by Crimethinc. Workers' Collective
Available in 284 free installments
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Developing relationships with those who experience less privilege is no guarantee that we will deal openly and consistentiy with race or any other such issue. Too often, people claim to understand the experiences of another group because of a high degree of exposure to them: "But my best fidend is black!" "But my stepdad wasn't bom here!" A white person's relationship with a person of color can never be a proof or a credential of anti-racist consciousness.
All the same, working to dismantle the institutional, cultural, and personal barriers that keep us alienated from one another is a fundamental part of undermining white supremacy and other forms of oppression. We may have to accept that there will always
be more barriers to remove, but in removing those we are able to, we learn and grow in revolutionary ways. Meaningful relationships that transcend boundaries and constructs can offer a taste of the world that oppression otherwise denies us. Building friendships and alliances with people whose experience of oppression is different from our own is much more than a strategy for working toward specific political ends; it is also a way to live life more fuUy and do our part to make it possible for others to do the same.
If you need to address people about potentially oppressive aspects of their behavior, you can make it easier for them to listen without becoming defensive by doing so constructively and respectfully, in a private, low pressure environment.
Undermining Oppression 575
Unemployment
Instructions
You can get as many credit cards
as possible, run them all up to their
limits purchasing useful materials,
and tlien declare bankruptcy. Better
yet, get together a circle of people
who are committed to supporting
each other; each year one will run
up massive debts paying for the
needs of the group, and then declare
bankruptcy There should be enough
people in the group to cover the
years until the bankruptcy period of
a participant is over and the process
can be repeated.
576
There are plenty of good reasons not to sell your labor on the market. Perhaps you don't like what that labor is being used to do: transform forests into landfills, perpetuate meaningless busywork as a way of life, centralize wealth in the hands of a rapacious few. Perhaps you have a better idea of how that energy should be employed, and no corporation or organization is offering you a salary to do what you think needs doing. Perhaps you're one of those dangerous hedonists who have somehow gotten it into their heads that life is supposed to be fun and exciting. Unfortunately, knowing why you want to be unemployed is the easy part. There are also reasons most people who hate their jobs keep going to them: they have bills to pay, they don't know any other way to get what they need, they can't imagine what else to do with their lives, they don't want to be social outcasts.
To some extent, these are valid concerns, and the more everyone accepts them as inexorable facts of hfe, the more they become so. At the same time, to the inverse extent, varying for each person according to his or her individual circumstances, they are empty threats. Only rigorous field testing can determine where necessity stops and superstition begins.
Dropping out of the exchange economy doesn't have to be all or nothing: there are many degrees to which one can do so, and many ways to go about it. You can work part-time, or at a full-time job that affords you the opportunity while on the clock to do some of the things you would do anyway. You can get a job that provides you access
to a resource that you or others in your community need, and take advantage of the situation to redistribute a little wealth. You can work in blitzes, financing long periods of unemployment by means of short periods of intensive wage slavery. You can barter your labor directly for the goods you need, instead of working for wages. You can try being self-employed, gambling that the market will be a less exploitative master than a boss would be.
Or, if no others depend on you to provide for them, you can quit working entirely and declare yourself openly at war with capitalism on every front. Whichever approach you choose, the same basic principles will apply.
Few people would go to work if they didn't need a paycheck to buy the things they need?so when you consider how to emancipate yourself from wage slavery, the first thing to work out is what you can do without.
