[lbo-talk] OWS Demands working group: jobs for all!

Angelus Novus fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com
Fri Oct 21 02:51:30 PDT 2011


Joanna wrote:


> Well, no. Loss of job also means loss of health care for many, with dire consequences for health. Also, to work is to have a social existence of some kind which is necessary for mental health.

I know I'm going to come across as a pedantic asshole because you already know this, but it's worth repeating anyway: to work is to have a social existence **only within a specific set of social relations* characterized by generalized commodity production.

I mean, I agree with Doug, it would be ridiculous to raise a demand for the immediate implementation of communism and de-commodification.  Nobody is demanding that.  Not me, not Eric, not Carrol.  I'm perfectly cool with the demand for full employment.  In fact, I even think it's a good demand.

It seems to me that the problem with the anarchists is not that they have a critique of work, it's that they have a totally boneheaded critique of work that they are trying to impose upon a mass movement through an authoritarian use of consensus procedure.  But if one were to talk to some OWS people one on one, particularly those that will inevitably develop a hunger for real theory as the movement deepens and broadens, then the first place I would want to point them would be Marx's _Capital_, and that book contains a very rigorous and sustained critique of the social relations that compel people to work to survive (and again, I know you know this, sorry to be sound pedantic).



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list