The Coming Insurrection 2

"Therein lies the present paradox: work has triumphed over all the other ways of existing, at the same time as workers have become superfluous. The gains made in productivity, relocation, mechanization, automation, and the digitization of production have gone so far that they have reduced the amount of living labor necessary for the creation of each commodity to almost nothing. We’re living out the paradox of a society full of workers with no work, where distractions, consumption, and leisure are only ever just a further indictment of the insufficiency that they must distract us from. (....)
In business, work is divided ever more visibly into highly qualified research, design, administration, coordination, and communication jobs, tied to putting in play the knowledge required for the new cybernetic production processes, and the unqualified maintenance and surveillance jobs for those processes. The first are few, highly paid, and thus so coveted that the minority that can get one would never think of letting even the slightest crumb slip away. Their work and their selves are one, locked together in a death grip. Managers, scientists, lobbyists, researchers, programmers, developers, consultants, or engineers literally never stop working. Even their one-night stands increase their productivity. “The most creative enterprises are also those wherein intimate relations are the most numerous,” theorizes one Human Resources department philosopher. “The enterprise’s collaborators,” confirms the one from Daimler-Benz, “are part of its capital... Their motivation, their manner, their capacity for innovation and their concern for the clients’ desires, constitute the raw material of innovative service... Their behavior, their social and emotional competence, have a growing weight in their work evaluation. They will no longer be evaluated by the number of hours they have been present, but on the basis of the goals they have attained and the quality of their results. They are businessmen.”


All the tasks that haven’t been able to be delegated to automation form a cloud of jobs that can’t be done by machines, but could be done by any human at all – warehousemen, storekeepers, assembly line workers, seasonal workers, etc. This flexible, undifferentiated labor force, going from one task to the next and never stopping too long at any one company, can no longer gather itself into a force, since it is never at the center of the production process, but instead pulverized into a multitude of cracks, where they patch up the holes in whatever hasn’t been mechanized. The temp is the perfect picture of a worker that’s not a worker anymore, that has no more profession but competencies saleable as jobs come along, and for whom having to remain available is another job still.

Out from the margins of this core of effective workers, necessary for the proper operation of the machine, spreads a vast, supernumerary majority, which is useful for the proper flow of production but hardly any more, and which presses upon the machine the risk that in all their idleness they might begin to sabotage it. The threat of a general demobilization is the specter haunting the present system of production. To the question, “then why work?” not everyone responds like the one-time welfare recipient at Liberation magazine who wrote “For my well-being. I’ve got to look out for myself.” There’s a serious risk that we will end up finding a use for our idleness. This floating population needs to be either occupied, or held in place. And to this day no better disciplinary method than the wage system has been found. So they’ll have to work to dismantle the various “social gains,” so that they can bring the most rebellious ones back to the wage system’s teat; the ones who don’t surrender in the face of having to choose between dying of hunger and rotting in jail. The explosion of the “personal services” slave sector must go on; cleaning ladies, waitresses, massage girls, house maids, prostitutes, personal nurses, tutors, therapeutic leisure, psychological aides, etc. And all of it accompanied by a continual increase in norms, for safety, hygiene, good behavior and culture, accelerating at the speed of fashions -- which are the basis for the necessity of such services. (...)
The order of work made the order of our whole world. Its collapse is so obvious that just thinking about everything that’s to come gives everyone lockjaw. To work today is less about the economic need of producing commodities than about the political need to produce producers and consumers, to save the order of work by any means necessary. Producing oneself is about to become the dominant occupation in a society where production has become aimless: like a carpenter who’s been kicked out of his workshop and who out of desperation starts to plane himself down. That’s where we get the spectacle of all these young people training themselves to smile for their employment interviews, who whiten their teeth to make a better impression, who go out to nightclubs to stimulate their team spirit, who learn English to boost their careers, who get divorced or married to bounce back again, who go take theater classes to become leaders or “personal development” classes to “manage conflicts” better – the most intimate “personal development,” claims some guru or another, “will lead you to better emotional stability, a more well directed intellectual acuity, and so to better economic performance.” The croaking of all these little people waiting impatiently to be selected by training themselves to be ‘natural’ is part of an attempt to save the order of work by a ethic of motivation. To be ‘motivated’ means to report for work not as if it were an activity, but as if it were a whole realm of possibility. If the unemployed take out their piercings, get haircuts and start making ‘plans,’ work hard on their ‘employability’ as they say, they’re proving how motivated they are. Motivation means that kind of a slight detachment from yourself, that minimal tearing ourselves away from what constitutes us, that condition of foreignness, with which it becomes possible for you to sell yourself, not just your labor power, and to be paid not for what you do, but for what you are. It’s the new norm for socialization. Motivation is what fuses together the two opposing poles of Work: here you participate in your own exploitation, and all participation is exploited. Ideally, every one person gets to be a little business enterprise, your own boss and your own product. And whether you’re working or not, you have to accumulate contacts, skills, and a “network:” what one might call “human capital.” The planet-wide injunction to get mobilized and motivated on the slightest pretext – about cancer, “terrorism,” an earthquake, the homeless – sums up the determination of the ruling powers to maintain the reign of work even beyond its physical disappearance.


The present machinery of production is therefore on the one hand a gigantic mental and physical mobilization-machine, sucking up the energy of those who have become “excess” humans, and on the other it is a sorting machine that allows conformed subjectivities to survive and lets drop any and all “risk individuals,” those who incarnate a different use of life, and in that sense resist it. On the one hand they give life to ghosts, and on the other they let the living die. Such is the specifically political function of the present machinery of production.


To organize beyond and against work, to collectively desert the regime of motivation, and manifest the existence of a vitality and discipline in demobilization itself, is a crime that a civilization in desperate straits will never forgive us; it’s in fact the only way to survive it. "