Manifesto Against Work

rdf:langString Manifesto Against Work

rdf:langString April 2022

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rdf:langString Manifesto Against Work is a manifesto critical of work written by the authors who were active in the journal Krisis a group that had the German philosopher Robert Kurz as one of its main contributors. The Manifesto Against Work emerged during the time in which the New Labour ideology spread across Europe in the late 1990s. The writing is based on the thesis that the work-society has come to an end, but that this end is paradoxically accompanied by an increased radicalisation of waged work and the social phenomena related to it. In recent years, work has increasingly taken the form of an "irrational end in itself". The manifesto critiques both the prevailing principle that unemployment is due to personal weaknesses such as a lack of willingness to work or excessive demands, and a personalised criticism of managers or politicians. In addition to the phenomena of neoliberalism such as wage dumping and the sorting out of people who do not meet the demands of this ideology, on the other hand, the anti-neoliberal left, which is fixed on a reactionary attitude towards the days of the welfare state, is also criticised for maintaining the paradigm of waged work as meaningful. Work is thus described as a social phenomenon whose logic permeates and increasingly determines social life. In contrast to weltanschaaungsmarxismus, the value-critical writing takes up the very dependence and not the "opposition of capital and work". The manifesto argues against the notion of class struggle as the motor of history. According to Krisis, there is no class-subject, and the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is not a struggle between a revolutionary class and its oppressor, but rather a struggle between two opposed interests that are integral to contemporary society, and form a single "work camp". Accordingly, the working class cannot be the subject of emancipatory change either. Since the historical role of the workers movement is also focused on a realisation of work, rather than the abolishing of it. So contrary to the given notion in modernity, they asserts that the struggle against capital is not the struggle for the liberation of work, but rather a struggle for liberation from work.

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