Who Does No Work, Shall Not Eat

[Chuck0]

Doug Henwood wrote:
> 
> Chuck0 wrote:
> 
> >Otherwise, you still have a system where people are forced to work.
> >
> >Capitalist gun to your head or socialist one? Choose neither.
> 
> Here's where I have to part company with anarchism, as charming as I
> find a lot of it. Sometimes it just seems like an infantile "No!"
> inflated to the level of a political philosophy. We have to work
> because if we don't we die. People who don't work are living off the
> work of others, one way or another. Of course, human societies have a
> lot of choices about how they arrange the work, and how much
> compulsion is involved, but it's not just a boss, capitalist or
> commissar, who forces us to work.

Doug: You seem to have missed my message about Wendell Berry and
meaningful work versus alienated wage slavery. Yes, we have to engage in
work, but the question becomes, what work is necessary to maintain life
and what work is alienating and exists to serve capitalism or whatever?
Anarchists like to avoid talking about blueprints for some future
society because we have seen what happens when a few people get some
grandiose scheme that they then force on everybody else (see Stalin,
Mao, or any apologist for capitalism).

Given that reluctance to outline how an anarchist planet would function,
there is an effort by anarchists to explain their vision. One example of
this is libertarian fiction, for example, Le Guin's "The Dispossesed" or
Piercy's "Woman on the Egde of Time." Anarchists also believe in
creating anarchist alternatives now instead of waiting until after some
revolution. These positive projects include Food Not Bombs, Homes Not
Jails, infoshops, cooperatives and collectives, and so on. Of course,
creating these alternatives is not enough, because capitalism can
function with the existence of these alternatives. This is why
resistance to capitalism is so important. Which is why you will find me
advocating "practical anarchism" at the same time I'm helping organize
big anti-capitalist protests.

Yes, there are always things that force us to work, but we need to make
the distinction between work and wage slavery. I'm really simplifying
things here, unfortunately.

<< Chuck0 >>

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Practical Anarchy Online -> http://www.practicalanarchy.org/
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INTERNATIONALISM IN PRACTICE

An American soldier in a hospital explained how he was wounded: He said,
"I was told that the way to tell a hostile Vietnamese from a friendly
Vietnamese was to shout ‘To hell with Ho Chi Minh!’ If he shoots, he’s
unfriendly. So I saw this dude and yelled ‘To hell with Ho Chi Minh!’
and he yelled back, ‘To hell with President Johnson!’ We were shaking
hands when a truck hit us." 

(from 1,001 Ways to Beat the Draft, by Tuli Kupferburg).