"Déclassé War:

Dropouts Cutting Class"

Harbinger, Crimethinc

Exiting the Economy as a Strategy for Reclaiming Your Life and
Saving the World

“If I am captured I will continue to resist by all means available.
I will make every effort to escape and to aid others to escape. I
will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.” —Article 3, U.S. Military Code of Conduct

Déclassé: (adj. or n.) having lost class or status in society

De-class: (v.) to reject one’s social and economic role

The Occupation

Occupation. The word brings to mind images of Russian tanks rolling
through the streets of Eastern Europe, or U.S. soldiers nervously
patrolling hostile neighborhoods in Baghdad.

But occupation is not always so obvious; sometimes occupations go on
so long that the tanks are unnecessary. They can be rolled back into
storage, as long as the conquered remember they can return at any
time—or behave as if the tanks were still there, forgetting why they
do so.How do you recognize an occupied people? The most common indication
is a tithe they must pay to their conquerors, or a service they must
render them. A tithe is a sort of rent the occupied pay just to live
on their own lands; and as for the service—well, what’s your
occupation? You know, what occupies your time? A job, probably, or
two, or preparations for one, or recovery from one. You need that
job to pay for rent, among other things—but wasn’t the building you
live in built by people like yourself, people who had to work to pay
their rent too? The same goes for all those other products you have
earn money to pay for—you and others like you made them, but you
have to buy them from the companies that employ you, and they
neither pay you all the money they make off your labor nor sell the
products at the cost it took to produce them. They’ve got you coming
and going!

Our lives are occupied territory. Who controls the resources in your
community, who molds the character of your neighborhood and the
countryside around it, who sets your schedule day by day and month
by month? Even if you are self-employed, are you the one who decides
what you have to do to make money? For that matter, picture your
idea of perfect bliss—does it bear a suspicious resemblance to the
utopia you see in television commercials? Not only our time, but
also our ambitions, our sexuality, our values, our very sense of
what it means to be human—all these are occupied, transformed
according to the demands of the market. As the days and nights of
work and recovery add up, eventually you can’t help but wonder: have
you lived ten thousand days, or just the same day ten thousand
times?

And we aren’t the only territory under enemy control. The invisible
occupation of our lives provides the resources for the military
occupation of areas at the fringe of this conquered land, places
where guns and tanks are still necessary to enforce the property
rights of robber barons and the liberty of corporations to trade at
the expense of hostile locals—some of whom may still remember what
life is like without leases, salaries, or bosses.

You might not be all that different from them, yourself, despite
having been raised in captivity. Maybe in the boss’s office, or in
career counseling or romantic quarrels, whenever someone was trying
to command your attention and your attention wouldn’t cooperate,
you’ve been chided for being pre-occupied. That is—some rebel part
of yourself is still held by daydreams and fantasies, lingering
hopes that your life could somehow be more than an occupation.

There is a rebel army out in the bush plotting the abolition of
wage-slavery, as sure as there are workers in every office and
factory carrying on the guerrilla war with their own loafing,
pilfering, and absenteeism—and you can join up, too, if you haven’t
already. But before we start laying plans and sharpening spears,
let’s rewind a bit and go over all the reasons to make a break for
it, just in case there’s anyone out there who hasn’t learned about
working life firsthand.

Everything You Always Knew About Working But Were Afraid To Ask

Liberation—it’s not working!

At this very moment, a black woman is looking after white women’s
children instead of spending time with her own, a tree is being
hewed down in a rainforest, a bullet is being fired from a soldier’s
or policeman’s gun into one of our bodies.

Let’s focus in on the shooting. Those bullets don’t come out of
nowhere. Each one was manufactured in a factory by workers—and at
each of those factories, there was a boss, and a secretary, and a
janitor or two. Someone kept track of accounts, someone made coffee
in the mornings, somebody tacked up motivational posters on the
walls. Other workers drove the trucks that delivered the bullets,
loaded and unloaded them, pumped gasoline into their tanks, repaired
them when they broke down. There was an advertising executive who
promoted the product, a designer who made sure it looked its best, a
programmer who maintained a webpage, a sales representative who
negotiated the sale to the police force. Inside that police force,
writing memos, training new officers, taking out the trash, were
hundreds more workers, not to mention the thousands who invested in
the corporation selling bullets, and the hundreds of thousands whose
taxes funded the purchase. Every murder has one million
accomplices—as does every polluted creek, every case of lung cancer,
every teenager who stops eating lunch after seeing one too many
fashion magazines. Guns don’t kill people, entire civilizations kill
people.

Meanwhile, somewhere else somebody is outraged about another
shooting. He writes an angry letter to a newspaper or email
listserve, perhaps he even takes time out of his busy schedule to go
to a demonstration. But between writing and demonstrating, he has
bills to pay, so he, too, goes to work. Perhaps he works at a
factory himself, or in an office or restaurant; regardless, his
labor serves to keep the economy running at full tilt, and that
economy keeps power centralized in the hands of the ones who ordered
the shooting and benefit from it. Perhaps his hard work turns a
profit that his employer deposits in a bank that loans money to the
corporation that produces bullets; perhaps he serves lunch to an
executive of the trucking corporation that delivered them; perhaps
when he comes home from work, exhausted, he opens a bag of potato
chips made by workers like himself in a factory owned by a company
that pays taxes that fund the police department that used the
bullets. He decries the injustices around him, but it is his labor
and consumption, in concert with the labor and consumption of
millions like him, that power the system that guns down innocents,
cuts down forests, addicts people to nicotine, and teaches young
people to hate their bodies.

Clearly, resisting this system can’t just be a part-time hobby
inevitably undercut by the full time jobs that keep it in place.
When the economy itself is an engine of destruction, withdrawing
from it isn’t just a matter of personal taste, or a hedonistic
exhibition of privilege—it’s the only way to engage with the total
horror of it all, the only way to contest it in deed as well as
word.

The man in our example may feel tiny and powerless in the sea of
millions like him—and he’s right to feel that way, so long as the
majority of his energy and time goes into perpetuating the processes
he would oppose. But the good news is it takes all that labor to
keep those processes going—modern capitalism is only possible on a
global scale, can only sustain itself by expanding and expending
constantly. That explains all the pressure to stay employed, pay
bills, and “get ahead,” then: the cartels are terrified that
someday, somewhere, someone will throw down his apron or briefcase
with the words “I quit!”—and know exactly what he is going to do
instead.

On that fateful day, whenever and wherever it happens, everything
changes.

It Sure Costs A Lot To Make Money!

“Cost of living” estimates are misleading, to say the least—there’s
little living going on at all! “Cost of working” is more like it,
and it’s not cheap.

Everyone knows what maids and dishwashers pay for being the backbone
of our economy. All the scourges of poverty—malnutrition, addiction,
broken families, debilitating medical problems—are par for the
course; the ones who survive these and somehow go on showing up to
work on time are working miracles, albeit for senseless ends. Think
what they could accomplish if they were free to apply this power to
something other than staying just barely alive enough to earn more
profits for their employers!

What about those employers, those fortunate enough to be higher on
the pyramid? You would think earning a higher salary would mean
having more money and thus more freedom, but in practice it’s not
that simple. Every job entails hidden costs in proportion to the
wages it provides: just as a dishwasher has to pay bus fare to and
from work every day, a corporate lawyer is expected to be able to
fly anywhere at a moment’s notice, to go to posh golf courses for
informal business meetings, to own a small mansion in which to
entertain dinner guests that double as clients. This is why it is so
difficult for anyone, at any salary, to save up enough money to quit
while they’re ahead and get out of the rat race: trying to get ahead
in this world basically means running in place1. At best, you might
move on to a fancier treadmill, but you’ll have to run faster to
keep on it.

And these merely financial costs of working are the least expensive.
In a well-known survey, people of all walks of life were asked how
much money they would need to live the life they wanted; from pauper
to patrician, they all answered approximately double whatever their
current income was. That is—not only is money costly to obtain, but,
like any addictive drug, it’s less and less fulfilling! And the
further up you get in the work hierarchy, the more you have to give
up to remain there. The middle class worker must abandon his unruly
passions and his conscience, must convince himself that he deserves
more than the unfortunates whose labor provides for his comfort,
must smother his every impulse to question, to share, to see through
others’ eyes; otherwise, he would be unfit to play his social role,
and some more ruthless contender would quickly replace him. Both
blue collar and white collar workers must kill themselves to keep
the jobs that keep them alive; it’s just a question of physical or
spiritual destruction.

Those are the costs we pay individually, but there is also a global
price to pay for all this working. There are work-related illnesses,
injuries, and deaths: every year we kill people by the tens of
thousands to sell hamburgers and health club memberships to the
survivors. There are the pollution and destruction of the
environment, obviously. And above all, more exorbitant than any
other price, there is the cost of never learning how to direct our
own lives, never getting the chance to answer or even ask the
question of what we would do with our time on this planet if it was
up to us. We can never know how much we are giving up by settling
for a world in which people are too busy, too poor, or too beaten
down to do so.

Last time economic recession caused massive layoffs in Japan, a
social epidemic spread in which out-of-work businessmen, ashamed to
admit to their families that they had lost their jobs and so
unfamiliar with freedom that they could not imagine what to do with
it, would leave their homes every morning to spend their former
working hours sitting in parks, alone and despondent. What a sad
civilization this is that creates such aimlessness and dependence!

The Reproduction of Production…

Why work, if it’s so expensive? Everyone knows the answer—there’s no
other way to acquire the resources we need to survive, or for that
matter to participate in society at all. All the earlier social
forms that made cooperative, recreational lifestyles possible have
been eradicated—they were stamped out by conquistadors, slave
traders, and corporations that left neither tribe nor tradition nor
eco-system intact. Contrary to capitalist propaganda, free human
beings won’t crowd into factories to serve if they have other
options—not even in return for name brand shoes and software.

Working every day, selling our labor on the market rather than using
it to create new alternatives, we perpetuate the conditions that
necessitate our submission to that market. Capitalism exists because
we invest everything in it: all our energy and ingenuity in the
production process, all our resources at the supermarket and in the
stock market, all our attention in following the mass media. To be
more precise, capitalism exists because our daily activities are it.

Instead of each buying our own set of tools that will inevitably sit
rusting in the basement while we’re out working to cover the
payments, we could all contribute a little towards a neighborhood
toolset to be shared; likewise, instead of all trying to make it on
our own, we could save a lot of trouble by meeting our needs in
cooperative groups, outside the exchange economy—but we don’t,
because we fear no one else would join in, because we’re too
exhausted from working to get started, because we’re too busy to
even meet each other in the first place.

Here we arrive at the catch-22 that maintains the status quo:
revolution is not possible until people change their lives, and vice
versa. But somebody has to break this vicious circle and test out
its implicit corollary: that revolution is possible when people
change their lives.

…and Submission

It is a foregone conclusion for the average white collar worker that
she would never sell sexual favors on the street—but spending her
life in a cubicle, engaged in meaningless repetitive tasks, she
willingly sells away more precious parts of herself.

Obeying teachers, bosses, the demands of the market—not to mention
traffic lights, parents’ expectations, religious scriptures, social
norms—we are conditioned from infancy to put our needs on hold.
Following orders becomes an unconscious reflex. As free-lance slaves
hawking our lives hour by hour, we come to think of ourselves as
each having a price; the amount of the price becomes our measure of
value. In that sense, we become commodities, just like toothpaste
and toilet paper. What once was a human being is now an employee, in
the same way that what once was a cow is now a medium rare steak.
Our lives disappear, spent like the money for which we trade them.
Commodities are consumed, working to produce commodities, and we
become less than the sum of our products.

Consumption—It’s Not Just a Nineteenth Century Disease Anymore!

Having become merchandise ourselves, we rush to consume merchandise
to prove we still have some power. Purchasing, once a necessary evil
suffered to obtain the resources necessary for survival, is now a
sacred act; in the religion of capitalism, in which value comes from
financial power and spending is thus proof of worth, it is a kind of
communion. The store is the temple in which the consumer’s status as
one who can buy is affirmed in the actual act of buying. That’s why
a certain class of people will gladly pay for bland food at an
expensive restaurant when there is cheaper, tastier fare right down
the street. For the consumer incarnate, spending money is the main
point; everything else—taste in food and clothes, investment in the
latest technologies, even political sympathies—is just a means to
that end.

This compulsive disorder, which keeps us all running back to our
jobs to earn more money as the credit card bills pile up, would be
bad enough on its own—but it’s also gobbling the world up from
beneath our feet. In the absence of beautiful mountain tops
destroyed by mining and pickup games of street hockey outmoded by
televised spectator sports, we can’t imagine what there might be
besides consumerism to fill the aching void selling our lives away
leaves within us.

Work Mentality: Servitude

Many of us have a real problem with initiative. We can’t show up on
time to band practice, but we never miss a day of work. We lack the
discipline to keep up with the reading for our book clubs, but we
always finish papers for school. This is a self-perpetuating symptom
of employment; thanks to it, we are our own worst enemies when it
comes to providing for our needs outside the exchange economy. When
a person stops working, she usually goes through a period of
restlessness and inactivity; but this is not a reason to keep
looking to someone or something outside ourselves for direction—on
the contrary, it’s one more reason to quit serving, so we can learn
to come up with our own projects and come through on our
commitments.

This is not easy in a society that punishes economic desertion with
total embargo. But once our very survival depends on being able to
direct our own activities rather than being incapable of doing so,
we’re sure to learn what it takes not only to survive but also
prosper without work. Necessity is the mother of invention, and
unemployment is the uncle of necessity.

Work Morality: Sacrifice

Trading the moments of our lives away, we become so used to
sacrificing that it comes to be the only way we know to express what
we care about. We martyr ourselves for ideas, causes, love of one
another, when these should be enabling us to find happiness
together.

There are families, for example, in which people show affection by
competing to be the one who gives up the most for the others. In
such families, gratification is not only delayed, it is passed down
from one generation to the next. The responsibility of finally
enjoying all the happiness presumably saved up over years of
thankless toil is deferred to the children; yet when they come of
age, if they are to be responsible adults, they too must forswear
all pleasure and begin saving to send their offspring to college.

But the buck stops here. If postponement breeds postponement,
mightn’t the same be true of enjoyment?

But What About the Children?

For that matter, what about the insurance coverage, car payments,
student loans, overdue credit card bills, cat food, eating at your
favorite restaurant, that digital camera you want to buy? Of course,
existing in this trap, we’ve all invested ourselves in it, made
lives out of our compromises with it—and that means whenever we
think about getting out we have to consider the hostages affected by
our choices.

But seriously—what about the children? Should they grow up with
absentee wage slave parents, suffering secondhand stress and
resentment—like we all had to? Should we go on selling ourselves to
the highest bidder, treating our breakdowns with mood-stabilizing
drugs and psychiatric therapy—so that they can too, one day? Let the
children grow up without televisions or social status—in order that
one day every child might!

Useful Unemployment and its Professional Enemies

What if nobody worked? The assembly lines would stop, forsaken
plastic gadgets would sit forever on their shelves, paper money
would be used as firestarter as people reverted to barter and even
gift-giving. Grass and flowers would grow out of cracks in the
sidewalk unchecked. Pretty soon there wouldn’t even be enough
working cars to have a traffic jam!

And, the nay-sayers announce, we would all starve to death. But
we’re not exactly subsisting on air fresheners and Hallmark cards,
are we? We built this world with our labor, and—thinking and acting
enthusiastically for ourselves, rather than reluctantly for
compensation—we could surely build a better one. That wouldn’t mean
abandoning everything we’ve learned, it would just mean abandoning
everything we’ve learned doesn’t work: hierarchy, coercion,
cutthroat competition.

Once upon a time, before time cards and power lunches, everything
got done without work. Knowledge and skills weren’t the exclusive
domains of licensed experts, held hostage by expensive institutions;
emotional and practical needs alike were met in the course of
recreation. Acting outside the work/leisure paradigm today, we can
do the same.

Henry Miller in Parisian Poverty vs. The Indignant and Materialistic
Class War Militants

Whenever you question the necessity or the wisdom of working,
someone inevitably accuses you of self-indulgence, laziness,
privilege. Working is an emotionally charged issue.

Let’s be frank about this: in an oppressive society, the moment of
self-liberation is often experienced as a separation from, or even a
lashing out against, one’s fellows and former coworkers: “Those
slaves!” Those who would propel themselves out of the orbit of a
lifestyle or ideology must build up quite a bit of momentum, and
such intense energy can make them difficult to bear; being
judgmental is a sign of life, as one wise woman put it.

But in the long run, if such escapees are to succeed in forging a
different life, they must find common cause with others, and
eventually make their way back to the ones whose society they
fled—as the context for individual lives is determined by the
content of all lives, liberation is for all or none. Resentment
among workers and self-righteousness among ex-workers are twin
obstacles that must be overcome—as are all sentiments that proceed
from our own insecurities.

So much class war is really about envy. If we didn’t subconsciously
feel that the ruling class’s position indicates their superiority,
our campaigns against them would be conducted with more pity than
spite. But if we’re right that wealth and power are not the greatest
goods, our foes, the supposed victors of the class struggle, can’t
be any better off than we are. We shouldn’t strive for what they
have and are, but desert the whole equation. We shouldn’t seize
their means of production—all this production is itself destructive,
and would probably be impossible without the accompanying
hierarchies—but destroy and replace them. This can begin right now,
in our own lives.

Making a Virtue of Necessity: “You Can’t Fire Me, I Quit!”

Unemployment isn’t foreign to everyone in this country—in fact, many
of us don’t even have a choice in the matter. Textile factories
close down, jobs emigrate overseas, family farms are seized, startup
companies go broke, corporate offices downsize, and we end up with
pink slips instead of paychecks… and, as everyone knows, the longer
you are unemployed, the less employable you become.

The unemployed, too, have a job to do in capitalism—to be miserably,
forbiddingly defeated. Fortunately, like any job, this is a job that
can be quit.

If you’ve lost your job and can’t find a new one, all the potential
energy and free time that was being taken from you is now back in
your hands—get active with it! Take all your crazy ideas, and
whatever resources you can get your hands on, and put them at the
disposal of all-out revolution! Make your liberation into a godsend,
and choose—however retroactively—a life of gainful unemployment!

This is hard to do, of course, when it feels like the whole world is
telling you that you are a failure and your life now has no meaning.
This is where communities come in. We’ll need each other’s love and
support more than ever as we set out into this unknown—not least
because, as the demands of the market have broken up almost all the
social infrastructures our ancestors had, the workplace is now one
of the only places people interact. We need to build connections
with each other that can provide for all the needs we’ve relied on
institutions to handle—and above all, we need one another to build
up the momentum that living and acting against the grain requires.

Not only should our communities take care of their own, but they
should also be accessible and welcoming to others. There are
hundreds of thousands of people unemployed in this nation
alone—think how much unharnessed energy they have! Must they
languish in dejected isolation from one another, when they could be
rescuing the world from corporate greed, mass alienation, and ennui?
Every neighborhood and township should have an ex-workers’ union,
open to all, offering a variety of starting places for idle hands to
do what businessmen have always called the devil’s work.

But with what resources will we do this work, being flat broke and
all? Workers aren’t the only thing being thrown out, you
know—wastebaskets and sidewalks overflow with our fellow trash,
yearning to be put back into circulation. If there weren’t enough
food in the garbage to go around, we scavengers would be fools to
encourage others to join us—but here in the flagship nation of
conspicuous consumption and waste, there’s far more than that. Every
night at closing time, enough useful material to feed, clothe, and
equip several armies of insurgent ex-workers enters the dumpsters of
this country. Hell, there are whole districts standing empty,
waiting to be occupied and put to use! Without jobs, we have the
time and energy we need to reclaim these; all we need is the
networks to do so, and the nerve to decide that we deserve such
playgrounds.

The working class may not have yet managed to sock it to the system,
but those of us without work have both the free time and a good
reason to do so. And the alternatives—alcoholism, homelessness,
incapacitating depression, total ostracism—don’t have much to
recommend them. All power to the unemployed—so we can learn to
employ our own power!

The Question of Lifestyle

A person who fails to find a way of life that integrates her
political beliefs, social inclinations, and personal needs into one
total approach will forever be disabled choosing between them, her
choices either cheating her of parts of herself or canceling each
other out.

Once upon a time it was chic for certain radical infighters to
accuse their foes of being “lifestyle anarchists,” the implication
being that they were more focused on enjoying their own lives than
on Changing The World. But it is actions that matter, not theories,
and an anarchist or activist whose practice does not extend into
every aspect of her life, comprising a total lifestyle, is an
anarchist or activist in theory only—that is to say, “lifestyle
anarchism” is the only anarchism. Similarly, the ultimate question
for anyone seeking social change is how to make it possible for
people to live differently—and a little field experience goes a long
way toward that end.

At War with Class

Let’s be clear: we’re not just talking about quitting jobs here, but
about deserting and ultimately destroying the class system itself.
Traditional revolutionary ideology has extolled membership in a
revolutionary class, the proletariat, which fights for its interests
against other classes. In place of this gang rivalry, we propose a
universal rejection of all possible positions within the social
order, in order to create classless communities.

The capitalist economy reduces not only individuals but entire
demographics and nations to their economic functions. This is the
enforcement of stereotypes as reality: under corporate monoculture,
you can’t grow anything but bananas in the banana republic, and the
same goes for silicon valley and motor city. Such stereotyping is a
mania we should leave behind with capitalism.

Waging déclassé war means resisting the temptation to establish new
standards or norms of resistance; the communist glorification of
“the worker” is no less alienating than the capitalist glorification
of the movie star. This is not a struggle for the triumph of one
class or ideology over others, but an ongoing cultural war against
all the roles currently on the market—and against markets, classes,
and ideologies in general.

Refusing to play our class roles, ceasing to evaluate and engage
with ourselves and each other according to the logic of capitalism,
we undermine the assumptions that perpetuate it. When it is
impossible for others to interact with you in any of the ways
prescribed by the market—they can neither sell you real estate nor
career counseling, neither peg you as a spoiled student nor a
despondent pauper—your every encounter has the potential to jerk
them out of their roles as well.

Déclassé war!

Make no mistake about it—in a system that runs on exploitation,
desertion and refusal are essential to any effective resistance, are
indeed the essence of resistance. Whether domination and submission
or cooperation and consensus triumph as the predominant social
forces is decided every day by the activities people participate in.
Most people don’t much like pollution, warfare, or brainwashing, but
are too busy selling their labor to manufacturers, warmongers, and
advertising agencies to do anything about them. If we are to put an
end to these, there is no substitute for taking our lives and assets
out of their hands, and out of the cycles of contention of which
their power is but a symptom.

The Disaster is not just the work of an elite few. Every class is
complicit in maintaining it: the bosses’ management would be nothing
without the workers’ labor, and even the unemployed do their part by
staying out of the way. We all have to stop playing our roles,
whatever they may be. This will take different forms for different
individuals, according to the classes they are escaping and the
details of their lives. It could mean quitting work completely:
cutting your commodity consumption down to the bare minimum,
exploring what resources are available in abundance outside the
exchange economy, and staking everything on finding another way to
live. Alternatively, it could mean turning your job against
capitalism: surreptitiously redirecting resources from the company
to the community, or sabotaging from the inside. As no employer will
ever pay you the full value of your labor, nor can playing by the
rules in even the most civic-minded profession ever counteract the
total impact of the system in general, you should never take a job
without having some trick up your sleeve to even the scales. And if
you have been thrown aside by the economy entirely, de-classing
might mean taking advantage of having nothing to lose to make your
poverty cost the ones who are counting on you to give up—or finding
a way to convey how things look from where you are to people in very
different social positions. Whatever it takes, no more business as
usual.

Whereas merely individualist efforts towards workless living can
remain within the territory of hedonism, a collective struggle for
freedom from wage slavery amounts to civil war. Such a struggle
requires that we build massive support networks and connections
between disparate social circles. There are already individuals and
groups from many different demographics out of work, or at least
disillusioned with it; they must discover what they have to share
with one another, and how to do so. This will demand a ruthless
clarity from each of us about what our personal advantages are and
how they can be applied for the benefit of all. Really de-classing
yourself does not mean cashing in your privileges, but contesting
them and privilege in general by putting them at the disposal of
those who have less or different privileges.

This is the opposite of the charity usually practiced by the
bourgeoisie, which reinforces deeper inequalities than the
superficial ones it addresses: in offering handouts without actually
correcting disparities in means and status, would-be do-gooders only
send the message that not only are they harder working and thus
wealthier than the unfortunates they assist, they are also morally
superior to them. Children of the middle class, if they would
establish solidarity with those of other classes, must actually live
as they do, facing the same challenges; you can only make common
cause in a common context.

Déclassé war manifests a working model of the world we fight for and
dream of. Those who would otherwise be segregated from each other by
class can forge mutually beneficial relationships in which each
provides the resources to which the others have been denied access.
Historically, the most revolutionary situations have resulted from
alliances between refugees of different classes, who met outside the
walls in the course of their struggles for freedom. Arming the
homeless with the means of the bourgeois and the ex-bourgeois with
street knowledge, bringing together migrant workers, temp slaves,
hobos, unemployed philosophers, and infuriated accountants in a
class to end all classes and a war to end all wars, we can give
capitalism a real run for its money.

The time is ripe for a new resistance. As manufacturing jobs
disappear overseas, this nation is shifting from a
production-oriented economy to a service-oriented one. With this
shift comes increased job insecurity, more frequent relocation of
jobs and workers alike, and the total demoralization and atomization
of the workforce. Whether or not the old class-based organizing
strategies were ever effective, they are less and less so today. Our
jobs were once the one thing we all had in common, and therefore the
best site for organizing opposition; our labor is still the
foundation of the economy, but as jobs no longer provide us with a
reliable foundation for our own lives, let alone for organizing, we
must come up with a strategy that solves the challenges this
instability poses and takes advantage of it to build momentum
towards a complete transformation of life. Déclassé war is just that
strategy.

Antivocation provocation by Average Guy Fawkes and Citizen Caine,
CrimethInc. Labor Union of the Unemployed Local 47. If this sounds
good in theory but you can’t imagine how to go about it in practice,
we can provide a wide variety of concrete testimonials through any
of the various CrimethInc. addresses. As for the admittedly cursory
analysis of class and declassing, we’re confident you can work out
the subtleties yourself.

Out of Order—Sorry for the Inconvenience!

We are not merchandise or mercenaries. We are not products that sell
themselves. We cannot be bought or leased—we are already
self-possessed.

What child earnestly dreams of growing up to be a grill cook, a
popcorn vendor? What young heart yearns to manage advertising
accounts or supervise fellow “team members” at a corporate
supermarket? We are dropping out because the market offers us no
wealth we can recognize. Digital video discs? We’re sick of watching
actors, we want adventures of our own. Political parties,
legislative solutions? We want, for once, the experience of using
our own power, representing ourselves. Tell us we need more
education, we’ll laugh—we know there isn’t room for all of us at the
top, and we’re starting to question whether we want to be there,
anyway. Tell us we need better work ethics, prescription drugs,
career counseling, psychiatric care, perhaps a summer on the student
hostel circuit, we’ll jeer—we know, finally, that the problem is not
us. We are through with symptomatic treatment, blaming the victim.
You always told us if we lost our jobs, it would be the end of the
world—sounds like it’s worth a shot.

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now here, you see, it
takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you
want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as
that.” “I’d rather not try, please!” said Alice.

Link: www.crimethinc.com