"From whatever angle you approach it, the present offers no way out. This is not the least of its virtues. From those who seek hope above all, it tears away every firm ground. Those who claim to have solutions are contradicted almost immediately. Everyone agrees that things can only get worse. 'The future has no future' is the wisdom of an age that, for all its appearance of perfect normalcy, has reached the level of consciousness of the first punks. (...)
Here lies the present paradox: work has totally triumphed over all other ways of existing, at the very moment when workers have become superfluous. Gains in productivity, outsourcing, mechanization, automated and digital production have so progressed that they have almost reduced to zero the quantity of living labor necessary in the manufacture of any product. We are living the paradox of a society of workers without work, where entertainment, consumption and leisure only underscore the lack from which they are supposed to distract us. (...) The order of work was the order of a world. The evidence of its ruin is paralyzing to those who dread what will come after. (...)
Today work is tied less to the economic necessity of producing goods than to the political necessity of producing producers and consumers, and of preserving by any means necessary the order of work. (...) We have to see that the economy is not 'in' crisis, the economy is itself the crisis. It’s not that there’s not enough work, it’s that there is too much of it" (The Coming Insurrection)
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