Voluntary (or neccessary) Unemployment
This text is taken from the book Recipes for Disaster, published by the Crimethink Ex-Workers Collective. Find more information about the book here.There are plenty of good reasons not to sell your labor on the market. Perhaps you don’t like what that labor is being used to do: transform forests into landfills, perpetuate meaningless busywork as a way of life, centralize wealth in the hands of a rapacious few. Perhaps you have a better idea of how that energy should be employed, and no corporation or organization is offering you a salary to do what you think needs doing. Perhaps you’re one of those dangerous hedonists who have somehow gotten it into their heads that life is supposed to be fun and exciting. Unfortunately, knowing why you want to be unemployed is the easy part. There are also reasons most people who hate their jobs keep going to them: they have bills to pay, they don’t know any other way to get what they need, they can’t imagine what else to do with their lives, they don’t want to be social outcasts.
To some extent, these are valid concerns, and the more everyone accepts them as inexorable facts of life, the more they become so. At the same time, to the inverse extent, varying for each person according to his or her individual circumstances, they are empty threats. Only rigorous field-testing can determine where necessity stops and superstition begins.
Dropping out of the exchange economy doesn’t have to be all or nothing: there are many degrees to which one can do so, and many ways to go about it. You can work part-time, or at a full-time job that affords you the opportunity while on the clock to do some of the things you would do anyway. You can get a job that provides you access to a resource that you or others in your community need, and take advantage of the situation to redistribute a little wealth. You can work in blitzes, financing long periods of unemployment by means of short periods of intensive wage slavery. You can barter your labor directly for the goods you need, instead of working for wages. You can try being self-employed, gambling that the market will be a less exploitative master than a boss would be.
Or, if no others depend on you to provide for them, you can quit working entirely and declare yourself openly at war with capitalism on every front. Whichever approach you choose, the same basic principles will apply.
What You Don’t Need
Few people would go to work if they didn’t need a paycheck to buy the things they need—so when you consider how to emancipate yourself from wage slavery, the first thing to work out is what you can do without.
When you think about your purchases, you may be astonished by how many of them are things that have nothing to do with survival or even with making you happy. What don’t you need? You don’t need those dumb trinkets you buy when you go on vacations, and you might not need those expensive vacations as much if your daily life were more fulfilling. You don’t need that soda you drink every afternoon, and if you stop drinking it you might not need to go to a dentist as frequently, either. You don’t need a wardrobe with a different outfit for every day of the month, and if you’re not going to your job at the office or the mall every day, you might not need to keep buying the latest fashions before your older clothes even start to show wear.
Limit the amount of advertising you expose yourself to—that’s the propaganda of senseless consumption, and it can influence your tastes and tendencies even if you’re wise to it. Be suspicious of socialized fashion and beauty and hygiene standards, especially the ones that demand you invest money in cosmetics, diets, and deodorants. In fact, be suspicious of all cultural conventions that necessitate some kind of consumption: expensive sports tickets instead of games at the park, Prozac prescriptions or costly therapy instead of networks of emotional support, keeping up to date with pop culture instead of setting out on your own adventures. Minimize your addictions: cigarettes, alcohol, and cocaine will keep you locked into the cycle of employment and consumption if you can’t break yourself of dependency on them. Take heart: as you work less, all the indulgences you once needed to make life bearable will probably feel less necessary. Try to center the ways you find happiness and the ways you evaluate your worth around what you do with your day-to-day life, rather than what you own.
Transportation can be a big challenge, unless you live in a small town or self-contained neighborhood. Bicycling is the cheapest and best means, and relying on public transportation can also save money, though in some areas these methods of getting around are difficult or unavailable. It may be, though, that the main reason you need a car is to get to work every day, and if you can restructure your employment situation, the car you had in order to get to the job that paid for it will become unnecessary. The same goes for your life ambitions—if you want to grow up to be a high-powered executive, you’ll have to spend seven years and seventy thousand dollars getting degrees, but if it’s a life of freedom and adventure you want, you’ll do better to start investing in those right away instead. The pressure to go to college is part of the protection racket, anyway—they say you need to go to college to get a job, but once you’re saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, you have to get a job just because you went to college. You can use the libraries and talk to the professors for free, and if you do have it to spend, couldn’t all that money be used for something more worthwhile?
If you’ve already amassed a debilitating debt to credit card companies or from student loans, and you’re afraid you’ll have to spend the rest of your life slaving to pay it off, fear not. With every kind of debt but student loans, you can declare bankruptcy, or just refuse to pay until the collection agency is willing to settle for a fraction of the original debt. If you’re fed up with a collection agency hassling you, ask for their address, as if to send a payment, and then send them a letter barring them from contacting you again; keep a copy, as this can stand up in court as sufficient grounds for them to be forced to leave you be. Student loans remain binding even when you declare bankruptcy, but you might be able to pay them off with credit cards and then default on the credit card payments. If that’s not an option, there’s still hope. You cannot be imprisoned for not paying debts, except in the case of tax evasion. As long as you have no assets that can be seized or income that can be tapped, no bill collector can touch you. Join a collective or an intentional community, in which none of your assets are in your own name and your income is too little or too obscure for them to requisition. Your credit might be ruined as far as corporate America goes, but as long as your credibility with your community is sound, you won’t need to qualify for any new loans. This might sound scary, but you have to draw the line somewhere, and the more of us keep paying, the more money our enemies have to make it hard for us not to.
How to Get What You Need
As much as you limit your consumption, there will always be things you need. Never fear—you live in the most profligate society on earth. There are countless ways to obtain and share the resources you require.
First, consider collective living. This could mean joining an intentional community, or just sharing things with your friends. The more you share, the less each individual needs to invest in being self-sufficient. The more you pool your resources, the greater the investments you can make together—perhaps you can even buy land.
Get things used from thrift stores and yard sales rather than buying them new. Learn how to repair the belongings you already have, so you won’t have to replace them as often.
Seek out and pass on family hand-me-downs. Borrow from your friends and neighbors, and encourage them to borrow from you—this helps build relationships[1], as well as saving money and discouraging over-production. Not everyone needs to have a set of carpentry tools, a fondue pot, or a weight-training bench—one per neighborhood should be enough. Make use of or set up a neighborhood lending library of tools, cooking supplies, books, records, and everything else you can think of. Take up a collection and buy resources for everyone to share. Set up a cooperative program, so people can buy food and other goods in bulk at wholesale prices. Deal direct with the producers, as in community-supported agriculture programs in which households buy directly from farmers. Barter goods and labor instead of trading in cash.
Take advantage of existing public resources: go to the library for books and videos instead of purchasing or renting them, go to art galleries instead of movie theaters. Investigate what free programs are offered locally—the state of Pennsylvania, to name one unlikely example, provides free classes in motorcycle riding.
Build local infrastructures for distributing things people need (see Food Not Bombs and Bicycle Collectives). Hold regular potlatch events—e.g., a monthly “Really Really Free Market” (see Festivals)—or establish a permanent space as a free store (see Distribution, Tabling, and Infoshops), so materials can flow to the people who need them. Host free movie showings. Set up social and cultural events that charge a sliding scale of admission according to each person’s financial means.
Make use of services corporations offer for customers, like paper cutters in photocopying franchises. Take advantage of computers, public access phones, and everything else like them at universities, businesses, and local community centers. Infiltrate college cafeterias, smuggle massive quantities of food out of corporate buffets. Keep an eye out for needed resources that come free with other services, like the hot showers you can take during your free trial membership at the health spa, or the fancy dinner you can get cheap at the casino even if you’re not gambling. Sign up for guided tours of production plants, just for the free samples. Piggyback along on activities that would be taking place anyway: stow away on freight trains, sit in on college classes.
Don’t be afraid to ask for things (see Hitchhiking). You can place want ads for things people might have and not need in the classified pages of local papers—paint, pianos, bicycles, scrap metal. You can call companies and ask if they have leftovers, or if they want to support a community organization with a donation of materials. Make use of the waste of your society (see Dumpster Diving). Get familiar with all the junkyards, scrapyards, and salvage programs in your area. Take over unused spaces (see Squatting).
Anything you can, make yourself (see Musical Instruments and How to Build a Rocketstove). Start a garden, build shelving from discarded timber at construction sites, forge yourself a bus pass. If you have medical needs, there are free and low-cost clinics that may provide for you, and there are ways to obtain free treatment from the medical establishment (see Health Care); you can also learn do-it-yourself forms of medicine and therapy.
Pilfer: pens, markers, matches, toilet paper, tape, envelopes, plates and silverware, everything that isn’t chained down in corporate America. Con your enemies out of things: show up to posh restaurants with forged paperwork, explaining that you are there from some glamorous magazine to do research for a story on their cuisine. Write to corporations asking for free coupons for their products—you purchased a defective item, or you want them to give as gifts—and counterfeit them in massive numbers. Steal from corporations (see Shoplifting)—that goes double if you work for one.
You can apply for grants, but don’t get lost in the world of bureaucracy. There are social welfare programs, but don’t rely on them unless you are very much in need—they have too few resources for too many needy people as it is. If you do have to buy anything, buy it from local, independent merchants that you respect, if possible.
How to Spend Your Permanent Vacation
Not working is only half the battle, and not the important half, at that. The real question is what you do instead.
Living in a society in which the market determines most of what we do with our time, few of us have been equipped to apply ourselves without direction. Without school, work, or shopping to order our hours, we can easily slip into listless inertia. Often it’s easier to identify the things you would love to be doing when you’re too busy to do them than it is when you have no commitments at all. You only discover what interests you by engaging with the world, and in capitalist society, employment and consumption can seem like the only ways to engage. As you cut down on these, replace them immediately with new projects, with the things you dreamed of doing when you didn’t have a moment free.
Perhaps you don’t know what you’d like to be doing, you only know what you don’t want to do. Don’t panic if you search yourself for your heart’s desires and come up empty-handed; these desires develop in action, not in rumination. Volunteer with community groups, or invent your own; teach classes, serve food, counsel survivors, plant gardens, baby-sit children, care for animals, build houses, organize festivals, gather berries and bake pies for unsung heroes and heroines, recruit fellow warriors for the anticapitalist struggle. Take on projects, both immediate and long-term—any of the practices described in this manual might be worth trying. Make a project out of enjoying yourself, too: develop your cooking skills, sneak into hot tubs and saunas, spend hours arranging elaborate games and scavenger hunts for your loved ones. Learn new subjects and skills and languages. Set out to explore areas—spatial, social, and intellectual—that you’ve never entered before. Follow through on every idea you have, even the most ridiculous ones. Stay busy, set deadlines, keep your time management skills honed so you don’t slump into torpor. Undertake tasks, however challenging, that will give you a sense of accomplishment and build up your personal momentum; by the same token, don’t set yourself up for failure—start with goals within your grasp, and get more ambitious as you proceed.
Don’t go it alone—make a point of being around people that keep you active. Just as it is far easier to meet your practical needs collectively, it is infinitely more rewarding to disport yourself outside the market with friends. In a best-case scenario, you will be part of an entire community of people liberating themselves from the work paradigm, all supporting each other’s efforts. At the same time, don’t abandon your old community for a more ostensibly radical one—figure out what you can do to help radicalize the community you come from. Set up structures that nurture activity: don’t just try to educate yourself in isolation, establish a reading group so you’ll have a reason to read and discuss a text every week.
Life in Exile
Full-time unemployment is not for the faint of heart: according to the standards of this society, joblessness is equivalent to idleness, and both are maligned and reviled. Everywhere you go, everything you do, there will be implications that you are worth less than others because you don’t make as much money or occupy a place in the hierarchy. But you’re not the one polluting the water and air, exploiting the disadvantaged, or flaunting unjust privileges—in a world working its way toward annihilation, shiftlessness itself can be a service to humanity and all living things. Don’t be ashamed of what you’re doing with your life: proclaim it to the hills, urge people to join or support you in it, emphasize that gainful unemployment is one of the cutting edges of a new way of life. Make sure you’re in constant contact with people who understand what you’re doing and what is beautiful about it, and make a point of encouraging one another.
Seek out ways to stay connected to the rest of society, so you aren’t isolated in a dropout ghetto. Don’t let the ties you have to people still in the economy atrophy; you need them to give you perspective on what life is like for everybody else, and they need you for perspective on what else is possible. Find projects and social roles that put you in touch with working people. If you’re ready for the responsibility, organize a labor union of the unemployed, so you can join your efforts to those of the millions that are out of work by no choice of their own; put the resources and knowledge you have developed at their disposal, learn from their stories and wisdom, and compose a strategy by which the ones at the bottom of this society can turn it upside down.
[1] The author, a white male middle-class dropout, once lived in a predominantly black ghetto in which his household was the only one on the street with a working telephone. The neighbors would come over to use his phone whenever they needed to make a call. The only other white people living in the neighborhood, a house of male college students, were not so liberal with their resources, and frequently suffered break-ins and robberies; however, when the author unthinkingly left his laptop computer unattended in the front yard one night, it was still there in the morning.