An article from De Moker, written in 1924.

‘There is in language, words and expressions that we must remove, because they designate concepts which constitute the disastrous and corrupting content of the capitalist system.

Firstly, the word to work (werken) and all the concepts in relations with this word – ‘workman’, ‘worker’, ‘time of work’, ‘salary’, ‘strike’, ‘unemployed worker’, ‘people with nothing to do.’

Work is the greatest affront and the greatest humiliation that humanity has committed against itself. This social system, capitalism is based on work; it has created a class of men who must work – and a class of men who do not work. Workers are compelled to work, otherwise they will die of hunger. ‘Whoever does not work shan’t eat’ profess the owners, who pretend furthermore that calculating and protecting their profits, is also to work.

There is the unemployed and the idle. If the first are without work with no fault of their own, the second simply do not work. The idle are the exploiters, who live on the work of the workers, the unemployed are the workers who are not allowed to work, because no profit can be extracted. The wonders of the apparatus of production have fixed the time of work, have set up workshops and ordered to what and how workers must work.

These only receive enough in order not to die of hunger and are hardly able to nourish their children during their first years. Then these children are instructed at school, just enough so that they can in turn go to work. The owners equally have their children educated so they can also be in charge of workers.

Work is the great curse. It produces men without spirit and without soul.In order to make others work for one’s benefit, one must lack personality, and to work one must also lack personality; one must crawl and traffic, betray, deceive and falsify.For the rich idlers, the work (of the workers) is the means of providing oneself with an easy life. For the workers themselves it is a burden of misery, a bad fate imposed from birth, whch prevents them to live decently.When we will cease to work, then life will start for us.Work is the enemy of life. A good worker is a beast of burden, with rough legs, with a moronic and lifeless glance.When man will become conscious of life, he will never work again.

I not not pretend that one must simply leave one’s boss tomorrow and see later how you will gobble up without working, whilst being convinced that life starts. If one is compelled to be down and out, it is already quite unfortunate. This fact of not working results from then on, in most cases, to live at the expense of comrades who work. If you are capable of earning your living bypillaging and stealing – like the honest citizens say – without being exploited by a boss, well then, go for it; but do not think nevertheless that the great problem is resolved. Work is a social ill. This society is the enemy of life and it is only by destroying it, that all societies of labour which will follow – that is to say by having revolution upon revolution – that work will disappear.It is only then that life will come – the full and rich life – where everyone will be brought, by their pure instincts, to create there, of its own movement, each man will be a creator and will produce exclusively what is beautiful and good; this is what is necessary. Then there will be no more worker-men, then each one will be man; and for vital human need, for internal necessity, each one will create in an inexhaustible manner that which, under all reasonable relations, cover vital needs. Then there will be but life – a grand life – pure and cosmic and the creative passions will be the greatest happiness of human life without constrant, a life where one will no longer be found either by hunger and neither by a salary, either by time or neither by the place, and where one will no longer be exploited by parasites.