Theses for Liberation from Work

Theses

Published by the Italian Council Communist Organization "Organizzazione Consiliare" in October 1970 and distributed as a leaflet in Turin, this text calls for the abolition of work through Workers' Councils.

Submitted by Indo_Ansh on December 14, 2024

1. The ideology of work is the stratagem with which repressive society succeeds in delaying the already possible general transition to a classless society free from the slavery of work.

2. The world market in its final phase: the exchange of material products exists only as an economic form in the process of being overcome; the most evolved form, now realized on a planetary scale, is the EXCHANGE OF IDEOLOGICAL GOODS.

3. Ideologies, the foundation of the current wealth of nations, are commodities in their modern version: their value is given by the time of consensus that they are able to guarantee. They are the form in which capital manifests itself and it is through them that power is exercised.

4. The ideology exchanged between states, the communist ones not excluded, is then distributed to the proletariat to be consumed. It is imposed in the form of NATURAL LAW: work as a continuous curse and production as an ineluctable necessity.

5. The logic of work, however, contains the conditions for its total overcoming. Capital could today reduce working time by half: the so-called revolutionary forces include in their objectives the progressive reduction of working time because they represent the permitted dissent.

6. The imposed production of material goods and the imposed consumption of ideological goods are identified and the wage earner occupies his 24 hours alternately in one or the other form. The working day is now 24 hours long: productive life and daily life now coincide in their misery.

7. No form of wage labor, although one can eliminate the inconveniences of the other, can eliminate the inconveniences of wage labor itself. It is therefore essential that thought be armed in the streets.

8. In the proletarian revolt of Reggio Calabria, as before it in Caserta and Battipaglia, this happened. The proletariat constituted itself in TEPPA to launch its conscious challenge to the unconsciousness of the established order. The solitude of the proletariat and the obscene and grinning face of its insurrections leave its oppressors and its false protectors dismayed.

9. Agostino's Neapolitan friends and the Calabrian devastators have made it clear, for the last time, that the new spontaneous struggle begins under the criminal aspect and that it launches into the DESTRUCTION OF THE MACHINES OF PERMITTED CONSUMPTION.

10. Today in Reggio the reasons for revolt are defined as “futile”. In fact the proletariat has no particular reasons to rebel because it has ALL of them; it has no particular requests to address to power because its objective is the destruction of ALL POWER other than that exercised by the PROLETARIAN COUNCILS.

11. The Proletarian Councils will ask for nothing less than the destruction of this society, the abolition of work, the violent elimination of every separate institution (school, factory, prison, church, party, etc.) since the decision-making power of each individual will exist in the UNITARY AND ABSOLUTE power of the Councils.

12. The Proletarian Councils will be nothing but the beginning of the construction by all of a free and happy LIFE, today relegated to the desires and dreams produced by the unhappiness of the current SURVIVAL.

13. Conscious proletarians, let the curse of work be cursed, let the inevitability of production become its mourning.

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