The Abolition of Work

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The Abolition of Work

Bob Black 1985

31. August 2013

[ This is Bob Blacks 1985 essay,The Abolition of Work (typeset inLATEX by Chandra Nath in the Sum-mer of 2013). It appeared in his an-thology of essays, The Abolition ofWork and Other Essays, publishedby Loompanics Unlimited, Port Town-send WA 98368 [ISBN 0-915179-41-5].The following disclaimer is reprodu-ced from the verso of the title page:

Not Copyrighted. Any of the mate-rial in this book may be freely re-produced, translated or adapted, evenwithout mentioning the source. Ty-ped in by Kurt Cockrum, noted arm-chair theorist, anarcho-hedonist dilet-tante, curmudgeon-philosopher-king ofhimself and bon vivant, in the Summerof 1992, in the Duwamish River waters-hed of Cascadia bioregion. ]

THE ABOLITION OF WORK

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all themisery in the world. Almost any evilyoud care to name comes from wor-king or from living in a world designedfor work. In order to stop suffering, wehave to stop working.

That doesnt mean we have to stopdoing things. It does mean creating anew way of life based on play; in otherwords, a ludic conviviality, commensa-lity, and maybe even art. There is mo-re to play than childs play, as worthy

as that is. I call for a collective adven-ture in generalized joy and freely inter-dependent exuberance. Play isnt pas-sive. Doubtless we all need a lot mo-re time for sheer sloth and slack thanwe ever enjoy now, regardless of incomeor occupation, but once recovered fromemployment-induced exhaustion nearlyall of us want to act. Oblomovism andStakhanovism are two sides of the samedebased coin.

The ludic life is totally incompati-ble with existing reality. So much theworse for reality,the gravity hole thatsucks the vitality from the little in li-fe that still distinguishes it from meresurvival. Curiously or maybe not all the old ideologies are conservativebecause they believe in work. Some ofthem, like Marxism and most brands ofanarchism, believe in work all the more

fiercely because they believe in so littleelse.

Liberals say we should end employ-ment discrimination. I say we shouldend employment. Conservatives sup-port right-to-work laws. Following KarlMarxs wayward son-in-law Paul La-fargue I support the right to be la-zy. Leftists favor full employment. Li-ke the surrealists except that Im notkidding I favor full unemployment.

Trotskyists agitate for permanent revo-lution. I agitate for permanent revel-ry. But if all the ideologues (as theydo) advocate work and not only be-cause they plan to make other peopledo theirs they are strangely reluctantto say so. They will carry on endles-sly about wages, hours, working condi-tions, exploitation, productivity, profi-tability. Theyll gladly talk about any-thing but work itself. These expertswho offer to do our thinking for us rare-ly share their conclusions about work,

for all its saliency in the lives of allof us. Among themselves they quibbleover the details. Unions and manage-ment agree that we ought to sell thetime of our lives in exchange for survi-val, although they haggle over the pri-ce. Marxists think we should be bossedby bureaucrats. Libertarians think weshould be bossed by businessmen. Fe-minists dont care which form bossingtakes so long as the bosses are women.

Clearly these ideology-mongers have se-rious differences over how to divvy upthe spoils of power. Just as clearly, no-ne of them have any objection to poweras such and all of them want to keep usworking.

You may be wondering if Im jokingor serious. Im joking and serious. Tobe ludic is not to be ludicrous. Playdoesnt have to be frivolous, althoughfrivolity isnt triviality: very often weought to take frivolity seriously. Id li-ke life to be a game but a game withhigh stakes. I want to play for keeps.

The alternative to work isnt just id-leness. To be ludic is not to be quaalu-dic. As much as I treasure the pleasu-re of torpor, its never more rewardingthan when it punctuates other pleasu-res and pastimes. Nor am I promotingthe managed time-disciplined safety-valve called leisure; far from it. Leisureis nonwork for the sake of work. Leisureis the time spent recovering from workand in the frenzied but hopeless att-empt to forget about work. Many peo-ple return from vacation so beat thatthey look forward to returning to workso they can rest up. The main differencebetween work and leisure is that workat least you get paid for your alienationand enervation.

I am not playing definitional gameswith anybody. When I say I want to

abolish work, I mean just what I say,but I want to say what I mean bydefining my terms in non-idiosyncraticways. My minimum definition of workis forced labor, that is, compulsory pro-duction. Both elements are essential.Work is production enforced by eco-nomic or political means, by the car-rot or the stick. (The carrot is just thestick by other means.) But not all crea-tion is work. Work is never done for

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its own sake, its done on account ofsome product or output that the wor-ker (or, more often, somebody else) getsout of it. This is what work necessari-ly is. To define it is to despise it. Butwork is usually even worse than its de-finition decrees. The dynamic of domi-nation intrinsic to work tends over time

toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industri-al societies whether capitalist of Com-munist,work invariably acquires otherattributes which accentuate its obno-xiousness.

Usually and this is even more truein Communistthan capitalist countries,where the state is almost the only em-ployer and everyone is an employee work is employment, i. e., wage-labor,which means selling yourself on the in-

stallment plan. Thus 95% of Americanswho work, work for somebody (or so-mething) else. In the USSR or Cuba orYugoslavia or any other alternative mo-del which might be adduced, the corre-sponding figure approaches 100%. Onlythe embattled Third World peasant ba-stions Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey temporarily shelter significant concen-trations of agriculturists who perpetua-te the traditional arrangement of mostlaborers in the last several millenia, thepayment of taxes (= ransom) to the

state or rent to parasitic landlords inreturn for being otherwise left alone.Even this raw deal is beginning to lookgood. All industrial (and office) wor-kers are employees and under the sortof surveillance which ensures servility.

But modern work has worse impli-cations. People dont just work, theyhave jobs. One person does one pro-ductive task all the time on an or-elsebasis. Even if the task has a quantumof intrinsic interest (as increasingly ma-

ny jobs dont) the monotony of its ob-ligatory exclusivity drains its ludic po-tential. A job that might engage theenergies of some people, for a reasona-bly limited time, for the fun of it, isjust a burden on those who have to doit for forty hours a week with no sayin how it should be done, for the pro-fit of owners who contribute nothingto the project, and with no opportu-nity for sharing tasks or spreading the

work among those who actually haveto do it. This is the real world of work:a world of bureaucratic blundering, ofsexual harassment and discrimination,of bonehead bosses exploiting and sca-pegoating their subordinates who byany rational-technical criteria shouldbe calling the shots. But capitalism in

the real world subordinates the rationalmaximization of productivity and pro-fit to the exigencies of organizationalcontrol.

The degradation which most wor-kers experience on the job is the sumof assorted indignities which can be de-nominated as discipline.Foucault hascomplexified this phenomenon but itis simple enough. Discipline consists ofthe totality of totalitarian controls atthe workplace surveillance, rotework,

imposed work tempos, production quo-tas, punching -in and -out, etc. Disci-pline is what the factory and the offi-ce and the store share with the prisonand the school and the mental hospi-tal. It is something historically originaland horrible. It was beyond the capa-cities of such demonic dictators of yoreas Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivanthe Terrible. For all their bad intenti-ons they just didnt have the machineryto control their subjects as thorough-ly as modern despots do. Discipline is

the distinctively diabolical modern mo-de of control, it is an innovative intru-sion which must be interdicted at theearliest opportunity.

Such is work. Play is just the op-posite. Play is always voluntary. Whatmight otherwise be play is work if itsforced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Ko-ven has defined play as the uspensionof consequences.This is unacceptable ifit implies that play is inconsequential.The point is not that play is without

consequences. This is to demean play.The point is that the consequences, ifany, are gratuitous. Playing and givingare closely related, they are the beha-vioral and transactional facets of thesame impulse, the play-instinct. Theyshare an aristocratic disdain for results.The player gets something out of play-ing; thats why he plays. But the corereward is the experience of the activityitself (whatever it is). Some otherwise

attentive students of play, like JohanHuizinga (Homo Ludens), define it asgame-playing or following rules. I re-spect Huizingas erudition but empha-tically reject his constraints. There aremany good games (chess, baseball, Mo-nopoly, bridge) which are rule-governedbut there is much more to play than

game-playing. Conversation, sex, dan-cing, travel these practices arentrule-governed but they are surely playif anything is. And rules can be playedwith at least as readily as anything else.

Work makes a mockery of freedom.The official line is that we all haverights and live in a democracy. Otherunfortunates who arent free like we arehave to live in police states. These vic-tims obey orders or-else, no matter howarbitrary. The authorities keep them

under regular surveillance. State bu-reaucrats control even the smaller de-tails of everyday life. The officials whopush them around are answerable on-ly to higher-ups, public or private. Eit-her way, dissent and disobedience arepunished. Informers report regularly tothe authorities. All this is supposed tobe a very bad thing.

And so it is, although it is nothingbut a description of the modern work-place. The liberals and conservatives

and libertarians who lament totalitaria-nism are phonies and hypocrites. Thereis more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is inthe ordinary American workplace. Youfind the same sort of hierarchy and dis-cipline in an office or factory as you doin a prison or monastery. In fact, asFoucault and others have shown, pri-sons and factories came in at about thesame time, and their operators cons-ciously borrowed from each others con-trol techniques. A worker is a par-time

slave. The boss says when to show up,when to leave, and what to do in themeantime. He tells you how much workto do and how fast. He is free to car-ry his control to humiliating extremes,regulating, if he feels like it, the clo-thes you wear or how often you go tothe bathroom. With a few exceptionshe can fire you for any reason, or noreason. He has you spied on by snit-ches and supervisors, he amasses a dos-

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sier on every employee. Talking backis called nsubordination,just as if aworker is a naughty child, and it notonly gets you fired, it disqualifies youfor unemployment compensation. Wi-thout necessarily endorsing it for themeither, it is noteworthy that children athome and in school receive much the sa-

me treatment, justified in their case bytheir supposed immaturity. What doesthis say about their parents and tea-chers who work?

The demeaning system of dominati-on Ive described rules over half the wa-king hours of a majority of women andthe vast majority of men for decades,for most of their lifespans. For certainpurposes its not too misleading to callour system democracy or capitalism or better still industrialism, but its re-

al names are factory fascism and officeoligarchy. Anybody who says these peo-ple are frees lying or stupid. You arewhat you do. If you do boring, stupidmonotonous work, chances are youllend up boring, stupid and monotonous.Work is a much better explanation forthe creeping cretinization all around usthan even such significant moronizingmechanisms as television and educati-on. People who are regimented all theirlives, handed off to work from schooland bracketed by the family in the be-

ginning and the nursing home at theend, are habituated to heirarchy andpsychologically enslaved. Their aptitu-de for autonomy is so atrophied thattheir fear of freedom is among theirfew rationally grounded phobias. Theirobedience training at work carries overinto the families they start, thus repro-ducing the system in more ways thanone, and into politics, culture and ever-ything else. Once you drain the vitalityfrom people at work, theyll likely sub-

mit to heirarchy and expertise in ever-ything. Theyre used to it.

We are so close to the world of workthat we cant see what it does to us.We have to rely on outside observersfrom other times or other cultures toappreciate the extremity and the pa-thology of our present position. Therewas a time in our own past when thework ethic would have been incom-prehensible, and perhaps Weber was on

to something when he tied its appea-rance to a religion, Calvinism, which ifit emerged today instead of four cen-turies ago would immediately and ap-propriately be labeled a cult. Be thatas it may, we have only to draw uponthe wisdom of antiquity to put work inperspective. The ancients saw work for

what it is, and their view prevailed, theCalvinist cranks notwithstanding, untiloverthrown by industrialism but notbefore receiving the endorsement of itsprophets.

Lets pretend for a moment thatwork doesnt turn people into stulti-fied submissives. Lets pretend, in de-fiance of any plausible psychology andthe ideology of its boosters, that it hasno effect on the formation of charac-ter. And lets pretend that work isnt

as boring and tiring and humiliatingas we all know it really is. Even then,work would still make a mockery ofall humanistic and democratic aspira-tions, just because it usurps so muchof our time. Socrates said that manu-al laborers make bad friends and badcitizens because they have no time tofulfill the responsibilities of friendshipand citizenship. He was right. Becauseof work, no matter what we do we keeplooking at out watches. The only thingfreeabout so-called free time is that it

doesnt cost the boss anything. Free ti-me is mostly devoted to getting rea-dy for work, going to work, returningfrom work, and recovering from work.Free time is a euphemism for the pecu-liar way labor as a factor of productionnot only transports itself at its own ex-pense to and from the workplace butassumes primary responsibility for itsown maintenance and repair. Coal andsteel dont do that. Lathes and typewri-ters dont do that. But workers do. No

wonder Edward G. Robinson in one ofhis gangster movies exclaimed, Workis for saps!

Both Plato and Xenophon attribu-te to Socrates and obviously share withhim an awareness of the destructive ef-fects of work on the worker as a citizenand a human being. Herodotus identi-fied contempt for work as an attributeof the classical Greeks at the zenith oftheir culture. To take only one Roman

example, Cicero said that whoever gi-ves his labor for money sells himself andputs himself in the rank of slaves.Hiscandor is now rare, but contemporaryprimitive societies which we are wontto look down upon have provided spo-kesmen who have enlightened Westernanthropologists. The Kapauku of West

Irian, according to Posposil, have a con-ception of balance in life and accor-dingly work only every other day, theday of rest designed to regain the lostpower and health.Our ancestors, evenas late as the eighteenth century whenthey were far along the path to our pre-sent predicament, at least were awareof what we have forgotten, the undersi-de of industrialization. Their religiousdevotion to SSt. Monday- thus esta-blishing a de facto five-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecration

was the despair of the earliest fac-tory owners. They took a long time insubmitting to the tyranny of the bell,predecessor of the time clock. In fact itwas necessary for a generation or two toreplace adult males with women accu-stomed to obedience and children whocould be molded to fit industrial needs.Even the exploited peasants of the an-cient regime wrested substantial timeback from their landlords work. Accor-ding to Lafargue, a fourth of the French

peasants calendar was devoted to Sun-days and holidays, and Chayanovs fi-gures from villages in Czarist Russia hardly a progressive society likewiseshow a fourth or fifth of peasants daysdevoted to repose. Controlling for pro-ductivity, we are obviously far behindthese backward societies. The exploitedmuzhiks would wonder why any of usare working at all. So should we.

To grasp the full enormity of our de-terioration, however, consider the ear-

liest condition of humanity, without go-vernment or property, when we wande-red as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmi-sed that life was then nasty, brutish andshort. Others assume that life was adesperate unremitting struggle for sub-sistence, a war waged against a harshNature with death and disaster awai-ting the unlucky or anyone who was un-equal to the challenge of the struggle forexistence. Actually, that was all a pro-

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jection of fears for the collapse of go-vernment authority over communitiesunaccustomed to doing without it, likethe England of Hobbes during the CivilWar. Hobbes compatriots had alreadyencountered alternative forms of socie-ty which illustrated other ways of life in North America, particularly but al-

ready these were too remote from theirexperience to be understandable. (Thelower orders, closer to the condition ofthe Indians, understood it better andoften found it attractive. Throughoutthe seventeenth century, English sett-lers defected to Indian tribes or, cap-tured in war, refused to return. Butthe Indians no more defected to whi-te settlements than Germans climb theBerlin Wall from the west.) The ur-vival of the fittestversion the Tho-mas Huxley version of Darwinism was

a better account of economic conditi-ons in Victorian England than it wasof natural selection, as the anarchistKropotkin showed in his book MutualAid, A Factor of Evolution. (Kropotkinwas a scientist a geographer whodhad ample involuntary opportunity forfieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: heknew what he was talking about.) Li-ke most social and political theory, thestory Hobbes and his successors toldwas really unacknowledged autobiogra-

phy.

The anthropologist Marshall Sah-lins, surveying the data on contempora-ry hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hob-besian myth in an article entitled TT-he Original Affluent Society.They worka lot less than we do, and their workis hard to distinguish from what weregard as play. Sahlins concluded thathunters and gatherers work less thanwe do; and rather than a continuoustravail, the food quest is intermittent,

leisure abundant, and there is a grea-ter amount of sleep in the daytime percapita per year than in any other con-dition of society.They worked an avera-ge of four hours a day, assuming theywere workingat all. Their labor,as itappears to us, was skilled labor whichexercised their physical and intellectualcapacities; unskilled labor on any lar-ge scale, as Sahlins says, is impossibleexcept under industrialism. Thus it sa-

tisfied Friedrich Schillers definition ofplay, the only occasion on which manrealizes his complete humanity by gi-ving full playto both sides of his twofoldnature, thinking and feeling. As he putit: The animal works when deprivationis the mainspring of its activity, and itplays when the fullness of its strength is

this mainspring, when superabundantlife is its own stimulus to activity. (Amodern version dubiously develop-mental is Abraham Maslows counter-position of deficiencyand growthmm-otivation.) Play and freedom are, asregards production, coextensive. EvenMarx, who belongs (for all his goodintentions) in the productivist panthe-on, observed that the realm of freedomdoes not commence until the point ispassed where labor under the compul-sion of necessity and external utility

is required.He never could quite bringhimself to identify this happy circum-stance as what it is, the abolition ofwork its rather anomalous, after all,to be pro-worker and anti-work butwe can.

The aspiration to go backwards orforwards to a life without work is evi-dent in every serious social or culturalhistory of pre-industrial Europe, amongthem M. Dorothy Georges England In

Transition and Peter Burkes PopularCulture in Early Modern Europe. Alsopertinent is Daniel Bells essay, Workand its Discontents,the first text, I be-lieve, to refer to the revolt againstworkn so many words and, had it be-en understood, an important correctionto the complacency ordinarily associa-ted with the volume in which it wascollected, The End of Ideology. Neit-her critics nor celebrants have noticedthat Bells end-of-ideology thesis signa-led not the end of social unrest but the

beginning of a new, uncharted phaseunconstrained and uninformed by ideo-logy. It was Seymour Lipset (in PoliticalMan), not Bell, who announced at thesame time that the fundamental pro-blems of the Industrial Revolution havebeen solved,only a few years before thepost- or meta-industrial discontents ofcollege students drove Lipset from UCBerkeley to the relative (and tempora-ry) tranquility of Harvard.

As Bell notes, Adam Smith in TheWealth of Nations, for all his enthu-siasm for the market and the divisionof labor, was more alert to (and morehonest about) the seamy side of workthan Ayn Rand or the Chicago econo-mists or any of Smiths modern epi-gones. As Smith observed: The under-

standings of the greater part of menare necessarily formed by their ordina-ry employments. The man whose life isspent in performing a few simple ope-rations... has no occasion to exert hisunderstanding... He generally becomesas stupid and ignorant as it is possiblefor a human creature to become.Here,in a few blunt words, is my critique ofwork. Bell, writing in 1956, the GoldenAge of Eisenhower imbecility and Ame-rican self-satisfaction, identified the un-organized, unorganizable malaise of the

1970s and since, the one no politicaltendency is able to harness, the oneidentified in HEWs report Work inAmerica, the one which cannot be ex-ploited and so is ignored. That problemis the revolt against work. It does notfigure in any text by any laissez-faireeconomist Milton Friedman, MurrayRothbard, Richard Posner because, intheir terms, as they used to say on StarTrek, t does not compute.

If these objections, informed by thelove of liberty, fail to persuade huma-nists of a utilitarian or even paterna-list turn, there are others which theycannot disregard. Work is hazardousto your health, to borrow a book tit-le. In fact, work is mass murder or ge-nocide. Directly or indirectly, work willkill most of the people who read thesewords. Between 14,000 and 25,000 wor-kers are killed annually in this coun-try on the job. Over two million aredisabled. Twenty to twenty-five milli-

on are injured every year. And these fi-gures are based on a very conservativeestimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus they dont countthe half million cases of occupationaldisease every year. I looked at one me-dical textbook on occupational disea-ses which was 1,200 pages long. Eventhis barely scratches the surface. Theavailable statistics count the obviouscases like the 100,000 miners who ha-

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ve black lung disease, of whom 4,000die every year, a much higher fatalityrate than for AIDS, for instance, whichgets so much media attention. This re-flects the unvoiced assumption that AI-DS afflicts perverts who could controltheir depravity whereas coal-mining isa sacrosanct activity beyond question.

What the statistics dont show is thattens of millions of people have heir li-fespans shortened by work which isall that homicide means, after all. Con-sider the doctors who work themselvesto death in their 50s. Consider all theother workaholics.

Even if you arent killed or cripp-led while actually working, you verywell might be while going to work, co-ming from work, looking for work, ortrying to forget about work. The vastmajority of victims of the automobi-le are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul ofthose who do them. To this augmentedbody-count must be added the victimsof auto-industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction.Both cancer and heart disease are mo-dern afflictions normally traceable, di-rectly, or indirectly, to work.

Work, then, institutionalizes homi-cide as a way of life. People think theCambodians were crazy for extermina-ting themselves, but are we any diffe-rent? The Pol Pot regime at least hada vision, however blurred, of an egalita-rian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sellBig Macs and Cadillacs to the survi-vors. Our forty or fifty thousand annualhighway fatalities are victims, not mar-tyrs. They died for nothing or rather,they died for work. But work is nothingto die for.

Bad news for liberals: regulatory

tinkering is useless in this life-and-death context. The federal Occupatio-nal Safety and Health Administrati-on was designed to police the corepart of the problem, workplace safe-ty. Even before Reagan and the Supre-me Court stifled it, OSHA was a far-ce. At previous and (by current stan-dards) generous Carter-era funding le-vels, a workplace could expect a ran-dom visit from an OSHA inspector on-

ce every 46 years.

State control of the economy is nosolution. Work is, if anything, moredangerous in the state-socialist coun-tries than it is here. Thousands of Rus-sian workers were killed or injured buil-ding the Moscow subway. Stories rever-berate about covered-up Soviet nuclear

disasters which make Times Beach andThree-Mile Island look like elementary-school air-raid drills. On the otherhand, deregulation, currently fashiona-ble, wont help and will probably hurt.From a health and safety standpoint,among others, work was at its worst inthe days when the economy most close-ly approximated laissez-faire.

Historians like Eugene Genovese ha-ve argued persuasively that as an-tebellum slavery apologists insisted

factory wage-workers in the NorthernAmerican states and in Europe we-re worse off than Southern plantationslaves. No rearrangement of relationsamong bureaucrats and businessmenseems to make much difference at thepoint of production. Serious enforce-ment of even the rather vague stan-dards enforceable in theory by OSHAwould probably bring the economy to astandstill. The enforcers apparently ap-preciate this, since they dont even tryto crack down on most malefactors.

What Ive said so far ought not tobe controversial. Many workers are fedup with work. There are high and risingrates of absenteeism, turnover, employ-ee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes,and overall goldbricking on the job.There may be some movement towarda conscious and not just visceral rejec-tion of work. And yet the prevalent fee-ling, universal among bosses and theiragents and also widespread among wor-kers themselves is that work itself is in-

evitable and necessary.I disagree. It is now possible to abo-

lish work and replace it, insofar as itserves useful purposes, with a multitu-de of new kinds of free activities. Toabolish work requires going at it fromtwo directions, quantitative and quali-tative. On the one hand, on the quan-titative side, we have to cut down mas-sively on the amount of work being do-ne. At present most work is useless or

worse and we should simply get rid ofit. On the other hand and I thinkthis the crux of the matter and the re-volutionary new departure we haveto take what useful work remains andtransform it into a pleasing variety ofgame-like and craft-like pastimes, in-distinguishable from other pleasurable

pastimes, except that they happen toyield useful end-products. Surely thatshouldnt make them less enticing todo. Then all the artificial barriers ofpower and property could come down.Creation could become recreation. Andwe could all stop being afraid of eachother.

I dont suggest that most work issalvageable in this way. But then mostwork isnt worth trying to save. Only asmall and diminishing fraction of work

serves any useful purpose independentof the defense and reproduction of thework-system and its political and legalappendages. Twenty years ago, Pauland Percival Goodman estimated thatjust five percent of the work then beingdone presumably the figure, if accura-te, is lower now would satisfy our mi-nimal needs for food, clothing, and shel-ter. Theirs was only an educated guessbut the main point is quite clear: direct-ly or indirectly, most work serves theunproductive purposes of commerce or

social control. Right off the bat we canliberate tens of millions of salesmen,soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers,clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers,landlords, security guards, ad-men andeveryone who works for them. There isa snowball effect since every time youidle some bigshot you liberate his flun-keys and underlings also. Thus the eco-nomy implodes.

Forty percent of the workforce arewhite-collar workers, most of whom ha-

ve some of the most tedious and idio-tic jobs ever concocted. Entire indu-stries, insurance and banking and realestate for instance, consist of nothingbut useless paper-shuffling. It is no acci-dent that the tertiary sector,the servicesector, is growing while the econdarysector(industry) stagnates and the pp-rimary sector(agriculture) nearly dis-appears. Because work is unnecessaryexcept to those whose power it secu-

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res, workers are shifted from relative-ly useful to relatively useless occupati-ons as a measure to assure public or-der. Anything is better than nothing.Thats why you cant go home just be-cause you finish early. They want yourtime, enough of it to make you theirs,even if they have no use for most of it.

Otherwise why hasnt the average workweek gone down by more than a few mi-nutes in the past fifty years?

Next we can take a meat-cleaver toproduction work itself. No more warproduction, nuclear power, junk food,feminine hygiene deodorant and abo-ve all, no more auto industry to speakof. An occasional Stanley Steamer orModel-T might be all right, but theauto-eroticism on which such pestholesas Detroit and Los Angeles depend on

is out of the question. Already, withouteven trying, weve virtually solved theenergy crisis, the environmental crisisand assorted other insoluble social pro-blems.

Finally, we must do away with farand away the largest occupation, theone with the longest hours, the lowestpay and some of the most tedious tasksaround. I refer to housewives doinghousework and child-rearing. By abolis-hing wage-labor and achieving full un-

employment we undermine the sexualdivision of labor. The nuclear familyas we know it is an inevitable adap-tation to the division of labor impo-sed by modern wage-work. Like it ornot, as things have been for the lastcentury or two it is economically ra-tional for the man to bring home thebacon, for the woman to do the shit-work to provide him with a haven ina heartless world, and for the childrento be marched off to youth concentra-tion camps called chools,primarily to

keep them out of Moms hair but stillunder control, but incidentally to ac-quire the habits of obedience and punc-tuality so necessary for workers. If youwould be rid of patriarchy, get rid of thenuclear family whose unpaid hadowwork,as Ivan Illich says, makes possiblethe work-system that makes it necessa-ry. Bound up with this no-nukes stra-tegy is the abolition of childhood andthe closing of the schools. There are

more full-time students than full-timeworkers in this country. We need child-ren as teachers, not students. They ha-ve a lot to contribute to the ludic revo-lution because theyre better at playingthan grown-ups are. Adults and child-ren are not identical but they will beco-me equal through interdependence. On-

ly play can bridge the generation gap.

I havent as yet even mentionedthe possibility of cutting way down onthe little work that remains by au-tomating and cybernizing it. All thescientists and engineers and techniciansfreed from bothering with war rese-arch and planned obsolescence wouldhave a good time devising means toeliminate fatigue and tedium and dan-ger from activities like mining. Un-doubtedly theyll find other projects

to amuse themselves with. Perhapstheyll set up world-wide all-inclusivemulti-media communications systemsor found space colonies. Perhaps. I my-self am no gadget freak. I wouldnt careto live in a pushbutton paradise. I dontwhat robot slaves to do everything; Iwant to do things myself. There is, Ithink, a place for labor-saving techno-logy, but a modest place. The histori-cal and pre-historical record is not en-couraging. When productive technolo-

gy went from hunting-gathering to agri-culture and on to industry, work incre-ased while skills and self-determinationdiminished. The further evolution of in-dustrialism has accentuated what Har-ry Braverman called the degradationof work. Intelligent observers have al-ways been aware of this. John StuartMill wrote that all the labor-saving in-ventions ever devised havent saved amoments labor. Karl Marx wrote thatit would be possible to write a histo-ry of the inventions, made since 1830,

for the sole purpose of supplying ca-pital with weapons against the revoltsof the working class. The enthusiastictechnophiles Saint-Simon, Comte, Le-nin, B. F. Skinner have always beenunabashed authoritarians also; which isto say, technocrats. We should be morethan sceptical about the promises of thecomputer mystics. They work like dogs;chances are, if they have their way, sowill the rest of us. But if they have

any particularized contributions morereadily subordinated to human purpo-ses than the run of high tech, lets givethem a hearing.

What I really want to see is workturned into play. A first step is to dis-card the notions of a joband an occu-pation.Even activities that already ha-

ve some ludic content lose most of itby being reduced to jobs which certainpeople, and only those people are forcedto do to the exclusion of all else. Is itnot odd that farm workers toil painfullyin the fields while their air-conditionedmasters go home every weekend andputter about in their gardens? Undera system of permanent revelry, we willwitness the Golden Age of the dilettan-te which will put the Renaissance toshame. There wont be any more jobs,just things to do and people to do them.

The secret of turning work into play,as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is toarrange useful activities to take advan-tage of whatever it is that various peo-ple at various times in fact enjoy doing.To make it possible for some people todo the things they could enjoy it will beenough just to eradicate the irrationa-lities and distortions which afflict the-se activities when they are reduced towork. I, for instance, would enjoy doingsome (not too much) teaching, but I

dont want coerced students and I dontcare to suck up to pathetic pedants fortenure.

Second, there are some things thatpeople like to do from time to time, butnot for too long, and certainly not allthe time. You might enjoy baby-sittingfor a few hours in order to share thecompany of kids, but not as much astheir parents do. The parents meanwhi-le, profoundly appreciate the time tothemselves that you free up for them,

although theyd get fretful if partedfrom their progeny for too long. Thesedifferences among individuals are whatmake a life of free play possible. Thesame principle applies to many otherareas of activity, especially the primalones. Thus many people enjoy cookingwhen they can practice it seriously attheir leisure, but not when theyre justfueling up human bodies for work.

Third other things being equal

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some things that are unsatisfying ifdone by yourself or in unpleasant sur-roundings or at the orders of an overl-ord are enjoyable, at least for a whi-le, if these circumstances are changed.This is probably true, to some extent,of all work. People deploy their other-wise wasted ingenuity to make a game

of the least inviting drudge-jobs as bestthey can. Activities that appeal to so-me people dont always appeal to allothers, but everyone at least potenti-ally has a variety of interests and aninterest in variety. As the saying goes,anything once.Fourier was the masterat speculating how aberrant and per-verse penchants could be put to usein post-civilized society, what he calledHarmony. He thought the Emperor Ne-ro would have turned out all right if asa child he could have indulged his taste

for bloodshed by working in a slaught-erhouse. Small children who notorious-ly relish wallowing in filth could be or-ganized in Little Hordesto clean toiletsand empty the garbage, with medalsawarded to the outstanding. I am notarguing for these precise examples butfor the underlying principle, which Ithink makes perfect sense as one dimen-sion of an overall revolutionary trans-formation. Bear in mind that we donthave to take todays work just as we

find it and match it up with the properpeople, some of whom would have tobe perverse indeed. If technology hasa role in all this it is less to automa-te work out of existence than to openup new realms for re/creation. To so-me extent we may want to return tohandicrafts, which William Morris con-

sidered a probable and desirable ups-hot of communist revolution. Art wouldbe taken back from the snobs and col-lectors, abolished as a specialized de-partment catering to an elite audience,and its qualities of beauty and creati-on restored to integral life from whichthey were stolen by work. Its a sobe-

ring thought that the grecian urns wewrite odes about and showcase in mu-seums were used in their own time tostore olive oil. I doubt our everyday ar-tifacts will fare as well in the future, ifthere is one. The point is that theresno such thing as progress in the worldof work; if anything its just the oppo-site. We shouldnt hesitate to pilfer thepast for what it has to offer, the an-cients lose nothing yet we are enriched.

The reinvention of daily life meansmarching off the edge of our maps.

There is, it is true, more suggestivespeculation than most people suspect.Besides Fourier and Morris and evena hint, here and there, in Marx there are the writings of Kropotkin,the syndicalists Pataud and Pouget,anarcho-communists old (Berkman)and new (Bookchin). The Goodmanbrothers Communitas is exemplaryfor illustrating what forms follow fromgiven functions (purposes), and the-re is something to be gleaned from

the often hazy heralds of alternati-ve/appropriate/intermediate/convivialtechnology, like Schumacher and espe-cially Illich, once you disconnect theirfog machines. The situationists asrepresented by Vaneigems Revolutionof Daily Life and in the SituationistInternational Anthology are so ruth-

lessly lucid as to be exhilarating, evenif they never did quite square the en-dorsement of the rule of the workerscouncils with the abolition of work.Better their incongruity, though thanany extant version of leftism, whosedevotees look to be the last championsof work, for if there were no work the-

re would be no workers, and withoutworkers, who would the left have toorganize?

So the abolitionists would be lar-gely on their own. No one can saywhat would result from unleashing thecreative power stultified by work. Any-thing can happen. The tiresome deba-ters problem of freedom vs. necessity,with its theological overtones, resolvesitself practically once the production ofuse-values is coextensive with the con-

sumption of delightful play-activity.Life will become a game, or rather

many games, but not as it is now - azero/sum game. An optimal sexual en-counter is the paradigm of productiveplay, The participants potentiate eachothers pleasures, nobody keeps score,and everybody wins. The more you gi-ve, the more you get. In the ludic life,the best of sex will diffuse into the bet-ter part of daily life. Generalized playleads to the libidinization of life. Sex, inturn, can become less urgent and despe-rate, more playful. If we play our cardsright, we can all get more out of lifethan we put into it; but only if we playfor keeps.

No one should ever work. Workersof the world... relax!

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Documents

The Abolition of Work