Abolish work! "Man" Begins When "Work" Ends!

WORK DOES NOT GIVE US EVERYTHING WE HAVE

Working, to a lot of men, has been one of the prized pearls of life that every man has to strive, to achieve, and to excel at. A criterion for many men in capitalist society to attain the most desirable form of masculinity and strength. A signal to others that this hard worker has certainly gritted his teeth and fought against the harsh state of society, as if it is something natural.

But it is not natural, in the slightest!

The assertion that “work” gives us everything relies on conflating labor as the human capacity for purposeful capacity (e.g., to create) with the commodified form of wage labor we call “work”.

These things are not the same! The former is human beings producing their own existence while the latter is a category of capitalism that must be abolished. Work is a category of capitalism in which workers, separated from their own labor as a social activity, are COMPELLED to participate in the creation of value.

This then gives them access to the means of consumption they need to survive through a process of exchange, DESPITE the fact that THEY, the workers, are the ones producing means of sustenance in the first place.

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration" (Abraham Lincoln).

Under capitalism, work ideology has elevated the concept of work to a noble, manly, “strong” status that it has become a sort of moral obligation and evidence of an individual’s worth as a human being. This fetishism prevents people from seeing the social reality of work - that it is a system of exploitation where your labor is separated from its direct use, and transformed into menial tasks for the production of profit. And this system further separates us from the products of our own labor, from each other, and from nature — a condition where our labor is alien to us, ie., where our social activity takes the form of alienated labor.

Your productive activity, your capability to do tasks and make stuff, is not used as a social process to actually produce the things YOU or anyone else needs and wants directly but is turned into a social relationship called “work” in which you are COMPELLED through the threat of starvation and homelessness to participate in creating value for other people, value that you do not get to enjoy.

By turning human nature into a commodity, humans have in turn separated themselves not only from their own labor, but from the labor process itself. The wage system separates our capacity to produce objects from its social basis and turns it into a commodity, thus separating humans from labor, making humans experience their productive activity as something alien to them — as something that is not inherently human — as something that is in another realm from day-to-day life. Something you’d have to pause your day-to-day life in order to get into, only returning to your day-to-day life only when you have produced enough value, or “clocked out of your shift”. Only then does your existence as a human being that produces meaning begin, when your work is done.

Should not humans as the social beings we are defined to be, return, or perhaps advance to our existence as truly social beings? Beings no longer separated from each other as workers creating commodities? That we should be producers of a means of consumption, directly for use, and not for value — to end the distinction between living and producing? To live through producing and reproducing ourselves freely, directly, without exploitation? Yes, that is our goal.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE: THE BASIS OF SOCIETAL CHANGE

What about the steps necessary to produce such conditions?

In 1865, Karl Marx gave a lecture to the International Working Men’s Association on just this question. In the section about the struggle for increased pay and better working conditions via the trade unions, and he stated:

"The working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not the cause of those effects that they are retarding the downward movement but not changing its direction. That they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in those unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachment of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economic reconstruction of society.

Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wage system” (Value, Price and Profit)".

The way society organizes productive activity / economic base is how the social relationships that govern that productive activity emerges. The first premise of all human existence is our productive activity. And it’s from this basis our social relations emerge.

To understand man, you must understand society.

A man does not live in a bubble, as he is affected by society. In the same way society does not exist in a bubble and is affected by material conditions.

A successful surgeon, painter and a sculptor might have really steady hands. A good barista, receptionist, and a cashier usually have a really bright smile and polite attitude, and a lot of CEOs and lawyers are psychopaths. These traits occur for obvious material and practical reasons which are inherent to the nature of those occupations and not the other way around.

And the same goes for societies!

To emphasize our point, we shall look at a plethora of societies throughout history:

In 1634 Father Paul Lejeune, a Jesuit missionary famously wrote about his encounters with the Montagnais people who are now also known as the Innu, and who live in what is now Quebec and Labrador Canada.

On their political organization he noted:

"…They have neither political organization, nor offices, nor dignities, nor any authority, for they only obey their Chief through good will toward him… All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages. Also, as they are contented with a mere living, not one of them gives himself to the Devil to acquire wealth".

Note that the term chief is Lejeune’s, Montagnais and Naskapi had no such rank.

Meanwhile on personal liberty Lejeune remarked with great irritation:

"They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of Wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever, except when they like… Their life is passed in eating, laughing, and making sport of each other, and of all the people they know… if I questioned them about one thing, they told me about something else, only to get something to laugh and jest about; and consequently, I could not know when they were speaking seriously, or when they were jesting".

These descriptions, the lack of authority, the lack of interest in wealth accumulation, and the broad individual personal liberty, can be found in ethnographies about hunter-gatherer societies of a particular type right up until today, who live in territories ALL across the world. And we also find other traits common to these societies, which LeJeune remarked on elsewhere in his account about the Montagnais and Naskapi, such as their creative intelligence and their restraint when it came to anger, which he very much admired, or else their sexual libertinism and lack of male domination which bothered him to no end.

Three hundred years later, and thousands of miles away, you can read ethnographies or articles about the Mbuti, who live in the Ituri rainforest in central Africa, or the Ju Hoansi of the Kalahari desert in southern Africa, or the Hadza tribe of the Tanzanian savannah, or the Batek who live in the Malaysian rainforest, or the Malapantāram and Paliyan who live in the forests of southern India and you’ll see the stories: extreme political and economic egalitarianism, lack of political authority, lots of humor, and lots of individual personal liberty.

What do all of these cultures share in common? On top of their cultural traits, they all practice the same kind of subsistence economy, a specific form of hunting and gathering that anthropologist James Woodburn called 'immediate return' andhunting and gathering, which means that people mostly consume what they hunt and gather within a couple of days without processing or storing it.

Immediate return hunting and gathering is the simplest form of hunting and gathering – and as such it’s probably what most human beings practiced since before we were anatomically modern human beings, up until the neolithic revolution which started about 12,000 years ago and totally changed humanity.

But if we look at more hierarchical and even patriarchal societies, like the Pacific Northwest Coast culture, we see a complete difference! And it is once again thanks to the kind of subsistence economy they practice in relation to their labor relations. The Pacific Northwest Coast Natives practice a different kind of subsistence economy to the Mbuti or the Montagnais, They practice what’s called “Delayed-return hunting-gathering” or “Complex hunting gathering”. With the similarity of still foraging and not engaging in agriculture, but process and preserve food for later use. The Pacific Northwest Coast tribes’ foraging economy was centered on control over salmon, as a result, their way of living became largely sedentary, living with massive amounts of stored wealth, and stored wealth and prized territories means war and raiding and defense which incentivizes the cooperation and tight coordination of larger groups of people to defend those resources or attack others and raid them for their resources.

And the result of all this is … strict social hierarchy. They had authoritative chiefs and delineated social ranks and social classes, chiefly nobility and commoners – with social power based on wealth inequality and slaves which were people captured in raids and brought far away from where they came from, to where they had no allies and were surrounded by enemy warriors and thus had to do what they were told if they wanted access to food.

But complex hunter-gatherers do not always end in a strict hierarchy like the Pacific Northwest Coast tribes, Another famous example is the !Kung bushmen of South Africa. They practice the same subsistence economy that of the Pacific Northwest Coast tribes, but have starkly different social relations regarding labor and other social relationships. The !Kung has shown very egalitarian standards of society, having no such positions of powers like a chieftain or a headman as many other complex hunter-gatherer societies do. The ǃKung people have given name to the Theory of Regal and Kungic Societal Structures due to their peacefulness and egalitarian social structure.

“Arrogance?”

“Yes, when a young man kills much meat he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle” (Tomazo, a hunter of Ju Hoansi).

A MESSAGE TO THE REVOLUTIONARIES

All of this means that to produce such social relations we must change our productive activity! Simply winning political power and only reorganizing their management can NOT dissolve value, wage-labour or commodity exchange because these relations are not neutral instruments but are the very expressions of capitalist social dynamics. Commodity production and exchange, wage-labour and value, are imminent to the capitalist mode of production they arise from — and can NOT be abstracted away from — the activity that produces them. The ONLY way to change them is to change our productive activity, so to break with the reproduction of value the revolution therefore must DIRECTLY call for the abolition of such relations of productions. Such are the immediate tasks of the revolution.

Editor note: The images embedded depict the Mbuti tribe, Lese tribe and Alaskan Chilkat dancers, respectively.