Well burrowed, old mole!

It is becoming increasingly difficult to find any work that is not collaboration with evil.  Workfare and food insecurity, the threat of becoming “surplus humanity,” of slums, work camps and prisons, battlefields; these things try to intimidate us into a collaboration with evil, but they can never succeed. It can never be said that we had to–there’s always that moment of heightened contradiction, of a decision for or against open collaboration. In that moment, it is equally possible to recognize the contradiction and repudiate all collaboration. Evil can never enjoy full and total monopoly because the earth itself defies it.

Evil, as chairman Mao put it, is indeed a paper tiger; violence intimidation bullying are the tantrums of impotence. American society is no longer, if it ever was, capable of producing work that is not collaboration with evil. Honest work is rare here, and where it exists it comes under constant attack and harassment. When you do something that does not require an eight hour abandonment of all moral commitment to your fellow man, and ecosystemic neighbors, that is honest work; when you do something that you really understand and support, something that you believe in and voluntarily dedicate yourself to, even if it is just taking care of a small patch of the world, that is honest work.

In the American economy, most of the activity that one can be paid for is antisocial exploitative and predatory. It may not seem this way to us at first, but once all the facts come forward, and the overall organizing rationale is made explicit through exchange of arguments, it seems like most employers don’t really care about doing right. Or maybe they do, but not very much. Either way, it is not smart to enter into contracts with individuals or entities which do not value right action very highly. To be employed by most American firms is to exchange the right to an authentic thinking moral existence for a handful of peanuts. The soul, that which has been called by this name, the eternal moral impulse that issues intuitively, is precisely what we must repudiate in order to work for these people. That is evil.

Evil is contra naturam. As evil extends it’s pestilential pseudopods across the globe, it engenders in us a renewed consciousness of natural law. Equality is natural law, laziness is natural law, the life free to be lived unprofitably without looking over its shoulder, this is the natural law and birthright of all creatures contra Malthus. Evil is driven by a suicidal fantasy of total domination. It is weak when confronted directly and when the truth is acted upon.

If a person works for a Corporation or a “small business” odds are he or she will not be lending labor power to any project for improving the world, or doing anything that can be fully and heartily affirmed as a positive service to mankind. Packaging cosmetics, selling cars, trading bonds, selling fast food, sweatshop clothes, serving drinks and so on—useless wasted labor. How many of us work to feed those who starve before us? Most jobs involve moving food further from those hungry mouths.    

All the stuff people actually want to do but can’t because they have to work is the stuff that can and must replace work. The things we’d prefer to be doing are perfectly doable. That stuff would actually work better for the majority than the pyramid of slavery, the organized crime, the irrationalist oligarchy that we currently tolerate. We now see in stark detail how the profit motive itself makes markets fail; market driven solutions lead to cost cutting and outright piracy. We see this in everyday life and know that it is not the final answer. Let us act on this..

The choice to starve or collaborate is also a choice between starvation and cannibalism; in the end it reduces to no choice at all. All options offered by this system must be repudiated. We must turn to the better world struggling to birth from our long silenced hearts and souls from our noblest and basest impulses. The world as we’d have it, if we were just living to live and not to keep someone else rich. We must stay true to that world. This is the real kosmopolites that Diogenes was talking about…