Post Work Manifesto*

by Dissidents for a nonTechnocratic Society

Guaranteed Annual Income [GAI]!

Everyone will be guaranteed a basic annual income sufficient for a decent standard of living from cradle to grave. This includes nutrition, housing, clothing, child-care, healthcare, transportation and recreation.

Shared Maintenance of Life!

Reproduction and rearing of children, housework, public service work, affective labor, and the maintenance of everyday life are necessary for the continuance of life and all institutions. This work will be shared among everyone and must be compensated through the GAI.

Cultural/Intellectual Work!

Cultural work, critical art work, intellectual work, and life arts (sociality, conviviality, travel, etc.) are necessary for a creative society and a satisfying life. This work should be valued and supported by public funds available to everyone.

Income Independent of Work!

To guarantee a more just distribution of resources, we call for the principle of income independent of work, and more free time for all. Rotational, seasonal, and reserve labor systems can share out available work among many workers rather than making some workers redundant and reducing us all to poverty.

Reduced Work Hours and More Free Time!

We call for the human right to control over our own time. Resistance to speed-up and work intensification can employ tactics such as slow-downs, sick-outs, hacking, or institutional sabotage. But more radical changes are also needed. We need to re-launch the fight for a reduced and self-determined work-week/ work year, and contest the rampant exploitations of workers in the just-in-time global market economy of the society of control.

Ecology of Skills and Knowledge!

We favor developing ecologies of skills and knowledges. What skills need to be maintained and passed on? How can we sustain those who practice them? Increasingly the rise of usually well-paid "immaterial" and technocratic knowledge work is coupled with the de-valuing or loss of traditional craft and affective life-maintenance skills. Increasingly, human lives and worker livelihoods are being sacrificed to "efficiency" and the mass consumption market. We need to maintain meaningful practices that embody techniques and skills developed through centuries of human experience.

Education as an Art of Life!

We call for life-long free education for everyone who desires it. Maintenance and upgrading of skills and learning new technologies is necessary in today's world. Our changing global and cultural conditions and the many new developments in the arts, media, sciences and environmental research also demand an engaged and critically informed citizenry. The pleasures of the life of the mind, and of freely chosen intellectual and creative study should be materially supported and available to everyone.

Becoming Autonomous Resistance Movements!

World-wide becoming autonomous worker resistance movements will be built by all people who are oppressed by their current work/life conditions. Solidarity and empathy are needed more than ever in the face of separations imposed by the society of control. A contestational, embodied cyberfeminism can be a catalyst for becoming autonomous resistance movements.

* We have freely borrowed from the "Post-Work Manifesto" by S. Aronowitz, D. Esposito, W. DiFazio, and M.Yard, in Post-Work, Eds. S. Aronowitz, J. Cutler.