(Nick’s Notes: Okay, so realized that I am cheating a bit here. Technically this is just an article by someone else that was published in Apio Ludd’s publication “My Own” and isn’t by Mr. Ludd himself. But I think it’s still well within Mr. Ludd’s spirit all the same!)

I don’t charitably sing the praises of work – I like it so little that I would more willingly sing the praises of idleness.

The modern weaklings, including – you understand – the saviors of the people who have made work their battle cry, have exalted it in their sauces.

If you listen to a bourgeois, a priest, a radical, a socialist and even – strange and ridiculous to say it – even some of the greatest anarchists, they will deafen your ears with tedious laments, and in every one of their meetings, every one of their discussions, they never miss the chance to stupidly echo old Jehovah, who according to the bible passed sentence against the first sin and the first heresy: “Woman, you will give birth with great suffering; man, you will labor by the sweat of your brow.”

But let’s leave the bearded cloud-dweller to his affairs. I understand quite well that work is a necessity; but is it then argued that necessity is what is to be exalted? To hell with all the poets of necessity, by god!…

I don’t mind if someone comes to me praising the intellectual work of brilliant inventors; but when someone comes to me saying and shouting with conviction: long live work; the nobility of labor, long live industrious, calloused hands – when someone shows me all the magazines, newspapers, bulletins and broadsheets with the obligatory illustrative colossus with hammer or mallet in hand, I feel the uncontrollable and spontaneous desire to cry: go away… go away… idiots; work is a curse, it is a life sentence, it is the patient toil of beasts of burden!

But here it is, a pandemonium rising: stop the idler, the vagabond, the sophist; I hear crying at my heels, with a hundred voices, with a thousand choruses, with every song, the curse of the crowd that has the new god that it sanctified broken in its hands.

But I – believe me – I don’t take offense at the hornet’s nest: do you want to work, toil, sweat and sing the praises of work?… Go ahead, a thousand times over!… But I feel an insult to my dignity when I have to prostitute myself to a master who – using and abusing my intelligence, exploiting my muscular activity and taking advantage of my mental audacity – finds ways and styles of living well in idleness and enjoying life.

Nor could this work seem less slavish and a tiny bit more “ennobled,” even if my hours of work were decreased and the financial pittance given to me for my usual energy were increased. In the first case, it is nothing more than a pious concession; in the second it is an obvious and shameful charity: both the trumpeted features of strike victories.

So I don’t want to shift the question to the point of making it smaller – I instead want to concern myself with the simple critique of the concept of those sentimentalists who have shaped a new idol, a new law, a stupid dogma, a new futuristic slavery out of work.

And to do this it is necessary to start from a simple premise, and here it is: Who has performed the work?

We answer immediately: In nature, the evolutionary phenomenon is eternal and indestructible and has always created and will create two categories of beings: the strong and the weak. The first – physically, economically, intellectually according to the time and the species – have always manifested as an affirmation of their superiority: the subjection of the weak and their bending to work.

Just as among bees we find queens and drones that go through life loafing, and the worker bees that provide the labor for the production of honey; just as also among the ants we have the workers employed in providing the anthill with whatever it needs for the harsh season, while the parasites are content to direct the operation or to lead them; thus we encounter the same in the human being who knows how to subject the manual labor of beasts, that are lesser breeds in comparison to him, to his advantage; and thuse among human beings themselves – who certainly make no exception to natural laws – we find the intellectually stronger who dominate and live free from manual labor, while the weaker and more ignorant find life hard and give themselves over to muscular work.

We learn from history the all human evolution is only a succession of masters and dominations: savage or cannibalistic domination when only physical force decided, now economic domination that only the force of money commands, intellectual domination tomorrow when the ennobled human being, freed from every form of state, economic and political tyranny – one will know how to mak the force of his intelligence, of his shrewdness, of his ability.

Progress, in fact, will be had – or rather will be calculated – from the smaller muscular effort used to obtain life, as from the ever growing substitution of intelligence for the arm: streetcars, automobiles, machinery and the whole, endless series of modern inventions are confirming it.

If the bourgeoisie, therefore, the radicals, the socialists and whoever else love the conservation of present-day society stupidly sing the praises of work, I find it logical, very logical; logical because this glorification re-echoes to their benefit and is converted into money jingling in their money boxes; but… but by god, those who claim to possess the label “non plus ultra” of subversiveness singing the praises of work, this is stupidity and nonsense, when it isn’t a fraud, a lie or song learned like a parrot and recited like an ape. Meanwhile an estimate of the great asininity of the people is when in some uprising one hears it shouting at the top of its lungs: Bread and work, we want bread and work!

Bread?… Okay, it’s not a bad demand, it’s still something if we don’t want to consider that man does not live by bread alone like the dogs that often refuse it; but to want work as well? And to shout it at the top of one’s lungs?… I say: why not be more logical, why not instead shout, Bread and slavery?…Considering that “work” and “slavery” only have an etymological difference in the vocabulary, but that they aren’t substantially different in practice? So you shouldn’t be surprised if you come across speeches like this: He is a good man, the worker…; that other one is a bad person, a vagabond, an idler…; now this is the opinion of the most, and the opinion of the most is called majority, the majority that always constitutes great human idiocy.

Go away… go away, for god’s sake, don’t deafen my ears anymore with your: long live work; with your: bread and work. May the devil take you for ever, you notorious old fools!…

And what do the great fathers of human redemption say about it?

Ah!… of course, you are right, excuse me… it didn’t occur to me! Of course, you want to prepare a blessed arcadia for the future humanity where all are workers. What a clever idea! What a fine show the uniformity and the green of your future – too distant future – communistic “blouse” will make!

That I might croak before finding myself there; that would be a joy, a fortune!…

Damn!… if today I have to work for one master – who is already too demanding and a crab to boot – tomorrow will I have to sacrifice my individuality for a thousand masters?

No, that doesn’t go well with me; because I want to live by lazing about and acting as a vagabond, precisely because I feel that I was not born under the good moon to have to keep slaving away.

And nor do I like getting branded with the red mark if, at a given time, I prefer for example to build a flying machine and get away from the smoke of the workshop or to not give a damn for the statistics that they have to mark the scarcity of a given product.

Because – should I admit it? – I am not at all an altruist, I am instead an egoist – and I will find ways of getting my enjoyment of life against all, perhaps by rising up against the common storehouse just like today – without any scruples – I have risen up against the area of “sacred” and “inviolable” private property for the satisfaction of my needs.

Will there be differences of tastes, tendencies, thought? It could be so; but still I know – and this makes more than one wrong – that one doesn’t walk against nature: so I would rather make myself strong, be cunning, in a word to refine myself and redeem myself from the slavery of work from now on for as long as I will live.

And this is why: I want to live, I want to enjoy: I don’t want to be used up, I don’t intend to suffer. So you can do what you want, all you symbolizers of muscular arms, of spades, plows and mallets; you can do what you want, all you backwards redeemers, talking yourselves hoarse and singing the praises of the load and saddle of modern slavery.

I don’t sing praises, I practice idleness by preference.

I am a vagabond!

– Vico Covi from Nihil, volume I, # 6, May 1, 1909