It's happened, as we all knew it would. After spending five years attacking those of us unable to find work, the Conservatives have now broadened their assault to include low-paid workers. Jeremy Hunt's recent remarks urging Britons to "work hard in the way that Asian economies are prepared to work hard" followed Conservative plans to cut tax credits, further increasing the burden on Britain's working poor. To see a man who has never done an honest day's work in his life idolising a country that works its citizens literally to death is a slap in the face to those of us who spend our time labouring to create the wealth that he and other capitalists leech off, but enough has already been written on that subject. What I want to talk about is the ideology behind his words. Hunt asks us if we want to work as hard as the Chinese. To any sane individual, the answer is obvious: of course we fucking don't. The people of this country already work far too hard for far too long, only to see the majority of the wealth our work creates siphoned off by wealthy parasites who then dare to lecture us on the dignity of labour. This Victorian idea that wanting to work less is somehow immoral is a key element of capitalist propaganda. When you have the public convinced that a good person is a hard and willing worker, it is easy enough to sell them on the idea that when workers ask for shorter hours, or higher pay, they are Bad People. We must accept our lot, we are told; work will set us free. But what will set us free from work?
The great anarchist theorist Petr Kropotkin(2) theorised in the early 20th century that, with the correct management of resources, people would only have to work four or five hours per working day in order to maintain a decent standard of living for everyone; John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the twenty-first century we would have reduced the working week to fifteen hours. And yet here we are, working forty-plus hours per week, many of us still struggling to make a living. The question is, Why? And the answer is very simple: because our society is still ruled by a class of people who live off our work, and so long as we continue to support them, they will continue to drain our resources. Therefore, it is in their interests to keep us working as hard as possible, for as long as possible, so that they can live in ever-increasing luxury, literally at our expense. The ruling class are clever - that's why they still exist as a class - and they know that overt force is an inefficient tool when it comes to keeping the masses in line. The times in history when workers have suffered the heaviest repression have also been those times in which workers have offered the strongest resistance, because people don;t like being pushed around, and therefore any overt exercise of authority will generate resistance. Stalin learned that; even with one all the coercive power of the Russian state at his disposal, he was still forced to invest in raising living standards for workers in order to deal with the epidemic of slacking and sabotage that plagued the USSR during his time in power(1).
The British government, and their capitalist backers, know that the stick is not enough, and the carrot is too costly to them. So they use propaganda. They demonise the unemployed, and spread a poisonous "strivers vs skivers" rhetoric that glorifies the work ethic to an almost Calvinist degree. In our present society, any calls for us to work less and live more will be met with accusations of selfishness and laziness by those who have internalised this rhteoric so completely that they are reduced to the status of dogs in love with the leash.
So how do we counter this? Well, there are numerous tactics that people have used and are using, to varying degrees of effectiveness. There's the dropout culture espoused by writers like Bob Black and bands like Crass; there's the approach of fighting for shorter hours and higher pay through union organising; and there's the approach of fighting propaganda with propaganda of our own. Personally, I think all of these approaches are useful and important for a libertarian, anti-capitalist movement, and that we should use whatever methods work best in our own circumstances. But, most important, we need to unify - we will not win this fight through the sectarianism and petty ideological squabbles so beloved of the modern left and liberal activists. Instead, we need to build bridges between the insurrectionary dropouts, the unionists, and the liberal activist groups that provide a fertile ground for radicalisation. As the late, great Rob Crow put it - spit on your own and you won;t acheive anything, but if we all spit together, we can drown the bastards.
(1) The Political Economy of Stalinism, Paul R Gregory
(2) The Conquest of Bread, Petr Kropotkin
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