Abolish Work

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 our agitprop; we can be clear, provocative, and easily understood without it.

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 of anarchist communist (in that they reject labor-time accounting in favor of galloping into higher phase communism immediately). It just really bothers me that (1) they say that money is simply a store of labor time and not value & (2) discount vouchers in the same breath. The last sentence about producing for need is great though.

Besides that semantic nitpick and being a little bit of a freak about definitions of money and protective of labor-time accounting, i loved it and would highly recommend it to anyone who's first getting into communist politics.