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Title: Work Community Politics War Author: prole.info Date: 2005 Language: en Topics: libertarian communism, politics, community, anti-capitalism, work, war, anti-work, anti-politics, anti-community Source: Retrieved on December 2, 2017 from http://prole.info/
“Everyone is asked their opinion about every detail in order to prevent
them from having one about the totality.”
--Raoul Vaneigem
We look around us and see a world beyond our control.
Our daily struggle to survive takes place against an immense and
constantly shifting backdrop…
…moving from natural disaster to terrorist attack… from new diet to new
famine… from celebrity sex scandal to political corruption scandal… from
religious war to economic miracle… from tantalizing new advertisement to
clichés on tv complaining about the government… from suggestions on how
to be the ideal lover to suggestions on how to keep sports fans from
rioting… from new police shootings to new health problems…
The same processes are at work everywhere…
...in democratic and in totalitarian governments… in corporations and in
mom n’ pop businesses... in cheeseburgers and in tofu… in opera, in
country music and in hip hop… in every country and in every language… in
prisons, in schools, in hospitals, in factories, in office towers, in
war zones and in grocery stores...
Something is feeding off our lives and spitting back images of them in
our faces.
That something is the product of our own activity… our everyday working
lives sold hour after hour, week after week, generation after
generation.
We don’t have property or a business we can make money from, so we are
forced to sell our time and energy to someone else. We are the modern
day working class—the proles.
"Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking
living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks."
–Karl Marx
We don’t work because we want to. We work because we have no other way
to make money. We sell our time and energy to a boss in order to buy the
things we need to survive.
We are brought together with other workers and assigned different tasks.
We specialize in different aspects of the work and repeat these tasks
over and over again. Our time at work is not really part of our lives.
It is dead time controlled by our bosses and managers. During our time
at work we make things that our bosses can sell. These things are
objects like cotton shirts, computers and skyscrapers or qualities like
clean floors and healthy patients or services like having a bus take you
where you want to go, having a waiter take your order or having someone
call you at home to try to get you to buy things you don’t need. The
work is not done because of what it produces. We do it to get paid, and
the boss pays us for it to make a profit.
At the end of the day the bosses re-invest the money we make them, and
enlarge their businesses. Our work is stored up in the things our bosses
own and sell—capital. They are always looking for new ways to store up
our activity in things, new markets to sell them to, and new people with
nothing to sell but their time and energy to work for them. What we get
from work is enough money to pay for rent, food, clothes and beer—enough
to keep us coming back to work.
When we’re not at work, we spend time traveling to or from work,
preparing for work, resting up because we’re exhausted from work or
getting drunk to forget about work. The only thing worse than work, is
not having it. Then we waste our weeks away looking for work, without
getting paid for it. If welfare is available, it is a pain-in-the-ass to
get and is never as much as working. The constant threat of unemployment
is what keeps us going to work everyday. And our work is the basis of
this society. The power our bosses get from it expands every time we
work. It is the dominant force in every country in the world.
At work we are under the control of our bosses, and of the markets they
sell to. But an invisible hand imposes a work-like discipline and
pointlessness on the rest of our lives as well. Life seems like a kind
of show we watch from the outside, but have no control over. All sorts
of other activities tend to become as alienating, boring and stressful
as work: housework, schoolwork, leisure. That’s capitalism.
“Of course, the capitalists are very much satisfied with the capitalist
system. Why shouldn't they be? They get rich by it.”
--Alexander Berkman
Work is experienced very differently depending on which side of it
you’re on. For our bosses, work is the way that they get their money to
make more money. For us, work is a miserable way to survive. The less
they pay us, the less we make. The faster they can get us to work, the
harder we have to work. Our interests are opposed, and there is a
constant struggle between bosses and workers at work—and in the rest of
the society based on work. The more we pay in rent or bus fare, the more
we have to work to pay our rent or bus fare.
The current state of wages, benefits, hours and working conditions as
well as politics, art and technology is a result of the current state of
this class struggle. Simply standing up for our own interests in this
struggle, is the starting point of undermining capitalism.
“Well, it is about time that every rebel wakes up to the fact that "the
people" and the working class have nothing in common.”
--Joe Hill
Civilization is deeply divided. Most of us spend most of our time
working and are mostly poor, while the owners, who are mostly rich,
manage and profit off our work. All the communities and institutions of
society are built up around this basic division. There are racial,
cultural and language divisions and communities. There is division and
community around sex and age. There is the community of the nation and
citizenship, as well as the division between nations and those with and
without citizenship. We are divided and united around religion and
ideology. We are brought together to buy and sell on the market. Some of
these identities have been around for millennia. Some are a direct
result of the way we work today. But they are all now organized around
capital. They are all used to help our bosses accumulate more of our
dead time stored up in things, and to keep the basic division of this
society from tearing it apart. Poor people from one country can be made
to identify with their bosses from the same country and can be made to
fight poor people from other countries. Workers have a harder time
organizing a strike with workers who look different and speak a
different language, especially if one group thinks it’s better than the
other. These divisions and communities are reflected in and reflect the
division of labor at work.
While these divisions and exclusive communities are being pushed on us
from one side, an all-inclusive human community is sold to us from the
other. This community is just as imaginary and false. It denies the
basic division of society. Business owners run the government and the
media, the schools and prisons, the welfare offices and the police. We
have our lives run by them. The newspapers and television put forward
their view of the world. Schools teach about the great (or unfortunate)
history of their society and produce a spectrum of graduates and
dropouts fit for different kinds of work. The government provides
services to keep their society running smoothly. And when all else
fails, they have the police, the prisons and the army.
This is not our community.
“Such power as the bourgeoisie still possesses in this period resides in
the proletariat’s lack of autonomy and independence of spirit.”
--Anton Pannekoek
They organize us against each other, but we can organize ourselves
against them.
The whole point of talking about class and “the proles” is to insist on
the very basic way in which people from different “communities” have
essentially similar experiences, and to show that people from the same
“communities” should in fact hate each other. This is the starting point
to fighting the existing communities. When we begin to fight for our own
interests we see that others are doing the same thing. Prejudices fall
away, and our anger is directed where it belongs. We are not weak
because we are divided. We are divided because we are weak.
The existing communities become irrelevant as they are attacked, and
they are attacked by becoming irrelevant. Racism and sexism are
unappealing, when working men and women of different races are fighting
their class enemies side by side. And that fight becomes more effective
by involving people from different “communities”. There will be no need
for a stand-in for everything that can be bought and sold—money--when
there is no need to measure work time stored in those things. This could
only happen when we make and do things because there is a need for them
and not in order to exchange them. There will be no need for a
government to manage society, when society is not divided between
management and workforce—when people can run their lives themselves.
There will be no need for national or racial communities—and there could
be a human community—when society is not divided into rich and poor. The
way to create these conditions is to fight the existing conditions.
This tendency to create community by fighting against the conditions of
our lives—and therefore against work, money, exchange, borders, nations,
governments, police, religion, and race—has at times been called
“communism”.
“The more we are governed, the less we are free.”
--The Alarm (anarchist newspaper from Chicago in the 1880s)
The government is the model for political activity. Politicians
representing different countries, regions, or “communities” battle with
each other. We are encouraged to support the leaders we disagree with
least, and we're never really surprised when they screw us over. All a
politician’s working class background or radical ideals are worthless
once they begin to govern. No matter who is in government, government
has its own logic. The fact that this society is divided into classes
with opposing interests means that it is always at risk of tearing
itself apart. The government is there to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Whether the government is a dictatorship or a democracy, it holds all
the guns and will use them against its own population to make sure that
we keep going to work.
Not that long ago, an extremely unstable situation in a particular
country could be diffused by nationalizing all of a country’s
industries, creating a police state, and calling it “communism”. This
kind of capitalism proved to be less efficient and less flexible than
good old-fashioned free market capitalism. With the fall of the Soviet
Union, there is no longer a Red Army to march in and stabilize countries
in this way, and Communist parties around the world are becoming simple
social democrats.
A working class political party is a contradiction in terms—not because
the membership of a particular party can’t be largely working class, but
because the most it can do is give the working class a voice in
politics. It lets our representatives put forward ideas on how our
bosses should run this society--how they can make money and keep us
under control. Whether they are advocating nationalization or
privatization, more welfare or more police (or both), the programs of
political parties are different strategies for managing capitalism.
Unfortunately, politics also exists outside of government. Community
leaders, professional activists and unions want to place themselves
between workers and bosses and be the mediators, the negotiators, the
means of communication, the representatives, and ultimately the
peacemakers. They fight to keep this position. In order to do that, they
need to mobilize the working class in controlled ways to put pressure on
more business-oriented politicians, at the same time offering business a
workforce that is ready to work. This means that they have to disperse
us when we start to fight back. Sometimes they do this by negotiating
concessions, other times by selling us out. Politicians always call on
us to vote, to sit back and let the organizer negotiate, to fall in line
behind the leaders and the specialists in a kind of passive
participation. These non-governmental politicians offer the government a
way to maintain the status quo peacefully, and in return they get jobs
managing our misery.
Political groups are bureaucratic. They tend to mirror the structures of
work where activity is controlled from the outside. They create
specialists in politics. They are built on a division between leaders
and led, between representatives and represented, between organizers and
organized. This is not a bad choice of how to set up organizations, to
be remedied with a large dose of participatory democracy. It is a direct
result of what political groups and activities are trying to do--to
manage a part of capitalism.
The only thing that interests us about politics is its destruction.
"Anarchism is not a beautiful utopia, nor an abstract philosophical
idea, it is a social movement of the labouring masses."
–--Dyelo Truda Group
When we start to fight against the conditions of our lives, a completely
different kind of activity appears. We do not look for a politician to
come change things for us. We do it ourselves, with other working class
people.
Whenever this kind of working class resistance breaks out, politicians
try to extinguish it in a flood of petitions, lobbying and election
campaigns. But when we are fighting for ourselves, our activity looks
completely different from theirs. We take property away from landlords
and use it for ourselves. We use militant tactics against our bosses and
end up fighting with the police. We form groups where everyone takes
part in the activity, and there is no division between leaders and
followers. We do not fight for our leaders, for our bosses or for our
country. We fight for ourselves. This is not the ultimate form of
democracy. We are imposing our needs on society without debate—needs
that are directly contrary to the interests and wishes of rich people
everywhere. There is no way for us to speak on equal terms with this
society.
This tendency of working class struggles to go outside and against the
government and politics, and to create new forms of organization that do
not put our faith in anything other than our own ability, has at times
been called “anarchism”.
"Let us devastate the avenues where the wealthy live.”
--Lucy Parsons
So we’re in a war—a class war.
There is no set of ideas, proposals, and organizational strategies that
can bring victory. There is no solution outside of winning the war.
So long as they have the initiative, we are separated, and passive. Our
response to the conditions of our lives is individual: quitting our
jobs, moving to neighborhoods with cheaper rent, joining subcultures and
gangs, suicide, buying lottery tickets, drug abuse and alcoholism, going
to church. Their world looks like the only possibility. Any hope for
change is lived on an imaginary level—separated from our everyday lives.
It’s business as usual, with all the crisis and destruction that this
implies.
When we go on the offensive we begin to recognize each other and to
fight collectively. We use the ways that society depends on us to
disrupt it. We strike, sabotage, riot, desert, mutiny and take over
property. We create organizations in order to amplify and coordinate our
activities. All kinds of new possibilities open up. We grow more daring
and more aggressive in pursuing our own class interests. These do not
lie in forming a new government, or becoming the new boss. Our interests
lie in ending our own way of life—and therefore the society that is
based on that way of life.
We are the working class who want to abolish work and class. We are the
community of people who want to tear the existing community apart. Our
political program is to destroy politics. In order to do that, we have
to push the subversive tendencies that exist today until we have
completely remade society everywhere. This has at times been called
“revolution”.