[...] how much of the bourgeois order is based upon fantasy, upon a dream world in which ruling fantasies become true because those who rule really believe they're true, because they make these fantasies come true. Through active will and not a little force, the bourgeoisie turns its economic pleasure principle into a political reality principle, and vice versa.

Take the greatest bourgeois fantasy of all, the world's biggest pipedream we all know is somehow true: the stock market. How much of that is predicated on fantasy and wishful-images of the future, on hope and desire, on the capacity of rampant imagination to create a purely fictitious looking-glass realm of riches? Here, participates recognize such a reality because they believe in it, because they see what they believe. [...]

[...] Do people around the world need Marx to reveal the root of their misery, to correct the illusions and lacunas of their vision of everyday reality? Don't they know this all too well themselves? Aren't they bludgeoned by a system that's all too obvious to them, that has absolutely no desire to conceal anything because it's based on raw, naked and highly visible power, on a brute force that doesn't need unmasking by anyone? Isn't it more the case that this ruling force wallows in the obviousness of its shenanigans because it knows that its opposition is too weak and feeble to stand up to its power? [...]

[...] The non-coincidence reveals the limit of power's political desire to control totally, of its quest for ultimate and indomitable mastery. No system of control can ever be ultimate and indomitable mastery. No system of control can ever be total, can ever be without possibility, contingency, inconspicuous cracks, without little holes in the net, glimmers of light and pockets of fresh air. There is always leakiness to culture and society, a non-coincidence between capitalist subjects and capitalist society, always unforeseen circumstances buried within the everyday, immanent moments of prospective subversion. [....]

[...] those who don't rule, the bulk of us, are an assorted and fragmented layering of disparate peoples who are neither conscious of class nor motivated to act in the name of any class. Nevertheless, these peoples are often motivated by a desire to act against a ruling class, against a system that this class so evidently props us, a system from which a non-class feels alienated and abused by. We might say that these people aren't so much class-conscious as collectively-conscious of an enemy, conscious of their desire to do something about that enemy, conscious about wanting no truck with that enemy's game. As Gorz remarks, this non-class "is no more than a vague area made up of constantly changing individuals whose main aim is not to seize power in order to build a new world, but to regain power over their own lives by disengaging from the market rationality of productivism. [...]

the abolition of work will only be emancipatory if it also allows the development of autonomous activity. The abolition of work doesn't mean abolition of time and effort, the desire for activity, the pleasure of creation, the need to cooperate with others and be of some use to the community. Instead, the abolition of work simply means the progressive, but never total, suppression of the need to purchase the right to live by alienating our lives.

[...] one huge mass of people is confined to either manual torment or mental boredom, while another much smaller group monopolizes skills, dominates knowledge and expertise, and prospers from that domination and monopolization. This division of labor is pernicious in the sense that the real possibility of lightening the work load, spreading the burden, is transformed into its dialectical other, a system of repression and repetition, of obsessive and odious work. Work as the instrument of man only betokens man the instrument.

Perhaps, during crises, we can hatch alternative programs for survival, other methods by which we might not so much "earn a living" as live a living. Perhaps we can self-downsize or even refrain from work itself, and at the same time address a paradox that goes back at least to Max Weber: work is revered in our culture, yet at the same time workers are becoming superfluous; you hate your job and your boss, hate the servility of what you do, and how you do it, the pettiness of the tasks involved, yet want to keep your job at all costs. You see no other way of defining yourself other than through work, through what you do for a living, through the "honor" of being employed. Perhaps there's a point at which we can all be pushed over the edge, "set-free" as Marx said, voluntarily take the jump only to discover other aspects of ourselves, other ways to fill in the hole, to make a little money, to maintain our dignity and pride, and to survive off what Gorz calls a "frugal abundance." Perhaps it's time to get politicized around non-work. [...]