this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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Antiwork
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For the abolition of work. Yes really, abolish work! Not "reform work" but the destruction of work as a separate field of human activity.
To save the world, we're going to have to stop working! — David Graeber
A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. ...the love of work... Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists, and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. — Paul Lafargue
In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. — Karl Marx
In the glorification of 'work', in the unwearied talk of the 'blessing of work', I see the same covert idea as in the praise of useful impersonal actions: that of fear of everything individual. — Friedrich Nietzsche
If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves. — Lane Kirkland
The bottom line is simple: all of us deserve to make the most of our potential as we see fit, to be the masters of our own destinies. Being forced to sell these things away to survive is tragic and humiliating. We don’t have to live like this. ― CrimethInc
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I mean, it still is. As another commenter pointed out, even in foraging societies people can share, so individuals might survive without labour, by the help of others - but only because others are labouring on their behalf.
If everyone stops working, everyone dies.
Labour in a society is about doing your share, even if others have the generosity to give you their food when you lack. And, in turn, you give to them/others when they lack. Or you make an 'economy' so you can kind of mix sharing with selfishness and try to make it fair.
Either way, labour has to be done for you to keep living. By you, or by others.
What we have now is a lot of wealth from a lot of labour, and a hugely complicated economy allowing even the fungible trade of such things as ideas, entertainment, trickery, authority and abstract property inheritance. But still, down at the bottom of it, people have to labour so that people can live.
You are precious without working to earn it; what you earn is your share of the ability to live on this difficult earth.