There are tendencies in ontological or lifestyle anarchism (Hakim Beyism, mystico-new ageisms, anti-civilization Zerzanisms, zero-work, situationist and other French postmodernisms, etc.) to sever ties with leftism or with the "horrible old men" of 19th century anarchism (reference Bookchin's "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism:An Unbridgeable Chasm"http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/soclife.html). I am not a great admirer of Murray Bookchin and believe there are many excellent ideas in third-way/lifestyle anarchism(TAZ, insurrectionism, sex-pol and work democracy, illuminating critiques of the Spectacle, culture jamming) however I distrust the disowning of radical leftist politics and extreme pagano-mystico-new age shinola(in "Post Anarchism Anarchy" http://www.t0.or.at/hakimbey/taz/taz2c.htm Bey calls for Mystical anarchism free of "new age shit and shinola" but irregardless of the efficacy of ancient pagan, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Judaic, or Freemasonic rituals in attainment of personal liberation it is as impossible to completely separate these from new age shit as it is to formulate a fully non-Marxist communism.) Lifestyle anarchism often seems to lead one to elitism, exclusion, or seclusion, withdrawal from the mundane world of politics. At least Wilhelm Reich and the Situationists retained the most important elements of radical leftist Council Communism in their ideologies but the trend is now very much anti-leftist and anti-social. Another rising ideological fashion is the rejection of subversive acts, movements, etc. which are considered to have been commodified or counter-subverted by capitalism and although it is obvious that many adopt the trappings of these mainstreamed revolutionary subcultures sans the revolutionary politics, "ringing denunciations" (e.g. Hakim Bey's "Ringing Denunciation of Surrealism" http://www.left-bank.org/bey/ringing.htm) are uncalled for, just as ontological anarchism's rejection of leftism seems reactionary and absurd. A few years ago I had a friend who had totally embraced what many would consider the absolutely commodified lifestyle of the deadhead flowerchild(anarchists in the 19th century were often reviled as "dead-heads" by the yellow journalists of the time). She was very real, dedicated to pacifist and ecological activism, communal living, and anti-capitalist self sufficiency(she grew her own food and other useful plants, made her own clothing, and rebuilt the engine of her VW bus)rivalled by few of the Bey or Bakunin readers I've met. The point is it is a mistake to write off any person, any subset, any ideology or culture because an overly intellectualized philosophy has condemned his, or her, or its revolutionary potential. I am always concerned when a neo-situationist addresses commodification and fails to mention recuperation. The anarchist culture will be that questionably derrided mosaic-melting pot-superculture because it will be tolerant, anti-authoritarian, and egalitarian and I believe must be built on same the framework upon which the "horrible old men" and women of the 19th century built left-anarchism.
I agree. No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of the same debased coin. The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for "reality," the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously -- or maybe not -- all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else. Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn't have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn't triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I'd like life to be a game -- but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps. The alternative to work isn't just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, it's never more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I promoting the managed time-disciplined safety-valve called "leisure"; far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is the time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacation so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation. I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it's done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist of "Communist," work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness. Usually -- and this is even more true in "Communist" than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee -- work is employment, i. e., wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In the USSR or Cuba or Yugoslavia or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions -- Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey -- temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millenia, the payment of taxes (= ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility. But modern work has worse implications. People don't just work, they have "jobs." One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don't) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A "job" that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who -- by any rational-technical criteria -- should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.
Yes, but one could refute all of your arguments with an examination of the evils of freedom from time-consuming activities. I'm talking about leisure time. My topic is nothing new. However, since no one else has found it fit to address directly, I will address it here. I begin with critical semantic clarifications. First, I want to embrace diversity. But first, let me pose an abstract question. Why doesn't leisure time reveal the truth about itself? This can be answered most easily by stating that if we let leisure time create a kind of psychic pain at the very root of the modern mind, all we'll have to look forward to in the future is a public realm devoid of culture and a narrow and routinized professional life untouched by the highest creations of civilization. As that last sentence suggests, leisure time is careless with data, makes all sorts of causal interpretations of things without any real justification, has a way of combining disparate ideas that don't seem to hang together, seems to show a sort of pride in its own biases, gets into all sorts of hostile speculation, and then makes no effort to test out its speculations -- and that's just the short list! There's one thing you can surely say about leisure time: It has a sense of humor. It was being a real comedian when it told us that its way of life is correct and everyone else's isn't. If we restore the ancient traditions that leisure time has abandoned, then the sea of recidivism, on which leisure time so heavily relies, will begin to dry up. While puerile fast-buck artists claim to defend traditional values, they actually trick academics into abandoning the principles of scientific inquiry. Once we have absorbed and understood leisure time's money-grubbing tricks, it is our inescapable responsibility to do whatever is necessary to invigorate the effort to reach solutions by increasing the scope of the inquiry, rather than by narrowing or abandoning it. What I just wrote is not based on merely a single experience or anecdote. Rather, it is based upon the wisdom of accumulated years, spanning two continents, and proven by the fact that leisure time insists that if it kicks us in the teeth, we'll then lick its toes and beg for another kick. This is a rather strong notion from someone who knows so little about the subject. On a more pedestrian level, I'm giving leisure time the benefit of the doubt, which is more than it's ever given me. But what, you may ask, does any of that have to do with the theme of this letter, viz., that yawping jackanapes like it are all alike? Here's the answer, albeit in a somewhat circuitous and roundabout style: If it wants to wage an odd sort of warfare upon a largely unprepared and unrecognizing public, let it wear the opprobrium of that decision. We will have to become much more vigilant to ensure that leisure time doesn't make us all miserable. Moving on, you should never forget the three most important facets of leisure time's expostulations, namely their despicable origins, their internal contradictions, and their tendentious nature. I like to face facts. I like to look reality right in the eye and not pretend it's something else. And the reality of our present situation is this: In order to renew those institutions of civil society -- like families, schools, churches, and civic groups -- that take advantage of a rare opportunity to hold out the prospect of societal peace, prosperity, and a return to sane values and certainties, we must drive off and disperse the insidious, doctrinaire antagonists who sugarcoat the past and dispense false optimism for the future. And that's just the first step. Remember, leisure time is locked into its present course of destruction. It does not have the interest or the will to change its fundamentally hateful rejoinders. You know what we'd have if everybody wanted to undermine the individualistic underpinnings of traditional jurisprudence? Total chaos. Leisure time says that society is supposed to be lenient towards brainless, sophomoric insolent-types. What it means by this, of course, is that it wants free reign to prevent the real problems from being solved. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Of course, if leisure time had learned anything from history, it'd know that it likes insinuations that focus too much on one side of the equation and not enough on the broader perspective of things. Could there be a conflict of interest there? If you were to ask me, I'd say that some deep void within leisure time makes it necessary for it to provide self-deceiving adulterers with an irresistible temptation to paint people of different races and cultures as unimaginative alien forces undermining the coherent national will. Of that I am certain, because it argues that those who disagree with it should be cast into the outer darkness, should be shunned, should starve. I wish I could suggest some incontrovertible chain of apodictic reasoning that would overcome this argument, but the best I can do is the following: Several of its thralls, who asked to remain nameless, informed me of its secret plans to give voice, in a totally emotional and non-rational way, to its deep-rooted love of opportunism. I mean, think about it. Don't kid yourself: Each rung on the ladder of commercialism is a crisis of some kind. Each crisis supplies an excuse for leisure time to establish tacit boundaries and ground rules for the permissible spectrum of opinion. That is the standard process by which hypocritical, neurotic braggarts address what is, in the end, a nonexistent problem. Well, leisure time, we're all getting a little tired of you and your kind messing up the world and then refusing to accept responsibility for what you've done. We're fed up. And the day is coming when you'll be held accountable for your hectoring sound bites. As a parting thought, remember that leisure time's failure to put to rest the animosities that have kept various groups of people from enjoying anything other than superficial unity is so mean-spirited that our sacred values and traditions mean nothing to leisure time.
both of u r the most BORING COCKSMOKERS I have ever heard tell of. I'm thinking u may be FUCKING RETARDS ------------------ I'm a VAGITARIAN
woops, I didn't mean u HARLAN. You're just a FUCKING RETARD. Not a COCKSMOKER. Who gives a FUCK anyways.....
What the HELL are you talking about? Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing. And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately deStalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a par-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work? The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it.
What's a "cocksmoker"? I've tried smoking a cigar with my penis before, but it wouldn't fit into my peehole. Did you have any better luck? Anyways, I have more important things on my mind, like demolishing the state.
what CUNT showed harlan the wonders of COPY N PASTE??? does this mean we'll be inundated with pseudo-intelligent posts from the king retard himself??? is this a concerted effort from the drooling one to give the appearance of having a glimmer of intelligence... rather than the snotty, salivating, pissing, shitting and masturbating idiot we all know he is??? or are you trying to tell me harlan suddenly got educated... then read that post and wrote a reply in 14 minutes!!! btw... you will never get the masses to relinquish their market-led lifestyles... we live in an aspirational society.. people want to work harder and longer to help pay for their shiny baubles... the general populace revel in the fact that they worship the golden calf... the false idol - money... fuck the rest of society... do what i've done.... buy some land in the countryside... i bought 6 1/2 acres in north wales... then become self sufficient... it seems a big step.. but it is remarkably easy ... hard work is involved... but you ain't working for 'the man' whatever effort you put in benefits you... but i ain't planning on dropping out of society yet... it's just a base for my active leisure time... mtb's, waterskiing, mountain climbing, huntin, shootin an fishin... but if i ever feel the need to up sticks and fuck society off... i can disappear up there and never pay anything to anyone, or work for anyone ever again.... and if you want to drop out of society... do it right... don't fuckin decide you don't wanna work anymore and then sign on... fuckin leeches like that make me wanna kill something!!!!!!
Your all talking complete BOLLOCKS... It is what it is...And all the bitching in the world isn't gonna change it...The only time things will start to change is when all the earths Fuel and energy resources are spent...Then things are gonna change...Oh yeah... ------------------ Aardvark-Zyrian
what... when the sun goes out and the world stops turning??... fossil fuel sources'll run out.. but theres always the sun and the wind..
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by PimpDaddy: what... when the sun goes out and the world stops turning??... fossil fuel sources'll run out.. but theres always the sun and the wind.. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Yeah..But the sun, wind and oceans ain't gonna power a city...I can picture it now...All those New York skyscrapers each topped with a big windmill... "Cold fusion"maybe???
We could build a great big steam generator and burn the ethiopians. energy + population control..yea now we are cookin with grease!! ------------------ When I fart it smells like rotting fetus.
Perhaps the universal mono-myth of the Industrial World is not too far from the truth. We in the West have one continual theme running through all our entertainment and media; things go wrong, but everything works out in the end. Right now, as our realities are changing at ever increasing speeds, we are learning to re-think things in a new light almost every day. As Alice said in "Through the Looking Glass", "You have to run as fast as you can to stay in one place." In America "The Wizard of Oz" is the single common denominator in the mind of almost every person who grew up between 1940 and 1990. It was shown every Thanksgiving for decades. Unmasking the Wizard for the Ultimate Truth that he is just another Wise Guy who has set himself up as God and King is ingrained in every American Heart. Yet the Emerald City would not exist without the Illusion he created. That dreams and aspirations lead to real life is the paradox of the human condition. We invent ourselves with culture and art then re-invent again another 'reality' as 'real' as what was replaced. The World ends and begins in the heart and mind of every person who 'keeps up' with the 'spirit of the times'. Those who fall behind lament the awful state of things that have moved on beyond the state of the world when they were young. Tim Leary used to say that people who worried about the end of the world usually meant that the world they were comfortable with was now obsolete. We need to re-create ourselves regularly to keep the Rainbow in sight. We continuously arrive at Now, only to be forced to run again to reach the New Truth born out of the ever evolving Mind of Humankind. The Rainbow can never be reached. The horizon is the limits of our sight. The horizons of our ancestors were narrower than ours. The horizons of our descendants will be larger than ours. The Rainbow will elude them just as it does for us. Then is no end to the Expanding Horizon for the Human Race. There are those who cannot keep up; for them the race is ended; the World has ended for them. For the rest the game of Wizards and Kings goes on. A New Dream to make Real; another Game to play; another Race to run. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow can never be reached. That has never stopped anyone from trying to reach it. Because we Believe we Reach. When we stop reaching the Wicked Witch has won. We can never stop reaching for the Rainbow, 'unreal' as it is. It is the Reaching that makes the World go round.
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by PinkorBrown69: That post makes me wanna reach alright... <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> reach-around??
