Introductory remarks on the German translation of “Work”

Work has just been released in German, thanks to our friends at Black Mosquito. Our poster on the pyramid of capitalism is also available in German translation. A German-language tour to present the book is underway, following an English-language tour on the same topic last spring.

Black Mosquito recently had a house raid where authorities used a pretext to steal their computers and merchandise. Our friends will not let this stop them, but if the authorities continue to harass them, we will call for solidarity actions. Our thanks also go to everyone who took part in the occupation of the Hauptmann School in Berlin and who took direct action against police attacks on refugees.

We reproduce here our introduction to the German version of Work, which briefly describes the goals of the project, the context in which it emerged and the preliminary results:

We sold approximately 15,000 copies of Work in less than three years and distributed over 60,000 copies of the accompanying poster. The text has already been published – among other languages ​​– in Serbo-Croatian, Russian and Korean. In addition, we sent hundreds of books and several thousand copies of the poster to the rapper POS, who sent them along with his album “We Don’t Even Live Here”. This brought the book into the hands of many who do not regularly search for anarchist literature. We got really good feedback from some of his listeners.

As with all of our publications, we approached “Work” not simply like a book, but like a multimedia project. There are several levels: Firstly, the Pyramid of Capitalism poster, a renewal of the IWW poster that appeared a hundred years ago; then a series of posters that were put up in various cities for months after the book was published; and finally the book itself. There were lecture tours across three continents, during which debates took place directly with the book's addressees and a series of internal discussions between comrades were facilitated, which aimed to deepen our understanding of the current economic context and to develop appropriate strategies.

We have decided to renew the original IWW poster for its centennial to express continuity with the old workers' movement - a lot has changed, but we fight in our context as our predecessors fought in theirs. At the same time, we wanted to represent a more complex pyramid - to show the breadth of hierarchies created by capitalism. We also wanted to make it clear that the problem lies not with the dominance of a particular social group, but with the power imbalances imposed by the market. Rather than a didactic or inflammatory poster, we wanted to create one that would raise questions.

We began Work in mid-2010, when the economic crisis had been looming for more than a year but little evidence of the coming global uprisings could be found outside of Greece. We had just published “The Struggle on the New Terrain” (published in German in Message in a Bottle) and wanted to start with a project of global reach where the projects criticized in this text left off. Some of us read a wide range of material and met regularly to develop a shared understanding of contemporary economics, starting with the details of our everyday lives. After lengthy discussions, we agreed on the details of the pyramid poster - as well as the analysis of the growth of the service sector, the right words for the paragraphs on sex work, and many other difficult topics.

When we were finishing the book at the beginning of 2011, the so-called Arab Spring had already started. At the end of the layout process, we attached a photograph of a poster containing excerpts from our design, posted at the Wisconsin State House Occupation. A few months after the publication of Work, we were ahead of the curve, announcing to all who would listen that there would not be an uprising spreading across the United States based on fixed positions within the economy (like secure jobs or union rights) - but that the most important thing was to start with the shared precarity increasingly imposed by capitalism.

This thesis turned out to be correct when the Occupy movement broke out. During the following months we took part in direct actions that continued to advance this movement, and organized speaking tours around the country to reach out to protesters who had become curious about anarchism and revolution.

When the Occupy movement died in 2012, comrades from New York City sent us the copy of Work that had been in the Occupy Wall Street library when the police raided the camp and confiscated everything. After months of passing from hand to hand, through storms and pepper spray, and then months more in police custody, the book looked like it had been at war.

One of the characteristic features of “Work” is the attempt to distill an anarchist – by which we mean non-Marxist – analysis of the economy.

Some Marxists, who (like monotheists) discover the work of their masters in everything they see, have misunderstood the project: for them there is no criticism of capitalism without Marx and so anything that deals with economics must be judged as better or worse Marxism. What is more important for us, however, is to constantly and collectively refine our own analyzes of the conditions, based primarily on our own experiences, rather than studying the works of the Great Men of history.

The development of our criticism for this book, even after it was printed, has sharpened our strategic sense. This criticism is constantly evolving, as you can see from recent projects (e.g. “Deserting the Digital Utopia”). “Work” is aimed primarily at those who want to adapt their resistance to current economic developments and do not want to stick to blueprints from the last centuries.

The book may be particularly relevant in today's Germany, precisely because of the differences between the German and US contexts. Germany has not yet experienced a real recession, but the entire world is in a slow decline into precarity. The old agreements between state and subject, employer and employee are slowly crumbling. Where we are today, you will soon be. Be ready.

For the revolutionary abolition of capitalism and work itself

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