POLITICAL WORK
 The militant devotes the « free » time, which his professional or educational obligations leave him, to what he himself calls « political work ». Its necessary to print and distribute leaflets, manufacture and stick up posters, hold meetings, make contacts, prepare rallies... But this sort of activity considered in isolation is not enough to characterise militant work. The simple fact of composing a leaflet, with the aim of printing and distributing it, cannot in itself be considered a militant act. If it becomes militancy it is because it forms part of an activity which has a particular logic. It's because the militant's activity is not the extension of his desires, it's because it obeys a logic which is external to him, that it approaches work. Just as the worker does not work for himself, the militant is not militant on his own behalf. Thus the results of his action cannot be measured by the pleasure he gets from it. Instead it will be by the number of hours spent, the number of leaflets distributed. Repetition and routine dominate the activity of the militant. The separation between execution and decision reinforces the civil servant aspect of the militant. But if militancy approaches work, it cannot be assimilated to it. Work is the activity on which the dominant world is based, it produces and reproduces capital and capitalist relations of production; militancy is only a minor activity. By definition, the results and effectiveness of work are not measured by the satisfaction of the worker, but they have the advantage of being economically measurable. Commodity production, by means of currency and profit, creates its standards and instruments of measure. It has its own logic and rationality, which it imposes on producer and consumer. By contrast, the effectiveness of militancy, « the advancement of the revolution », still hasn't found its measuring instruments. Their control evades militants and their leaders. Assuming, of course, that the latter still worry about the revolution ! So they are reduced to counting the material produced and distributed, the levels of recruitment, the number of actions undertaken; obviously none of these measure what they pretend to. Naturally enough from this they come to imagine that what is measurable is an end in itself. Imagine a capitalist who could not find a means of evaluating the value of his production, and so settled for measuring the quantity of oil consumed by machines. Conscientiously, workers would empty oil into the gutter in order to produce an increase in... production. Incapable of pursuing its proclaimed goal, militancy only gives itself the name of work. As they conscientiously endeavour to imitate work, militants are very badly placed to understand the prospects which are opened up, on the one hand by the increasingly widespread contempt for all constraints, and on the other by the progress of knowledge and technology. The most intelligent of them line up alongside modernist bourgeois ideologists, in order to demand that hours of work are reduced, or that repugnant activity is humanised. Whether they speak in the name of capital or of the revolution these people are unable to see beyond the separation between work time and leisure time, between activity devoted to production and activity devoted to consumption. If we are obliged to work, the cause is not natural, but social. Work and class society go hand in hand. The master wants to see the slave producing because only what is produced can be appropriated. The capitalist doesn't give a shit for the joy or the pleasure which can be found in any activity, and which cannot be capitalised, accumulated, or translated into money. When we work we are entirely subjected to authority, to an external law, our only reason for existence is what we produce. Any factory is a racket, where our lives and our sweat are squeezed out, to be transformed into commodities. Time spent at work is time in which we cannot directly satisfy our desires, but which instead we must sacrifice, while waiting for the subsequent compensation of a salary. This is exactly the opposite of play, where the unfolding and rhythm of what you do is led by the pleasure you take in it. In emancipating itself the proletariat will abolish work. The production of the foodstuffs necessary for our biological survival will no longer be anything but the pretext for the liberation of our passions. |