed against the spirit of the labour
idol? Frankly, the opponents of labour are not against laziness. We will
give priority to the restoration of a culture of leisure, which was once
the hallmark of any society but was exterminated to enforce restless
production divested of any sense and meaning. That’s why the opponents
of labour will lose no time in shutting down all those branches of
production which only exist to let keep running the maniac end-in-itself
machinery of the commodity producing system, regardless of the
consequences.
And don’t believe that we are only talking about the car industry,
defence industry, and nuclear industry, that is to say, industries,
which are obviously a public danger. We also think of the large number
of “mental crutches” and silly fancy-goods designed to create the
illusion of a full life. Furthermore, those occupations will disappear
that only came into being because the masses of products had and have to
be forced through the bottleneck of money form and market relations. Or
do you think we will be still in need of accountants, controllers,
marketing advisers, salesmen, and advertising copywriters if things are
produced according to needs and everybody can take what he or she wants?
Why should there be revenue officers and police forces, welfare workers
and poverty administrators when there is no private property to protect,
no poverty to administer, and nobody who has to be drilled in obeying
alienated systemic constraints?
We can already hear the outcry: What about all these jobs? That’s right!
You are welcome to figure out what part of its lifetime humanity
squanders every single day in accumulating “dead labour”, in controlling
people, and in greasing the systemic machinery. Entire libraries are
cram-full of volumes describing the grotesque, repressive, and
destructive properties of things produced by the end-in-itself social
machinery. If we would only switch it off, we could bask in the sun for
hours. Don’t be afraid however. That does not mean that all activity
will cease if the coercion exerted by labour were to disappear. It is
the quality of human activity, though, that will change as soon as it is
no longer subject to a sphere of abstract (Newtonian) time flow,
divested of any meaning and a mere end-in-itself, but which can be
carried out in accord with an individual and variable time scale fitting
with one’s own way of life. The same applies to large-scale production
when people will be able to decide themselves how to organise the
procedures and sequences of operation without being subjected to the
compulsions of valorisation. Why should we allow the impertinent
impositions forced upon us by means of the “law of competition” to haunt
us? It is necessary to rediscover slowness and tranquillity.
What will not vanish are housekeeping and the care for people who became
“invisible” under the conditions of the labour society, basically all
those activities that were separated from “political economy” and
stamped “female”. Neither the preparation of a delicious meal, nor baby
care can be automated. When along with the abolition of labour the
gender segregation will dissolve, these essential activities can be
brought to the light of a conscious social (re-)organisation beyond
gender stereotypes. The repressive character of the “chores” will
dissolve as soon as people are no longer subsumed under what essentially
constitutes their life. Men and women likewise then can do those things
according to the circumstances and the actual needs.
Our contention is not that every activity will turn into pure pleasure.
Some of them will, some of them will not. It goes without saying that
there will always be necessities. But who will be scared of that if it
doesn’t consume one’s life? There will be always more that can be done
of one’s own accord. Being active is as much a need as leisure. Even
labour was not capable of wiping out this need, but exploited it for its
own ends, thereby sucking it dry like a vampire.
The opponents of labour are neither fanatics of blind activism nor do
they champion passive loafing. Leisure, dealing with necessities and
voluntary activities are to be balanced wisely, taking in account actual
needs and the individual circumstances of life. As soon as the
productive forces are freed from the capitalist constraints of labour,
disposable time for the individual will increase. Why should we spend
long hours in assembly shops or offices when machines of all kind can do
such “work”? Why should hundreds of human bodies get into a sweat when
only a few harvesters can achieve the same result? Why should we busy
our intellect with dull routine when computers can easily accomplish the
objects?
Only the lesser part of technology can be adopted in its capitalist
form, though. The bulk of technical units will have to be reshaped
because they were constructed in accordance with the narrow-minded
criterions of abstract profitability. On the other hand, for the same
reason, many technological conceptions were debarred from realisation.
Even though solar energy can be produced “just round the corner”, labour
society banks on centralised large-scale power stations at the hazard of
human life. Ecologically friendly methods of cultivation are well known
long since, but the abstract profit calculation pours thousands of toxic
substances into the water, ruins the fertile soil, and pollutes the air.
For mere “economic-administrative” reasons, construction components and
groceries are sent round the globe although most things could be
produced locally and could be delivered by short-distance
freight-traffic. For the most part, capitalist technology is just as
absurd and superfluous as the entailed expenditure of human energy
utilised in the industrial process.
We don’t tell you anything new. You do know all these things very well.
Nevertheless, you will never draw the logical consequences and will act
accordingly. You refuse to decide consciously how to make use of the
means of production, transportation, and communication wisely and which
options should be discarded because they are destructive or simply
unnecessary. The more hectically you reel off your mantra of “freedom
and democracy”, the more grimly you refuse any social freedom of choice
in respect of even essential matters because of your desire to keep on
obeying the ruling corpse of labour and its pseudo “laws of nature”.
But that labour itself, not merely in present conditions but insofar as
its purpose in general is the mere increase of wealth – that labour
itself, I say, is harmful and pernicious – follows from the political
economist’s line of argument, without his being aware of it.
Karl Marx, Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844
The abolition of labour is anything else but obscure utopia. In its
present form, global society can not survive for more than 50 or 100
years. The fact that the opponents of labour have to deal with the
clinically dead labour idol does not necessarily make their task any
easier. The more the crisis of labour society is worsening and reformist
attempts of “repair work” fail, the more the gap is widening between the
isolated and helpless monads as constituted by (capitalist) society and
the potential formation of a movement that is ready to re-appropriate
the socially constituted species capacities. The rapid degeneration of
social relations all over the world proves that the old ideas and
sentiments on labour and competition are unshaken, but are readjusted to
ever-lower standards. Step-by-step de-civilisation seems to be the
“natural” course of the crisis despite widespread discontent and unease.
Especially because of these bleak prospects, it would be fatal to
refrain from criticising labour practically by means of a comprehensive
socially all-embracing programme and to confine oneself to the scraping
of a bare living in the ruins of labour society. Criticism of labour
will only stand a chance if it swims against the tide of
de-socialisation instead of being carried away by it. The standards of
civilisation, however, cannot be defended by means of democratic
politics, but only by fighting against it.
Those who aim at the emancipatory re-appropriation and transformation of
the entire social fabric can hardly ignore the authority that has so far
organised the general conditions. It is impossible to rebel against the
expropriation of the social general capacities without heading for
confrontation with the state. The state is not only the custodian of
about 50 percent of the national social wealth, but also guarantees that
all social capacities are compulsorily subject to the dictates of
valorisation. It is a truism that the opponents of labour cannot ignore
state and politics. Yet it is also true that the opponents of labour can
not succeed in being supportive of the state.
If the end of labour implies the end of politics, a political movement
for the abolition of labour is a contradiction in terms. The opponents
of labour make demands on the state, but they do not form a political
party and will never do so. The whole point of politics is to seize
power (i.e. to become “the administration”) and to carry on with labour
society. That’s why the opponents of labour don’t want to take the
control centres of power, but want to switch them off. Our policy is
“anti-politics”.
State and politics of the modern age and the coercive system of labour
are inseparably intertwined and have to disappear side by side. The
twaddle about a renaissance of politics is just an attempt to haul back
the critique of economic terror to the right road of positivist civil
action. Self-organisation and self-determination, however, is the exact
opposite of state and politics. Winning socio-economic and cultural
freedom is not feasible in a political roundabout way, through official
channels, or other wrong tracks of this sort, but in constituting a
countersociety. Freedom neither means to be the human raw material of
the markets, nor does it mean to be the dressage horse of state
administration. Freedom means that human beings organise their social
relations on their own without the intervention and mediation of an
alienated apparatus.
According to this spirit, the opponents of labour want to create new
forms of social movement and want to occupy bridgeheads for a
reproduction of life beyond labour. It is now a question of combining a
counter-social practice with the offensive refusal of labour.
May the ruling powers call us fools because we risk the break with their
irrational compulsory system! We have nothing to lose but the prospect
of a catastrophe that humanity is currently heading for with the
executives of the prevailing order at the helm. We can win a world
beyond labour.
Workers of all countries, call it a day!