Going through my late father's papers, I found a newspaper clipping of the "Manifesto of the Work-Shy," published in 1978 by Marxist scholar Gustav Bunzel and writer Paul Smith. It served as the ideological foundation for SABAE (Sammenslutningen af Bevidst Arbejdssky Elementer —the Association of Consciously Work-Shy Elements), a political group from Aarhus that emerged from Denmark's Marxist and anarchist circles.

At a time when Denmark faced mass unemployment and stagflation, mainstream discourse moralised joblessness as individual failure. SABAE offered a provocative counter-narrative: Unemployment as liberation.

The late 1970's marked a high point of unemployment insurance in the Danish welfare state. The system had been fully built out and had not yet fallen prey to the neoliberal reaction. Back then the unemployed enjoyed benefits that were close to what they could have earned from wage labour. The period you could receive unemployment benefits was significantly longer and unlike later regimes, who saw the threat of economic destitution as a useful tool for disciplining the work force, it was a stated objective of the system to keep the unemployed within the insurance system by offering time limited employment to those at risk of expiring their benefits. Workfare, unpaid compulsory labour as a condition for receiving benefits, had not yet been implemented. While unemployment came with its downsides and hardships back then, conditions were a lot less harsh than they would be later on and unemployment truly did come with a form of freedom to have your own time at your disposal.

The manifesto parodies The Communist Manifesto for comic effect, but behind the satire lies a serious argument: that compulsory work serves capital's logic of exploitation, that freedom from labour could be genuinely liberating, and that the left's obsession with "meaningful work" often masked an inability to imagine life beyond the wage relation.

By ironically embracing the slur "work-shy", a term with a dark past in Nazi Germany, where the label Arbeitsscheu could mean a death sentence, Bunzel and Smith weaponised humour against the ideological fetishisation of work.

From the late 1970s, SABAE front figure and comedian Jacob Haugaard ran as an independent candidate for parliament as a joke; in 1994, to everyone's surprise including his own, he became the first and only independent ever elected to the Danish parliament, securing a seat on a platform promising tail-wind on bike lanes, less sex in teachers' break rooms and men's right to impotence.

The manifesto doesn't appear to be available online, so I have transcribed and translated it here.

The Manifesto Of The Work-shy

A spectre is haunting the world — the spectre of freedom from work. All the powers of the old world have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and the new Tsars, Carter and Schmidt, left-wing radicals, German police and Danish social workers.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried for not wanting to fight unemployment enough by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of inability to get more people in work, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:

Freedom from work is already acknowledged by all world powers to be itself a power.

It is high time that the work-shy should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the scourge of unemployment with a manifesto drawn from the wells of reason.

To this end, work-shy of every stripe have assembled at a feast in Aarhus and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish, Danish, Swahili and Greenlandic languages.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of compulsory labour. And it came to pass in those days, when all the unemployed of the world were to be enrolled in men and women, that the three wise men appeared bearing gifts of balances of payment, coffee grounds and statistics, and proclaimed the joyful tidings: In the year to come, 200,000 Danish men and women shall be delivered from work — the employer's gift. Once, twice or four times in the month shall they go forth to fetch money; otherwise they roam free.

But how have the Pharisees and temple servants of work received this message? Have they hailed this greatest opportunity for freedom in history? No — they have filled souls with infantile shame. They have sung nauseating hymns in the minor key about idleness, which is supposed to be the root of all evil, where unemployment appears as the torments of purgatory and the rebaptism of work as the coming salvation. With horror they depict especially the misery of the newly confirmed as youth unemployed. They fear the apparition before them: Generations of young and work-free, who have all their time at their disposal — time that erodes the public school-instilled, pedagogy-reformed self-repression which work was meant to safeguard from kindergarten to state pension. Hypocritically they bemoan a society where the young are not corralled into the normality of working life. Even an office boy who fills and empties wastepaper baskets, dishwashers who retch with disgust in hotel kitchens, labouring boys who become men in the stench of the construction trailer, cafeteria girls whose maiden dreams are enveloped by the smell of deep-fryer fat and the spluttering burps of ketchup bottles — these live in the blessedness of the industrious, granted, as long as the wages are high enough. Yet in this choir, just voices sound! Progressive forces demanding meaningful work with radical expressions, while they underpay their domestic help because she works off the books. Meaningful work! Circles cannot be square, the camel cannot pass through the eye of the needle, the work of capital is filled with but one single meaning: Exploitation!

To comfort and soothe the middle-aged unemployed, the media serve up entertaining tragedies about the suicide, self-hatred and self-destruction of the unemployed. We hear of family life shattered when one has time to be together, nothing of the families who use this time. We hear of the ache for workmates, nothing of how 200,000 work-free people have time enough for companionship. In fact, they are thereby saying that freedom from the stupefying busywork of labour makes people feel superfluous, like the masochist who loses their identity without suffering. We are revolted by interviews with tear-soaked slave souls who long back to the prison of the factory and office landscapes.

When do we hear the television clothes-rack Bjørn Elmquist[^1] call attention to the following simple truth: Never have so many been able to live so well without lifting a finger — unless they feel like it — without waking with a jolt to the alarm clock, without flattened packed lunches consumed in the stale haze of the break room, without the frenzied St. Vitus dance choreography of piecework, without the armoured mass-murder's twice-daily repeated migration to and from the cult sites of work , without having to surrender the children to the state-employed brood-keepers. In all simplicity: Unemployment is freedom, like the deliverance from bondage under the pharaohs' madness, where the meaning of life manifested itself in the accumulation of the largest and the most pyramids possible.

Work-shy of All Countries, Unite!

Viborg, May 24th 1978

SABAE

(signed)

(The Association of Consciously Work-Shy Elements)

P.S.: Adherents of the above ideas may contact Carl Heinrich Petersen, Viborg, for further information.

[^1]: State TV journalist at the time, later Liberal Party and “Radical Left” party politician.