Love Of Labour? Love Of Labour Lost....

A historical failure. That could be a blunt but not too unfair summary of the communist movement 154 years after Marx’s and Engels’s Manifesto.

One interpretation of such a miscarriage centres on the importance or predominance of work. From the 1960s onwards, a more and more visible resistance to work, sometimes to the point of open rebellion, has led quite a few revolutionaries to revisit the past from the point of view of work acceptance or rejection. Former social movements are said to have failed because the labourers tried to have labour rule society, i.e. tried to liberate themselves by using the very medium of their enslavement: work. In contrast, true emancipation would be based on the refusal of work, seen as the only effective subversion of bourgeois and bureaucratic domination alike. Only work refusal would have a universal dimension able to transcend quantitative claims, and to put forward a qualitative demand for an altogether different life.... It seems to us that these views are not borne out by historical facts, and (more important) that their starting point, their "method", is debatable.