AGAINST THE LOGIC OF WORK: a revolutionary manifesto intended to be taken lightly

1. Among the Undead

Today, very few people truly live.
Very few few people experience the vitality of their becoming in the present moment.
Very few people reach out to grasp the energy of their desire in order to create that becoming...

Instead, they work.

2. Sleepwalking

I may dream of a world through which unique beings gracefully wend their way, every move, every passage through the streets, the gardens, the wilds,
a dance, a game , a voyage in an endless adventure.
But this daydream itself is belied by reality as my wandering mind is shocked back into my lurching body just in time to avoid crashing into some other distracted sleepwalker.
Such a graceless, joyless world, this world of work.
Not the world of a dance or an elegant game or a voyage into the unknown,
but of bouncing atoms and grinding gears and lock-step marches toward death.
Not lives created joyfully in complicity and conflict, with spontaneous intent,
but survival acted out habitually, in roles already set, where somnambulists thoughtlessly fall into place,
gears in a machine whose purpose eludes them.
But all that really matters is that it works...
that you work...
that I work...

3. My Revolution

And so my revolution--
any anarchist revolution--
any revolution that intends to take back life here and now--
requires the destruction of work...
IMMEDIATELY!

4. Revolutionary Work?!?

No revolution to date has managed to eradicate work,
because even the revolutionaries most hostile to work have failed to imagine a revolution free from its logic...
Working against work, their efforts are doomed.
So it is necessary to know what work is and how its logic operates.

5. The Work Ethic

"Those who do not work shall not eat."
This hellish christian motto sums up the work ethic perfectly.
Small-minded and small-hearted, pathetic and miserly,
it is the feeble morality of the shopkeeper frightened of the clever thief or daring robber.
It is the threat of the police--the slave driver's whip of our times...
And it is easy to reject this self-serving ethic of grasping, narrow-minded bigots.
Far more difficult is seeing through to work's logic,
beyond the bigots, to their masters...

6. Undercover Slavery

The logic of work remains hidden, veiled, operating undercover, because it functions through alienated activity.
When you and I act out of habit,
without thinking for ourselves,
repeating the same banal motions,
we are sleepwalkers,
somnambulists...
When you and I sell our activity for a cause we do not know,
we are slaves...
somnambulant slaves...
zombies...
This is alienation, where the aims, the goals, the products of our activities are strangers to us.
And this is why the logic of work remains well-hidden,
operating undercover
through the judgments of the work ethic.

7. A Limited Attack

And perhaps this is also why the enemies of work have mostly just attacked the work ethic.
In this limited attack, all that is opposed to work is leisure,
the time of idleness,
of inconsequential activity.
The battle is then merely quantitative--
a reduction of work-hours,
an increase in leisure time--
a withering away of work,
perhaps even to zerowork...
but still within the framework of the world of work and its logic.

8. The Logic of Work

The logic of work can be summed up in this way:
All activity of consequence must have a goal, an end.
And so every activity is to be judged and valued in terms of its end product.
This product takes precedence over the creative process,
causing the non-existent future to dominate the present.
Immediate satisfaction in the joy of creating has no value,
only success or failure count...
and counting is what value's all about.
Winners or losers, but not a free creator in the lot.
It should come as no surprise that in the world of this logic, efficiency is valued for itself.
Regardless of the end, what works most efficiently to bring it about successfully is what counts...
penny by penny...
dollar by dollar...
And this is why you have to work...
This is why I have to work...
Or be counted among the worthless...
the zeroes in society's accounting book.

9. The Theft of Life

Always aimed toward ends,
final goals,
products,
life in the present disappears.
The aimless, end-less becoming of each unique individual
is sacrificed to the goal of production and social reproduction.
The flux of interweaving relationships is dammed up
and channeled into roles which are nothing more than gears in the social machine.
This is alienation,
the theft of my activity,
the theft of your activity,
the theft of my life
and of your life.
Not even the products we make are ours.
Not even the successes are ours.
Only the failures,
above all, the failure to live...

10. Revolution in the Logic of Work

Within work's logic, revolution is a task with an aim...
a goal...
to produce the perfectly functioning society.
It has a beginning and an end.
It succeeds or fails, is won or lost.
But always...
it comes to an end.
Within this logic, there is only revolutionary work
or revolutionary idleness.
Anti-work revolutionaries can embrace the task of activists or militants,
defeating themselves from the beginning
by working for the end of work...
Or they can idly wait for an abstract History
or an equally abstract "objective" or "essential" revolutionary subject
to make the revolution in their place...
Once again defeating themselves...
choosing to let their lives slip through their hands
waiting for their savior to appear.
Failing to escape the logic of work,
every revolution to date has failed...
even the ones that were victorious...
especially the ones that were victorious.
They have failed from the beginning,
because within the logic of winners and losers,
of success and failure,
the revolution has already ceased,
because the past has fixed the future,
guaranteeing the defeat.
And so with their victory these revolutions ended
and the "liberated" people...
went back to work...

11. Breaking with the Logic of Work

So why not break completely with the logic of work?
Why not conceive of activity that is of consequence, not because of its end product,
but because of what it is here and now?
Why not embrace RESOLUTE PLAYFULNESS?
To conceive of revolution in this way is to conceive of it in a way that is fundamentally different,
absolutely other
than the ways that it has generally been conceived by revolutionaries...
Revolution not as a task,
but as a form of play,
as a game, but only in the broadest sense...
As an exploration,
an experiment...
with no beginning and no end...
Rather an endless opening out into new explorations, new experiments, new adventures.
A kind of alchemy or magic of continual transformation...
Putting our lives at stake in each moment for the sheer joy of living...
Here there can be no failure...
Here there can be no defeat...
because there is no aim, no goal, no end...
just the ongoing adventure of conflict and complicity,
destruction and creation,
that is life lived to the full.

AGAINST THE LANGUAGE OF MILITANCY

Sadly, in recent years, too much of the writing coming out of social conflict is wrought with stiff, wooden language, a tired, dead language that seems to contradict the energy of the rebellions of which they speak. It is the language of militancy, not of freedom, not of individuality creating itself against all odds. Perhaps this is, in part, because many of the present-day conflicts spring from the harshness of the times; they are responses to the hardness of current social, political and economic realities. But how can a response in kind counter these realities? Shouldn't the very method of our response reflect our rejection of these imposed realities?

Militancy is mistaken for passion and intensity, when in fact it is just an armored straightjacket closing in one's nakedness, stiffening and limiting one's movements. Seriousness is mistaken for resoluteness, when in fact it is enslavement to the abstract, to the future, to the cause, to the past, another sort of self-imprisonment. And isn't this precisely what we resolutely need to refuse as we fight to make our lives our own in each moment?

Perhaps the problem is that so many of those involved in social conflict do not see themselves as free individuals creating their lives, encountering obstacles to this self-creative process and fighting to destroy these obstacles, but rather as oppressed people resisting their oppression.

It is not necessary to ignore the reality of oppression to recognize that when our project becomes resistance to oppression, we become centered on our oppressors. We lose our own lives, and with them the capacity to destroy what stands in our way. Since resitance focusses on the enemy's projects, it keeps us on the defensive and guarantees our defeat (even in victory) by stealing our projects from us.

If, on the other hand, we start from our own project of self-creation, insisting upon moving through the world as free and aimless beings, we will encounter rulers, exploiters, cops, priests, judges, etc., not essentially as oppressors, but as obstacles in our paths, to be destroyed rather than resisted.

It is only in this context that destruction takes on its insurgent, poetic, revolutionary meaning, as a truly gratuitous act that defies the logic of work and opens reality to the marvelous, to surprise. Only then does destruction become playful.