This has been the demand shouted by a handful of university students against the “Gelmini Reform”, or rather against the predicted cuts to schools and universities; the shout was launched in the course of a very strange form of “protest". If protesters once occupied schools and universities and took to the streets, today they practice a “flash mob” — modern pleasantry of a sad present — getting oneself taped by video cameras, loyal to the directives of the society of the spectacle. 

But if things don’t change with a little spectacle in the streets, there is also another point on which one needs to pause to reflect: the continual demand for work. 

Not a day passes in which one doesn’t get bombarded by the media shoving tearful stories down one’s throat; stories that tell of honest workers that demand the intervention of the forces of order so as to be able to work, of the good mothers of families fired and forced to buy less fashionable clothes for their children. One demands the right to work not only to be able to cope with the primary vital requirements, but also to guarantee oneself everything useless with which one usually surrounds oneself and that one is not willing to do without. One demands to work so that one can consume, continuing in this way to feed the perverse capitalist mechanism that is the real cause of the current situation of generalized redundancy. The dog bites his own tail. 

And then, why should we be interested in the fate of so many workers whose work has harmful and negative effects on the live of those who live nearby? The case of those left jobless by the closure of the Copersalento incineration plant of in Maglie is typical. That of the majority of university researchers is identical: what projects and what interests will enslave their research? Too often it is research aimed at new forms of the domination and exploitation of human being over human being and over nature. Another exemplary case is that of researchers in the nano-technology laboratories in Lecce, employed in a project of control and war; so then it would be desirable if such people didn’t remain precarious to life but, more simply, didn’t ever begin to work.  

But a deeper reflection imposes itself. Is it at all possible that the sole horizon to which one is able to aspire is that of a working future, made of alienated time and the usual exhausting routine until death, and that one is not, instead, able to imagine a different life, made of idleness, enjoying the slow flow of time to use for one’s own needs and one’s own wants? Is it possible that one isn’t able to imagine one’s future outside of a life made of exploitation in exchange for a wage (or a salary) and of understanding work in a form different from that now crystallized in the course of centuries of exploitation and submission? 

There are many bleeding hearts completely willing to guarantee their own and other people’s exploitation: not us. 

Let’s not die of work!

Some enemies of Stakhanov