WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE CZECH News Journal Update - (en) Czech, AFED: Work is dead, long live action! - Excerpt from the book "Farewell to Capitalism" by Neklid publishing house. (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The book Goodbye to Capitalism, written by Jérôme Baschet and published

in a Czech translation by our favorite publishing house Neklid, should
definitely not be missing from the bookshelf of any anarchist. If you
don't have it yet, order it directly from the publisher HERE. And if you
hesitate, we have a little teaser for you, a sub-chapter from the book
called "Work is dead, long live action!". * * * Although necessary, each
person's participation in production and organizational activities
should not become a burden and should rather be a source of satisfaction
and opportunities for useful intersubjective experiences. However, the
fundamental circumstance that transforms the very meaning of the
mentioned activities and activities is the amount of time that remains
untouched by them. This time is devoted to what each one decides to do,
for himself or for others. Therefore, the post-capitalist society is
mainly a society of free time. In the capitalist world, "leisure time"
represents only the flip side of work, its necessary complement enabling
consumer behavior, unless it is consumed by the hard work of one's own
employability or the hopeless emptiness to which unemployment condemns.
In a post-capitalist society, free time is not a remnant: on the
contrary, it is the most important thing. As a result, it is no longer
possible to talk about work in the sense of suffering activity that
dominates a person's whole life and forces him to give up all his manual
or intellectual abilities and put them into a project controlled by
others. In wage work, the employee is detached from the means of his
activity and from its goals, and thus lacks the real meaning of his
activity. The abolition of wage labor restores unity to human activity.
It closes the gap between work and the decisions that go with it, giving
back control over their activity to those who do something.

While the capitalist system is based on the logic of the division of
labor and increasing specialization, the time of action and free time
allows for a general despecialization that opens up the possibility of
experimenting with different areas of activity and abilities (which,
moreover, makes it possible to realize independently many activities
that previously required foreign labor, i.e. market-consumer behavior).

Free time is, by definition, what everyone chooses to have. So there is
no guide to it, and it would be wisest not to comment on it, precisely
because it is the most important. And in the same way, on the contrary,
we can let our imagination run wild and imagine it as a time of joy,
love, friendship, dance and creativity. A time of joy from activity and
a time of inquisitive discovery, musical or culinary delights,
experimentation in the field of philosophy or gardening. In this
society, the same person could gradually make inner tubes for bicycles
and sit on the municipal council, grow tomatoes and corn and do word
problems with the children in his neighborhood, participate in
cooperative software development and take care of the household, not to
mention - among thousands areas of human knowledge open to general
inquiry-a passion for the anthropology of rites of passage and insect
literature. In such a world, the hierarchical distinction between manual
and intellectual activity has no place, which simultaneously eliminates
any superiority of head over body, thought over emotion, male over
female, or theory over practice.

The society of free time presupposes a different temporality, which is
the basis of a completely different subjectivity. Against the tyranny of
short periods of time and haste, the logic of measured time, which
confines each person to a racetrack in which they have to run as if on a
tightrope, stands a time of freedom, open to all possible forms of
exchange, all shoots of possible futures. Against the quantified time,
dominated by the obsession with profit, stands a qualitative and
concrete time: the time of lived life and conviviality. Against the
market cult of speed and the impatience that is hidden in it, we can
build a celebration of slowness and patience - virtues that will
certainly be necessary in a world based on cooperation and not always
easy to find consensus. But it's even more about seeing time as open to
an absolute multiplicity of rhythms, changeable and completely free. The
right to slowness, aimlessness, to the free loss of time, which is never
completely lost, does not exclude a sense of urgency and speed, which
can also have its charm, at least for some, and need not be ostracized
in any way if it does not assert itself as the only legitimate index of
temporality .

Above all, this multiplicity of rhythms is part of the regime of
temporal relaxation, the inherent ease of reunited activity, just as
temporal compression was associated with demands for productivity and
yield of measured work. Time decompression, the opposite of the time
pressure underlying market society, is a condition for the general
despecialization of activities. However, the sense of duration and long
time cannot be unilaterally opposed to the market cult of immediacy. The
awareness of the irreversibility of time can only enhance the taste of
each moment, so it may take a long time to tune into the optimal harmony
between temporal relaxation and appreciation of each moment. However,
the temporality of the moment does not yet imply a cult of immediacy: it
crystallizes the intensity of life, far removed from any concern for
performance.

The society of leisure is also the society of childhood: it will
doubtless be the first society since the Paleolithic in which adults
really and equally have time to care for children. Here, childhood would
stand on the first rung of the value ladder: we should evaluate human
societies precisely according to their ability to make of that only
limited socialized energy, their own childhood, the basis of a dignified
and developed life and their willingness to accompany this period of
life characterized by partial autonomy towards a collective life driven
by full autonomy. In a long history of violence, misery, exploitation
and injustice, childhood has for too long been an age of authoritarian
training, frustration and feelings of humiliation and wrongdoing. This
inevitably led throughout to a social life imbued with misunderstanding,
inability to acknowledge the other, hidden hatred and painful wounds,
despite the contradictory progress of the 20th century. It is called the
"century of childhood", but at the same time, with the intensification
of genocidal violence, labor exploitation and the wretchedness of living
conditions, it broke all records of barbarity towards children.

So just try to imagine the new horizons that will open up in a society
that emphasizes childhood and relaxing time. A society that, with its
kind approachability in relation to children, their rhythms and their
art of play, can develop all their emotional and creative potential and
at the same time gradually lead them to be able to independently control
their exuberance: this is what the living source of the unprecedented
diversity of human activities looks like, joyful , finally a possible
source of cooperating subjectivity. There is no question of an ideal
childhood without the slightest psychological conflict and a single
frustration, of growing up among perfect adults. We are only concerned
with emphasizing how much a radically transformed social life would help
to accommodate possible shortcomings within much more reasonable limits
than current modernity and would much more easily overcome the
inevitable tensions and conflicts. Regardless, would it be an
exaggeration to talk about a new humanity, full of creative energy and
multifaceted talents, such as we cannot even fully imagine in our
present, in a world where psychological tensions are increasingly
causing social tensions?

https://www.afed.cz/text/7984/prace-je-mrtva-at-zije-doba-konani
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