supported by:
OSI Open Society Institute Foundation, ACNP Arts and Culture Networks Program, Budapest

Tigran Khachatryan / Yerevan

BROTHER OF " LA CHINOISE"

A spectre is haunting the world — the spectre of dead labor. All the powers of the world have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: the church and the World Bank, businessmen and labor unions, ecologists and socialists. But it’s too late now. The society, which is ruled by the dead labor corpse is not just in crisis, but is on the brink of its self-ruining. The microelectronics revolution has turned the use of manpower into something superfluous in the process of production. Bringing such an evolution to a stop is unfeasible, all the more as changing it back.
However, the some-fifty-century ongoing propaganda stating that ‘the forced labor is the human’s sole mode of living’ is not only declining, but has even grown to an extent of wild fanaticism. The topmost manifestation of the labor society became the 20th century with its Stalin ‘Labor-Reformatory Settlements’, Hitler ‘Concentration Camps’ carrying cynical slogans like ‘Glory to Labor!’ or ‘Labor to Liberate You!’.
The more a society built on labor worship is in the face of decline, the stronger the apprehension of the end is ousted from the society’s consciousness. At the instant of its death, labor appears as the force that exercises overall control, and tolerates no value other than itself.
Labor, paranoidly obstinate in self-destructing, is still the measure of individual or collective unfitness of a person. Up to today, the attempt is being made to maintain the idol of labor as the irrational objective of the world reality. The delirious screams for employment and working places continue to serve as justification for the precipitated destruction of the human being and of nature.
The ’He who does not work, shall not eat’ ironic catchword continues to maintain its quondam power. A society, which is fixed upon the irrational abstraction of labor, does inevitably give rise to discrimination. Yet in the 30s of the 20th century the so-called left-wing labor parties reached a confidential agreement with the bourgeois and clerical conservative forces and, within their power, proceeded with offering up sacrifices to the deity of ‘dead labor’. In this way, Karl Marx’s idea of labor became buried in oblivion:

The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague.

The Marxists who edited Marx wanted to substitute ‘market relations’ with mechanisms of ‘state regulations’, and at the same time held on to the fetishes that the labor society had: competition, goods, price, money, state, nation, and et cetera. This hypocritical ideology still remains appealing to a great mass of the population. But it can never have liberating significance.
Since the rise of the first agricultural poleis, the human being - exploited and his manpower sold - has been fed up with demagogical promises meanwhile the process of multiplying the bureaucratic machinery has never ceased. No matter if ‘living on state wages’ is almost impossible; what matters is being within the system and obtaining a license to possess and rule people and nature on behalf of ‘Holly Labor’.
Dead labor is formed and augmented in the form of capital with money as the unit of measure. In reality, there is no antagonism between capital and labor. Left-wing political powers always worshipped labor with incredible energy. It is not ‘estranged labor’ they banished, but the augmentation of fortune occurring as a result of that labor. All the working-class parties proclaimed ‘the liberation of labor from capital’; whilst the real substance is the human being’s emancipation from labor. The antagonism between labor and capital is nothing more than animosity within one social system, guided by the same ‘logic of exploitation’ and acting as an end in itself. Class struggle is simply the clash form of the spheres of interests among forces of same social grounds, which have found themselves in competition. It was only one aspect of the activity of the elapsing process of amassing capital, ongoing for hundreds of centuries.
The quality content of production is as unimportant in the aspect of labor, as in that of capital. They both show interest in the optimal feasibility of selling out manpower. If at one time people cherished hopes that self-governing production would reorganize the old forms of production and regulate market relations through equivalent barter, now word only goes of creating new job offerings. The expressions of ‘creation of job offerings’, ‘employment guaranteeing’ demonstrate of their own accord that this huge labor theatre has turned into an end in itself phenomenon, and that the personages involved no longer bear responsibility for their actions.
Just as working-class has never been the real subjects of human liberation; capitalists and managers have not governed society led by their own subjective evil and greedy will. The labor society elite are bound by the dead labor idol as much as the rest are. If not in the social irrational end in itself state of being, they at best fall into infantilism. ‘Life itself appears only as a means to life’ is incomprehensible for the actors of the society lead by dead labor. The power-wielding idol very effectively manages to compel its featureless will, proclaiming competition an instrument for progress. All are to bend before this compulsion- the mighty of the world even more than the others, for they are the ones that possess the colossal wealth. The players of capital are not self-determined; this is in fact what makes them perilous rather than their personal evil will.
Thousands of years of evident violence and artful means for massive scale influence were indispensable for it to become possible to compel people to serve the idol of labor utterly. The object of this bloodstained history has never in the least been the ‘raise of prosperity’.