„You can work something!“ Or „They haven’t worked a day!“ I hear such and similar sayings at every demo or protest. Apart from the fact that none of those who puff themselves up, perhaps sitting casually in the coffee house or going on a nice day of shopping, knows what who of us is doing, it seems to be a foregone conclusion that one does not have to comply with this request when one drinking coffee or shopping. You know from yourself that you can recover from a strenuous work week with these activities and, above all, support the economy. Working and consuming are the cornerstones of our capitalist system. Anyone who disobeys, even prevents the poor, intimidated consumers from indulging in their well-deserved spending craze at a demo, cannot hack anything themselves.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter at all whether those people who stand up for peaceful protests against whatever injustice are doing their job, they are destroying even the best mainstream activity that they pursue apart from activism. Nevertheless, the rumor continues unabated that these people are, if not professional demonstrators, who are paid for their indolence, at least they are unemployed or lazy students who are bland, but who are at the same time too lazy to do a decent job. Now of course the question arises, what is a decent job? This is generally, in the bourgeois sense, a kind of pastime in which one undertakes to spend a certain amount of time in an occupation that is prescribed by someone else and for which one receives remuneration. These are the working people. Self-employed people or artists form a gray area. In the case of the latter, it is also not entirely sure whether you can really call their activity work, because sometimes they are very subversive and attack the system that works so well. Which in the end doesn’t matter, because nobody listens to them anyway, if you understand the message at all. In short, it’s all good work that makes you part of the system. It’s just stupid that it is precisely this system that is currently in the process of destroying our planet and thus the basis of all of our livelihoods. So, it is good and honorable work when I travel to Africa as highly subsidized food and ruin the local economy. It is equally honorable to contaminate the groundwater with nitrates, because the farmers who do this supply the local market with the meat of „happy“ animals. However, it is by no means honorable to be chained to trees for months, e.g. to ancient trees in one of the last primeval forests in Europe, in Poland, in order to prevent them from being destroyed. Activists who go through this, including the corresponding repression on the part of the executive, until the EU finally vetoed and thus saved the trees, do not pursue any decent activity in the eyes of the bourgeois, conservative, traditionalist average person. Neither are the Seasheperd activists, who campaign against illegal fishing and piracy, or underground fighters, who campaign for the integrity of the indigenous population by saving the rainforest as their home from destruction. In short, most decent activities contribute to the destruction of the planet. But what these activists are doing, be it in the primeval forests of Poland or on the oceans or in the rainforests of South America, is nothing more and nothing less than securing our survival and that of our children. Each and every one of them has achieved more during this time than all the good cogs in the juggernaut of neoliberal economic activity. So many activities that our high-tech, turbo-civilized, dehumanized society requires are either completely unnecessary or destructive, because it is part of their self-image to benefit from the deforestation of the rainforests, the overfishing of the oceans or the destruction of old forests without a guilty conscience, in the form of cheap meat and biodiesel. What is destroyed there, however, is irreversibly lost. But because of all the hacking and shopping, most of them don’t have time to question their own actions and instead want to force everyone else into their worldview. Perhaps instead of all the chopping you should save the world a little now and then.