some observations on positives of 'flexibility' and escaping work
sovietpop said:
I just wonder is the idea of a positive spin on flexibity more the internalisation of a logic that suits capitalism, than something that many people actually experience in their own lives. I really don't know. That's why I was looking for other examples.
Apologies before i begin as im going to go a little abstract on y'all for a minute...
the thing we're really talking about here is the capacity for small groups of proletarians to find the means to subtract themselves from producing value... there are several things about this:
1) self evidently we
cannot abolish work until we've abolished capitalism - so in a sense there always exists in these tendencies the danger that they are simply peripheral to capital and accomodated within capital... we know well the problems of marginalisation, ghettoisation, recuperation of struggles & social experiments, etc. etc. However;
2) if we agree that revolution is not encapsulated in an
event but is a
process (we are not leninists) then it is clear that redefining and reconstructing social relations - communist social relations - is central to this process. Marxists and Anarchists have to some degree absented themselves from addressing this question: how do we at once
transform our social relationships whilst simultaneously
waiting for the 'masses' to rise up (where we bide our time by issuing agit-prop as
our form of activity) For
it is the case that without a significant section of working class won over to the idea of a better life, the danger is that it we amount to no more than that in point 1 above. But this is only a partial truth. Its a circular problem... and this roadblock creates inertia on creative thinking for those interested in such things
3) the strategy of the refusal (of work) in the 70s was an attempt to break this circularity. As has been mentioned already this strategy grew in use across italy and elsewhere and reflected the desire to break away from the post war consensus, to be free from work, to live rather than to exist, to get their jam today and fuck waiting for tomorrow. Some will describe such strategies as elevating vanguardist notions of struggle > priveleging certain workers with revolutionary potential because of the work they do, rather than the working class as a whole.
4) the lessons from this strategy (and more to the point this movement) leave us with with an understanding of the dangers of what happens when it gets detached from its base (when autonomia was no longer a
part of the class, but separated
from it) Whether it started with vanguardism is a moot point, but there can be little argument that thats where it ended up by the end of the 70s...
5) But for me what is clear is that the escape from work must once again form part of any strategy aimed at escaping capitalism. It would seem inevitable that this stuff will begin in small groups and among individuals - people like us, minorities. What we need to keep in constant check is that we are not marginalising ourselves, that we are a 'big voice' in the community and we keep things open and fluid. So initiatives like social centres, physical spaces that offer support and solidarity, places where people can meet and arrange their lives without exchange are all positive moves. We cannot
invent class war where there is none but we can try to reconstruct how are lives are organised in the here and now with such means and be a public space already established if, and when, ever larger numbers of people find such places useful in themselves or as beacons by which we advance our interests, personal or collective.
6) What this is basically saying is that those who will critique others looking for ways to escape from work often leap to rather crass generalisations ("its activist-y", "its hippy", its not authentically "working class" "its vanguardist" and so on). In doing so they would appear to be dazzled by the
form and so they miss the
content of these desires... which for me is the part that is most useful, the only important part really
They also probably work harder than they used to, don't drive BMWs or have huge houses, don't get to Goa, but comparatively... well if the freelances aren't earning more, and with more control, then they're struggling (or they're all young enough to still be dreaming).
