FOUND YOURSELF OUT of work? The exploiter who previously bought your life no longer has any use for you? Time on your hands, short of things to do? No problem. It could turn out to be a golden opportunity to find there can be more to life than the tyranny of the workplace. In an imposed world, instead of life consisting of meaningful pursuit, our core humanity vanishes without trace, devalued and obliterated. Technology is reshaping us, whether as workers or consumers. Being thrown out of work might just be the spur that precipitates change, a chance to confront the given status quo and to structure life in the context of one’s own devising rather than follow a script laid down from the day we are born. With time to think, we learn to reject, challenge and oppose everything drilled into us up through the conditioning phases of schooling, social life, workplace discipline and the vacuous nonsense poisoning the mind via the non-stop media barrage. Life can be considered in a clearer, more penetrating light. Importantly, the formula for living may be set according to a perspective of choice, instead of having each day’s precious time dictated through a controlling framework that frequently results in boredom, fatigue, stress, illness and interpersonal harassment, all maladies degrading to the human condition and spirit, and which are endured constantly workers struggling to scratch a living from the crumbs cast downward on the terms of the bosses, they of the exploiting class, busy raping the world from corner to corner in the insane pursuit of profit, power and what they regard as wealth.

Alarm clocks and buzzers

When this writer came out of work by virtue of a third redundancy in an (over) long working life, it wasn’t with the explicit aim to enjoy it, but only that it not turn into a negative experience, depressing or limiting to the quality of life either physically or mentally. The longer the system, by its own shortcomings, kept me at arms-length from employment, with not even the hint of a half-decent job showing its face, the easier it got to see through all the lies, the deceit and illusions upon which capitalism is built, fuelled and sustained. So, how desirable or necessary was it to place myself yet again inside the clutches of conformity to an order that is detested by nearly everybody who has to put up with it? Was it really such an enticing prospect to submerge one’s being once more in the abjectly competitive, soul-crushing regime once again? A world virtually sealed off from normality by death-wraps of tarmac and caskets of concrete, noise and pollution swirling around every street, choking everything that draws breath from within its confines. Where was the attraction in returning to that sad little routine? Money? Busyness? Social approval? No thanks, here was discovery of a new, fresh, uncluttered, pleasantly harmonious world, a world that responded not to shrieking alarm clocks and buzzers, but to natural rhythms, patterns and cycles through which everything moved at its own pace. Flora, fauna, colours, sights, sounds, smells, growth, things that can never be empathised with, marooned inside the suffocating atmosphere of the industrial concentration camps called factories, or in the sterile isolation of walled, sealed and cocoon-like offices, indeed anywhere where life has become a commodity to be bought, sold and homogenised. No more reluctant submission to a hierarchical order based on smiley boardroom fascism with its power junkies, underlings, creeps, regimentation and pay-roll numbers ascribed like identification tags to armies of workplace slaves the world over.

Suddenly there was time and space to get involved, to connect up with important things, all those things that it was a struggle to cope with when life had to be put up for sale to an employer. There was time and space to positively engage in the fight back against capitalism’s oppressions, to help plan and take part in occupations, demos, to keep in touch with others on a regular, personal basis. Visiting/writing/campaigning for victims of the system. Castigating scabs from the solidarity of a picket line. Working on articles for alternative zines. Cultivating an allotment. Help with the care of sick relatives or friends. There is no shortage of tasks to be done. There is much in need of doing and not a little of it far outside the blueprint set down for us all without input, discussion or agreement from the masses.

No sane person would acquiesce with the kind of world that has been created and is being perpetuated if they could avoid it. Money, profit, has become the dominant factor around every single facet of living. So is it really surprising if some fear for the very survival and sanity of the human race? When those who position themselves as experts and leaders are responsible for manifold destruction at every level, how else can they ever be regarded other than as mad, bad and inhuman beings defining everything and everyone in terms of price, gain and loss? And the cost of this madness is inevitably wrought upon ordinary people, changing them and breeding irrationality and conflict in every aspect of life: desperate people driven to commit terrible acts that in an equal world they would never be pushed to even contemplate. The work ethic was created by and alongside the profit motive, it is the engine, the pulse, the heartbeat of the vicious capitalist monster, the corporate culprit now metaphorically careering right off its axis. Rejection of work and the exploiter’s agenda need not be negative. Work undertaken at the behest of a ruling class is a brutal and repressive act of social control. Whole lives are eaten up by the work habit. The refusal of work (employment) would instantly curtail (if enough of us got out of the loop) much of the world-slaughtering capitalist ethos. Is that not the ultimate objective, that which every anarchist revolutionary aspires to achieve with their endeavours?

The spectacle

If these are some of the worst elements of having to submit oneself to the ‘benevolence’ of a boss, there are other disparities permeating the world of paid work. When, for instance, we compare what ‘ordinary’ people earn with the obscene amounts of money ‘earned’ by the cult of the self-obsessed such as endlessly flaunt themselves in the public eye like sports stars, ‘personalities’, show-biz freaks and politicians with fingers in every pocket and every pie, not to mention the ruthless, worthless scum manipulating the filthy drug cartels. All pulling in huge bundles of money, yet possessed of no discernible talent or socially commendable merit, whilst people who do the vital tasks in the community receive barely a pittance, this despite enduring long hours, poor conditions and the constant fear of job insecurity. Some (safe and warm in the comfort-zone) will call it envy; but for the life of me it’s not plain why these celebrity cretins are reaping rewards so utterly beyond the dreams of ordinary, decent, hard-grafting people. To take as one example, that of a footballer, an ‘occupation’ considered less than useless a few decades ago and a sport holding its lofty position today of fevered worship solely due to marketing and the media (football is now corporate-led, focussed on the middle classes), not through any commonweal value or social contribution. It is galling to listen to the comments of the clowns in government when they’re ranting and pontificating about the ‘dignity of work’. Where is the dignity, much less the morality, in a remark like the following, muttered by one of the so-called people’s game’s high-profile role models, Michael Owen, a 20-year-old international footballer, earnings potential £50,000 a week: "There is nothing going on in the world at the moment that I find distressing or have a view on" (October 1999). Is that not the pinnacle of pigshit, imbecilic ignorance? Why doesn’t this cosseted, shallow, privileged young man simply tell the truth and say that he doesn’t give a damn about all the misery, suffering and devastation going on right across the globe? Is this, then what fifty grand a week does for you? Turn you into an insensitive, dumb, myopic primadonna who doesn’t know, doesn’t care what’s happening in the real world? Keep it, ball-kicker, some folks with more integrity than you’ll ever know will settle for £50 a week grudgingly repaid to us as the dole and a justifiably clear conscience, while trying to put the world on a fairer footing, if not for themselves then for those who come after.

The argument for refusing work in it’s current context was never more clearly put than by Peter Marshall in his book Riding The Wind: "In nearly all cases, the so-called work-shy are square pegs in round holes. Given a meaningful activity which fulfils their natures rather than degrades them, which is undertaken voluntarily rather than forced upon them, which unites them with their fellows rather than divides them, which enhances nature rather than destroys it, then I believe virtually everyone would be pleased to do real work. They would then work not for the sake of money, not for the sake of reward, not for the sake of status but for the intrinsic value of the work itself." Bob Black also puts it all in a nutshell: "Work is the source of nearly all misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working."

For further can-work-won’t-work, spanner in the works ideas, see: The Abolition of Work, Bob Black; Ballad Against Work, Majdoor Library Group; Finding Time, Norman Juppe; The Refusal of Work, Echanges Et Mouvement.