crossposted to anarchists 

Maxing out at the Red & Black Café.

I am currently contemplating an interesting conflation of paradigms again--

The Red & Black is hosting a benefit for VOZ (en inglés, "Voice", pinché gringos!), a Worker's Rights Education Project. This is specifically to help fund a day labor hire site, instead of a street corner to be harassed by the weather, the police, and antipathic Portlanders.

Also in attendance tonight is a moribund surplus of shoeless hippies. Ah, Portland. The Day Labor Hire Site raises some interesting questions for me. Many of the white kids that I have met around here that can claim radical politics of various shade and viligree have an almost unnatural abhorrence for physical labor. I find this to be very interesting, because I have always wondered when "The Collapse"/"The Revolution" comes, who the hell is going to harvest potatoes if nobody can tell the difference between a garden rake and a field hoe. Or take out the trash, or run the sewers, or work construction jobs, or......

In the interim, VOZ perhaps has an answer for the contemporary movement that may put the deliberately jobless to shame. The day laborers want to work because they need to. The paradigm is this: what is the pertinence of the politics to remain deliberately unemployed at all costs as a form of political protest in the face of the same argument rehashed and served again in the form of the desire to OBTAIN work at all costs, in any condition, duration, or realm of comfort or safety? The debate boils down to this: is the anarchist that does not want to work to avoid paying war tax, or to simply avoid selling one's hours of life over to the capitalist cabal more justified or less so in this decision than the worker that will break several laws before most people get up in the morning, facing deportation, political exile, homelessness, exploitation, et al., simply to obtain the means of survival?

It may be crude to put this to a matter of preference, but to put the issue more succinctly, who do you favor in an argument-- The anarchist that works, or the anarchist that refuses to? And why? What, if any, are the ethical differences you see?