Communiqué #4: Abolish Work

Day 1,294, 08:15 Published in Spain United Kingdom by Johnobrow
'Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy.' - Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy.

There is nothing more incompatible with capitalist exploitation than laziness. Capitalism, both here in eRepublik and in "Real Life", functions via the appropriation of both our productive value and our desires, our pursuit of pleasure. Our appropriated products and desires, in other words the representation of real life, are sold back to us - for a profit.

This is the key to capitalist exploitation. Work and consumption. This is the real meaning of fetishism - working when work maintains the system that exploits us, and consuming when consumption denies us the real life we desire. Our productive power and our desires do not belong to capital, to capitalists, to the Spectacle. If we do not possess them it is only because they are stolen from us - but they can only be stolen when we work and consume. Here then is the key to escaping the void of alienation that capitalism creates; laziness.

'Laziness in capitalist society implies refusal to do, an active assertion of an alternative practice. Doing, in the sense in which we understand it here, includes laziness and the pursuit of pleasure, both of which are very much negative practices in a society based on their negation. Refusal to do, in a world based on the conversion of doing into work, can be seen as an effective form of resistance.'
- Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power.

Real life is found in space outside capitalist forms of social relations, outside the workplace and Spectacle, outside the arenas of work and consumption. This is where we have to escape to, the secret elsewhere. And this is the meaning of revolution - escape. For what is the negation of capitalist forms of social relations if not revolution? And what is it we replace them with if not communism?

When workers go on strike they reveal, for a limited time at least, an alternative practice. They reveal more than the fact another world is possible, they reveal that in fact another world is already here - we just have to escape to it. The struggle is staying there. The question we should ask ourselves is; why do strikes ever end? When strikes show us how clearly we don't have to work if we organise ourselves autonomously; why do we ever go back to work?

P.S. The Insurrection is coming.