CrimethInc

Work “makes people poor” - “in self-determination, in free time, in health, in sense of self beyond our careers and bank accounts and poor in spirit.”(Work: Capitalism Economic Resistance, Far East, Salem, 2011, p.21)

So far from this project we have definitely highlighted how the system of "working" has changed how we think about the ways we spend our time. CrimethInc. highlights how while when we think of work we automatically think of an accumulation of wealth, work actually "makes people poor". This is a valid point as having to spend so much of our lives at a place of work is inevitably going to take away from other aspects, or potential aspects of life.

While CrimethInc. claims that work takes away free time, work also creates free time. Not to say that thanks to work we get given, or we earn, all this lovely free time to use how we wish. Because if it wasn't for work there would be no need to define this time as free. Work defines this time for us, and then dictates when we are allowed to use it.

Of course, as we have discussed in this project there isn't just work and free time. Time can feel like it's wasted. If you're not actively doing work, or you're not doing something productive, then time feels wasted. However, with our 'Facebook Wages' intervention we highlighted that even though we might feel that how we spend our time is not beneficial in any way, someone is profiting. Does this change the definition of wasted time? Most people in the intervention denied that they deserved a wage for Facebook, or just saw it as a funny idea. Our work, and therefore out right to a wage, has been successfully hidden.

"For the market manages the managers, hierarchy bosses the bosses, capitalism owns the owners, but a crimethinker is truly a human being, free and wild" (CrimethInc. Manifesto Part 72-A)

We've tried in different ways, through different interventions, to get people to think like a "crimethinker". We put out the ideas that capitalism is at work in every moment of our lives even when we think we aren't doing anything. We gave people the option to do 'something' rather than 'nothing' during the spare, seemingly empty and wasted moments given to us by the working day (wether you're the one at work, or consuming through someone else's work). We wanted people to claim back time, and do what they want with it. But just telling people to be free, or that they have the option to be free, doesn't create free individuals. Telling people to do something at a specific moment in time defeats the point of creating real free time. While we we're trying to get people to question how they spend their 'wasted' time, all of our interventions still worked with and around the capitalist system of work.

This "free and wild" individual cannot be created through planned intervention. All we can do in our interventions is take these theoretical ideas about time and work and create 'real life', tangible ways of seeing them.