On Work

by Mark S. Lennon

bourgeois-pig

Serving the bosses is going out of style. The bosses, o the bosses, those bosses. The ‘boss’ mentality is an evolutionary atavism: in a sane society, what we call a boss, a general, a banker, economist etc. would be referred to as a sociopath. The bigger the boss, the more monstrous the deformity.  Serving these bosses is going out of style.

They have robbed the country in broad daylight. They are snatching the bread from our mouths with their austerities and budget hoaxes. Under the Ancien Regime, the bosses were exempt from all taxation and we see the return of this now.  The bosses are demanding a total reduction of the social wage under the guise of budget cuts. Who has stepped forward to denounce this and call for action? This is a declaration of total war. 

We have never lived from the largess of the bosses–we would be more productive if we didn’t have the ‘jobs’ they create. In fact, the opposite is true: bosses only exist by taking advantage of people. They make us do their bidding when we could be working to make our own lives better directly instead of making them rich. Today, after the end of history, they have grown incredibly brazen. They are stealing so much–the money from our taxes, our labor, making us work alienating and destructive jobs we hate like the inmate band at the prison camp. They have stolen our lives: what little time we aren’t forced to give the employer we have to waste fending off other bosses who try to prey on our human needs, and our leisure time for extraction purposes. These include all those who send bills, retailers, media corporations and so on.   

Workers of the world unite(the bosses already have). The bosses have united against us. There is no point in being sentimental about this: as the days go by, they will be snatching at our very flesh with their greedy paws. Bosses wearing proletarian-skin shoes. Is this how far it will have to go in America?

Tonight I called the newspaper and asked the editor to stop serving the bosses.  To speak more precisely, I asked that the paper stop serving the bosses. I do not think the editor  understood what I meant. He explained that, in order to make money, advertising, profits and so on, and that on top of that technology was making papers obsolete.  I suggested to him that integrity and honesty would win the people over, that it was not technology making papers obsolete, but advertising dollars  making them irrelevant to people.  Nobody wants to read a paper sponsored by the boss.

On some level, we all want to attack the bosses. These impulses are truth. Our liberation lies in striking back against the bosses. If they piss their pants the people smell it even through the smog.

Refuse work, smash the bank. Occupy the places the corps. have stolen. Burn the thousand colored straightjacket of consumer culture.