From ‘Freedom: The Anarchist Weekly’, November 15, 1958, London, UK
At the beginning of this year [1958] the government was telling us that the complaint from which the country was suffering was inflation: too much money was chasing too few goods. So measures were taken to curb spending; hire-purchase deposits were raised and cuts made in public investment and the social services. In the months that followed this diagnosis, unemployment has increased, and production has fallen sharply. We are now told that we are suffering from a slight slump: that we have too many goods and there is not enough money about to buy them, so now the government has taken measures to encourage spending. All the shackles on Hire Purchase have been removed and public investment is to be increased by £125 millions next year, equivalent to about 150,000 jobs in the two year period, as well as a “major reinforcement” of the economy.
Though the Labour Opposition made great play of this reversal of the Government’s economic policy, (and with general elections in the air they exploited every tactical advantage offered by the situation), we do not think the government has cause to be embarrassed. After all in January, when Mr. Amory took over from Mr. Thorneycroft, he declared that two aims would remain “paramount” with him: “maintaining the strength of the pound and internal price stability”. Everything else had to be sacrificed to the almighty pound sterling, including if necessary a few hundred thousand jobs. Now that pound sterling is strong it is necessary to try and correct some of the troubles that have arisen in the process, and this Mr. Amory is trying to do by putting the financial machine in reverse. As Mr. Bevan concedes in last week’s Tribune:
We are not in the old phase of boom and bust. There is never a real boom and never a real bust. There is only a persistent sabotage of productive potentialities.
He goes on to explain that the main reason for “the fact that the swing of the economic pendulum is not as violent as it once was is to be found in the fact that quasi-Socialist principles have been inserted into the economy”. The measures for increasing public investment are proof “of how past Socialist success is now relied upon to rescue capitalism from committing suicide”.
Mr. Bevan and his friends may well be proud of having in part converted the Tory government to their way of thinking. But we wonder how many socialists who support the Labour Party will like to hear, by implication in what Mr. Bevan says, that Labour’s economic policies are designed to save capitalism from committing suicide? Yet this is as much as the Labour Party would attempt to do if returned to power. The Labour approach to the economic problems besetting the world differs from that of the Tories only as to the measures to be taken to secure Mr. Amory’s paramount aims of “a strong pound and stable prices”.
There is no question of either side permitting capitalism to commit suicide or of hastening such a process. Labour has no objection to a capitalist economy so long as a Labour government can control it. Nationalisation far from representing a revolutionary approach to the methods of production, a first step in the direction of workers’ control of industry and the abolition of the capitalist rationale for production, is simply the implementation of Labour’s theory that capitalism can be made to work smoothly if the government replaces “private enterprise” by State control in all the major industries and services. And even this theory seems to have fewer enthusiasts in the Party than at one time. Whether this is due to sincere misgivings or simply betrays the opportunism of those leaders of the Party more concerned with winning elections and enjoying the fruits of personal power, it is difficult to say.
The concern working people of all countries show for the question of full-employment is understandable… but spineless! Yes, spineless, because in the industrialised countries of Europe and America industry has reached a stage in its development where we should no longer be struggling to establish our right to a job but demanding access to the necessities of life as of a right: not the pittance of unemployment benefit or soup kitchens and relief when we are out of a job.
The idea that “he who does not work neither shall he eat” was an approach to life the rough justice of which could be understood at a time in Man’s history when mere survival depended on every member of the community doing his share of work. Life was the struggle for physical survival; work the symbol of life. Such is still the situation in great, and densely populated areas of the world, but not in the established industrial nations. Yet with modifications, emulating Orwellian cynicism, the concept that only those who work are entitled to eat has been carried into present society.
Production has become an end in itself, unrelated to needs. Workers operate machines which produce goods simply to keep men in employment and the machines turning. Man’s ingenuity is taxed to find new uses to which the machines can be put irrespective of whether what they produce is useful, harmful or useless. There are workers who spend a lifetime in the armaments industry producing weapons for their own destruction or which by the time they come off the production line are obsolete and automatically transferred to the scrap heap.
The workers themselves are the last to question the social value of their work. What counts for them is that they have a job which provides them with the money to buy food, shelter and a few frills to hide the emptiness of their lives. Coal miners in this country and Europe are risking their lives digging coal knowing that a part of it is then dumped in quarries because there is no outlet for it. But what does it matter to them so long as they keep their jobs.
20,000 London dockers for whom there is no work nevertheless continue to report twice a day at the docks because by doing so they are entitled to attendance pay. Even that is a job. Millions of people are engaged in work which they despise because they are servile jobs, useless, time-wasting and from which each evening they flee at the double the moment the bell rings, but which, nevertheless, they would shudder at the thought of losing. After all everyone must have a job just as everyone must have had a mother!
Surely the time has come for a new approach to work. We are still thinking in terms of living to work when science and technology have made it more than possible to think in terms of working to live, not only for those of us in the industrialised half of the globe but for the thousand million human beings in the rest of the world crushed and humiliated by appalling man-maintained poverty.
“Full-employment” is the slogan of wage-slaves in an unfree society. It is an insane society which is embarrassed by too many willing and skilled hands, and food and industrial surpluses. In a free society there can be no unwanted surpluses because production will be geared to needs; no unemployed because the more of us there are in the world the lighter will be our task of providing for the needs of everybody.
But one cannot legislate for the free society. It can only be born by the actions of men and women who have understood what freedom is all about and desire it more than anything else that present society and the political wordspinners have to offer by way of consolation prizes in its stead.
Politicians, Scientists and Technologists
A quote from Vernon Richards’ introduction to his 1983 book, ‘Why Work…’
“For many years I have been of the opinion that the greatest threat to mankind comes not from the politicians but from the scientists and technologists aided and abetted by the media and high finance. Politicians are not very intelligent, they are unprincipled and vanity is their undoing. Whereas scientists and technologists are people possessed by their one consuming passion.”
Also
Vernon Richards texts at the Anarchist Library
The Right To Be Lazy, by Paul Lafargue (1883)
Useful Work versus Useless Toil, by William Morris (1884)
“Timid” Capital, by Lizzie M. Swank (1886)
The Conquest of Bread, by Peter Kropotkin (1892)
Useful and Useless Labor, by Lucy E. Parsons (1905)
Developments at Spokane, by J.H. Walsh (1908)
The Dominant Idea, by Voltairine de Cleyre (1910)
To Arms Ye Braves! An Appeal from the I.W.W. Brigade in Mexico, from Industrial Worker (1911)
The Spirit of Revolt, from Industrial Worker (1913)
The Haymarket Martyrs, by Lucy E. Parsons (1926)
In Praise of Idleness, by Bertrand Russell (1932)
Terrorism In Palestine: “Democracy” at Work, by Vernon Richards (1937)
Palestine: Idealists and Capitalists, by Vernon Richards (1938)
The Future of the Proletariat, by George Woodcock (1942)
The Tyranny of the Clock, by George Woodcock (1944)
Time is Life, by Vernon Richards (1962)
“Never Work”, by Guy Debord (1963)
Basic Banality number 19, by Raoul Vaneigem (1963)
The Decline and Fall of Work, by Raoul Vaneigem (1967)
The Reproduction of Daily Life, by Fredy Perlman (1969)
Armed Joy, by Alfredo M. Bonanno (1977)
From Riot to Insurrection, by Alfredo M. Bonanno (1988)
Let’s Destroy Work, by Alfredo M. Bonanno (1994)
To Work or Not to Work ? Is that the Question?, by Troploin (2002)
A Few Clarifications on Anti-Work, by Bruno Astarian (2017)
Head Hits Concrete, by M.Gouldhawke (2021)
communism as the abolition of work, by ediciones inéditas (2023)
“The ‘dignity of labor’ sings the politician and the grafter; the sky-pilot and the labor fakir. Organize in the I.W.W., make them do some labor, and give them a chance to be dignified. Don’t hog all the dignity — play ‘fair!’”
Industrial Worker, Apr.22, 1909, Spokane
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