“The real enemy" is the totality of physical and mental constraints by which capital, or class society, or statism, or the society of the spectacle expropriates everyday life, the time of our lives. The real enemy is not an object apart from life. It is the organization of life by powers detached from it and turned against it. The apparatus, not its personnel, is the real enemy. But it is by and through the apparatchiks and everyone else participating in the system that domination and deception are made manifest. The totality is the organization of all against each and each against all. It includes all the policemen, all the social workers, all the office workers, all the nuns, all the op-ed columnists, all the drug kingpins from Medellin to Upjohn, all the syndicalists and all the situationists.” PhilosophySociologyPolitical PhilosophyPolitical ScienceAnarchismSituationist InternationalNeo SituationismPost Left Anarchy Book:The Abolition of Work and Other Essays Source: The Abolition of Work and Other Essays
“Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.” WorkFreedomCapitalismLaborWork EthicAnarchismWork Life BalanceClass WarfareWork Life ConflictSociology Of Consumption Book:The Abolition of Work Source: The Abolition of Work
“Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the "tertiary sector," the service sector, is growing while the "secondary sector" (industry) stagnates and the "primary sector" (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That's why you can't go home just because you finish early. They want your *time*” WorkFreedomCapitalismLaborWork EthicAnarchismBread And Circuses Book:The Abolition of Work Source: The Abolition of Work
“When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is *forced* *labor*, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it's done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it.” WorkFreedomCapitalismLaborWork EthicAnarchismWork Life BalanceClass WarfareAnti CommunismWork Life Conflict Book:The Abolition of Work Source: The Abolition of Work
“The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled "The Original Affluent Society." They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that "hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society." They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were "working" at all. Their "labor," as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities...” WorkCapitalismLaborAnarchismAnthropologyWork Life BalancePrimitivismEco Socialism Book:The Abolition of Work Source: The Abolition of Work
“Cleansed of its leftist residues, anarchy - anarchism minus Marxism - will be free to get better at being what it is.” Get BetterAnarchyMarxismAnarchismLeftistsMinus Author:Bob Black
