Herman J. Schuurman
Originally published in the newspaper De Moker, 1924. Translated by Michel Prigent
There is in language, words and expressions that we must
remove, because they designate concepts which constitute the
disastrous and corrupting content of the capitalist system.
Firstly, the word to work and all the concepts in
relations with this word – ‘workman’, ‘worker’, ‘time of
work’, ‘salary’, ‘strike’, ‘unemployed worker’, ‘people
with nothing to do.’
Work is the greatest affront and the greatest
humiliation that humanity has committed against itself. This social
system, capitalism is based on work; it has created a class of men
who must work – and a class of men who do not work. Workers are
compelled to work, otherwise they will die of hunger. ‘Whoever does
not work shan’t eat’ profess the owners, who pretend furthermore
that calculating and protecting their profits, is also to work.
There is the unemployed and the idle. If the first are
without work with no fault of their own, the second simply do not
work. The idle are the exploiters, who live on the work of the
workers, the unemployed are the workers who are not allowed to work,
because no profit can be extracted. The wonders of the apparatus of
production have fixed the time of work, have set up workshops and
ordered to what and how workers must work.
These only receive enough in order not to die of hunger
and are hardly able to nourish their children
Work is the great curse. It produces men without spirit
and without soul. In order to make others work for one’s benefit,
one must lack personality, and to work one must also lack
personality; one must crawl and traffic, betray, deceive and
falsify. For the rich idlers, the work of others is the means
of providing oneself with an easy life. For the workers themselves it
is a burden of misery, a bad fate imposed from birth, which prevents
them to live decently. When we will cease to work, then life will
start for us. Work is the enemy of life. A good worker is a beast of
burden, with rough legs, with a moronic and lifeless glance. When man
will become conscious of life, he will never work again.
I do not pretend that one must simply leave one’s boss
tomorrow and see later how you will eat without working, whilst being
convinced that life has now started. If one is compelled to be down
and out, it is already quite unfortunate. This fact of not working
results from then on, in most cases, to live at the expense of
comrades who work. If you are capable of earning your living
by pillaging and stealing – as the honest citizens call it – without
being exploited by a boss, well then, go for it; but do not think
nevertheless that the great problem is resolved. Work is a social
ill. This society is the enemy of life and it is only by destroying
it, that all societies of labour which will follow – that is to say
by having revolution upon revolution – that work will disappear. It
is only then that life will come – the full and rich life – where
everyone will be brought, by their pure instincts, to create there:
where of his own movement, each man can be a creator and may produce
exclusively what is beautiful and good; this is what is necessary.
Then there will be no more worker-men, then each one will be man; and
for vital human need, for internal necessity, each one will create in
an inexhaustible manner that which, under all reasonable relations,
cover vital needs. Then there will be but life – a grand life –
pure and cosmic and the creative passions will be the greatest
happiness of human life without constrant, a life where one will no
longer be bound either by hunger or a salary, neither by time nor by
place, and where one will no longer be exploited by parasites.
To create is an intense joy, to work is an intense
suffering. Under the actual criminal social relations, it is not
possible to create. All work is criminal. To work is to collaborate,
to make profits and to exploit. It is to collaborate to
falsification, to deceitfulness, to poisoning, it is to collaborate
for the preparations for war, it is to collaborate in the
assassination of the entire humanity.
Work destroys life.
If we have well understood this, our life will mean
something else. If we feel within ourselves this creative urge, it
will be expressed by the destruction of this vile and criminal
system. And if, by force of circumstances, we have to work in order
not to die of hunger, one must through this work, contribute to the
collapse of capitalism. If we do not work to
the collapse of capitalism we work towards the collapse of humanity.
That is why we are going to sabotage consciously each
capitalist enterprise. Each boss will bear losses by our act. There,
where we, young in revolt, are forced to work, the raw materials, the
machines and the products inevitably will be put out of action. At
any moment the cogs will go off in the gearing, the knives and the
scissors will break, the most indispensable tools will disappear –
and we will communicate our recipes and our means.
We do not want to kick the bucket because of
capitalism. That is why capitalism must die because of us.
We want to create as free men, not work like slaves; for
this reason we are going to destroy the system of slavery. Capitalism
exists because of the work of workers; that is why we do not want to
be workers and why we are to sabotage work.
