by Alfredo M. Bonanno
Work is a subject that is coming back into fashion
in a big way in newspapers, academic lectures, papal sermons,
electoral speeches and even articles and pamphlets produced by
anarchists.
The main questions raised are: what can we do
about growing unemployment? How can we give meaning to lost
professionalism in jobs that are undergoing the effects of
neo-industrial development? What alternatives can be found to replace
traditional work? And, finally, and this is the way many anarchists
think, how can we abolish work or reduce it to the indispensable
minimum?
Let us make it clear right away that none of these
problems interests us. We are not concerned with the political
problems of those who see unemployment as a danger to democracy and
order. We do not feel any nostalgia for lost professionalism. We are
even less interested in elaborating libertarian alternatives to grim
factory work or intellectual labour, which are unwittingly doing
nothing but toe the line of the advanced postindustrial project. Nor
are we for the abolition of work or its reduction to the minimum
required for a meaningful happy life. Behind all this there is always
the hand of those who want to regulate our lives, think for us, or
politely suggest that we think as they do.
We are for the
destruction of work and, as we will try to demonstrate, that is quite
a different matter. But let us proceed in an orderly fashion.
The
post-industrial society, which we will come to later, has resolved
the problem of unemployment, at least within certain limits, by
dispersing the work force into flexible sectors which are easy to
manoeuvre and control. In actual fact the social threat of growing
unemployment is more theoretical than practical, and is being used as
a political deterrent to dissuade wide social strata from attempting
to organise in ways that might question the choices of
neo-liberalism, especially at international level. So, precisely
because workers are much easier to control when they are skilled and
attached to the workplace with career prospects in the production
unit, there is insistence everywhere - even among the ecclesiastical
hierarchies - on the need to give people work and thereby reduce
unemployment. Not because the latter constitutes a risk from the
point of view of production, but because the danger could come from
precisely that flexibility which is now indispensable to the
organisation of production today. The fact that the worker has been
robbed of a precise identity could lead to social disintegration,
making control more difficult in the medium term. That is what all
the institutional fuss about unemployment is really about.
In
the same way, the productive process no longer requires a high level
of professional training, at least for the majority of workers. The
need for skilled labour has been replaced by a demand for
flexibility, i.e., an adaptability to do tasks that are constantly
being changed, and willingness to move from one firm to the other. In
short, they must adapt to a life of change in accordance with the
bosses needs. This is now being programmed from school onwards, where
the institutional cultural elements that once constituted the basic
technical knowledge from which the world of work built real
professionalism, are no longer provided. Not that there is no longer
a need for a high level of professionalism. But this now only applies
to a few thousand individuals who are trained in postgraduate courses
often funded by the big companies themselves in their attempt to
secure people suitable for indoctrination and conditioning.
Until
recently the world of work was permeated with an iron discipline: the
assembly line, strict controls by white collar workers, to the point
of secret files and sacking for any deviation from the norm. Holding
on to a job meant submission, acquiring a military-style mentality,
learning procedures that were sometimes complex, sometimes simple,
and applying them, identifying with them. It meant considering one's
self, one's whole way of life and everything that mattered in the
world including one's ideas and social relations, to be summed up in
them. The worker spent most of his time in the factory, made friends
with his workmates, talked about problems at work during his time
off. He used recreational facilities provided by the company and when
the holidays came round he ended up going away with his workmates and
their families. To complete the picture the large companies held
social events and organised periodical outings to bring families
together. Their children went to the same schools, and one of them
usually inherited his father's job when he retired. In this way work
went full circle, affecting not only the worker's whole personality
but also that of his family, thereby creating complete identification
with the company. Just think of the tens of thousands of Fiat workers
in Turin who supported the Juventus football team owned by Fiat boss,
Agnelli, for example. This world has now disappeared for good. Even
though some residue of it still exists, most of it has disappeared
along with its projectual uniformity. A provisional, uncertain work
relationship has replaced it. Insecurity about the future is a
fundamental element, and lack of skill means the lack of a base on
which to plan one's life as a worker, now left with no project beyond
earning enough to make ends meet or pay a mortgage.
In the
past, escape from work took the form of searching for alternative
ways of producing so as to reappropriate the creativity extorted by
the capitalist mechanism. The model applied was the refusal of
discipline and sabotage of the production lines in order slow down
the work pace and get time off - even if only minutes - free from
alienation. In this way the time stolen from meticulous factory
supervision had a value as something alternative. Just for a moment,
one breathed free from the prison-like atmosphere of the factory or
the office. As we can see, such a world has almost ceased to exist,
and will go further along this road in the near future.
More
than that. The old conditions did not differ all that much from the
primitive factory structures - the textile works set up with the
British capital that had been accumulated over two centuries of
piracy - where the work force fleeing from the English and Scottish
countryside literally came to be enclosed en masse. But under these
conditions, the taste of regained time was soon poisoned by the
inability to give it any meaning beyond the work environment. In
other words, time was regained in terms of reducing physical fatigue,
not because one had the knowledge or dessire to do something
different. And this was also due to the fact that one had become part
of one's job, espoused it for life. Even the revolutionary theories
of anarcho-syndicalism did not contradict this basic condition.
Instead they gave it a libertarian qualification, giving the
syndicalist organisation the task of building the free society of the
future, starting off from the work categories that already
existed.
So, up until a few years ago, abolishing work simply
meant reducing fatigue, creating enjoyable alternative work or, in
the most advanced and in some ways most utopian and fanciful
instances, substituting it with a game, an absorbing game with its
own rules capable of giving the individual an identity as a player.
One might argue that the game as a logical category has gone far
beyond the regulated version (e.g., chess), and taken to its logical
conclusion as ludic, individual behaviour: play as the expression of
the senses, as eroticism or sexuality, as free self-expression in the
field of gesture, manual dexterity, art, thought, or all these
elements put together. This had already been theorised of course,
starting with Fourier's genial intuition, similar to Bentham's theory
that the purssuit of personal interest indirectly and involuntarily
leads to greater collective interest. The fact that the good
travelling salesman Fourier made a treasure of his individual
experience in order to weave an incredible web of social relations
based on affinity, is not devoid of interest. Nevertheless, none of
that escapes the essential rules of work seen in terms of the global
organisation of control, even if it is not exactly production in the
capitalist sense of the word.
So we see that work cannot be
abolished progressively: we need to approach the problem in a
destructive manner. Let us see why.
In the first place,
capitalism itself has now dismantled its obsolete apparatus, at the
same time depriving the individual worker of his identity as such. It
has made him 'alternative' without realising it, and is now preparing
to plant in him all the seeds of the external aspects of formal
freedom. Freedom of speech and in ways of dressing, a variety of jobs
to choose from, not much intellectual effort, standardised safety
procedures explained in simple manuals, a slowing down of the work
pace, robotisation of basic procedures, progressive separafion
between the different aspects of work - all going towards building a
different model which does not correspond to that of the past.
To
insist on reappropriating stolen time implies inventing a unit of
measure along with all the other discretional units relative to the
suspension of work, a notion which the worker would have difficulty
grasping. Rather than acquire the capacity to envisage a project that
is an alternative to working for a third party, he could develop a
growing feeling of panic. The fact that far less work is necessary
than that required to earn a living wage has already been clearly
illustrated by revolutionary theoreticians in the past. This analyses
is now being used by post-industrial capital itself, and is often
brought up in conferences and meetings concerning the restructuring
of production.
A reduction in labour would mean reducing work
to the minimum required to produce only what is useful. We cannot
accept this theory today as it is now being considered by capital
itself. Only the time frame within which this is to come about
differs, whereas nothing is said about the methods that would be
used. To struggle for a reduction in working hours, even a
considerable one of say twenty hours a week, means nothing in
revolutionary terms as it would do no more than open the way to
solving some of capital's problems, certainly not lead to the
liberation of all. Unemployment as an element of pressure, no matter
how slight now that it is finding a considerable outlet in the
numerous versions of marginal work, seems to be the only factor
pushing capitalist production to look for solutions to reduce working
hours at the moment. But in a not too distant future the need to
reduce production might become a reason for reducing working hours,
especially since international military equilibrium no longer depends
on two opposing superpowers.
Voluntary work (about which
little has been said, although it is a question that deserves all our
attention) acts as a safety valve which could, among other things,
provide a solution to the problem of reducing working hours without
having to worry about how the masses, relieved of the control of a
third of their day, might spend their new-found free time. So we see
that unemployment is no longer the most serious crisis capital is
having to face today, but it is still one that is constitutionally
linked to it. It can become institutionalised, then recuperated as
the projectual use of free time by the same companies in structures
created for this purpose. So post-industrial capitalism is a
homogeneous system within which the concept of a crisis in
unemployment no longer exists, the latter having become one of the
elements of the productive process itself.
The 'alternative'
ideal of a life based on the art of 'getting by' is also
disappearing. Small-scale handicrafts, little self-produced
undertakings, the street selling of objects, the necklaces...
Infinite human tragedies have unrolled in dingy, airless shops over
the past twenty years. Much really revolutionary strength has been
trapped in illusions that required not a normal amount of work, but
super-exploitation, all the greater because it was tied to the
individual's will to keep things going and show that it was possible
to do without the factory. Now, with the restructuring of capital and
the new conditions resulting from it, we can see how this
'alternative' model is exactly what is being suggested at an
institutional level to get through this moment. As always, they see
the way the wind is blowing. Other potentially revolutionary forces
are now shutting themselves up in electronic laboratories and
burdening themselves with work in dark, stuffy little premises,
demonstrating that capital has won over them yet again.
If we
were to sum up the problem in a simple formula, we could say that if
work once gave a social identity, that of the worker to be exact,
which along with that of the citizen came to form the perfect
subject, any escape from that was a truly revolutionary attempt to
break out of this suffocation. Today, where capital no longer gives
the worker a specific social identity but tries to use him in a
generic differentiated way, with no prospects and no future, the only
struggle left against work is that of destroying it, thus procuring
one's own projectuality, one's own future, and a new social identity
in opposition to the attempts at annihilation put into action by
post-industrial capital.
Most of the strategies that
self-aware workers have used over past decades against brutal,
immediate exploitation - about which hundreds of pages could be
written - have now become normal procedures for capital itself. It is
capital that is now suggesting - when it does not impose - the
breaking up of work units, reduced flexible hours, self-defined
projects, participation in decision-making, deciding on particular
aspects of production, autonomous work islands that become each
other's customers, quality competition and everything else. All the
paraphernalia taking the place of the old, monolithic uniformity of
work has now reached levels that are no longer controllable by
individual conscience in the narrow sense of the word. That is to
say, the single worker is constantly faced with the possibility of
being pulled into a trap where he ends up bartering his own
combativeness (now only potential) in exchange for a few concessions.
And if these were once self-determined and could be considered part
of the great movement of struggle against work, today, being
conceded, they are simply another aspect of work, moreover the one
which contains most characteristics of recuperation and control.
If
we are to play with our lives and during our lives, we must learn how
to do so and set the rules of the game ourselves, doing it in such a
way that these are clear to us and incomprehensible labyrinths to
others. We cannot just say that a game with rules is still work
(which is so, as we have already said), and that if the rules are
abandoned the game becomes free, therefore libertarian. The absence
of rules is not synonymous with freedom. Rules that are imposed
through control and sanctions are slavery. And work has been this and
could never be anything else, for all the reasons we have just seen
and all those we have forgotten to mention. But the absence of rules
could become a different, perhaps worse, form of tyranny. If free
agreement is a rule, I intend to follow it and I expect others, my
comrades in the agreement, to follow it too. Especially when it
concerns the game of my life, and my life is at stake. The absence of
rules would leave me in the clutches of the tyranny of uncertainty,
which might provide a thrilling dose of adrenaline today, but might
not agree with me in the future, or rather certainly won't agree with
me.
Furthermore, freely chosen rules not only build my
identity, my Doing with others, but also my individual knowledge of
myself and my desire to open up to others, to live in a world
populated with other free - vitally free - beings capable of deciding
for themselves. All the more so at a time when there is a move
towards the illusory freedom of the absence of rigid rules, at least
in the world of production. In order not be taken in by reduced,
flexible working hours and exotic paid holidays, or to be beguiled by
wage increases, early pensioning or free financing of individual
enterprises, it is necessary to devise one's own project for the
destruction of work. It is not sufficient to simply limit the
damage.
Here, a few ideas that seemed to have seen their day
have become topical again.
A mentality cannot be destroyed. In
fact, the professional mentality as expressed even in party and
trades union organisations - including the anarcho-syndicalist forms
- cannot be destroyed from the outside. Not even by sabotage. When
sabotage was used it was only as a means to intimidate the
bosses, a hint of something beyond the strike, a way of making it
known that one was more determined than others, but was nevertheless
ready to suspend the attack as soon as the claim was accepted.
But
sabotage is still destructive. It does not affect profit indirectly
like the strike but hits the structure directly, either the means of
production or the end product, it makes no difference. That means
that it acts beyond the work situation. It does not strike to obtain
something specific but also, and I would say principally, to destroy.
And the object to be destroyed, although it is property, is still
work when you think about it, as it concerns something that has been
obtained through work, whether it be the means of production or the
finished product. We can now understand the horror many workers once
felt before acts of sabotage. Here I mean workers whose lives of
total dependence had given them a social identity that could not
easily be eradicated. I have seen men in tears in front of their
factory after it had been attacked and partly destroyed, because they
saw a considerable part of their own lives also being attacked and
destroyed. And that life, poor and miserable as it might have been,
was the only one they had, the only one they had any experience
of.
Of course, in order to attack one must have a project, an
identity that has been worked out projectually, an idea of what one
wants to do even, perhaps all the more so when one considers this to
be a game and lives it like a game. And sabotage is a fascinating
game, but it cannot be the only game one wants to play. We must have
a multitude of games at our disposal, games that are varied and often
in contrast with each other, aimed at avoiding the monotony of the
rules becoming just another boring, repetitive job. Making love is
also a game, but you can't play it from morning till night without
banalising it, without feeling wrapped up in a drowsiness which,
although it gives a pleasurable sensation of well being, also dulls
us, makes us feel useless.
Taking money from where it is to be
found is also a game, one that has its own rules and which could
degenerate into professionalism as an end in itself, thereby becoming
a full-time job with everything that that implies. But it is an
interesting - and useful - game if seen in the perspective of a
mature consciousness which refuses to fall into the contradictions of
a consumerism that is forever ready to swallow up what one has
managed to snatch from the economy as a whole. Once again it is
necessary to overcome the moral barriers they have built into us. It
is necessary to put ourselves beyond the problem. Reaching out and
taking other people's property is something that is full of risks,
even for a revolutionary. Not just legal risks in the narrow sense of
the word, but in the first place moral ones. Clarity on this question
is important, as it is a question of overcoming the same obstacles
that made the old worker shed tears in front of the damaged factory.
The idea that property is sacred has been instilled in us since birth
and it is not easy to free ourselves from it. We prefer to prostitute
ourselves to a boss for a lifetime but have a clear conscience at the
end of the day. We feel we have done our duty and contributed in our
own small way to producing the national income - which naturally ends
up in the outstretched hands of the politicians with the nation's
destiny in mind, who got rid of any scruples about taking what we
have accumulated with fatigue long ago.
But the essential part
of any project to destroy work is creativity taken to the maximum
possible degree. What could we do with all the money of all the banks
we were able to rob put together, if the only thing we can think of
doing is buying a fast car, a big house, going to nightclubs, or
filling our lives with thousands of useless needs and boring
ourselves to death until the time comes to rob the next bank? That is
something many of the bank robbers I have met in prison
systematically do. If all the comrades who have never had any money
in their lives think this is the way to satisfy some of their whims,
let them go ahead. They will find the same disillusion as they would
in any other kind of job that is perhaps less remunerative in the
short term, but is certainly less dangerous in the long one.
To
imagine the refusal of work to be no more than the listless
acceptance of non-activity is a result of the mistaken idea that
work-slaves have about those who have never worked in their lives.
The latter, the so-called privileged from birth, the heirs to the
great fortunes, are nearly always indefatigable workers who dedicate
all their strength and imagination to exploiting others and
accumulating even more wealth and prestige than they already have.
Even if we were to limit ourselves to the great squanderers of
inheritances that the tabloid gossip columns take great pains to
portray, we would still have to admit that this horrible race are
also eternally busy at their daily grind, occupied by their tedious
social relations or by fears of falling victim to aggression or
kidnapping. This is also work, carried out according to all the rules
of obligatory activity. It becomes a true job, where the boss of
these exploiters is often their own lust or fear.
But I do not
think many of us can consider the refusal of work simply to be an
acceptance of the deadly boredom of doing nothing while we keep on
the lookout for traps set by others who might try to convince us to
do something through solicitations or flattery, perhaps in the name
of an ideal, or personal affection or friendship, or who knows what
other devilry capable of threatening our condition of complete
inertia. Such a situation would be pointless.
On the contrary,
I think that the refusal of work can be seen in the first place as a
desire to do what one enjoys most, that is to say of transforming
obligatory doing into free action. I wrote a long article about this
many years ago in Pantagruel, which is till valid today in many
respects. But this condition, free action, is not mapped out once and
for all. It is not part of a situation that exists beyond ourselves,
nor does it rain down on us like an inheritance or the spoils of a
ransacked bank. Such incidents could be an occasion, an accident,
sought or not, desired or not, to enhance a project that is already
in course, it is certainly not the condition that determines it or
carries it out. If we have no project in terms of life, projectuality
in the full meaning of the word, no amount of money will ever free us
from the need to work, to be doing at all costs, pushed by a new kind
of necessity, not poverty this time but boredom or to acquire social
status.
The dilemma can only be resolved by inventing one's
own creative project or, to put it differently, by reflecting upon
what one wants to do with one's life and finding the necessary means
to realise it, without working. If we want to destroy work we must
build roads of individual and collective experimentation which take
no account of work except to cancel it from the reality of what is
possible.
Insurrectionary Anarchists of the Coast Salish Territories