Q: Are you for anything? Do you have a vision of this new society you talk of?
A: Yes. We are for a free society.
Q: Could you spell that out?
A: F-R-E-E.
Q: What do you mean free?
A: You know what that means. America: the land of the free. Free means you don't pay, doesn't it?
Q: Yes, I guess so. Do you mean all the goods and services would be free?
A: Precisely. That's what the technological revolution would produce if we let it run unchecked. If we stopped trying to control it.
emphasis mine: Very few people were speaking of the technological revolution in 1968
Q: Who controls it?
A: The profit incentive, I guess. Property hang-ups. One task we have is to separate the concept of productivity from work. Work is money. Work is postponement of pleasure. Work is always done for someone else: the boss, the kids, the guy next door. Work is competition. Work was linked to productivity to serve the Industrial Revolution. We must separate the two. We must abolish work and all the drudgery it represents.
Q: Who will do what we no call dirty work, like picking up the garbage?
A: Well, there are a lot of possibilities. There won't be any dirty work. If you're involved in a revolution you have a different attitude toward work. It is not separate from your vision... All work now is dirty work. Lots of people might dig dealing with garbage. Maybe there won't be any garbage. Maybe we'll just let it pile up. Maybe everybody will have a garbage disposal. There are numerous possibilities.
Q: Don't you think competition leads to productivity?
A: Well, I think it did during the Industrial Revolution but it won't do for the future. Competition also leads to war. Cooperation will be the motivating factor in a free society. I think cooperation is more akin to the human spirit. Competition is grafted on by institutions, by a capitalist economy, by religion, by schools. Every institution I can think of in this country promotes competition.
Q: Are you a communist?
A: Are you an anti-communist?
Q: Does it matter?
A: Well, I'm tempted to say Yes if I sense you are. I remember when I was young I would only say I was Jewish if I thought the person asking the question was anti-Semitic.
Q: What do you think of Russia?
A: Ugh! Same as here. Dull, bureaucratic-sterile-puritanical. Do you remember when Kosygin came here and met with Johnson in New Jersey? They looked the same. They think the same. Neither was the wave of the future. Johnson is a communist. </excerpt>
Contrast the above with the following:
It might come as a shock to some that neither Bill Gates nor the American Military owns the World Wide Web. It belongs to those who use it. I am not paid for writing this essay. I do it of my own free volition, just as I take a walk, make a cup of tea, or pick some psilocybin mushrooms and ingest them for spiritual enlightenment. There is no hope of financial retribution from this stuff I'm writing. I am doing it (in grand anarchist style) because I want to do it and I fucking feel like it.
There is nothing to fear from work with no pay or toil with no thanks if it is done with passion and emotion for the right reasons. Anarchy is not a bunch of punks running around injecting heroin into their veins. Anarchy is admitting that if everybody works together for fifteen minutes a day we could run our own fucking lives.
excerpted from Anarchy is Going On right here at Pax Acidus.
Sloth, I'm impressed. It gives me a sliver of hope for the future.
I used to get it; then, I lost it. Getting seduced -- corrupted -- by The Machine is a lot easier than most people expect. Now, I get it again... and won't be losing it until my ashes have been scattered from a low altitude over a busy fucking metropolis on a windy day.
