Manifesto Against Labor

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The Manifesto Against Labor is a pamphlet published in 1999 by the Krisis group , including the value critic Robert Kurz , which takes a critical look at the present of wage labor and its social and cultural environment.

content

The Manifesto against Labor emerged in the wake of the New Labor ideology , which spread across Europe in the late 1990s and marked a change in social democracy . It consciously refers to the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , published in 1848 . The first few sentences say: A corpse rules society - the corpse of work. All powers around the globe have joined forces to defend this rule: The Pope and the World Bank, Tony Blair and Jörg Haider, trade unions and entrepreneurs, German ecologists and French socialists. The writing ends with the exclamation: proletarians of all countries, put an end! .

The text is based on the thesis that the labor society has come to an end, but this end is accompanied by an increased radicalization of wage labor and the social phenomena related to it. The work has proven to be an "irrational end in itself" in recent years. Both a prevailing principle, according to which unemployment is based on personal weaknesses such as a lack of willingness to perform or excessive demands, and personalized criticism of managers or politicians are criticized. Worldwide, one society after another is being " crushed under the wheels of economic totalitarianism ."

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 by the welfare state and also upholds the paradigm of wage labor as a meaningful element, is criticized. Work is described as a social phenomenon, the logic of which permeates and determines all of life. In contrast to traditional Marxist approaches, the value-critical writing takes up the dependence and not the opposition between capital and labor. Accordingly, the working class cannot be the subject of emancipatory change either. Correspondingly, the historical role of the labor movement is also focused on a commitment to work .

The aim of the authors is to enable a society in which "leisure, necessary activity and freely chosen activities [...] are brought into a meaningful relationship that is based on needs and life contexts."

reception

Criticism came from a Marxist-Leninist direction, the core statements of the manifesto against the work were errors and the alternatives presented were unclear and unrealistic, so that the pamphlet could only serve as a justification for dropouts. Thies Gleiss accused the authors of "falling into the ideological trap of the ruling class" and accused them of idealism .

The font received a positive reception, for example, in circles that advocate an unconditional basic income and, similar to the authors, deal with the future of wage labor.

Christoph Henning sees the manifesto as a stylistically brilliant and pointed essay, which in some points is definitely in the footsteps of Theodor W. Adorno . The theses are, however, value judgments without any scientific or theoretical claim.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Herbert Steeg: Marxism in the headstand ( Memento from May 17, 2006 in the Internet Archive ). in: UZ No. 3, January 21, 2000.
  2. ↑ Thies Gleiss: "Manifesto Against Work": Funny theory beyond reality in: SoZ - Sozialistische Zeitung No. 22, October 28, 1999, p. 14
  3. ^ Christoph Henning: Time work and deduction Marxism. Moishe Postone puts old wine into new bottles, review of time, work and social domination , in: Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 2004 , Akademie Verlag 2005, ISBN 978-3-050033-23-5 , page 256

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