GROWING up as a teenager in the late-70s and early-80s, I was always bemused when one of my favourite bands began demanding the so-called ‘right to work’. Mass unemployment was all the rage back in the Thatcher years, but I wasn’t interested in securing a dead-end job simply because a pseudo-rebellious punk outfit had told us how important it was, or on the basis that thousands of Socialist Workers Party drones had filled Trafalgar Square with the same dull platitudes. Needless to say, whilst I had to endure a few grey factories and glorified sweatshops it never brought me any satisfaction.
Bob Black’s 1985 essay, The Abolition of Work, seems far more sensible than wasting your life in meaningless forms of employment and I was pleased to note that Jean Baudrillard also presents the ‘right to work’ as a capitalist trap. In fact demanding any kind of ‘right’ seems pretty ludicrous to him:
“The individual is a self-referential and self-operating unit. Under such circumstances, the human-rights system becomes totally inadequate and illusory: the flexible, mobile individual of variable geometric form is no longer a subject with rights but has become, rather, a tactician and promoter of his own existence, whose point of reference is not some agency of law but merely the efficiency of his own functioning or performance.”
Baudrillard argues that today’s simulated world relies on a “unilateral Good,” meaning that we are always ridiculously overprotected from the darker side of human existence. Similar claims have been made by the Korean philosopher, Byung-Chul Han, about whom I published a book in 2023.
One area in particular that Baudrillard pinpoints as something which modernity fails to engage with is the question of evil. Again, like his contemporary Korean counterpart, Baudrillard says that everything has become relentlessly ‘positive’ in the sense that companies and organisations are now expected to observe a policy of ‘transparency’. Evil has also become transparent to the extent that it appears everywhere without necessarily being identified as ‘evil’.
Accepting that Foucault’s brutal world of punishment and discipline is still operative, at least until it was philosophically overthrown by Han in the wake of the Frenchman’s death, Baudrillard claims that ‘difference’ is a form of oppression because it “destroys otherness”. Third World nations that value their own cultural identities, for example, are repeatedly threatened with obliteration by the West and informed that they “would do well to hang onto this distinction because it is all you have left”.
Baudrillard advances the notion that the existence of evil must be retained, not in a celebratory manner but in the way that Bataille’s ‘accursed share’ was an attempt to include the ‘negative’ alongside the ‘positive’. Baudrillard views evil as an anomaly, but it remains important as something that cannot be assimilated and therefore assumes the role of the radical other. As he explains in The Transparency of Evil (1990):
“The principle of evil is not a moral principle but rather a principle of instability and vertigo, a principle of complexity and foreignness, a principle of seduction, a principle of incompatibility, antagonism and irreducibility. It is not a death principle – far from it. It is a vital principle of disjunction.”
In other words, a belief in ‘human rights’ or the laughable ‘right to work’ has very little bearing once you take into consideration the complementary ‘negativity’ of existence in general.
