Harry Cleaver Quotes & Sayings

When we lose our waged jobs we are not freed from work! We are supposed to go on doing the work of reproducing labour power and to make the labour market function by looking for waged jobs. Part of our effort must be to make these dynamics clear so that we can struggle for what we really want, which is a secure income and less work-for-capital so that we have more time to re-craft our lives. Thus, instead of demanding "full employment" and strenuously searching for new jobs, we can demand less restrictive and more unemployment compensation or even "citizen wages" independent of jobs. — Harry Cleaver

What the recognition of all this means is not only that the class struggle is omnipresent but also that the struggles of those of us who are waged and the struggles of those of us who are unwaged are inherently related through the common refusal of work, that is, the refusal of the reduction of our lives to work, and the struggle for alternative ways of being. Thus the Old Left definition of the working class as the waged proletariat is obsolete, not only because capital has integrated the unwaged into its self-reproduction, but also because the struggles of the unwaged are integrally related to, and can be complementary to, those of the waged. — Harry Cleaver