.
—Jean Weir
If the anarchist project can seem incomprehensible to those who
have learned to accept the necessity of being ruled, who have
learned to prefer security to freedom, that project understood in its
totality, as the complete overturning of all social relations based on
obligation and compulsion, can even be incomprehensible to many
anarchists. The idea of the destruction of work is frequently met
with incomprehension. And this comes in more than one form.
The most frequent form of incomprehension I have encountered
when I have spoken of the destruction of work is that which simply
exclaims: “But we have to eat!” In certain ways this reaction is
quite similar to the response to the call for the destruction of
prisons, cops and states which cries: “But then rape, robbery and
murder would run rampant!” It is a response that stems from habit –
we have always lived a certain way. Within this way specific
institutions are said to fulfill specific needs – thus, work and the
economy are the institutional framework through which food is
provided within the present system of social relationships, and we
know of no others (except by rumor). So the thought of a world
without work evokes visions of starvation precisely at the point
where the capacity to dream stops.


Another form of incomprehension involves confusion over what
work is. This stems in part from the fact that the word can be used
in ambiguous ways. I may, indeed, say that I am “working” on an
article for WD or on a translation. But when I am doing these things,
it is, in fact, not work, because there is nothing compelling me to do
them, I have no obligation to do them; I do them solely for my own
pleasure. And here is where the basic meaning of work and its
destruction becomes clear.
Work is an economic social relationship based upon compulsion.
The institutions of property and commodity exchange place a price
tag upon survival. This forces each of us to find ways to buy our
survival or to accept the utter precariousness of a life of constant
theft. In the former case, we can only buy our survival precisely by
selling large portions of our lives away – this is why we refer to