Lunar Economics
All economics, as Karl Marx observed, is an economics of time. Capitalism has robbed us of time. We’re endlessly reminded that ‘time is money’. Having fun? Playing with your kids? Enjoying slow sex? Singing in your local choir? According to the ideologues you’re losing out because you could be earning. You’re basically wasting time. Go back in history a bit. We once had our feast days, our holidays, our moments of sacred time. Not just Christmas, Easter or a few paltry bank holidays – but every sabbath, every saint’s day, every festival or carnival week or month throughout the year. Then came Cromwell and his killjoy bourgeois revolutionaries. They abolished Christmas. They abolished May Day. No maypoles, no celebratory sex, no feasting, no joy! They laid the groundwork for the ‘protestant work ethic’ – experienced nowadays as capitalism’s regime of 24/7 endless anxiety, constant orientation toward money-making, endless profit-seeking in wage slavery.
All categories of time became merged into just one: time for work. In Britain today, the employers are trying to abolish even the very concept of ‘overtime’. Sundays are like any other day: one more opportunity for profit, for work. Well, lunarchy means going on strike. Not just over some dispute but regardless of any dispute – just to take a break. Defending the picket line is demanding work, but creative and exciting. It’s wage-slavery in reverse. We’re now working for comradeship and solidarity – ultimately for another world. Lunarchy means restoring sacred time. And each sacred holiday lasts two whole weeks!
Think about it. At present, half the world’s population is working far too much. Millions of the urban population in, say, China or India are kept on production lines in what amount almost to concentration camps, deprived of leisure time, deprived of a life, without trade union rights and barely able to make ends meet. Meanwhile, millions of us are unemployed, without any regular income whatever, excluded forcibly from the whole wage slavery system, struggling to make a living on rubbish tips or in other hopeless and degrading tasks.
So why is going on strike a solution? It’s a brilliant, extraordinarily simple solution. We who are in work just go on strike. It’s a general strike and it lasts for two whole weeks. We down tools at new moon and return to work at full. That makes the whole period of the moon’s waxing a holiday – time just for ourselves. But it also has another consequence, hugely beneficial. It means that when we do go back to work, there’s TWICE as much work to be done! That means TWICE as many of us need to be involved.
So instead of allowing one half of the world’s population to be permanently enslaved while the other is excluded from work, we establish a proper balance. Work is declared a legal activity only during waning moon.
Think of it as restoring the Sabbath – while extending the Lord’s Day to full parity with the Devil’s.
All categories of time became merged into just one: time for work. In Britain today, the employers are trying to abolish even the very concept of ‘overtime’. Sundays are like any other day: one more opportunity for profit, for work. Well, lunarchy means going on strike. Not just over some dispute but regardless of any dispute – just to take a break. Defending the picket line is demanding work, but creative and exciting. It’s wage-slavery in reverse. We’re now working for comradeship and solidarity – ultimately for another world. Lunarchy means restoring sacred time. And each sacred holiday lasts two whole weeks!
Think about it. At present, half the world’s population is working far too much. Millions of the urban population in, say, China or India are kept on production lines in what amount almost to concentration camps, deprived of leisure time, deprived of a life, without trade union rights and barely able to make ends meet. Meanwhile, millions of us are unemployed, without any regular income whatever, excluded forcibly from the whole wage slavery system, struggling to make a living on rubbish tips or in other hopeless and degrading tasks.
So why is going on strike a solution? It’s a brilliant, extraordinarily simple solution. We who are in work just go on strike. It’s a general strike and it lasts for two whole weeks. We down tools at new moon and return to work at full. That makes the whole period of the moon’s waxing a holiday – time just for ourselves. But it also has another consequence, hugely beneficial. It means that when we do go back to work, there’s TWICE as much work to be done! That means TWICE as many of us need to be involved.
So instead of allowing one half of the world’s population to be permanently enslaved while the other is excluded from work, we establish a proper balance. Work is declared a legal activity only during waning moon.
Think of it as restoring the Sabbath – while extending the Lord’s Day to full parity with the Devil’s.
