France: We are against work

[From a leaflet distributed in the summer of 2016 against the Labour Laws in France]

Because we are against a system that exploits everyone.

Because the managers of this world transform living things everywhere into merchandise.

Because this society offers us no other choices than being put to work, a few crumbs for survival, or incarceration, for the undesireable or recalcitrant.

Because work means selling your time, your energy, your body, and your mind to bosses, leaders, and machines.

Because capitalism and the state try to control every aspect of our lives and take away ever more of our autonomy, including our dreams of something profoundly different.

Because this system of endless production leaves no space outside of itself, where we could each freely decide on our own activities.

Because the state only grants us rights at the price of our freedom: this same state sicks its guard dogs on us in the street, creates and militarizes borders, and wages war in every corner of the world.

Because restructuring (also known as “crises”) means an intensification of misery, social cannibalism, and further techniques and technologies of control.

For all these reasons and for many more besides, we aren’t just against work, but also against world that it sustains and that offers us nothing beyond it.

If we don’t want to just adjust the length of our chains but to truly destroy them, no dialogue or negotiation with power is possible. We need then to push this struggle beyond the limits imposed by those who want to see the struggle smothered in the confines of the existing world (which includes politicians and managers of all sorts).

Instead of always following agendas set by others, we need to ask ourselves how to expand the revolt while deciding for ourselves what we want to oppose, while imagining a thousand and one ways of overturning this world, while associating freely and organizing ourselves without leaders or hierarchy, while taking initiative individually and collectively with direct action. In this way, it becomes possible to confront the powerful who seek to impose their law on us, to do away once and for all the endless war they wage against us with their authority, money, and cops.

They offer big media spectacles of social engagement to reduce revolt to a simple matter of democratic indignation and to bring it back into the realm of politics and representation. But conversely, by directly attacking what allows this system to work, and to make us work, opens up possibilities creates the space needed to develop other ways of relating.

Blockades and sabotage aren’t just buzzwords, but rather real practices offering us a path out of the routine of exploitation and the logic of consumption, including the spectacle of opposition. For as long as the metro transports human cattle, as long as electrical lines power factories of death and laboratories of control, as long as money continues to circulate, as long as screens broadcast propaganda, as long as cables and antennas maintain our dependency, as long as the arteries of the city impose their rhythm on our bodies and minds, as long as…

And so let’s destroy the daily grind!