Lift the curtain, look behind it and see the world as it really is

Our everyday our lives is sold hour after hour, week after week, generation after generation. Few of us have property or even less of us possess a business we can make money from, so we are forced to sell our time and energy to someone else. We are the working class — the proles.

WORK

"Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour,and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." –Karl Marx

We don’t work because we want to. We work because we have no other way to exist. We sell our time and energy to a boss in order to buy the things we need to survive.

We are brought together with other workers and assigned different tasks. We specialise in different aspects of the work and repeat these tasks over and over again. Our time at work is not really part of our lives. It is dead time controlled by our bosses and managers. We live in limbo like zombies – the walking dead – or more accurately the working dead.  During our time at work we make things that our bosses can sell. These things can be objects like tee-shirts, computers and skyscrapers or services like cleaning floors and helping to maintain healthy patients or driving the bus to take you where you want to go, being fast-food worker to take your order or being the person who calls you at home to try to get you to buy things you don’t need. The work is not done because of what it produces. We do it to get paid, and the boss pays us for it to make a profit. At the end of the day the bosses re-invest the money we make them, and enlarge their businesses. Our work is stored up in the things our bosses own and sell—capital. They are always looking for new ways to store up our activity in things, new markets to sell them to, and new people with nothing to sell but their time and energy to work for them. What we get from work is enough money to pay for rent, food and clothes—enough to keep us coming back to work.

When we’re not at work, we spend time traveling to or from work, preparing for work, resting up because we’re exhausted from work or trying to forget about work. The only thing worse than work, is not having it. Then we waste our weeks away looking for work, without getting paid for it. If welfare is available, it is a bureaucratic pain-in-the-ass to get and is never as much as working. The constant threat of unemployment is what keeps us going to work every day. And our work is the basis of this society. The power our bosses get from it expands every time we work. It is the predominant force in every country in the world.

It is very different for the employers. They are very satisfied with the capitalist system. Why shouldn't they be? They get rich by it. At work we are under the control of our bosses, and of the markets they sell to. But an invisible hand imposes a work-like discipline and pointlessness on the rest of our lives as well. All sort of other activities tend to become as alienating, boring and stressful as work: housework, education and leisure. That’s capitalism.

For our bosses, work is the way that they get their money to make more money. For us, work is a miserable way to survive. The less they pay us, the less we make. The faster they can get us to work, the harder we have to work. Our interests are opposed, and there is a constant struggle between bosses and workers at work—and in the rest of the society based on work. It is about time that everybody wakes up to the fact that we "the people", the working class, and our employers have nothing in common.

Most of us spend most of our time working and are mostly poor, while the owners, who are mostly rich, manage and profit off our work. All the communities and institutions of society are built up around this basic division. There are racial, cultural and language divisions. There is division around sex and age. There is the division between nations and those with and without citizenship. We are divided around religion. Yet we are all brought together to buy and sell on the market. We are all now organized around capital. We are all used to help our bosses to accumulate more. Poor people from one country can be made to identify with their bosses from the same country and can be made to fight poor people from other countries. Workers have a harder time organizing a strike with workers who look different and speak a different language, especially if one group thinks it’s better than the other. These divisions are reflected in and reflect the division of labor at work. The “nation” is imaginary and false. It denies the basic division of society. Business owners run the government and the media, the schools and prisons, the welfare offices and the police. We have our lives run by them. The media put forward their view of the world. We are taught their history. The government provides services to keep their society running smoothly. And when all else fails, they have the police, the prisons and the army to enforce their will if “consensus” falters.

The ruling class organise us against each other, but we can organise ourselves against them. The whole point of class and being “the proles” is the recognition that people from different communities have essentially similar experiences, and to show that people should not hate each other. This is the starting point to fight our masters. When we begin to fight for our own interests we see that others are doing the same thing. Prejudices fall away, and our anger is directed where it belongs. Differences become irrelevant and our fight becomes more effective by involving people from different experiences.

There will be no need money when there is no need for buying and selling or to measure work-time. There will be no need for a government to manage society, when society is not divided between employers and employees and when people can run their lives themselves. The more we are governed, the less we are free. The only thing that interests us about the State is its abolition.

When we start to fight against the exploitative conditions of our lives, a completely different kind of activity appears. We do not look for a leader to come change things for us. We do it ourselves, with other working class people. We organize in a way where everyone takes part in the activity, and there is no division between leaders and followers. We do not fight for our leaders, for our bosses or for our country. We fight for ourselves. We’re in a war—a class war. There are no other solutions other than winning this war. We cannot reform capitalism with palliative measures into something more humane. The cure does not lie in forming a new government, or even ourselves becoming the new bosses. We are workers who want to abolish work and class. This is what revolution really means. Our political platform is to end politics.