Julian Assange
618 weeks of deprivation of liberty for telling the truth
618 weeks of deprivation of liberty for telling the truth
Work, but why? Earning a living, yes, but how? Can we continue to bury our heads in the sand for so long when most of the jobs offered by the company are either harmful to society, dangerous for the workers themselves, polluting or degrading — making weapons is a degrading job because it involves participating in the death of other human beings. Most workers are reduced to inventing justifications that we know are not really justifications: they work because they have a family to feed, or because they don’t know how to do anything else but work. And indeed, it is not the school that teaches us to escape from the Company, quite the contrary, since more and more, it is a kind of learning center for future adults in which the options are chosen by the students according to the access to a job that they are supposed to facilitate in the near future (out with ancient Greek and Italian, long live computer science and Chinese!) The crisis that this planet and our societies are going through is not only the crisis of the Company and of the Power, it is also a crisis of the Work that leads us to a dead end.
We capitalize the Enterprise, because it has the right, like the State, to its capital letter: it is indeed the form that will soon succeed the State, at least according to the wishes of the neoliberals, especially since they have been engaged for two decades on this path, and they have only been successful. It is therefore up to us to understand the logic of the Company, since we sweat the work for it. To understand it in order to crack it, and even to lead it to its loss.
The so-called laws of economics show over and over again that the logic of industry — including agro-industry — as well as finance, is to go for more and more: a larger market, more productive workers, more profitable companies, greater profits, etc. There is no point in arguing this point, which has been made by both supporters and critics of the system. The problem arises with the « false critics » of the system, who merely criticize the forms that these « pluses » take. They then enter into a superficial criticism, which assumes that companies should treat their workers better and would have an interest in doing so, notably because they would then be happier and healthier, and therefore work better — a perfectly ridiculous idea at a time when unemployment rates are high and a real reserve army is indeed available for the Company, which therefore does not have to bother pampering its « protégés ». These false critics call for a better socialization of profits, through various taxes, whose percentages are so ridiculous that one wonders how such smoke and mirrors can still dazzle some of us. The Tobin tax is the embodiment of the inanity of these proposals, at a time when the accumulated debts of States, Companies and households amount to almost three times the planetary gross product, or about 200,000 billion dollars in 2014(1). This figure, which we do not even dare to call astronomical, indicates a double reality.
First of all, this system works because the vast majority of us do not know how it works, and because those who do understand it are most often beneficiaries and accomplices, or are cynical — « greedy », as economist Joseph Stiglitz would say(2).
Then, let’s take up here what the historian Marc Bloch said(3): this system works because credits are always in progress and constantly overlap each other. They are the ones who keep the economy going, the company as much as the State or the households. First of all, let’s note that for decades now, central banks have no longer had stocks of gold corresponding to the face value of the banknotes they issue; yet they continue to issue billions of dollars, euros or yen without the currencies losing their value, as should be the case if the law « the more there is, the less it’s worth » were true. Alas, the True Law is: « The more you believe in it, the more the system works », and since we all have an interest in believing in the value of money, we can go into debt, inventing money that has no countervalue in gold or in anything else but pixels on screens. We only have to rely on our… work to pay back our debts to the bank. Companies, on the other hand, operate on a more complex model, since they are tempted to make money by speculating, and this temptation, which is decisive in the causes of the current crisis, cannot be explored further here. Let’s go back to the Company in relation to the workers.
The latter are necessary to him, because they produce and consume what they have produced. The more credit they take out, the more they become slaves to their own labor, since labor remains the only source of their pecuniary « wealth, » and thus their only capacity to repay their « debt. This « virtuous » circle from the point of view of the Company leads to producing more and more to satisfy more and more workers… who are more and more alienated by the products they produce and whose only goal is to be bound, hand and foot, to the survival of the system, therefore of the Company, therefore of the master who gives them this famous Work… which destroys them as human beings, thinking, thinking themselves free and having to work for the emancipation of all humans. The circle is both vicious and oily.
The logic of the Company is: always produce more. In other words: overproduce. « On » due to the fact that our relationship with time is totally distorted by these credits that are constantly overlapping, this money that we spend before having earned it, this money that the banks no longer print but make appear on our accounts by simple lines of virtual pixels, embellished with a + in preference to a -, of course! For three or four decades now, we have understood that « producing more and more » has not been able to remain within the limits of production to satisfy the needs of all. Indeed, the number of poor people in the dominated countries is such that it would have been possible to produce more while distributing production equitably, but in an egalitarian model, neither the Enterprise nor the State really have their place. A horizontal model, based on solidarity and the principles of humanity, is incompatible with the State as with the Enterprise, which presuppose hierarchy and domination — thus voluntary servitude, as La Boétie understood in the 16th century(4).
Over the last twenty or thirty years, the Enterprise has begun to rise up against the State, which is accused of no longer being the best placed to direct and organize the great productivist maneuvers. The company knows how to make better use of work than the State, it is less cumbersome and, above all, it does not have the same presuppositions — to hell with social security, long live individual and « voluntary » insurance! Little by little, this program of transferring economic power from the planning state to the enterprise has been imposed, first in poor countries via the aptly named structural adjustment plans of the International Monetary Fund, and now, including in rich countries. The CEO of Google now has much more power at the global level than the president of a country like France. And the workers are just as enslaved, perhaps even « better » insofar as the reality of this handover escapes them and the false critics, who serve as an alibi for this system, continue to reel off their imbecilic litanies about the role of the state, whose diminishing role they do not perceive, its narrowing to the tasks, in particular, of open repression. The company itself is perfectly capable of carrying out the tasks of « soft repression », which include the consumption of adulterated products and adherence to a system whose central functioning is no longer understood.
The company has taken a place in the contemporary world from which it will not be easier to dislodge it than the State from its place in past centuries. Because the Company, like the State before it, relies on the ideology of work, this absurd idea that taking it easy is an anti-social horror. Of course, it is necessary to participate in the maintenance of the community, and it is even quite human to activate ourselves to improve or maintain our capacities to live in a framework that we do not destroy, thinking of us and our close relations, of our children, but also of our « distant » ones, because it is not a question either of preserving the hierarchy that centuries of religious and labor dumbing down have imposed on us. But this has nothing to do with working for the Company, whose only drivers are profit and domination. It is therefore to a reversal of perspective that we can — that we must? — we are working on.
How can we reverse this economy that impoverishes us? We will have understood: the first overthrow must be abstract, theoretical, we could even say ideological — provided that we remember that only one ideology triumphs today, neoliberalism, and that it will be necessary to bring it down not only as a mode of existence and domination of human beings but also as an ideology, that is to say as an apparatus of mental, intellectual and social submission.
Thus: as long as work appears to be a noble activity, whatever its purpose, the system will continue to have a bright future — in the form of neoliberal capitalism or fascist capitalism, it doesn’t matter, as we have seen in Germany, a country where capitalist enterprises managed to get through the years of the Nazi regime without a hitch, and find themselves almost unchanged in the current landscape.
We must question the purpose of the work we provide to the Company. And in particular to the specific company that employs us. Awareness begins with a refusal: refusal to participate in the construction of that which destroys us. Do not save the system that crushes us(5). The task seems insurmountable? It is not. It is through the resistance, more or less open, more or less offensive, or even defensive, that each individual feels able to assume that the idea that yes, it is possible to change is propagated. This is exactly the social phenomenon that occurs in moments of strike, when individuals working for a given company and not really knowing each other enter together in conflict against the State or the Company; in general, the conflicts are defensive, but if they last a few days, let alone a few weeks, as all the strikers know, it is at this moment that a new meaning to existence emerges. The strike becomes its own goal, not because the workers no longer understand the causes of the conflict, but rather because they realize all too well that the only interest of the conflict is to change the relationships between them. To simply make them more human, and nothing is more human than the collective struggle around noble ideas.
Not to save the system that crushes us is to assume a critique of work, a critique of life as the Company forces us to lead it, and to try, together, to make this critique a reality.
We don’t think, however, that this refusal to be lampooned by a system, in 2015, is anything other than a tension. Even if this tension could very quickly lead to a large-scale refusal to work, as a reaction against this or that political development — what we call, in union-political language, a strike, and which we prefer to call here an attempt to be together, finally.
Work is not bearable and does not constitute the human being. We are the only animal that works — some animals may appear to work, like the beaver, but in reality, its activity as a builder has other purposes than making a profit… As a result, most of us would say that work is a man’s job. But why? Art, too, to take just one example, is one of man’s « own ». And creativity is much better than work! After all, aesthetics is also an explanation of the world: we might decide to do this rather than that because this is beautiful and that is ugly, even if it is more profitable than this!
Finally, in the workplace, there are several categories of activity. We should not put under the same term the person who cultivates his garden to feed himself and his family by natural means(6), and the industrial farmer who cultivates huge areas to make profit, using farm machinery, pesticides, fertilizers … We must not act against what allows us to live, it is an absolute nonsense. Capitalism is a productive system that is based on destruction: by wars and by its very type of production.
This evolution will occur by « disobeying » the injunctions of the Enterprise — what we can also call, with Lewis Mumford, the « Megamachine »(7). We refuse a little, then more and so on. And one builds one’s liberation — which cannot be total or perfect within the framework of this system of course, but, in the face of the catastrophes in progress or to come, the construction of concrete and credible alternatives, even modest ones, and the reflection linking all the emancipatory and contesting practices together will allow us to move towards non-action in the sense of ceasing to act against others and against this planet, and, in the final analysis, against ourselves.
Philippe Godard
