Animals, wild creatures totally governed by instinct, busy themselves with providing for themselves, but they are

not said to work, much less to be employed. We were once the same. The effort we made to live was part of living. We were free to live, or die. We instinctively and urgently wanted to live, and reproduce so as to continue life, and from that the effort to do so naturally followed. This effort became known as work when that freedom was lost to us and we were forced unwillingly to labour for masters, indirectly of our own needs and harder and longer than those needs once required. Then, when the majority were no longer forced to work for a minority of humans, we all, in our various ranks, became obliged to work for the competitive money economy of the Machine. This is known as employment, work for money, the sole means of purchasing survival. We can not now live without money, which is obtainable only from the Machine; therefore we are obliged to go cap-in-hand to the Machine for employment. The Machine is responsible for deciding what work shall be done, for it holds the pursestrings and, according to profitability, determines how much money we shall be paid for that work. We are responsible for securing the Machine's employment of us, doing its work to its satisfaction, and living according to what the amount of money it pays can buy back from it. Inwardly, we are all free to decide whether or not to conform in our minds to this automatic system. Outwardly, what freedoms we have are automated, and severely limited. We are 'free' obediently to submit to the Machine's education, or otherwise apply ourselves to gaining its approval and privileged employment, and to live in a style which this economic level makes appropriate. We are 'free', having accepted a lower level of employment and a more cramped economic style of life, to unite with fellow workers to bargain for 'fair' wages and conditions using the threat of withdrawing our labour. We are 'free' to decline employment and face starvation or, in the case of the rich nations, to live on the lowest possible income paid by welfare or charitable institutions to the unemployed. We can develop ways of supporting and enriching life independently of the Machine and its money economy, but we

can do this only on the margins of reality while still being basically Machinedependent. We are not free to decide overall what work shall be done; to do work that the Machine disallows, however humanly vital; to survive or prosper when unwilling to do the work which the Machine allocates or allows, in the way it requires; to live as or where we wish, or live at all, without the Machine's money; or to demand work which the Machine is not willing to provide. We are free to prosper by limiting our ambition to self-interest, but since our work is mostly imposed on us, or enticed out of us, we are not free to feel the enthusiastic goodwill which goes with good labour voluntarily contributed to the common cause. There is all the difference in the world between giving our effort in that spirit of willing responsibility and toiling unwillingly in our own defence or purely for selfish gain. We are carried along by the autoprogressive, money economy tide, our reality a day-to-day practical and political adjustment to its waves. Some of us resist and hold back against the tide, but mostly the economically strong push forward, pressing back the weak. We have not yet acquired that enlightenment which would give us the collective will to swim against the tide and to break its power over us. Our deeply ingrained concept of employment, which translates the combined effort for the well-being of whole humanity into the separated individuals need for a specific Machine job, is as ridiculous as our concept of reality. And the practice of one human employing others for profit is morally akin to slavery, a creator of inequality. It is our present reality, almost unquestioned, that we need employment to survive, and the Machine is the only employer. So we work for the competitive money economy, keep its lores and look to it for survival of our species, when its objective is not whole human survival; it is not interested in humanity at all as a morally aware intellectual race, only in autoprogression of itself by human agency. Consequently, humanity generally depends for its continuing life on employment, which accrues to its detriment and possibly to its eventual destruction. The Machine cannot of itselfdo anything. It directs but must rely

on humans to act. Mostly we do anything that the Machine requires us to do, whatever it may be and whatever the circumstances. We don uniforms, gain degrees, take office, accept rank, make and use weapons, bulldoze rainforest, build nuclear power stations, compete with each other, cheat one another, argue with one another, crush one another - all for automatic reasons. Just as the concept of employment is an economic phenomenon, so is the occurrence of unemployment. It is the logical accompaniment of competitive inequality, a necessary casualty of money-economic recession, the low point of cyclic automatic activity as it oscillates between rest and the full generation of energy, naturally, like winter as opposed to summer, but with the difference that whilst we cannot control the seasons, we can and should control our own economy, or management. Each time a cycle touches bottom enough determination and energy has been gathered to begin striving towards the top once more. This activity characterises instinctive life, which has no motivation but the impulsion of energy to act and react, reflected in the explosive birth of a life-form, then of its seed, its implosion to death, and the explosive re-birth of its seed. When there is unemployment we cry out for jobs. It is the cry of the mentally blind, mesmerised by automation into believing they are unable to take responsibility for their own affairs into their own hands. We are asking employment of the very automatic economy which has carelessly caused our unemployment. That we do not prevent unemployment is because we have no control over money-economic recessions. This in turn is because recessions are part of an instinctive cycle which we aid and abet, and to ask instinct to contradict itself is asking the impossible. We shall get rid of unemployment only when we have thrown out the concept of employment; when we have subjected our instinct to the full wisdom of our intellect, so giving human life its true motivation. Unemployment is part of the myth of the money economy which insists, when in recession, that there is no work for many of us when there is work in plenty. The reason behind this is that, according to the current rule, we may not work

except for money. So when there is no money to pay us we may not work. What is the real difference between times of full employment and massive unemployment? In terms of humantruth there is no real difference. The work needing to be done is the same, needful resources are the same, and our capacity for labour is the same. It is only an artificial economic difference that creates this human suffering. Let me repeat - in a humantrue society such labour would be done as was necessary to provide all needs, and needs would be simply provided. The money economy is an unnecessary and inhuman intervention which upsets this straightforward voluntary equation. Humanity in general accepts automatic reality without question, but we do vary in our reactions to the effects of automatic policies on people. Now a little about the political division between Right and Left(more to come later). Generally speaking the former supports the authority of the Machine over the people, and the latter champions the rights of the people against the Machine. The majority of those on the Left are the least rewarded, least privileged and most vulnerable, the manual workers, whose rights are represented by the trade union movement, a movement whose influence has been very much reduced in recent years. This movement has opposed employers, but not the Machine. It has accepted that its members are employed by the money economy, and that its job is to make their employment secure and to raise their rewards and privileges to the highest possible level. This has relieved or re-distributed but not eliminated poverty; it has changed but strengthened the Machine by spreading the practice of consumerism; and it has had no good effect on the cycles of periodic prosperity and recession, except that in periods of recession the wages of union members may not be reduced out of hand and workers either continue on full pay or are made redundant and receive very much lower welfare payments. By no means all workers now belong to unions, however, and in the case of non-members wages are again at the mercy of market forces. What I am trying to demonstrate is that humanity can not be benefited effectively by automatic means, only by ridding itself of the Machine. The Machine is a system for serving the automaton by way of many institutions, of

which the trade union movement is one. In times of comparatively full employment all our work is devoted to the Machine, whereas we should be devoting ourselves to overthrowing the Machine. As it happens, some unemployed people have found that by rejecting normal automatic standards they have converted their state of unemployment from one of deprivation to one of new opportunity for understanding themselves and their world. They have discovered something better than working for the Machine. This is but a short step from realising that the Machine is unnecessary and that only it prevents us all voluntarily working for humanity. The institution of employment, then, is a strong factor in our failure to realise humantruth. It has the effect of continually reinforcing our automatic conditioning, often for reasons which seem good. All who are employed are busy fulfilling some function of the Machine, more or less. By this means most are also fulfilling a family responsibility. To be humanly, companionably satisfactory is to be content with one's lot. To be satisfactory in automatic terms is to fulfil one's function to the best of one's ability. Those who go against automatic reality appear, in this light, to be recklessly trying to upset the applecart, failing in their private responsibilities by publicly opposing the Machine. Automatic functions are separated and competitive, not co-operative. Each tends to deal with its own matters within its own strictly limited boundaries. All vie with each other for resources, priorities and profits. So they tend to occupy fully the conscious minds of the humans engaged in them. If all these functions were for one common human purpose they would have to take criticism of the Machine seriously, for they clearly do not work for human good. But they all do work for their own different, specific, competitive, automated purposes, which make sense only to minds which remain submerged in the automatic chaos. The individual whose reasoning questions this reality might be heard, but in the end those who listen have to return to their automatic functions, and if they are to give these functions their full attention, as they must do for

Machine-success, then they do not normally allow such critical comments to penetrate beyond the periphery of their minds. What is required, and what this book aims for, is abnormal human effort to break this deadlock.