or: Sisyphus and the Capital Relationship

At that particular moment when man turns to his life, Sisyphus, returning to his stone, considers the series of disconnected actions that will become his destiny as created by him, united under the gaze of his memory and soon sealed by death.

So convinced of the completely human origin of everything human, a blind man who wants to see and knows that the night has no end, he is always on the move. The stone is still rolling. […]
This universe, which no longer has a master, does not seem barren or worthless to him. Every grain of this stone, every mineral flash in this mountain shrouded in night, is a world of its own. The struggle against summits can fill a human heart.

We must imagine Sisyphus as a happy man.

Camus, Albert: The Myth of Sisyphus

Identification with the Absurd

The preceding quote seems inappropriate when thinking about work. After all, this is a philosopher's reflection on the absurd, as an abstraction of the impossibility of metaphysical knowledge. Yet we choose this opening because this idea has always filled us with disgust, yet it is in a certain way appropriate when one applies the image to all too mundane questions.

But first, the allegory:
In his debate with the nihilists, existentialists and phenomenologists of the past, Camus formulates a critique of the avoidance of the knowledge of one's own fate. For while those predecessors of his thinking pulled the ripcord when they came close to the problem, sought God or the eternal in order to save themselves in the face of absurdity by finding meaning, the latter avoided the struggle with human misery in their leap.

So far, so illuminating. And yet—as if bitter and masochistically in love, Camus's rebellious man transforms in this image into a proletarian blinded by her pride:
Sisyphus, punished by God the Father, takes on the dead rock in his supposed return to life, happily performing his penance in order to attain freedom in the impossible pursuit of knowledge. All this is ultimately sealed with death.

But how similar is the fate of this sweat-driven man to that of the worker who exhausts herself for a misunderstood machine, and ultimately even identifies with the company, with the boss, with her colleagues, with the company's goal of securing her own labor power and her nourishing and culturally capricious income?

The Tyranny of Abstract Labor

Karl Marx excellently analyzed what value critics later rightly emphasized:
In the bourgeois economy of capital, abstract labor (i.e., the general activity of acquiring means of payment—regardless of its respective content) becomes the dominant principle. This presents itself as the computational counterpart to the purposive, concrete labor (e.g., fishing to obtain food in the form of fish or wiring circuits for lighting), which the former stands in opposition to.

This means that those who perform work do so not to satisfy their needs, but rather to accumulate social wealth. Wealth, in turn, is based on precisely this work, even though efficiency gains through machines and digitalization, division of labor, and innovation—throughout history—have been able to exorbitantly increase the quantity of products produced.
Not only is this bad, but it gives us possibilities that a pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer could not have imagined even when high on drugs.

From the point of view of a free society, there would certainly be several options to deal with this wealth and the reduction in working hours:
1. More production with the same amount of work creates either new luxuries that can be consumed additionally or more necessary goods that can feed a larger number of people.
2. The freed-up work is shifted to further development segments (research, manufacturing of machines, etc.) in order to save even more work in the future.
3. The freed-up work is used to enhance the concrete activity of work, to slow it down or even to generate free time:
An enlarged part of the day in which the worker can do whatever she considers meaningful – in which she no longer has to be a worker.

But anyone who understands the laws of the private sector - no market economist would doubt this - knows that the third option does not really exist (at least not without violence). Because competition, as the forced competition by the state-organized private sector, ultimately prevents the use of this last option.
To prove this, let us consider the above cases from the perspective of capital:
Option 1 results in the realization of value through the sale of consumer goods (monetary profit is generated -> the company generates more money)
Option 2, on the other hand, allows for an increase in the value produced in the future (less labor in relation to more products -> the company produces more cheaply than the competition -> the company generates more money)

Option 3, however, corresponds to the abandonment of further value creation. If work is stopped, even if overall production may initially increase than before, the well-intentioned entity (from the company to the national economy to the international economic area) will sooner or later be taken advantage of by those who do not allow individuals to sit back and relax. Ultimately, the altruistic economy of the frugal even threatens to die out if, over time, its products become too inefficient—in other words, too expensive—compared to the competing market.
While this can certainly work for a while, as the general prosperity of the masses and their free time initially increases demand, as soon as the market is saturated (people are too happy), a lull inevitably follows.

Here again: In a free world, this would certainly not be a problem. Those pursuing better technologies and innovative concepts can share them. But not in a globally oriented, partial economy that is driven by self-interest.

This dynamic inevitably leads to what we described at the beginning as the rule of abstract labor:
An economic entity must work. And the content of the activity is initially irrelevant. Complete satisfaction of needs would be fatal.
Demand creation, dependency, marketing, data collection, psychology, and addiction, on the other hand, are the driving force behind the self-reinforcing economic system of capital. The logic is thus easily summarized:
More work for individuals while simultaneously eliminating it technically, 40 hours a week, if possible more – because competitiveness depends on it.
According to this principle, concrete benefits for the individual are merely a random result. If products fill you up, that's good—after all, they're meant to be bought. But if they're addictive and quickly run out, that's better.

It's good for the economy.

Sisyphus on the assembly line

So let’s get back to rolling stones:
Camus says we should imagine Sisyphus as a happy man when he recognizes his tragedy and faces it stoically. He calls this attitude "taking up the fight."

This struggle, however, presents itself as a struggle against the stone, inescapably doomed to repetition. Thus, we are by no means witnessing a struggle against Zeus, the very man who brought the wretch into this predicament in the first place. And what is absurd to the absurdist, capital is to the social democrat:
An annoyance that must not be overcome, but rather nurtured and cared for, while at the same time taking up the fight against the mischief that it perpetrates behind our backs - and does so again and again, like a round rock that tumbles down again once the pinnacle of social policy has been reached with the New Deal.

The fact that this boulder now threatens to become ever larger and more cumbersome doesn't seem to bother anyone. Even the grim-faced assembly line worker, who is at least honest enough to genuinely hate her job, begins to defend its supposed dignity when so-called welfare parasites start to flee—or even just look like they might.
The unemployed and beggars, asylum seekers and migrants, even speculators and managers—all of them reap their hatred when the rumor arises that they are receiving something they didn't work for. While some remain largely untouchable due to their actual wealth, the defenseless, however, feel this anger most acutely:
The happy Sisyphus throws stones at them.

To avoid any misunderstandings, here is a follow-up note:
The cashier in this picture is just an example. She certainly doesn't deserve any hostility. At least one of the authors of these lines knows both what it's like to be a cashier and the disgust for his own profession.

However, the utopia – a free society – could choose against it. All three options would be available to its tableau:
Exuberance, frugality and tranquility.
But capital only knows the schizophrenia of loud-mouthed restraint, the renunciation of instincts in favor of ecstatic self-destruction.

work in general

But what, one might ask at this point, would be the work itself?
Shouldn't an essay that claims to explain work in general also include activities that are not capitalist in nature?
Certainly. But this is only a brief summary, because it is, in fact, of little relevance. For example:
Forced labor, that is, concrete work for the benefit of an immediate master under one's own direction, would also fall into this category under investigation. So would slave labor.
And last but not least, the so-called care work, i.e. caring activities that are quite strenuous in order to keep oneself and one's loved ones (or even complete strangers) alive and to enable them to have a comfortable life or at least to make it easier, is work.
In general terms, Marx proposes the following definition:
Work is the expenditure of muscle, nerve and brain.
This, it should be added, is carried out for the purpose of achieving a goal in exchange with the environment.

(The aforementioned value critics always resisted this equality, emphasizing that non-capitalist work was not work in the capitalist sense, but that their criticism only attacked this. Everything else would simply be something else. It is a True Scotsman argument that can be presented as follows:
They are against work, define it in the capitalist sense, and criticize everyone else for calling other phenomena work. Why this should be important, however, is not clear to us.)

But we should by no means pretend, as is often accused of the value critic, that work (or abstract work) is something bad per se. After all, expenditure is the modus operandi of humans, and planning and instrumental rationality are also provided for in the emphatic concept of progress in history. And even a liberated society, if it did not have magical abilities or divine technologies (we welcomed this), would probably still have to do one thing or another in order to survive.
For the sake of fairness, and not least for logistical reasons, it may be unavoidable to combine various activities according to time constraints, thus having to deal with abstract labor. But at least their rule would be broken:
People calculated precisely to satisfy needs – but they did not create a need to be able to calculate.

The free society, as a generalized self-management, would ultimately act against (non-capitalist) labor as a necessary expenditure in a double sense:
Within the realm of necessity, as Marx puts it, it would act against domination, external determination, the imposition of labor, making it more pleasant and friendly.
But outside this sphere, the true realm of freedom would ultimately begin:
The less work one has to do, the more one can focus on one’s soul.
There is no exchange or calculation here. People are harmless in their egoism, the worker becomes a citizen and a private person, a real individual, who creates, enjoys, discovers, experiences, creates and gives without any expectation of reciprocity.

Sisyphus and the Soul of Socialism

In this world, our prince would let go of the chunk of dead rock, perhaps breaking it into small pieces and scattering it over the mountain to build the new world on them. Perhaps the truly happy Sisyphus is one who does not avoid the question of the absurdity of existence, but who is just as unconcerned with the deprivations that our unfinished existence presents to us.

Adorno aptly wrote:

“Life that had meaning did not ask about it; it flees from this question.”

Adorno, Theodor W.: Negative dialectics

This escape mentioned here would certainly not be the leap that Camus rightly warned against, but an immediacy that can only arise mediated by the course of history, as an experience of progress that would shatter Sisyphus's rock.
The hope offered to us by this sentence is that if society ultimately no longer appears to us as a hostile thing - which it actually is at present - then perhaps a relationship to the cosmos would develop that would produce ideas and feelings that would no longer make the cosmos seem absurd to us.

The idea behind this may be highly speculative, indeed, but it is true that the human psyche, as well as the philosopher's thoughts, are to a high degree preformed by our experiences in childhood and everyday life.
A free person may one day be able to trust his intuition, which in our times is so fallible and fragmented that one should overcome it if one does not want to deceive people even more brutally than is already inevitable.

One must therefore imagine Camus as a lazy scoundrel in the liberated society.

Happy and unemployed.

Commune Mondiale Art project

Liora Bina, Mark Erschüttert, and Renard Volant are united in a common cause. The Commune Mondiale is a small, self-proclaimed avant-garde art project. It is nothing more than a personal collection of texts: unfinished, unedited, fragmentary. Fundamental to us is what we call the diamodern conception, which we represent and uphold. This ultimately expresses a common program—namely, that of world-republican socialism: We attempt to intellectually unite democratic law, communist production, and cosmopolitan organization in this spirit—each in our own way, and not always in the most direct way.

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