Abolish Work

Abolish Restaurants Plus Work

• Publisher: Pm Press E Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781604869958
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Finally available for the first time in a single book format, Abolish Work combines two influential and well-circulated pamphlets written from the frontlines of the class war. The texts from the anonymous workers at Prole.info offer cutting-edge class analysis and critiques of daily life accompanied by uncensored, innovative illustrations. Moving from personal thoughts and interactions to large-scale political and economic forces, Abolish Work reads alternately like a worker's diary, short story, historical account and an angry political flyer.

work

community

politics

war

“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 . . .

62

. . . 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-and-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.

63

WORK

“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like,
only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the
more, the more labour it sucks.”

Karl Marx

64

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; 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.

65

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.

66

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 every day.

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.

67

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.

68

All sorts of other activities tend to become as alienating, boring, and stressful as work: housework, schoolwork, leisure. That’s capitalism.

69

ANTI-WORK

“Of course, the capitalists are very much satisfied with the
capitalist system. Why shouldn’t they be? They get rich by it.”

Al...