'The class war begins in the desecration of our ancestors: millions of people going to their graves as failures, forever denied the experience of a full human existence, their being was simply cancelled out. The violence of the bourgeoisie’s appropriation of the world of work becomes the structure that dominates our existence. As our parents die, we can say truly that their lives were for nothing, that the black earth that is thrown down onto them blacks out our sky.'
-- Monsieur Dupont, This is the definition of class hatred
Mandela is dead. Good riddance. Unfortunately the democratic lie is as healthy as ever. In 1994 blacks in this country were satisfied with electing a black president; if they were not, they would not have allowed him and his cronies to order an end to mass struggle or to turn it off and on, like a tap, when it suited them. The saints came marching in. They have come and they have gone, and they have changed nothing. St Tutu and St Mandela paraded the dazzling colours of the rainbow-nation before our eyes, teasing us with a freedom we could never touch, dancing tantalisingly like so many wrinkled old revolutionary strippers. They have made the country and its history in their image; they have changed the names of streets and cities, but not their owners. We own nothing. We control nothing. A society of window-shoppers, we sat and salivated while the image of a world and a life wholly separate from our own experience enticed us to keep hoping, keep praying – and more importantly, keep voting and keep working – so that one day we too could enter into the promised kingdom. It has not come. It will not come. I wander, like you, through the ruins of disconsolate dreams, trying to piece together a coherent picture of where it is I find myself, and how on earth I was brought to such a desolate place.
The taps, already leaky twenty years ago, have begun to break down altogether. We are not satisfied anymore. More elections come and go where we are ordered to voice our dissatisfaction at the voting booth with the old motto: don't change life, change leaders. The majority see through the con: most don't bother to vote. The fact that so many people find such an apparently significant act not worth the trouble of standing in line for a few minutes (or hours) once every five years is indication enough of the level of disaffection felt by people towards the putrid corruption at the heart of this ridiculous charade. To us, free and fair elections = Free-from-relevance and fairly-useless. We are disgusted not at electoral fraud but at the fraud of elections. Despite the renewal of independent struggles in the workplaces and the streets; most of this despair (and anger, as shown by ever-present protests) over the failure of politricks to change our condition of daily misery has thus-far been contained within the terrain of politics itself. What is necessary, however, is to direct this discontent towards its source the miseries experienced in everyday life.
Often the route to this kind of radical simplification turns out to be complicated: To approach everyday life, it is necessary to return for a moment to uTata Madiba. He is a hero. There is perhaps nothing more to say about him. Like every other hero, celebrity, and star in this upside-down society (including those of the progressive, radical and revolutionary variety); Mandela has always been an enemy of ordinary proletarians. Whenever there are national elections the politicians, the decrepit elders whose bankrupt wisdom rules over the ruins of the old world, will use his image as a red flag, waving it around like bull-fighters to trick us, those whose futures are crucified on the crosses of their ballots, into running this way, running that way, only to butcher us in the end (see: Kennedy Road, Cato Crest, Marikana, Sasolberg, Brits, De Doorns, et cetera ad nauseum). 'The emancipation of the proletariat is the task of proletarians themselves.' An essential element of this task is learning to say: Fuck politics, political parties and politicians. Fuck the ANC, fuck all the fake-opposition parties, fuck the president, fuck parliament, fuck Desmond Tutu, fuck big bosses and little ones, top cops and their grunts, and especially fuck Nelson Mandela. Unless we can tell them all to go to hell, they will do everything in their power to throw us into its deepest recesses. As a matter of fact we are already there; and its the job of Mandela and all those like him to keep us here. Many mortals have had visions of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Dante Alighieri, the inventor of the Italian language, was one of them. But, as a poet once said, Visions are problems. Vision is the solution that precedes the problem. To put it another way:
When he trod Hell, it was the earth:
Itself sufficient for the hearth
That warms the hands of a cold God.
Comrades, let us not mourn famous men
We dont need visions or visionaries, heroes or heroism. They are all part of the problem. What we need is clarity. A disillusioned vision of the problem. Then we can begin to experiment with solutions for ourselves. Everything about this society trains us to keep our eyes turned to the sky: you may starve down here but you'll get pie up there when you die. This way we are unable to look at the un-heroic existence right under our noses. The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. We see visions, we follow dreams, we fight for phantoms. We fear sin, we pursue careers, we struggle for democracy. And every day, life passes us by because -- unnoticed, unthought of, and unspoken -- everyday life passes us by.
'But to use a somewhat simplistic spatial image,' wrote Guy Debord in Perspectives for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life which, to modern ears, sounds like a self-help manual, and in a sense it is, though a rather radical one, 'we still have to place everyday life at the center of everything. Every project begins from it and every accomplishment returns to it to acquire its real significance. Everyday life is the measure of all things: of the (non)fulfilment of human relations; of the use of lived time; of artistic experimentation; and of revolutionary politics.'
The English say the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Which means: if capitalism were good, the lives of those who live in it would be good. Our lives are not good. They have not been good. We know they will not be good as long as we have to work, so long as we have to make money, so long as we have to live in a world of jobs, couples, schools, prisons/suburbs, armies, police, trade-unions, banks, gangster-governments, anarchism, democracy, NGOs, religion, The Mail and Guardian.
Of all these evils, work is the worst curse that ever struck mankind. When our ancestors lived off the land, when they hunted and farmed for themselves, they did just that: they lived. They laboured and they played, they struggled and they toiled it was not always easy to make a living, but at least what they made, poor as it may have been in many respects, was life. The moment they started to work, labour stopped being used to make life. It is now used, as the bosses put it, to make a killing. When we enter our workplaces we leave our lives behind. We do the making, we do the killing; it is our lives that are killed. When it is done to make money, labour is murder. When it is done to make love, to make life when a woman goes into labour or to nurture life in child-rearing, housework, and re-creation; labour is not work. It makes no money. It means nothing, because it kills nothing. In the vile world of work & workers there is no meaning, no value, no use outside the autonomous movement of non-life whose slick gears are greased by blood and fuelled with corpses. To be a worker is to be a slave. Many poorer workers are ashamed of their poverty. It is not, to use the technical terminology of Marx, the relative poverty of some but the absolute poverty of all workers that is truly shameful.
All of us, worker or unemployed, home-maker or student, suburbanite or bergie, are forced each day to live in ways that are out of our control. Until now we have failed at every opportunity for securing a full, fruitful existence for all because we never attacked this curse of work in a simple, straightforward enough way. We have confused ourselves with a mishmash of jumbled ideas about abstract freedom, the economy, social-justice, the government, social-services, elections, social-democracy, growth-rates, grass-roots participation, self-management, and other useless bullshit. We've tried every way to change our lives except the one way that will work: to get rid of work. There is nothing unusual about such a goal. For the majority of human existence on this earth, not a single person worked. For thousands of years, women across Africa would call their neighbours to help them farm their fields, and nobody thought of turning it into a 'decent job' or demanding a 'living wage'. They shared homemade beer, cider and wine; they sang and they danced in graceful, elaborate costumes; they smoked tobacco and dagga out of painstakingly carved, beautifully assembled pipes; they ate together with food freely provided by the host; the children played among themselves or snuck off, as they always do, to quench the passions of the heart in one anothers bodies. Even with all the digging, weeding, harvesting and planting, it was actually an excuse for a party.
Today it is work rather than field-parties that organises social time and space; the only parties of any significance these days are political ones. Every Party, even when it calls itself revolutionary, promises to put us back to work. Whenever we walk out on the job, sure enough all the unions will call for a return to work. The problem with the workers movement is that its not an anti-workers movement. The only solution to the unemployment crisis is full unemployment. The proof of the pudding is in the eating; the test of the truth is in the tasting. Now that the old parties and unions have so thoroughly discredited themselves, and more people are coming together to change their own lives, many choices will be faced which will determine whether the fate of our generation escapes the miserable failures of our parents. Many people will spring up with proposals for this or that imaginary system and requests for support of such and such a cause. From now on, whenever there is need to test if a course of action actually holds the possibility for helping us to get a life, the first thing to ask is 'will this be a practical step towards the abolition of work'? If not, not.
Its never so simple, of course. Often the answer will be, 'possibly'. Then the question is 'how and how likely?' Another is, 'what next?' Another is 'what else?' And so on. Still, the first principle remains – primary.
If not, not.
Siddiq Khan
2014
'For there are intellectual vagabonds too, to whom the hereditary dwelling-place of their fathers seems too cramped and oppressive for them to be willing to satisfy themselves with the limited space any more: instead of keeping within the limits of a temperate style of thinking, and taking as inviolable truth what furnishes comfort and tranquillity to thousands, they overlap all bounds of the traditional and run wild with their impudent criticism and untamed mania for doubt, these extravagating vagabonds. They form the class of the unstable, restless, changeable, i.e. of the prolétariat...'
-- Max Stirner, The Unique and its Property
