4.

Beyond
work

Capitalism has unceasingly revolutionized the means of production, but it’s been incapable of truly liberating and transforming productive activity. Industrial work signifies the most extreme alienation. The proletarian, in blue collar or white, is chained to his machine or to his desk. He’s lost the license to appreciate his work, and the leeway to undertake it as he sees fit, which belonged to the artisan and even the serf or the slave. The impersonal nature of this domination doesn’t make it any less unbearable.

Work has set itself apart from all other aspects of life. It dominates them through the fatigue and the stupefaction it engenders and through the salary it secures.

Given the control that modern capital exercises over all social life, the principles of work end up regulating the entirety of existence. The logic of efficiency and production govern “free” time. Everything must be rationalized and made profitable, including pleasure and waste! All are cordially invited to take up the reins of system—within their own established conditions.

Communism is, first of all, the radical transformation of human activity. That’s where can we start to discuss the abolition of work.

Work and torture

If there’s one word that is neutral, it’s certainly not the word work.

In French and in Spanish,1 it derives from the Latin word trepalium, which designates an instrument of torture that succeeded the cross. Before coming to its modern generalization, it’d first designate work of a particularly grueling nature, and then work in mines. Today, its meaning has expanded considerably but its boundaries remain unclear. As if to provide itself with a natural justification, work ends up accounting also for physical phenomena.

In English, the word originates from a tangible agrarian activity.2 What now characterizes the term work is precisely its abstract quality. It no longer designates this or that specific activity, but rather the activity or effort as such. You no longer plant cabbages, you no longer spin wool, you no longer tend sheep—you work. All work is fungible. What counts is the time spent on it and the wages made off of it. As Marx said: “Time is everything, man is nothing; he is nothing more than the carcass of time.”3

It isn’t the word work that we revile but the foul reality it encompasses. Never mind whether the term stays or goes. If it must stay, it’ll have to undergo a profound alteration in meaning. Maybe it’ll end up designating the pinnacle of pleasure!

In communist society, productive activity will lose its strictly productive character. The obsession with output and efficiency will disappear. Work will merge into the whole of a life transformed.

Such a change signifies the end of hierarchy, of the division between the leaders and the led, of the rift separating decision and execution, of the opposition of manual and intellectual labor. Man will no longer be dominated by his tools or by the products of his own activities. The subjugation of nature to the productive process, its monopolization by groups and individuals, will cease to be.

This revolution will be accompanied by a technological transformation. What’s at stake is the very nature of industrial development.

Capitalism’s parasitic nature is betrayed by the fact that it’s possible to sustain social life while shuttering a large portion of businesses. In France, the strikes of May 1968 gave proof to the resources of a developed country. The whole of industry was able to be shuttered for a month with no discernible consequences.

There might be a shortage of bread during the revolutionary period. It wouldn’t be attributable, however, to a lack of production capacity. It would be due to specific circumstances. This doesn’t at all detract from the possibility of shutting down parasitic industries. Quite the contrary; it makes it more imperative, in order to be able to redirect forces toward vital sectors.

It’s not possible to determine beforehand, much less in detail, what will or won’t be eliminated. We’re convinced the war industry is dirty; it’ll have no further reason to exist in a developed communist society. Even so, you can’t decide ahead of time that it won’t be necessary to develop during some transitional phase!

In any case, decisions won’t be made by technocratic committees but directly by the workers concerned. And the threat of lost wages will no longer hang over their decision-making!

If some people cling to useless or even harmful tasks, either out of professional self-interest or for less respectable reasons, they’ll be held responsible before the whole of the communist proletariat. The right to property or to self-determination won’t be an excuse for cops or financial analysts who’d like to carry on with the routines of their regular little jobs!

Everything that serves finance and the state machine—everything that demands substantial, grueling effort just to meet secondary needs—will be eliminated, or at least profoundly transformed. Products and “services” currently hogged by businesses, like the telephone or electric power, can be redirected toward individual consumption. Buildings and machines can be put to different uses.

It’ll be possible to meet numerous needs at much-reduced social costs. Transportation, for example, will be built on a more rational use of both individual and collective vehicles. The demands of the timetable will be greatly relaxed. The need to travel will arise less frequently.

Some activities won’t actually disappear, but they will be profoundly transformed. Education will cast off, as far as possible, the doings of specialists. Print shops will leave the service of the major newspapers and begin serving a multitude of small bulletins.

The principle won’t be to produce for the sake of producing, or to compete to retain customers, but to reduce arduous and uninteresting industrial labor as much as possible. Shuttering useless sectors will allow society to lighten and diversify those productive duties that remain necessary. Human energy, liberated in this way, can see about new activities.

Children, students, elderly people, and housewives will be able to participate in social activities befitting their abilities, all without becoming a competing workforce on the job market.

These transformations aren’t luxuries that the revolution will have to indulge in order to entice the hesitant. They are necessary, here and now, for fighting and gathering forces against the party of capital, which is threatening to stick around for some time.

Science and automation

All these measures provide us with only a vague idea of what’s to come. Communism will make use of the material foundations bequeathed by the old world. Above all, it’ll further technical and scientific achievements. It’ll do so quickly, and better than capital can.

It’s considered good form to rhapsodize about the technical progress made since the last world war. Really, it’d be more sensible to be shocked at how slowly scientific discoveries have trickled down to industry. Industry is characterized, first and foremost, by its inertia. It advances when historical “accidents” oblige it to change suppliers or markets; it modifies its technical foundations to evade economic stagnation when interest rates collapse.

Present-day industry subsists by refining inventions and discoveries that date back to dozens on dozens of decades ago. Vehicles based on petroleum energy and the internal combustion engine, for example—like our own state-of-the-art automobiles­­—are veritable fossils in light of what’s possible scientifically. Industry hasn’t been able to actually advance either automation or new sources of energy. It could only do so if these were to become profitable from within its narrow point of view.

Communism will be able to get away with building machinery and industrial outfits that wouldn’t have been considered profitable by businesses, or even by capitalistic states. It’ll see progress as worth the effort, regardless of immediate benefit. Only, it’ll often be able to discover this immediate benefit in places that capitalism wouldn’t notice it: in the improvements to product quality, the good of research, and the betterment of working conditions.

From capitalism’s point of view, it wouldn’t be profitable to manufacture a silent jackhammer unless the machine could rival or undercut a noisy jackhammer in price. It would matter very little that the resulting savings would come at the cost of obvious unpleasantness. At the moment of launch, it’s not possible to take into account the fact that the silent jackhammer might become cheaper than the noisy one, once its production was fully developed. Why would a business risk going bankrupt or, at minimum, make sacrifices in the name of technical progress or humanitarianism? Communism won’t simply take over from capitalism; it will transform science and technology. From servants of an industrial hellscape, knowing or unknowing, they’ll become tools of liberation.

Science will no longer be a sector distinct from production.

Capital has a vital need for innovation. It can’t bring it forth directly from the productive sector. That sector must stay calm, its imagination chained up. Science therefore developed on its own. It remained marginal for a long time, the work of amateurs. But capital, having more pressing need of its services, had to take it in hand. Under the aegis of corporations and the state, science would become an investment. It would bureaucratize, coming under the yoke of functionaries and administrators. Creative freedom would be kept on a leash.

Depending on who you ask, science is a fairy godmother or a wicked witch. The scientist is a sorcerer turned wage laborer. What is the outcome of critical inquiry seems like the work of magic.

The ideology of production recuperates what it’s had to concede to the experimental method. Science appears as a sector producing one special commodity: Information. Knowledge ceases to be the precarious result of specific research, instead becoming a sacred product offered up for the contemplation of the mentally infirm masses.

It’s a question of liberating initiative and experimentation in order to restore them to the people. Science must cease to be the possession of a caste of specialists, becoming once more an appetite for risk and for play, the pleasure of discovery.

The “conquest” of space demonstrated the possibilities of automation and electronics. It’s only a matter of applying all this technology to the transformation of our daily lives. Automation makes it possible to relieve humans of tedious tasks and charge machines with what should be theirs to do.

The first step toward automatic systems—those that function and self-regulate without intervention, once set in motion—dates back to the time of the Pharaohs, when they were used to regulate the Nile. In modern times, they began to flourish. Automated “factories” began to appear; see the mill near Philadelphia that, from 1784, would receive wheat and transform it into flour without any manual invention. Alongside these machines for automatic production, machines for calculation began to appear. It’s in 1881 that the automatic telephone exchange was introduced.

Automation has existed for a very long time. It’s nothing but an extreme form of mechanization. Electronics are what will make automation a standard, if not most commonplace, form of mechanization.

Electronics, combined with the control of the major sources of energy, will make it possible to operate remotely and to centralize a great number of operations.

Automation doesn’t merely represent the possibility of entrusting machines with tasks that humans are unenthusiastic to perform. It is also, and perhaps above all, the possibility of undertaking what would never otherwise be possible. It enables operations that call for faster reactions and more complex calculations than humanly possible. Machines can act in conditions unsuitable for life. Without automation, the development of nuclear energy and the discovery of space would have been impossible undertakings.

Those who want revolution but don’t want to resort to cursed science and technology are at an impasse. The extensive destruction of our environment is certainly not independent of technology and its possibilities, but you can’t pin the blame on them.

Nuclear energy and information technology may present some very dangerous characteristics; this is a reflection of their power. But that fact only condemns present-day society, which uses them recklessly or enlists them to consolidate its control over people.

Up to now, capitalism has only automated things in a piecemeal way. That doesn’t mean it can stop there. Its logic­­—the necessity of maintaining or recouping a reasonable profit ratio—has to compel it to go further. That doesn’t mean that the expansion of automation might be compatible with the continued existence of the current system. Automation’s very hypothesis is contrary to the survival of a class society; it renders the proletarian unnecessary. “The automatic machine … is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor” (N. Wiener).4 At the furthest stage of mechanization’s development, human machines will be rendered unnecessary.

The resolution is therefore either communist revolution or the destruction of the proletariat, which would be reduced to a stratum of welfare recipients—or eliminated outright. The prophets of woe have forewarned us of the second eventuality. But our optimism isn’t founded on the humanitarianism of our leaders; history’s shown that not even genocide rattles them. We simply believe them incapable of mastering the situation and actually implementing policy. For better or worse, we’re governed not by übermenschen with incredible foresight but by cretins, clever at maneuvering but incapable of taking an historic view of events. They are themselves more or less rejected from the productive process. In this affair, the important thing is that the proletariat not show itself to be too weak.

The strength of the proletarians is immense. Their awareness of this strength is extremely limited. The working class has always drawn its might from its place in the productive apparatus. The first stirrings of automation, within the apparatus, have only served to bolster this might. A small fraction of workers and technicians now hold tremendous power in their hands. Economic upheavals risk giving them the appetite to use it.

Neither the bourgeoisie nor the bureaucracy can deny the proletariat without denying itself. It’s chained to value, which is to say to the human labor that’s the basis of this value. It doesn’t want progress for the sake of progress but for the sake of money. If it develops mechanization, it doesn’t do so with the ulterior motive of drumming out overly disruptive workers. The proletariat is not a mere instrument of the bourgeoisie. It’s also the bourgeoisie’s raison d’être. Capital (or work) might reduce man to the rank of machine, but it can’t stop being a social relation between classes.

Class society and robotization

All class society seeks to turn human beings into robots, to reduce them to objects whose bodies and intellects can be put to use. When one part of society stops working for its own sake but breaks its back to put food in the mouths of a different fraction of society, this not only means that the former is needing to make extra efforts, but also, and above all, that its activity changes in nature. What interests the master isn’t the pleasure or displeasure of the slave, his joy or his anguish; it’s his production. Class society is founded on the human capacity to develop goods that can be alienated from their producers for the use of others. The human being is no longer a human being but an instrument. The uniquely human ability for building, and for thinking production through ahead of time, backfires against him and turns him into a tool himself!

The exploiter may be cruel or kind toward the exploited. No sentiments are ruled out. Better still, sentiment is necessary to grease the cogs of the system—but it’s only one of the system’s limited secondary products. The exploiter might be decent, but he can’t stop exploiting. He might be sadistic, but he can’t destroy his human assets. When capitalism comes to this barbaric juncture, however, it’s been driven to it by economic necessity.

The ruling classes of the past used to graft themselves onto peasant communities. Capital shattered these communities in order to bring a crippled and atomized human material under its rule. A commodity amidst commodities, the proletarian confronts his mechanical competitors on a marketplace of the “factors of production.” In this struggle, the machine gradually supplants the man and reduces his role in the process of production.

Communism will upend the nature of this progression. Man will no longer be in competition with machine because he will no longer be a factor of production.

The communist use of mechanization means the possibility of automating a very great number of activities. This isn’t to say that the key to the social question can be found in widespread automation.

The abolition of wage labor isn’t the replacement of man with machine; it’s the human transformation of human activities by means of machinery. It isn’t a matter of reducing the workweek from forty hours to zero, gradually or abruptly, as some pseudo-revolutionaries have proposed. A world where one entirely automated industry, working inexhaustible equipment, could at once supply anything imaginable and desirable­­—that would reduce man to a vegetative state. It’d be a stagnant universe without adventure, because all that could be adventured would have to be programd in advance.

Regardless of the faith it puts in science, that myth is profoundly capitalist. It considers the separation of working time and leisure time as consummate and natural. It wants to reserve the hell of production for machines and the paradise of consumption for human beings. Depending on how strictly that boundary is drawn, it’d all lead to either a permanent all-inclusive resort or a society of fetuses.

Communism is the end of all separation between working time and free time, between production and consumption, between that which is lived and that which is experienced.

Remuneration

The disappearance of wage labor is enough to shake the bedrock of the old society. The obligation to work in order to survive disappears. Work ceases to be a means of making a living. It no longer plays intermediary between man and his needs. It is the direct satisfaction of need. In this way, it ceases to be work. What motivates action stops seeming like an external obligation, becoming instead an internal necessity: the desire to occupy oneself, the determination to be useful. The dissociation of activity from remuneration—if in remuneration you don’t include the pleasure that activity can materially provide—needs to go hand in hand with the profound transformation of man. It requires individuals who are responsible for what they undertake. It demands that initiative and intellect be cultivated, that selfishness and pettiness disappear.

It’s become customary to attribute all of humanity’s ills to the incorrigibility of human nature. It’s well-known—man is a wolf to man.5 The phrase explains nothing, but it does demonstrate the contempt in which we humans manage to hold ourselves. It’s a reflection of the fatalism that capital cultivates, reducing the human being to the role of spectator in his own development.

The idea of maintaining some kind of remuneration during the transitional period in the form of vouchers distributed in proportion to work hours performed, as Marx proposed, isn’t advisable. If the development of productive forces allow for a communist revolution—and they allow for one today—the revolution cannot defer the full implementation of its own principles. A voucher system for remunerating and thereby compelling work would fall short of the spontaneous revolt of the oppressed, of all those who rose up expecting neither power nor money nor reward. It would be favored by bureaucrats, administrators, and all those who would rather supervise and demand action from others. This kind of system could only bridle the proponents of action without managing to bring along their opponents. If you have to force someone to do something, we prefer the method of the kick in the ass. It’s more frank and more effective.

We aren’t inveterate opponents of the employment of vouchers. It’d be absurd to leave diamonds up to free distribution! Vouchers can be issued, in such cases, by qualified authorities. When it comes to goods concerning production, the vouchers will be issued by factory councils; when it comes to rare or dangerous pharmaceuticals, they’ll be supplied by hospitals or doctors; and so on. These vouchers won’t serve as remuneration. They’ll play the part currently played by medical prescriptions. Their use will be determined by the nature or the rarity of the goods for which they’re “redeemed.”

The greatest possible number of goods, especially food, must be made free and freely available, whether under the aegis of revolutionary committees and councils in zones that have come into the hands of the revolutionary party, or by coups de force in unliberated zones. This is the method of distribution that’s simplest, least costly, and most pleasant. This is the method best suited for popularizing communism. It’ll be better to implement this general rule, even if it means cracking down harshly on abuses, than to get bogged down in distribution by distasteful and finicky audits.

Laziness

Won’t that kind of program encourage laziness? If you could abolish the principle of remuneration for work while maintaining the world was it is, this would most certainly be true. Only, communism upends the conditions of life and of work in their entirety.

The revolutionary spirit isn’t the spirit of sacrifice, each person setting themselves aside to serve the community. That’s Maoism! Communism assumes a certain degree of altruism, but it also assumes a certain degree of egocentrism. Above all, it doesn’t pit loving your neighbor against loving yourself, demanding that one be made subservient to the other. We don’t love vicars any more than we love profiteers. It’s capitalism that makes it so that the individual interest and the collective interest are always in conflict—to give is to give in.

The communist man will be no more prone to resignation than to fatalism. The transformation of mindsets will have nothing to do with pedagogy. There won’t be an ideal image to conform to. There won’t be a transformation of social structures on one side and a transformation of individuals on the other. It’s capitalism that separates things in that way. The proletariat will disalienate itself, and it won’t be able to do so without changing the whole world and its living conditions. A few weeks of revolution will throw decades of conditioning into disorder. Cowardice, greed, and stupidity are the results of a specific social state. If the situation that engenders them and lends them a certain utility doesn’t disappear, the carrot, the stick, and education can only serve to suppress them. With communism, these flaws will disappear because they’ll no longer correspond to anything.

The possibility of there being egocentrists, incurable slackers, or irredeemable incompetents isn’t necessarily too serious a problem. The greatest enemy of these people isn’t repression but boredom. They can quell a great deal of unwillingness. Men are social creatures; it takes a lot of audacity to bear being useless to your own community. Even now, the parasitic and the egocentric have to fake it, for others’ sakes and their own. With the abolition of wage labor, it’ll be very difficult to maintain delusions about anyone’s activity. Everybody will be judged, not on time spent, but on what’s actually been done.

Communism doesn’t preclude conflict between individuals or groups. Profiteers risk seeing themselves held accountable. If people support them, and if people fatten them up, it’s because they really want to.

Communists have nothing against a healthy sense of laziness. Revolutionary society isn’t made for people to work themselves to exhaustion within it. The lazy are only at fault if they demand from others what they refuse for themselves. So let the audacious refuse to be suckered, in their view, but don’t let them presume to force their personal preferences on everyone!

Given the replacement of coerced labor with impassioned activity, most of the causes of habitual laziness will disappear. Also to disappear is the irritation that the workhorse feels toward the slacker, which often is no more than envy in disguise.

The lazy people of today won’t necessarily be the lazy people of tomorrow. Some of those who currently run around exhausting themselves, spurred by profit, will need our kindness. Others who currently seem incapable of rousing themselves will wake up and run wild.

In developed communist society, mechanization will confer man a great power. Each person will be able to choose his own pace of life. One will exhaust himself in costly adventures and spend more than he gives back to society. Another won’t ever do much, and yet society will find itself indebted to him. Nobody will be keeping score.

Once financial incentives have disappeared, won’t the spirit of inquiry and invention also vanish? Won’t everybody content themselves with doing their little chores in a humdrum little way? It’s a mistake to believe that the lure of gain and the spirit of inquiry go hand in hand. The merchant consorts with lies and illusions; the scientist constantly needs to ward them off. Science brings in money and invention pays, but it’s often not the same person making a discovery who profits off of them. Even in the capitalist world, money isn’t what motivates scientific passion. People pilfer their own creativity and imagination in order to make money.

The allocation of tasks

If it isn’t possible to stop laziness, won’t our society risk sinking into disorder? Even if there’s widespread goodwill, will it be enough to resolve the matter of coordinating all activities? Won’t everybody rush to take the nice jobs, neglecting the others before machines have had time to take the reins? In short, everyone doing as they please would lead to disaster!

The idea that modern society is very complex, and that this complexity is inevitable, is very widespread. It isn’t a mere illusion. The individual feels himself lost in the capitalist jungle. He can’t manage to get his bearings, much less understand how the whole thing manages to function. But it would be a mistake to believe that this impression holds true for all modern societies. The impression isn’t necessarily engendered by the multitude of operations and situations which constitute the social whole. It arises from the estrangement between decision-making and coordination on the one hand and action on the other.

This impression of complexity and permanent confusion that capitalist society engenders has had its repercussions on the depictions of a socialist world. People have come to believe that the foremost problem to be solved, in the society of the future, is that of planning and coordination. They’ve imagined a “plan factory” responsible for surveying the state of the economy and determining technical coefficients that link the production of a product to the production of another product—the amount of carbon necessary to produce a ton of steel, for example. This factory would propose practicable goals and take responsibility for any necessary revisions over the course of their undertaking. The problems of the society of the future are seen principally through the lens of management (Chaulieu, Socialism or Barbarism No. 22).6

Communist society will have plenty of complex technical difficulties to resolve—only, these difficulties won’t fall within the purview of any particular authority. There’s no point in trying to predict the forms that human activity will take, only in determining its content. There will be no unifying or managing what won’t have been divided. The individual producer will see as much to his own activity as to its connection with the system of general possibilities and needs.

In revolutionary society, relations between men and between groups of producers will be simple and transparent. The fear of competition that compels secrecy will cease to exist. It isn’t important that each person arrive at the universal science and that each brain be a scaled-down “plan factory.” What’s the use of knowing where the ore in my fork came from! What matters is that the necessary information should circulate and be accessible.

In a fluid society where parochial attitudes and corporate patriotism have vanished, where each person can have many skills and play many roles, individuals and groups will orient themselves in accordance with society’s needs.

Social obligations won’t be imposed from without by some central office’s intermediary, whether dictatorial committee or democratic assembly. The individual or group won’t have to give way to their own awareness of circumstances, if we imagine this awareness as a simple reflection of external imperatives. People will act according to their awareness of social needs and possibilities, of course, but not in disregard of their own tastes. Often, there won’t be any need for compromise. People feel their own desires as social needs before anything else. They’re quite drawn to remedy things that they perceive as a lack. If I’m having trouble obtaining wine and I miss it, I wouldn’t necessarily need to go look into production curves on a computer to know that maybe someone should go tend to the vineyards!

The communist man won’t separate the pursuit of his desires from its social repercussions. He won’t rush into tasks that are already being seen to. At any rate, it’s stupid to think that the world will be made homogeneous and everybody will be carried away by crazes for the same activities.

Awareness of what’s necessary to society will be much keener than it is now. All will be able to keep themselves informed, and capable of understanding what works and what doesn’t, even if it doesn’t bear direct consequences for each person. Computers will be indispensable tools for the circulation and interpretation of news.

The general organization of society doesn’t necessitate a central governing office, much less multiples of them. Perhaps there will be people who deal more specifically with gathering information and making plans, but they won’t have blueprints to draft, in the imperative sense of the term. Planning amounts to the desire to shackle the future to the present!

Organizing can’t become the work of any given caste. It’ll be done constantly and at all levels of society. Men, no longer being divided by a thousand barriers, will coordinate as a matter of course.

Not everything will necessarily go smoothly. Some conflicts will be inevitable. But the point of the revolution isn’t to rid society of all conflict, nor to engender a society where everything will be harmonized a priori. Certain forms of conflict will, of course, be eliminated—those that divide classes, nations… But in the world that we want, opposition will have as much of a place as agreement. Harmony and balance will be forged by means of conflict and debate.

The fundamental difference with the current situation is that each person will only be bringing their own forces to their own battles. It’ll no longer be possible to allude to abstract rights, detached from the tangible world of oppositions and power relations. It’ll no longer be possible to win recognition for the legitimacy of a cause through recourse to specific bodies like the army or the police.

Communism will make conflict normal and even necessary, provided, of course, that the benefits at stake are no less than the damages caused. Capitalism is profoundly antagonistic. It’s founded on the opposition between classes, nations, and individuals. Everyone’s in opposition with everyone else. It’s to ward off this reality that people preach fraternity and starry-eyed love. Aggression erupts everywhere, but the picture of peace must reign. Whenever people brutalize each other, it’s not in the name of any individual interest but for the good of civilization, of universal values, etcetera etcetera.

Don’t you risk wasting a lot of time in idle discussion and conflict? By addressing the problems of coordination and adjustment down at the level on which they actually arise, there’s actually the chance of saving some time. But the idea that time is a thing that can be lost or saved is astonishing enough in and of itself.

From a communist point of view, the problem can’t be reduced to knowing which method might conserve the most time. What matters is how this time is spent. Will people find it enjoyable and interesting to debate and come to agreements, or will they prefer to limit themselves to wordlessly implementing the resolutions of a governing committee that’s planned in advance for a lack of conflict? Men will relearn how to talk to one another and have real debates in a considerate way. Tedious discussions will be limited by the boredom of their interlocutors, but also by the simple fact that everything won’t always have to be brought back up. We’ll be able to rely on past experiences.

Onerous jobs

There are some tasks that are indisputably onerous and unpleasant. We can hope to reduce them through mechanization, but someone will have to do them until then, and nobody can say whether all of it will necessarily be possible to eliminate.

It wouldn’t be acceptable, and certainly wouldn’t be accepted by the people involved, for those thankless jobs to lie on the same shoulders all the time. It’ll therefore be necessary to arrange things so that the greatest possible number of people deal with them in rotation. The loss in profitability will be incidental.

In factories and other sites of production, people will easily be able to take turns at unpleasant positions.

At the level of society as a whole, people can call for these thankless jobs to likewise be subject to rotation. Everyone will be on garbage collection duty for some part of the year.

Onerous jobs are much less so when they’re the extension of and prerequisite for pleasant activities. Today, tasks are compartmentalized to an extreme, and the requirements of the “rational” use of the workforce demand that people do what they’re qualified for while leaving the rest to others. In communist society, the researcher can very well deal with cleaning the facilities he uses, the motorist with helping tar the roads—and the dead with digging their own graves.

Unpleasant activities will be much less so when those who do them only give over a small portion of their time and no longer feel, as is currently the case, that they’re shackled to them for life. Above all, these activities can be done in an environment that’s entirely different from today—no more petty tyrants, no more obsession with productivity. Garbage collection, for example, could assume the air of Mardi Gras.

Many activities become onerous, not on account of their actual nature, but because they’re made to be performed over and over again by the same people, and all in the name of workforce rationalization.

These transformations in the rhythm, the distribution, and the very nature of jobs obviously won’t be planned in advance and pondered on high. They’ll be made on the ground, in accordance with the wishes of the relevant people. If, on a construction site, there were someone passionate about wheelbarrowing or some other generally unpopular task, it would obviously be absurd to deprive him of his pleasure.

We aren’t maniacs for equality. If there were a shortage of surgeons, it’d be idiotic to compel them to do the work of nursing assistants. That kind of inequality will only be mitigated by cultivating versatility and retraining people for sectors that are truly useful.

The end of separations

Communism signifies the end of the separations that compartmentalize our lives.

Professional life and emotional life are no longer at odds. There’s no longer a time to consume and a time to produce. Schools, places of production, leisure centers—they’re no longer distinct and mutually irrelevant universes. They gradually disappear with the disappearance of their specialized functions. Within the productive process, the hierarchization and segmentation of human activity fades away. This marks the end of those situations where the worker is the underling of the designer, the designer the underling of the engineer, the engineer the underling of finance and administration.

Bringing these changes to fruition will take some time. Our living environment—a specific variety of technological developments, habits, and human deficiencies—can’t be wiped clean with the swipe of a dishcloth. It’ll be vital to take active measures in this direction. Their effects will be felt the moment that commodity production and wage labor are abolished.

The separation between professional life, on one hand, and emotional and family life, on the other, is tied to the development of wage labor. The peasant saw himself torn from his land and his family so as to be integrated into the industrial sphere. Once, family constituted the unity of life and production. Husband and wife, but also children and the elderly, contributed to the work of farm and field. Each found useful activities that suited their strengths.

Reactionaries love to posture like defenders of the embattled family. These cretins refuse to see that the very order they defend is precisely what’s reduced the family to the marginal role it’s come to occupy today. The ties of kinship were ties of mutual aid, as far as farming went. They extended well beyond the couple and their direct descendants. Today, the family is nothing more than the production site for infants—if that! Its economic role is that of the unit of consumption. The fundamental institution, the baseline cell of the developed capitalist society, isn’t the family. It’s enterprise.

We don’t intend to get the old patriarchal family back on its feet so that it can be made to handle production in lieu of capitalist enterprise. The ties of blood may have played a significant role in the past, but they no longer relate to much in the modern world.

In communist society, people will no longer be rounded up by the force of capital to carry out activities, productive or not. They’ll bring themselves together, united by their shared tastes and affinities. The relationships between people will take on as much importance as production itself.

We aren’t contending that strictly romantic ties will correspond to professional liaisons. That will be a matter of choice and of chance. But it’ll be much likelier than it is at present.

Some people want to imagine communism as the communalizing of women and children. This is stupidity.

Romantic relationships will have no guarantee beyond love. Children will no longer be bound to their parents by the need to be fed. The sense of ownership over people will disappear in tandem with the sense of ownership over things. Now there’s something deeply disturbing to those who can’t imagine doing without the guarantee of policeman or priest. Marriage will disappear, in its capacity as state sacrament. The question of whether two (or three, or ten) people want to live together, and even bind themselves by pact, will be nobody’s business but their own. We don’t have to determine or limit in advance which forms of sexual relations are possible or desirable. Chastity itself isn’t to be rejected. It’s a perversion as commendable as any other! What matters, besides the pleasure and satisfaction of the partners, is that children grow up in an environment that meets their need for material and emotional security. That isn’t a matter of morality.

In the remains of a family putrefied by the commodity, hypocrisy reigns supreme. People attribute to love what’s nothing but economic, emotional, or sexual security. The relations between parents and children have reached the depths of degradation. Under the guise of affection, the will to exploit answers the desire to possess. The child carries the hopes of his parents’ wasted lives like a millstone. He has to play the well-trained dog, succeed in school, show himself to be wise and calm or active and full of initiative. In exchange, he receives a bit of affection or pocket money.

Just as the family, that haven of security and love in a rough-and-tumble world, can’t escape the commercial realities, the enterprise can’t excuse itself from affectivity. The handshaking and seeming goodwill disguise contempt, rivalry, and exploitation. Everybody’s lovely, everybody’s sweet, everybody’s chatting, but mostly, everybody’s bored stiff of one another.

Production and consumption

The separation between production and consumption looks like a natural division between two very distinct spheres of social life. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s wrong on two counts.

Firstly: the boundary between what’s called production time and consumption time is fluid, from an historical viewpoint, and vague, from an ideological viewpoint. In which categories do cooking and sports fall? It depends on whether they’re undertaken by professionals or amateurs. It’s not the nature of the activity itself that decides the question; cooking’s more productive than mail sorting, in the sense that it’s an act of material transformation, whether or not the cook earns a wage.

Many activities that once fell under consumption have moved into production. The astronaut and the invalid breathing oxygen out of tanks, the housewife buying ground coffee or canned goods—all participate in this shifting of boundaries.

The schism between production and consumption masks the continuing importance of unpaid housework in the modern world. It confers a fixed and natural appearance on a demarcation that’s actually fluid and social.

Secondly: every act of production is necessarily also an act of consumption. People can only transform material in a certain way and to a certain purpose. At the same time that you destroy (or if you prefer, consume) something, you get (or if you prefer, produce) another out of it. Consumption produces, production consumes. Production and consumption are inseparable faces of the same coin.

The concepts of production and consumption aren’t neutral. It can’t be said that they’re bourgeois, but bourgeois society has put them to specific use. A pear tree isn’t bourgeois because it produces pear brandy. The notion of production takes on an ideological character because, beneath the idea of conception and detachment, people slip the idea of planning and consciousness. This maintains the confusion between the two. Everything ends up being interpreted in terms of production. A chicken becomes a factory for manufacturing eggs.

Thus is disguised the continuity of the cycle by which man, primitive or civilized, capitalist or communist, modifies the world around him by means that are simple or skillful, individual or collective, irreversible or temporary, at scale or in miniature—and, inseparably, is transformed in his own turn. The totalitarian usage of the notion of production hides the human being’s radical integration in, and dependence on, his environment and its natural laws. Everything’s interpreted in terms of domination and use. Man the producer, self-aware and self-controlled, sets out to conquer nature. The omnipotence that humanity once conferred on the image of the divine, it now attributes directly to the image it has of itself. Communism isn’t the victory of consciousness over unconsciousness. It isn’t the stage where, after having devoted himself to the production of things, man will finally be able to produce himself, so to speak, taking the reins from the divine creator. Hoping that man becomes his own master, the way he’s the master of the things that he manufactures—this is hoping to reunite the separated under the sign of production, and therefore of separation itself. The producer wouldn’t stop being an object; he’d simply become his own object.

The schism between production and consumption will fade because the separation between time spent earning money and time spent expending it—very tangible but very arbitrary, from the standpoint of nature and physiology—will cease to be.

For the communist man, consuming won’t be opposed to producing, since there will be no conflict between caring for himself and caring for others. This is because, by producing for others, by exerting himself for others, he creates use values that he can help himself to as well. Nobody will be producing shoes in one moment so as to be obliged to go buy them at the market in the next. Above all, production will be transformed, becoming creation, poetry, expenditure. Groups and individuals will express themselves through what they do. In this, the revolution will be the proliferation of art, and art’s advancement from its current capacity as a separate commercial sector.

Continuing to reason out the opposition between consumption and production, you could say that in finding satisfaction and pleasure (or, in counterpoint, dissatisfaction and displeasure) through his productive activity, man will thereby become a consumer. The computer or the trowel that he utilizes won’t have a fundamentally different value from the car or the food that he makes use of at other times.

Communism is absolutely not production pressed at last into the service of the consumer, any more than capitalism might be a dictatorship of production. In devoting themselves to an activity, people will acquire a certain power. They’ll be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor, up to a certain point, donating or refusing to donate what they produce. Above all, supplying this good or that service, and having them take a certain form, makes an immediate impact on what’s possible in a society. The activity of the users will be determined by that of the producers. There’ll be no reason for the latter to abuse a power which, in any case, won’t be a political or a separate power, but the simple expression of the usefulness of their occupations.

The “consumer” won’t be able to reproach the producer for some flaw, overlooked in pursuit of profit, in something that wasn’t given in exchange; simply put, he‘ll critique the producer from the inside, not the outside. What’s at stake will be their shared work, if they participate in the same enterprise. If someone’s dissatisfied with something that was done or not done, he won’t be able to evoke his abstract rights as a consumer. He’ll have nothing to set forth but his own ability to do better, or at least to show off his own contributions. Criticism will be impassioned and constructive. It can’t be left to those who are happy to make fun but prefer not to get involved.

Production and education

The separation between productive life on the one hand and education on the other isn’t the fruit of necessity. It doesn’t find its raison d’être in the growing scope of knowledge to be digested. Or rather, it does, but you then need to understand why it’s become necessary that knowledge no longer be the direct fruit of experience.

The basis of this schism is that the proletarian can’t be allowed to see to himself, his pleasure or his education, while he’s producing. This separation, key to the survival of the economic world, comes at a very steep cost. It leads a significant portion of the population to stagnate in schools, vocational colleges, and universities, when they could be making themselves useful elsewhere and having more fun besides. It doesn’t allow for human abilities to adapt very well to the demands of the activities they need to be applied to. This canned education is supplemented by on-the-job training, which is often done surreptitiously.

The school is presented like a public service that transcends social class. Its usefulness is supposed to be incontestable. Who’d have the nerve to become an apostle of ignorance? Enlightened minds do dare to go after the subject matter of instruction. They criticize it for being archaic, for being detached from life, for being a factor of subversion. Depending on whom you ask, toddlers should learn to read from the Holy Gospels, the Communist Manifesto, or the Kama Sutra!

Extremists are starting to go after the school itself. This isn’t on account of its deadly efficiency but because of its inefficiency. They’re going after the school in order to better protect pedagogy.

It’s necessary to learn and to always be learning. To digest this insipid mush that people call culture. The world is so complex! You don’t understand? Then you’ll need to be retrained.

Never before have people learned so much; never before have they been so ignorant of the things that touch their own lives. They’re inundated, dazed by the mass of information pouring out of universities, newspapers, television. The truth will never emerge from this accumulation of commodity-knowledge. It’s a dead knowledge, incapable of understanding life because its fundamental nature is precisely that of being detached from practice and lived experience.

The school is the place where you learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. But the school is above all an apprenticeship in renunciation. There, you learn to bear boredom, to respect authority, to win out against your friends, to bluff, and to lie. There, you sacrifice the present on the altar of the future.

Communism is the decolonization of childhood. There will be no further need of any particular institution for educating children. Are you worrying about how children will learn to read? Then you should worry first about how they’re learning to speak.

The school dissociates and inculcates the dissociation between the effort (or the learning) and its need. What matters is that the child should learn to read because it’s necessary to learn to read, and not for the sake of satisfying his curiosity or his love of books. The paradoxical result is that, if it has reduced illiteracy, it has at the same time stifled most people’s taste and true capacity for reading. In communist society, the child will learn to read and to write because he’ll feel the need to learn and to express himself. The children’s world not being separated from the rest of social life, learning will become a pressing necessity to the child. He’ll do it as naturally as he learned to walk or talk. He won’t be left entirely to his own devices to do so. He’ll get hold of parents or elders, better informed than he is, to help him. The difficulties that he encounters will be useful to him. By overcoming them, he’ll learn how to learn. By not receiving knowledge like predigested food from the hand of an educator, he’ll acquire the habit of looking and listening; he’ll become capable of developing understanding and making deductions on the basis of his experience. This will be lived experience’s revenge on the curricular and extracurricular programming of human beings.

Men will share their experiences and transmit their knowledge amongst themselves. The places and the times will be chosen at their convenience. The format of the relation won’t be determined a priori. It’ll depend on the contents of the exchange and on the mutual understanding of those involved on the subject in question. With all due respect to fans of active pedagogy, if 10 or 10,000 people start waiting around to learn what a single individual knows, it’ll become simplest to revive the lecture hall.

The modern interest in pedagogy reveals the fact that teaching methods aren’t imposed on the basis of any particular content. When there’s nothing left to be said, when the content of instruction has become interchangeable, then people discuss the way in which to say it. It’s when the soup’s bad that you take an interest in the appearance of the bowl.

What would happen in the world of capitalist production if workers suddenly had the right to truly experiment, no longer being judged on their immediate profitability? They’d very quickly be in danger of forgetting why they were hired. They’d derive experience through experimentation and experimentation through experience. Being unconcerned with production, they’d quickly be in danger of abandoning efficiency in pursuit of their own pleasures. The joy of discovery and the intoxication of freedom would replace routine and repetition. The connections that would be formed between workers, under the pretext of improving production through experimental exchange, would run the risk of taking a different direction. Why not give in to the heady joys of collective sabotage, why not organize games, why not reorganize or redirect production toward routes that directly benefit workers?

The principle of wage labor prohibits trusting workers to submit to the necessities of the production system—a production system that doesn’t matter to them. Even the most alienated, hard-working, and servile of wage laborers couldn’t be held back from this slippery slope. You can’t let a worker make his own decisions during the production process. An instrument needs to be treated like an instrument. Let him look after himself and he’ll acquire a taste for it, rising up against the capital that denies him his humanity.

The capitalist division between production and learning has its limits.

It’s impossible to completely dissociate production, education, and experimentation. In production, even the stupidest job requires a certain adaptability from its worker, the ability to deal with unplanned situations. Likewise, in education, the greatest abstractions must be made tangible through certain “products,” even if they’re only exam books. The necessities of extrinsic testing fall back on production.

The student isn’t a soft wax onto which knowledge can be imprinted; he can learn nothing if he stays completely passive. Learning can’t completely absolve itself of experimentation and production, even if it sequesters itself from the actual economic sphere. The school serves to provide a restrictive setting and a content for this activity, to uncouple it from real life. Instruction functions and is perpetuated by means of the principles it represses. This applies to training in interpretation and composition. In this way, the latter becomes the very negation of communication. The student must learn to express himself in writing, regardless of what he might have to say and regardless of those to whom he might say it. It’s a completely empty exercise. If the student manages to write, however, he was made to do so, and it was only possible by couching it in a certain form of communication. In the same way, the laborer who’s made to work can only perform his work by participating in it up to a certain point. He’s only ever a simple executor, a machine.

The system of production would collapse if workers could no longer experiment, help each other, advise each other. The hierarchical organization of work can only survive when its rules are constantly being flouted. It imposes an insurmountable boundary on these transgressions and on the spontaneous activity of workers, so as to prevent them from evolving and becoming truly dangerous and subversive.