What is "on-topic?"

[Aeon Flux]

::

I presume that dialogues such as the following:

"Which Net?"

"THE Net."

"Bad Net! No supper for you."

which one day was recorded by alt.baka.sailor-moon ARE in fact
highly on-topic.

"Artificial Intelligence is far better than Natural Imbecility."

[AndrAIa --- "ReBoot"]

\\\\\\\\\\\\

Gruppe Krisis

Manifesto Against Labour


1. The rule of dead 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


2. The neo-liberal apartheid society

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


3. The neo-welfare-apartheid-state

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


4. Exaggeration and denial of the labour religion

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


5. Labour is a coercive social principle

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


6. Labour and capital are the two sides of the same coin

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


7. Labour is patriarchal rule

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


8. Labour is the service of humans in bondage

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".


9. The bloody history of labour

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


10. The working class movement was a movement for labour

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


11. The crisis of labour

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


12. The end of politics

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.


13. The casino-capitalist simulation of labour society

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


14. Labour can not be redefined

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


15. The crisis of opposing interests

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


16. The abolition of labour

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


17. A programme on the abolishment of labour directed against the
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


18. The struggle against labour is anti-politics

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!

[&-B!to St@a]

First, I'd like to say I read your article (back when you
linked to it on a website) and that I actually agreed with it.
But to answer your question, judging by the groups you've
cross-posted it to, it's not "on-topic" because it doesn't
involve anime or other members of this group in any way,
shape, or form.

In short, to make it on-topic, simply add a line that mentions
anime ;).

[Roehl Sybing]

"Aeon Flux" <i2j2k2minus1@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:49b0a2c3.0301300959.5cfe9023@posting.google.c om...
>
> I presume that dialogues such as the following:

[snip]

Are you still here? *shrugs*
---
Roehl Sybing - (917) 741-5355
infiniteDeferral - http://www.infinitedeferral.com/
Webmaster, 2003 YDA National Convention - http://www.buffaloniagara2003.org/

[Chris Mattern]

Aeon Flux wrote:
> ::
>
> I presume that dialogues such as the following:
>
> "Which Net?"
>
> "THE Net."
>
> "Bad Net! No supper for you."
>
> which one day was recorded by alt.baka.sailor-moon ARE in fact
> highly on-topic.
>

That's alt. You can try to struggle against the idiocy in alt,
but it's a lost cause. (not that it's much better here)

< long rationalization of "Why I deserve to get everything I want
for free" snipped >

Chris Mattern