WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Galatea, FAI: MAY 1ST AGAINST WORK (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 On a new anniversary of May 1 we insist with a ruthless criticism of work. It is

undoubtedly a provocation. But a justified, necessary and revolutionary
provocation that we have supported for at least twenty years in each
commemoration of this date of memory and struggle. The first time we made it
public was on the morning of May 1, 2004 in the Plaza de la Cooperación
(Rosario): ---- "Work does not dignify, it mortifies. Spending salary is
dignified, competing is dignified, overexerting the body is dignified,
overexerting the mind is dignified, not being with loved ones is dignified, not
having a life outside of work is dignified, getting up early to work is
dignified, sleeping to go back to work is dignified, risking your life at work
dignifies, to see how life went away dignifies, to give up dreams dignifies. Are
we willing to continue being dignified like that?! Let's not celebrate work. Work
subjugates us and kills us. The work does not dignify ."
We thought it might cause rejection, but the opposite happened. It is that any
person who works and wants to change the world can feel these words as theirs.

Over the years, the critique of the work that we echoed, which had already been
going on for a long time and from different parts of the globe, was enjoying a
certain popularity, or at least it was growing. That popularity on many occasions
separated it from its revolutionary, transformative aspect. Thus, understandably,
work is criticized from personal regrets, many times to extol leisure or to
assume that this criticism would mean leaving work now, individually or as a
group. An unobjectionable proposal, but we seek to go further. For our part, we
insist on the critique of work as part of the new world we want :

«While the majorities celebrate "Worker's Day" or worse still "Labor Day", some
of us remain convinced of the need to get rid of it. That is, to free ourselves
from the form that human activity has acquired under capitalism. (...)

Material misery, but also affective, social. The reality is the terrible working
conditions, the highly alienating, disgusting and repetitive tasks that we are
forced to perform. The reality is that we do not decide what to produce, nor do
we dispose of what we produce. Whether they are gigantic public or private
companies, or small producers, they are always isolated production units, united
only by mercantile exchange, based on obtaining the highest possible profit. (...)

While they want to convince us of the virtues of paid work and that if we work
hard we can enjoy them, they seem to forget the incessant wars, pollution, work
accidents, suicides, mental and physical problems, child exploitation and a long
etcetera. It will be said that all these are "details" to be eliminated, however
they are a constitutive part of the world of salaried work, of its normality, and
without these elements it would not be what it is.» ( The Black Sheep no. 8, Work
does not give dignity , 2013)

Being a worker is not a chosen identity, it is an imposition of this mode of
production. That is why we understand criticism of work as a social issue and not
merely as an individual suffering:

«The citizen, in his frenzy of consumption, consumes ideology, consumes identity
and takes time to understand that there are imposed realities that he has not
acquired in the market. Being a proletarian is not a chosen identity, it is a
social reality . And being proud of this condition is like being proud of being a
slave . We do not love to be proletarians. And revolution does not mean, in any
way, expanding the condition of workers to all humanity.» ( Denial Notebooks No.
4 , 2010)
We criticize work and we still talk about the proletariat, because we precisely
criticize what condemns us to be part of this social class. By proletariat, once
again, it is not about the male, factory worker, unionized and father of a family:

«Taking into account the importance that the worker had at the beginning of the
great proletarian struggles, it is understandable that many have looked for the
"revolutionary subject" in the workers and that "proletariat" has been, in many
cases, interpreted as a synonym. (...) the proletariat was seen as a worker and
reproducer of Capital, and not as its gravedigger, while, in many cases, the
importance of peasants was underestimated and the ideology of capitalist progress
was strengthened with its monstrous cities and factories, in opposition to the
"backwardness" of the countryside. Many workers felt part of that development and
at most wanted to remove the bourgeoisie from the middle to manage and "enjoy"
capitalist progress themselves. (...)

The obrerismo venerates manual work, the "work with hammers". His vision of the
proletariat is the "muscular man." By rejecting commercial and office work, he
rejects a large part of female wage workers, revealing himself as a sexist as
well. » ( Denial Notebooks No. 3 , 2010)

Down with work!
Surely not everything we do is work. Doing is not synonymous with working . Work
is a specific form of activity in a specific society . Our organs do not do their
work, nor do an engine or other machines work:

«"Work" sounds today to the ears of the whole world as the perfect synonym for
"activity", since for the majority of human beings, work has unfortunately become
the entirety of their lives. And we are not just talking about how to get money
to survive, everything is experienced as work: housework, artistic creativity,
having sex, political activism, raising a child or going out with friends.» (
Denial Notebooks No. 3 )
The critique of the work is mainly directed at the critique of exploitation .
Regarding the notion of exploitation, we are not going to undertake a discussion
of a moral order. The reproduction of capitalist society is oriented towards the
maximum possible profit. And the main source of profit is surplus value, which is
produced through the exploitation of wage labor:

«By "exploitation", we almost always mean precarious and poorly paid work, which
is indeed the case for the vast majority of wage earners on the planet. But this
restrictive definition implies that creating educational software for six hours a
day in exchange for a good salary and in an environment that respects the
environment, without any ethnic, sexual or gender discrimination, in connection
with the inhabitants of the neighborhood and consumer associations , it would no
longer be exploitation. In a word, a society in which everyone has a good time
going to the market on Sunday morning, but without anyone suffering from the law
of financial markets. In short, the dream of the Western salaried middle classes
extended to six billion human beings..." (Gilles Dauvé,Decline and Resurgence of
the Communist Perspective )
Down with leisure!
Work and leisure are two sides of the same coin . The salary does not pay for the
work done but for the reproduction of the workforce, which requires some
recreation: football, netflix, music. If "leisure time" exists, it is because
there is a "work time" that defines it .

«We dedicate a certain number of hours to what we define as recreation, to
recover from the generalized stress in which we live daily. We pause our role as
producers of objects and services, to give way to our role as consumers of
products and services.

Carrying out our moments of leisure and fun in the generalized commercial society
has similarities with salaried work: it must be done quickly and well, it becomes
repetitive and obligatory, there is no time to rest, passions are rejected, the
norm of dominant ideology.

Having fun seems to be directly proportional to the money spent, that's why you
walk around malls and malls, that's why you pay to do sports, music or have sex,
or you pay to watch others do sports, music or have sex.» ( Denial Notebooks No. 3 )

Down with unemployment!
As long as money and private property exist, they will never be enough for
everyone. Well, the same can be said about work:

« In a world with work there will never be enough for everyone. Unemployment is a
condition of the world of work . Unemployment is a permanent and structural
feature of capitalist society, which requires a mass of unemployed to guarantee
low wages and always poor working conditions. In other words, if we were all
employed or had the possibility to change from one job to another we could always
demand better wages or better working conditions without the specter of
unemployment on our heels. (...)

It is from our conditions of existence that we draw the lessons to "make theory"
and we do not have "principles" prior to the facts. The discomfort and need
suffered by those of us who work, the precarious and dangerous situations to
which we are subjected, force us to become aware of the society in which we live
and to which we contribute every day to maintain. It is up to us to rely on
characters who want to direct us and lead us to various blind alleys or begin to
think and explore other possibilities. For this it is important that we do not
confuse the defense of the workforce with the defense of the source of work. Nor
do we defend the profit of the exploiters. Let's not trust those who live from
our efforts." ( The Black Sheep no. 70, Work is the plague , 2020)

Down with housework!
Class societies, throughout their history and in pursuit of their reproduction,
had to control four fundamental and inseparable elements of the life of the
species: the body, sexuality, reproduction and child rearing. At this point, the
sexual division and the specific domination over those who have the capacity to
bear children becomes essential . What we know as women and men is based on this
anatomical characteristic (the ability to bear children) and the social division
created from it in class societies due to the need for population growth.

The control of women (their body, their sexuality, their reproductive capacity)
makes it possible to control the rest of the population at the same time. In
turn, it is decisive in the upbringing of girls and boys, as well as in
sustaining the family or at least in the reproduction of the labor force in
today's society.

Salaried work requires a specific sphere dedicated to certain tasks necessary for
the reproduction of the labor force: domestic work , whose allocation reproduces
the sexual division built through the different class societies.

The assignment of certain tasks to a certain group of people defined according to
their reproductive capacity is what has historically constituted women, and those
who do not have it as men. It is this social division into two sexes that has
created what we know as biological sex, which naturalizes what has been socially
constructed.

It is also assumed that women are naturally inclined towards caring and
housework. Just as it is assumed that men are naturally inclined to rough and
dangerous jobs, for which they die in droves every year in so-called "work
accidents."

«The capitalist mode of production, despite its rationalist and scientific image,
also produces myths. One of them is that work is alien to history, that it has
always existed and therefore could not cease to exist. (...) when thousands of
proletarians in the world insist with the slogan "Down with work!" We are not
proposing that we have to let ourselves die of cold and starvation, but that we
must fight to constitute a community where our needs for food and shelter, as
well as enjoyment and creativity are shared without being an alibi to quantify
them and generate profits. (...)

Another necessary myth to prop up capitalist normality is exposing housework as a
natural attribute of women, who are supposed to be by nature good cooks,
laundresses, lovers, sensitive, weak and, above all, dependent. It is no
coincidence, the first step for domestication is the creation of dependency.

A dependency that is both economic and ideological, based on the myth that it was
always the male wage worker who brought bread to the table. And in the poor
social imaginary - and even though he was in plain sight! - this worker would
have lacked the need for care, because he was a healthy adult who fended for
himself. This fallacy not only made this care invisible - and still makes it
invisible - but also produces a model, especially masculine or masculinizing,
that is characterized by its claim of not needing anyone. An individual who
rejects human interdependence in the name of the strong and prominent
independence typical of capitalism.

As with any work, the function of the dominant ideology is that domestic work is
naturalized, amalgamated to any human activity, when in truth it is a determined
and historical social phenomenon. Women's domestic work is under even greater
shadow than salaried work, because it is mistakenly considered a natural
attribute of the female personality, an aspiration of "being a woman" . But what
is forgotten is that to create the image of this supposed natural attribute,
entire centuries of dispossession and misogynistic persecution were necessary.» (
La Oveja Negra no. 46, Down with housework!, 2017)

What we propose is to investigate and assume the implication between class and
gender from a perspective of abolition of work. It is not about adding the
"question" of women to the "cause of the working class" as parallel struggles, as
reformism tends to understand.

Down with the proletariat!
Criticism and rejection of work expressed in struggles, theoretical reflections
and in everyday life are closely linked to the decline of workerism, pride and
worker identity. Obviously, something has changed in capitalist society:
precariousness and flexibility of work, globalization and relocation of
production centers, growing financialization of the economy in general and a
prominent role for the State in the reproduction of the workforce (subsidies,
social assistance). .

Product of these transformations, the proletariat has not disappeared by any
means, but the possibilities of its struggle have drastically changed. There is
no longer a predominant concern in proletarian struggles about the management of
the world of work. That was necessarily linked to an imaginary of the revolution
where many of the fundamental features of the capitalist mode of production and
its sociability were maintained: management of the means of production without
questioning them, development of industry, population growth, family and, in the
sectors more reformists, including nationalism and the state.

We analyze the recent and ongoing struggles noting their limits, but not in
relation to an idealized past that was not, but in terms of current possibilities:

«The revolts unleashed in different parts of the world in recent decades, as well
as the "new social movements", despite the interclass and citizen character that
we observe on many occasions, make clear the persistence of the class struggle.
At the same time, they warn us of the diverse character that the proletariat has
and has had. The centrality of social reproduction in the struggles reminds us
that the revolution must imply much more than the certainty of having a roof and
food . It must attend, not only as a point of arrival but also as a starting
point, the so-called question of gender, race, sexuality, family, the nature of
which we are a part.» ( La Oveja Negra no. 76, May 1: Memory and perspectives , 2021)
The class struggle of the last decades has not focused on workers' struggles or
in the workplace. New protagonists appear. We are referring to the struggles and
protests of unemployed proletarians, the movement of women and sexual dissidents,
the so-called environmental struggles, anti-repression, or against drug
trafficking and other mafias. That manifest in the streets, the routes, outside
the cities and even in homes. That they must necessarily curb circulation more
than production and that they usually confront or address the State more than a
company or an employer (and hence the possibility of their interclass and citizen
character that we mentioned earlier). This does not mean that exploitation and
work have lost centrality in capitalist society, precisely their transformations
have modified and highlighted different aspects of the reproduction of the labor
force.

This has not only allowed us to criticize workerism, but also to question our
existence as a class:

«Those who do not seek to become one more power among all the powers in this
world, who aspire to destroy all these powers, could summarize their program like
this: "Down with the proletariat". Obviously not in the sense of an opposition to
proletarians as human beings. (...) The revolutionaries do not propose the
improvement of the proletarian condition. They propose its deletion. The
revolution will be proletarian because of those who carry it out and
antiproletarian because of its content .

Proletarians, one more effort to stop being so..." ( Down with the proletariat.
Long live communism , Les amis du potlatch, 1979)

Long live the social revolution!
History is not only the past, much less a mythologized past. We can make history,
not just study it :

«If we take a look at modern society, it is evident that in order to live, the
vast majority of people are forced to work, to sell their labor power. The set of
physical and intellectual faculties that human beings possess, their
personalities, which must be set in motion to produce useful things, can only be
used on the condition that they are sold in exchange for a salary. Labor power is
generally perceived as a commodity to be bought and sold, just like any other.The
existence of exchange and wage labor seems to us something normal, inevitable.
However, the introduction of wage labor implied conflicts, resistance and
massacres. The separation of the worker from the means of production, which today
has become a harsh reality accepted as such, took a long time and could only be
carried out by force. (...)

Through its educational system as well as through its political and ideological
life, contemporary society hides the past and present violence on which the
current situation rests. It hides both its origin and the mechanics of its
operation. It seems that everything is the result of a free contract in which the
individual, as a seller of his labor power, meets the factory, the office or the
store. The existence of the commodity would seem to be the most obvious and
natural thing in the world, and the disasters it periodically causes on different
scales are often seen as quasi-natural catastrophes. (...) What he essentially
keeps hidden is that the insubordination and revolt could be big and deep enough
to end this relationship and make another world a reality.

The production relations in which people participate are independent of their
will: each generation is confronted with the technical and social conditions
bequeathed by preceding generations. But you can change them. What we call
"history" is made by people ." (Gilles Dauvé, Capitalism and Communism , Lazo
Editions, 2020)

In each era, the struggle of the proletariat expresses and confronts new questions:

«They can make important points to us about capitalist society and its
overcoming, but the revolution will ultimately depend on what we can do as a
class. The struggle is inevitable and necessary, it transforms us and we seek to
transform it into a definitive one. Our concern is that the class struggle is
capable of producing something more than its own continuation.

For this reason we trust that it is so important not only to participate but also
to understand, study and debate the development of the present struggles. Because
in the possibilities and conditions of these struggles, in their criticisms and
ruptures, the revolutionary horizon is outlined .» ( La Oveja Negra no. 76, May
1: Memory and perspectives )

https://gruppoanarchicogalatea.noblogs.org/post/2023/05/01/il-primo-maggio-contro-il-lavoro/
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