A Revolutionary Manifesto Intended to Be Taken Lightly
1. Among the Undead
Today, very few people truly live.
Very few few people experience the vitality of their becoming in the present moment.
Very few people reach out to grasp the energy of their desire in order to create it
for themselves.
Instead, they work.
2. Sleepwalking
I may dream of a world through which unique beings gracefully wend their way, every move, every passage through the streets, the gardens, the wilds,
a dance, a game , a voyage in an endless adventure.
But this daydream itself is belied by reality as my wandering mind is shocked back into my lurching body just in time to avoid crashing into some other distracted sleepwalker.
Such a graceless, joyless world, this world of work.
Not the world of a dance or an elegant game or a voyage into the unknown,
but of bouncing atoms and grinding gears and lock-step marches toward death.
Not lives created joyfully in complicity and conflict, with spontaneous intent,
but survival acted out habitually, in roles already set, where somnambulists thoughtlessly fall into place,
gears in a machine whose purpose eludes them.
But all that really matters is that it works…
that you work…
that I work…
3. My Revolution
And so my revolution–
any revolution that intends to take back life here and now–
requires the destruction of work…
IMMEDIATELY!
4. Revolutionary Work?!?
No revolution to date has managed to eradicate work,
because even the revolutionaries most hostile to work have failed to imagine a revolution free from its logic…
Working against work, their efforts are doomed.
even at the end of a successful revolution the revolters just
return to work.
So it is necessary to know what work is and how its logic operates.
5. The Work Ethic
“Those who do not work shall not eat.”
This hellish christian motto sums up the work ethic perfectly.
Small-minded and small-hearted, pathetic and miserly,
it is the feeble morality of the shopkeeper frightened of the clever thief or daring robber.
It is the threat of the police–the slave driver’s whip of our times…
And it is easy to reject this self-serving ethic of grasping, narrow-minded bigots.
Far more difficult is seeing through to work’s logic,
beyond the bigots, to their masters…
6. The Logic of Work
The logic of work can be summed up in this way:
All activity of consequence must have a goal, an end.
And so every activity is to be judged and valued in terms of its end product.
This product takes precedence over the creative process,
causing the non-existent future to dominate the present.
Immediate satisfaction in the joy of creating has no value,
only success or failure count…
and counting is what value’s all about.
Winners or losers, but not a free creator in the lot.
It should come as no surprise that in the world of this logic, efficiency is valued for itself.
Regardless of the end, what works most efficiently to bring it about successfully is what counts…
penny by penny…
dollar by dollar…
And this is why you have to work…
This is why I have to work…
Or be counted among the worthless…
the zeroes in society’s accounting book.
7. The Theft of Life
Always aimed toward ends,
final goals,
products,
life in the present disappears.
The aimless, end-less becoming of each unique individual
is sacrificed to the goal of production and social reproduction.
The flux of interweaving relationships is dammed up
and channeled into roles which are nothing more than gears in the social machine.
This is alienation,
the theft of my activity,
the theft of your activity,
the theft of my life
and of your life.
Not even the products we make are ours.
Not even the successes are ours.
Only the failures,
above all, the failure to live…
8. Breaking with the Logic of Work
So why not break completely with the logic of work?
Why not conceive of activity that is of consequence, not because of its end product,
but because of what it is here and now?
Why not embrace RESOLUTE PLAYFULNESS?
To conceive of revolution in this way is to conceive of it in a way that is fundamentally different,
absolutely other
than the ways that it has generally been conceived by revolutionaries…
Revolution not as a task,
but as a form of play,
as a game, but only in the broadest sense…
As an exploration,
an experiment…
with no beginning and no end…
Rather an endless opening out into new explorations, new experiments, new adventures.
A kind of alchemy or magic of continual transformation…
Putting our lives at stake in each moment for the sheer joy of living…
Here there can be no failure…
Here there can be no defeat…
because there is no aim, no goal, no end…
just the ongoing adventure of conflict and complicity,
destruction and creation,
that is life lived to the full.
I was bound to be misunderstood, and I laugh at those who misunderstand me. Kind mockery at the well intentioned, but unfettered cruelty towards those would be prison guards of my creative possibilities. This so as to learn as much from misunderstanding as from understanding. Taking pleasure in worthy opponents and making language fluid and flowing like a river yet pointed and precise as a dagger. Contradicts the socialistic purpose of language and makes for a wonderful linguistic dance, A verbal martial art with constant parries that hone the weapon that is the two edged sword of my mouth.
harpo-my-“SON” 1 year, 4 months ago.
