Abolish Work

"Abolish Restaurants" Plus "Work, Community, Politics, War"

Paperback, 96 pages

English language

Published Sept. 3, 2014 by PM Press.

ISBN:
978-1-60486-340-6
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
926705496

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(7 reviews)

Available for the first time in a single volume, the two influential and well-circulated pamphlets that comprise Abolish Work offer cutting-edge class analysis and critiques of daily life from the frontlines of the class war accompanied by uncensored, innovative illustrations. “Abolish Restaurants” is an illustrated guide to the daily miseries, stress, boredom, and alienation that restaurant work can entail, as well as the ways in which restaurant workers fight against these. It draws on a range of anticapitalist ideas as well as considerable personal experience. “Work, Community, Politics, War” is a comic book introduction to modern society, identifying both the oppressive and subversive tendencies that exist today with the aim of remaking society. Together, the pieces read alternately like a worker’s diary, a short story, a psychology of everyday life, and a historical account.

2 editions

Delightful and a quick read.

It packs a lot into one place, with a lot of really well constructed and fast critiques. Definitely good for those who haven't yet recognised the way that restaurants fit into the capitalist system (because the first two sections focus on the food service sector).

Two things I wasn't fond of, though.

First, the zine design with hyper-crammed text, which was frustrating for a dyslexic person. Sometimes I couldn't figure out where I was in a sentence, meaning I had to go backwards. Genuinely had to read it on the computer because I needed to be able to highlight lines to keep reading properly.

Second, a common issue in anarchist agitprop is provocative phrasing that often shows cracks in solidarity. They talk about people as being 'schizophrenic', implying that this is an inherently bad thing (or implying the people doing this are bad). We don't need to do ableism in …

Review of 'Abolish Work' on 'Storygraph'

It's a lot better than I was expecting. It's definitely something for new folks to read to get a firmer grasp of Communist politics.

In "Work Community Politics, War" the author labels the working class developing its own organizational forms and disregarding the old government as anarchism, which as something like a council communist i disagree with. But I understand that they conceive anarchism a little differently from other anarchists (the non-historical materialist or class struggle anarchists types).

This section, also from "Work, Community, Politics, War," also bothered me:

“There will be no need for a stand-in for everything that can be bought and sold-money-when there is no need to measure work time stored in those things. This could only happen when we make and do things because there is a need for them and not in order to exchange them.”

I figure that the author is an anarchist-communist type …

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