Abolish Wage Labor

Abolish
Wage Labor

Capital allows us only one kind of productive activity:
wage-earning people have to be broken in for years before they are
willing to accept the loss of 1/3 of their time to working, not to
mention the other 2/3 of their time which is spent recuperating from
work. Ideologists maintain that work is necessary, because they
equate commodity-production with social wealth. But nowadays being
rich doesn’t necessarily mean that you lead an exciting life; it
just means that you own a lot of objects.

Society leads proletarians to believe that, if they work hard
enough, they can lead this mythical “good life,” thereby
condemning them to mind-numbing work at some idiotic activity with
the goal of obtaining ridiculous objects.

All those hours lost on the job, all those unfulfilled desires,
and in return, a salary, the reward for having participated in
commodity-produciton. And the only thing one can do with this reward
is acquire more commodities. A salary gives access only to what is
marketable. Unfortunately there is no way that it can make life any
more fulfilling.

The things we give up in order to work are never returned to us.
The misery of consumerism is a direct reply to the misery of work.

Any non-wage-earning activity takes on an inhuman quality:
drinking becomes alcoholism, to rest is to vegetate, and to learn is
to consume ideology. Physical and intellectual interests become
manias: the appreciation of games becomes fan hysteria, fishing and
hunting are only poor excuses for adventurous activities, hobbies
only mimicry of parcellized labor.

If we have to work, the reasons are not natural, but social. The
work society and the class society are one and the same. The master
wants the slave to produce, because only what is produced can be
owned. The capitalist doesn’t give a shit about the pleasure
possible in any activity, because this pleasure cannot be stocked up,
accumulated or translated into money.
When we work we are
totally subservient to an outside authority. Our existence has
little, if any, sense, its purpose being the production of
merchandise.

Since its beginnings capitalism has relentlessly revolutionized
its methods of production and increased work productivity. All this
mechanization hasn’t done much to alleviate humanity’s distress.
Jobs requiring dexterity and close attention have been progressively
eliminated, not so that workers may engage in more rewarding
activities, but in order to make every producer a wage-slave. When
you look at wage-earning in general, you see that between the day
laborer and the engineer, the difference is only in the degrees of
misery, and more importantly in the kinds of illusions the individual
has about his or her life. For all those whose major activity
consists in shuffling papers, working out insoluble and absurd
problems, in smiling and grovelling on command, in communicating
out-dated knowledge or in guarding gold bars, factories, lawns,
children etc… For these people, work is not only pain, effort or
abusive work paces, it is also emptiness, boredom, uselessness and
futility.

Anyone can see how a worker is shaped by his or her job. The
parcellisation of tasks, the habit of obedience, have repercussions
in the way a person is or the way s/he thinks. For wage-earners, the
meaning of their relationship with society is lost, and with that
their relationship to their own activity. Capital is a living
contradiction. On the one hand, it strives for the reduction of
work-time, and on the other hand, it proclaims work as the only
source and measure of wealth. The proletarian, primary victim of the
commodity economy, is also the one who perpetuates this economy by
looking for ways to ease misery: junk food and video bliss to escape
boredom and Off Track Betting so that there’s always hope. There
you have it, the affluent society, the per capita income that the
system is so proud of! Since when is a cripple better off than
someone in perfect health just because he owns a wheelchair?

There are an increasing number of work activities that are no
longer directed towards satisfying even the most alienated consumer
needs. They prostitute themselves directly to capital. Can there be
any human significance to the activities of a policeman, a soldier, a
bank employee or even a distributive or advertising worker?

Never before has society had such formidable means at its
disposal, and never have these been used in such a demented and
inhuman way. Every day millions of people spin the web that holds
them prisoners.

Recession and unemployment reveal even more clearly the absurdity
of the wage-society, which consists at the same time in intense
exploitation and incredible waste. Unemployment is only one of the
subdivisions of wage-labor. By no means is it the negation of work,
it’s just work at degree zero. Nonetheless, unemployment has lost
some of its ability to neutralize worker combativity: the growing
contempt and disaffection for work bear witness to this fact.

Communist revolution is not just a modification of the status of
property, nor is it just a change in the distribution of wealth. More
than anything else it is the expression of a radical transformation
which modifies human relationships themselves, the relationships
existing between people and the products of their activities, and the
exchanges between nature and society.

There is no reason in the world that today, human activity should
be confined to working. The solution to the problem is certainly not
a return to a more primitive life. On the contrary fantastic
developments have taken place in knowledge and technology; the
solution lies in their utilization.

Some specialists claim that even thirty years ago a major portion
of the means of production could have been completely automated. With
the technological developments that have taken place since, even more
would be possible today.

The only reason that automation has been limited to so few of its
possible uses is that corporations have not found it financially
feasible, since automation demands long term capital investments that
prevent a rapid rotation of capital.

Today, refraining from expanding automation is called “charity”.
Tomorrow, when it’s necessary to automate in order to keep up
expansion and profit rates, the pink slips will be handed out in the
name of progress and economic necessity. Man and machine are
competitors on the market of “factors of production”. This is the
case because in capitalist production, human being and object, the
living and mechanical materials of production, have a comparable
use-value: both are only cogwheels. But capital as the expression of
a social relation, cannot completely reduce people to robots, it
cannot rid the process of production of the human factor, it cannot
reduce itself to a community of objects that can reproduce
themselves. This limit is imposed by the fact that value- and
work-time are at the base of the economic regulation of the system.

Communism does not mean the replacement of human beings by
machines, it means using the possibilities offered by modern
technology in order to bring about a change in the possibilities of
human activity.

Conflicts inherent to the society we now live in; conflicts
between work time and free time, between production, apprenticeship
and schooling, between what is experienced and what is attempted,
these will be void of any meaning in communist society. We’re not
talking about some idyllic vision of the disappearance of all
struggle and all suffering. It’s just that it’s important to show
what possibilities exist in this world.

When we demand the abolition of wage-slavery, we are only using
theoretical terms to express a movement that is already materializing
before our very eyes, in wild-cat strikes, or riots, when American
factory workers foul up assembly lines, and Polish workers loot state
stores, when the effort is justified by passion, when wage earners
disobey the mummies that govern them. When this happens, prattling
gives way to speech, because people finally have things to say to
each other and experiences to share. This movement is not a product
of chance or a surprising historical coincidence. It’s the point of
development of the productive forces at which the order of the day is
the refusal of work, the undermining of traditional values, and most
important of all, rising above the taste for sacrifice and alienated
effort. Historical possibilities, trapped within the
commodity-economy, are preparing the ground for the last revolution:
the result will be an international proletarian struggle against
wage-slavery and all those who defend it.

Made by Workers Against Work for Social Warfare,