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SMOKESTACK LIGHTNING
Bob Black is a revolutionary, smirks David Ramsey Steele, "the way Gene
Autry was a cowboy" ("The Abolition of Breathing," _Liberty_, March 1989).
A Marxist turned libertarian, Steele is miffed that to me his forward
progress is just walking in circles. Steele's is the longest harshest
review _The_Abolition_of_Work_and_Other_Essays_ has ever received, and while
no nit to my discredit is too small to pick [1], my critique of work is the
major target. Steele tries, not merely to refute me, but to make me out to
be a gesticulating clown, by turns infantile and wicked (htey are probably
synonyms for Steele). "I'm joking _and_ serious," he quotes me in opening,
but if I am a sometimes successful joker I am serious only "in the sense
that a child wailing for more candy is serious." Steele wants to bomb me
back into the Stone ge, just where my ideas (he warns) would land the
handful of humans who might survive the abolition of work.
[1] Since I took German in college, it so happens I _do_ know that
"Nietzsche" doesn't rhyme with "peachy." I am sure that Ray
Davies of the Kinks, Steele's fellow Briton, likewise was well
aware that "the Regatta" doesn't rhyme with "to get at her,"
not even in Cockney. We poets stretch the language, but not,
like Steele, the truth.
For a fact I am, as accused, joking and serious. Because he is neither,
Steele is fated never to understand me. Metaphor, irony, and absurdity play
-- and I do mean _play_ -- a part in my expression which is, for Steele, at
best cause for confusion, at worst a pretext for defamation. I write in
more than one way and I should be read in more than one way. My book is
stereoscopic. Steele complains I failed to make "a coherent case for some
kind of change in the way society is run." But I did not (as he implies)
make an incoherent case for what _he_ wants -- new masters -- I made a
coherent case for what _I_ want, a society which isn't "run" at all.
When a libertarian who ordinarily extols the virtue of selfishness calls me
"self-indulgent" he shows he is prepared to sacrifice secondary values if
need be to meet a threat of foundational dimensions. Emotionally the review
is equivalent to an air raid siren. Do _not_ (repeat do _not_ take this
"half-educated" mountebank seriously!
Steele careens crazily between accusing me of snobbery and, as when he calls
me half-educated, exhibiting it himself. If with three academic degrees I
am half-educated, how many does Steele have? Six? Who cares? Much of what
I write I never learned in school, certainly not the Austrian School.
Steele says I am "out of my depth" in economics, oblivious to my vantage
point exterior and ( if all goes well) posterior to the dismal science of
scarcity. I never dip into that malarial pool, not at _any_ depth -- I
drain it. I am not playing Steele's capitalist game, I am proposing a new
game. I am not a bad economist, for I am not an economist at all. Freedom
ends where economics begins. Human life was originally pre-economic; I have
tried to explore whether it could become post-economic, that is to say,
free. The greatest obstacle, it seems to me -- and Steele never does
overtly disagree -- is the institution of work. Especially, I think, in its
industrial mode. Like most libertarians, Steele so far prefers industry to
liberty that even to pose the problem of work _as_ a problem of liberty
throws a scare into him.
Much toll must have gone into Steele's only serious criticism which does not
depend on a previous faith in _laissez-faire_ economics, the attempt to
reveal my definitions of work and play as confused and contradictory. He
quotes my book (pp. 18-19) thusly:
Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the
carrot or the stick... Work is never done for its own sake, it's
done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more
often, somebody else) gets out of it.
Steele comments: "This seems to say at first that work is work if you do it
because you have to or because you will be paid for it. Then it seems to
say something different: that work is work if you do it for the sake of an
anticipated goal." The first sentence is roughly accurate, the second is
not. _All_ human action is purposive, as our Austrian Schoolmarm would be
the first to agree, which is to say all human action is goal-directed.
Work, play, everything. Play too has an "anticipated goal," but not the
same one work has. The purpose of play is process, the purpose of work is
product (in a broad sense).
Work, unlike play, is done _not_ for the intrinsic satisfaction of the
activity but for something separate which results from it, which might be a
paycheck or maybe just no whipping tonight. The anticipated goal of play is
the pleasure of the action. Steele, not me, is confused when he glosses my
definitions to collapse the very distinctions I set out to draw with them.
Elsewhere in the title essay I offer an abbreviated definition of work as
"forced labor," as "compulsory production." Predictably a libertarian like
Steele contends that the economic carrot is not coercive as is the political
stick. I didn't argue against this unreasonable opinion there because only
libertarians and economists hold it and there are not enough of them to
justify cluttering up the majestic breadth and sweep of my argument with too
many asides. Steele, I notice, doesn't argue about it either. All this
proves is that I am not a libertarian, a superfluous labor since I make that
abundantly clear in another essay in the book, "The Libertarian as
Conservative." On this point Aristotle, a philosopher much admired by
libertarians, is on my side. He argues that "the life of money-making" is
"undertaken under compulsion" (_Nic._Eth._ 1096a5). Believe it, dude. But
even if Ari and I are mistaken we are neither confused nor confusing. There
is nothing inconsistent or incoherent about my definitions, nor do they
contradict ordinary usage. A libertarian or anybody else who can't
understand what I'm saying is either playing dumb or he really is. People
who are maybe not even half-educated understand what I say about work. The
first time my essay was published, in pamphlet form, the printer (the boss)
reported "it got quiet" when he took the manuscript into the back room; he
also thought the workers had run off some extra copies for themselves. Only
miseducated intellectuals ever have any trouble puzzling out what's wrong
with work.
Work is by definition productive and by definition compulsory (in my sense,
which embraces toil without which one is denied the means of survival, in
our society most often but not always wage labor). Play is by definition
intrinsically gratifying and by definition voluntary. Play is _not_ by
definition either productive _or_ unproductive, although it has been wrongly
defined by Huizinga and de Kovens among others as necessarily
inconsequential. It does not have to be. Whether play has consequences
(something that continues when the play is over) depends on what is at
stake. Does poker cease to be play if you bet on the outcome? Maybe yes --
but maybe no.
My proposal is to combine the best part (in fact, the only good part) of
work -- the production of use-values -- with the best of play, which I take
to be every aspect of play, its freedom and its fun, its voluntariness and
its intrinsic gratification, shorn of the Calvinist connotations of
frivolity and "self-indulgence" which the masters of work, echoed by the
likes of Johan Huizinga and David Ramsey Steele, have labored to attach to
free play. Is this so hard to understand? _If_productive_play_is_
possible,_so_too_is_the_abolition_of_work_.
Fully educated as he must be, Steele thus flubs my discursive definitions of
work. I am no define-your-terms Objectivist; I announce definitions only as
opening gambits, as approximations to be enriched and refined by
illustration and elaboration. Work is production elicited by extrinsic
inducements like money or violence. Whether my several variant formulations
have the same _sense_ (meaning) they have, in Frege's terminology, the same
_reference_, they designate the same phenomenon. (Ah picked up a li'l
book-larnin' after all.)
According to Steele, what I call the abolition of work is just "avant-garde
job enrichment." I display "no interest in this body of theory" because it
has none for me (I am as familiar with it as I care to be). "Job
enrichment" is a top-down conservative reform by which employers gimmick up
jobs to make them seem more interesting without relinquishing their control
over them, much less superseding them. A job, _any_ job -- an exclusive
productive assignment -- is, as "Abolition" makes clear, an aggravated
condition of work; almost always it stultifies the plurality of our
potential powers. Even activities with some inherent satisfaction as freely
chosen pastimes lose much of their ludic kick when reduced to jobs, to
supervised, timed, exclusive occupations worked in return for enough money
to live on. Jobs are the worst kind of work and the first which must be
deranged. For me the job enrichment literature is significant in only one
way: it proves that workers are sufficiently anti-work -- something Steele
denies -- that management is concerned to muffle or misdirect their
resentments. Steele, in misunderstanding all this, misunderstands
everything.
I have never denied the need for what the economists call production, I have
calle dfor its ruthless auditing (how much of this production is worth
suffering to produce?) and for the transformation of what seems needful into
_productive_play_, two words to be tattoo'd on Steve's forehead as they
explain everything about me he dislikes or misunderstands. _Productive_
play_. Plenty of unproductive play, too, I hope -- in fact ideally an
arrangement in which there is no point in keeping track of which is which --
but play as paradigmatic. _Productive_play_. Activities which are, for the
time and the circumstances and the individuals engaged in them,
intrinsically gratifying play yet which, in their totality, produce the
means of life for all. The most necessary functions such as those of the
"primary sector" (food production) already have their ludic counterparts in
hunting and gardening, in _hobbies_. Not only are my categories coherent,
they are already operative in every society. Happily not so may people are
so economically sophisticated they cannot understand me.
If Steele really believes that there can be no bread without bakeries and no
sex without brothels, I pity him.
Whenever Steele strays into anthropology, he is out of his depth. In
"Primitive Affluence" I drew attention to the buffoonery of his portrait of
prehistoric political economy, a few cavemen on loan from "The Far Side"
squatting round the campfire shooting the shit for lack of anything better
to do and every so often carving a steak out of an increasingly putrid
carcass till the meat runs out. Racism this ridiculous is sublime, as
shockingly silly as if today we put on an old minstrel show, blackface and
all. The hunters didn't do more work, he explains, because "they saw little
profit in it because of their restricted options." For sure they saw no
_profit_ because the concept would be meaningless to them, but their options
weren't as restricted as ours are. If the San are any example, they
normally enjoyed a choice we only get two weeks a year, the choice whether
to sleep in or get up and go to work. More than half the time a San hunter
stays home. What Steele considers "options" are not choices as to what to
do but choices as to what to consume: "When such hunter-gatherer societies
encounter more technically advanced societies with a greater range of
products, the hunter-gatherers generally manifest a powerful desire to get
some of these products, even if this puts them to some trouble."
This generalization, like the others Steele ventures, only appears to be
empirical. In fact it is a deduction from an economic model which assumed
away from the start any possibility that anybody ever did or ever could act
as anything else but a more or less well-informed rational maximizer.
Historically it is insupportable. While the hunter-gatherers (and
horticulturalists and pastoralists) often did take from the European
tool-kit, they wanted no part of the work-subjugation system by which the
tools were produced. The San like to turn barbed wire stolen from South
African farmers into points more effective and more easily fashioned than
those of stone, but they do not like to work in the diamond mines. "Most of
humankind," Steele supposes, "has been practicing agriculture for several
thousand years, having at some stage found this more productive than
hunting." The "at some stage" betrays the contention for what it is, a
deduction from the axioms, not historical reportage. Steele would have a
cow if somebody said, "Most of humankind has been practicing
authoritarianism for several thousand years, having at some stage found this
more free/orderly/stable/satisfying than libertarianism."
The parallelism is not fortuitous. Overwhelmingly, stateless societies are
also classless, marketless, and substantially workless societies.
Overwhelmingly, market societies are also statist, class-ridden, work ridden
societies. Am I out of line in suggesting there just _might_ be a challenge
for libertarians in all this which is not fully met by Steele's red-baiting
me?
Steele's pseudo-factual contention assumes the consequent, that what
everybody everywhere wants is higher productivity. Although Steele
characterizes my goal (a little less inaccurately than usual) as something
like anarcho-communism or "higher-stage" communism (he remembers the jargon
of his Marxist phase), it is Steele who sounds like the collectivist,
reifying "humankind" as some kind of organism which "at some stage" _chose_
to go for the gold, to take up the hoe. Just when and where was this
referendum held? Supposing that agricultural societies are more productive
(of what?) per capita, who says the surplus goes to the producers? Steele
may no longer agree with what Engels said in _The_Origin_of_the_Family,_
Private_Property,_and_the_State_ but he surely remembers the issues raised
there and cynically suppresses what _he_ knows but his intellectually
impoverished libertarian readership doesn't. Peasants produced more,
working a lot harder to do it, but consumed less. The wealth they produced
could be stored, sold and stolen, taxed and taken away by kings, nobles and
priests. Since it could be, in time it was -- "at some stage" what was
possible became actual, the state and agriculture, the parasite and its
host. The rest is, literally, history.
If agriculture and the industrial society which emerged from it mark stages
in the progress of liberty we should expect that the oldest agricultural
societies (now busily industrializing) are in the vanguard of freedom. One
stretch of country enjoyed the blessings of civilization twice as long as
the next contender. I speak of course of Sumer, more recently known as
Iraq. Almost as libertarian is the next civilization, still civilized:
Egypt. Next, China. Need I say more?
And once one or more of these agricultural slave societies got going it
expanded at the expense of its stateless workless neighbors whose small
face-to-face societies, though psychologically gratifying and economically
abundant, couldn't defeat the huge slave armies without turning into what
they fought. Thus they lost if they won, like the nomadic armies of the
Akkadians or Mongols or Turks, and they also lost, of course, if they lost.
It had nothing to do with shopping around for the best deal.
Steele fails (or pretends not) to understand why I ever brought up the
primitives at all. It's not because I've ever advocated a general return to
a foraging way of life. If only because the specialized stultification of
the work we have to do unfits us for the variegated _skilled_play_ which
produces the abundance the hunter-gatherers take for granted. Donald Trump
worries a lot more about his economic future than a San mother worries about
hers. A hunter-gatherer grows up in a habitat and learns to read it. I've
quoted Adam Smith to the effect that the division of labor, even if it
enhances productivity, diminishes the human personality. Now if there is
anything in my entire book a libertarian ideologue ought to answer or
explain away it is what the old Adam said about work, but Steele is careful
to cover up this family scandal altogether. (How many libertarians, for
that matter, know that Smith was a Presbyterian minister? Or that
"benevolence" was crucial to his utilitarian ethics? Or that he advocated
compulsory schooling precisely in order to counteract the debasing impact of
work?)
Hunter-gatherers inform our understanding and embarrass libertarians in at
least two ways. They operate the only known viable stateless societies.
And they don't, except in occasional emergencies, _work_ in any sense I've
used the word. They, like we, must produce, but they don't have to work
usually. They enjoy what they do on the relatively few occasions they are
in the mood to do it; such is the ethnographic record. Some primitives have
no words to distinguish work and play because there is no reason to draw the
distinction. We're the ones who need it in order to understand what's
befallen us. Remarkably, I agree with Steele that we moderns cannot
"approximate that lifestyle very closely and still maintain advanced
industry, though we could gradually approach it by reduced hours and more
flexible work schedules, and a few individuals [this is a dig at me]
approximate it fairly closely by a combination of occasional work and living
off handouts." Very well then, let's not "maintain advanced industry." I
want liberty; Steele, in _Liberty_, prefers industry. I think the rag
should rename itself _Industry_ if that's where its deepest loyalty lies.
In "Abolition" I was deliberately agnostic about technology because I meant
to make the abolitionist case in the most universal terms. It is not
necessary to agree with my actual opinions of industrial technology (very
skeptical) to agree with my opposition to work, although it helps. Steele
doesn't trouble to keep his accusations consistent, on one page charging me
with "the ambitious mission of stamping out social cooperation and
technology" thus effectuating "the elimination of more than 95 percent of
the world's population, and the reduction of the remnant to a condition
lower than the Stone Age" (even _lower_!) -- and on the next page saying I
repeat "the usual communist claims" that "'automation' can do almost
anything." What Steele quaintly calls the Stone Age is the one million
years in which all humans lived as hunter-gatherers and we have already seen
there is much to be said for a lifestyle most of us have been unfitted for.
For Steele "the usual communist claims" serve the same diversionary function
"the usual suspects" do when rounded up.
At least two science fiction writers who likely know a lot more about high
tech than Steele does, the cyberpunks Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, have
drawn on "The Abolition of Work" in sketching zero-work lifestyles which
variously turn on technology. In _Islands_in_the_Net_, Sterling
extrapolates from several anti-work stances: the "avant-garde job
enrichment" (as Steele would say) of the laid-back Rhizome multinational;
the selective post-punk high-tech of Singapore's Anti-Labour Party; and the
post-agricultural _guerrilla_ nomadism of Tuareg insurgents in Africa. He
incorporates a few of my phrases verbatim. Shiner in _Slam_ recounts an
individual anti-work odyssey expressly indebted to several Loompanics books,
including "a major inspiration for this novel, _The_Abolition_of_Work_ by
Bob Black." If I am skeptical about liberation through high-tech it mainly
because the techies aren't even exploring the possibility, and if they
don't, who will? They are all worked up over nanotechnology, the
as-yet-nonexistent technology of molecular mechanical manipulation -- that
SF cliche', the matter transformer -- without showing any interest in what
work, if any, would be left to be done in such a hypertech civilization. So
I find low-tech decentralization the more credible alternative for now.
It is false, but truer than most of what Steele attributes to me, that I
think "the tertiary or services sector is useless." I view most of this
sector -- now the largest -- the way a libertarian views most of the
government bureaucracy. Its dynamic is principally its own reproduction
over time. The services sector services the services sector as the state
recreates the state. In _I_Was_Robot_ Ernest Mann carries forth a long
utopian socialist tradition by recounting all the industries which exist
only in order that they and others like them continue to exist and expand.
According to the libertarian litany, if an industry or an institution is
making a profit it is satisfying "wants" whose origins and content are
deliberately disregarded. But what we want, what we are capable of wanting
is relative to the forms of social organization. People "want" fast food
because they have to hurry back to work, because processed supermarket food
doesn't taste much better anyway, because the nuclear family (for the
dwindling minority who have even that to go home to) is too small and too
stressed to sustain much festivity in cooking and eating -- and so forth.
It is only people who can't get what they want who resign themselves to want
_more_ of what they can get. Since we cannot be friends and lovers, we wail
for more candy.
The libertarian is more upset than he admits when he drops his favored
elitist imposture, the lip uncurls, the cigarette holder falls and the
coolly rational anti-egalitarian Heinlein wannabe turns populist demagogue.
In _Scarface_ Edgar G. Robinson snarls, "Work is for saps!" In _Liberty_,
David Ramsey Steele yelps that the _saps_ are for _work_. When it says what
he wants to hear, _Vox_Populi_ is _Vox_Dei_ after all; not, however, when
the talk turns to Social Security, farm subsidies, anti-drug laws and all
the other popular forms of state intervention. Steele assures us that
workers prefer higher wages to job enrichment. This may well be true and it
certainly makes sense since, as I have explained, job enrichment is not the
abolition of work, it is only a rather ineffectual form of psychological
warfare. But how does he know this is true? Because, he explains, there
has been virtually no recent trend toward job enrichment in the American
marketplace. This is blatant nonsense, since for the last fifteen years or
more workers have not had the choice between higher wages and _anything_ for
the simple reason that real wages have fallen relative to the standard of
living. Payback is the kind of trouble the prudent worker does not take to
the counsellors in the Employee Assistance Program.
What I espouse is something that money cannot buy, a new way of life. The
abolition of work is beyond bargaining since it implies the abolition of
bosses to bargain with. By his delicate reference to the standard "job
package" Steele betrays the reality that the ordinary job applicant has as
much chance to dicker over the content of his work as the average shopper
has to haggle over prices in the supermarket check-out line. Even the
mediated collective bargaining of the unions, never the norm, is now
unavailable to the vast majority of workers. Besides, unions don't foster
reforms like workers' control, since if workers controlled work they'd have
no use for brokers to sell their labor-power to a management whose functions
they have usurped. Since the revolt against work is not, could not be,
institutionalized, Steele is unable even to imagine there is one. Steele is
an industrial sociologist the way Gene Autry was a cowboy. He commits
malpractice in every field he dabbles in; he is a Bizarro Da Vinci, a
veritable Renaissance Klutz. Surely no other anthropologist thinks "The
Flintstones" was a documentary.
With truly Ptolemaic persistence Steele hangs epicycle upon epicycle in
order to reconcile reality with his market model. Take the health hazards
of work: "If an activity occupies a great deal of people's time, it will
probably occasion a great deal of death and injury." Thus there are many
deaths in the home: "Does this show that housing is inherently murderous?"
A short answer is that I propose the abolition of work, not the abolition of
housing, because housing (or rather shelter) is necessay, but work, I argue,
is not. I'd say about housing what Steele says about work: if it is
homicide it is justifiable homicide. (Not all of it, not when slumlords
rent out firetraps, but set that aside for now.) And the analogy is absurd
unless _all_ activities are equally dangerous, implying that you might just
as well chain-smoke or play Russian roulette as eat a salad or play
patty-cake. Some people die in their sleep, but not because they are
sleeping, whereas many people die because they are working. If work is more
dangerous than many activities unrelated to work which people choose to do,
the risk is part of the case against work. I have no desire to eliminate
all danger from life, only for risks to be freely chosen when they accompany
and perhaps enhance the pleasure of the play.
Steele asserts, typically without substantiation, that workplace safety
varies directly with income: "As incomes rise, jobs become safer -- workers
have more alternatives and can insist on greater compensation for high
risk." I know of no evidence for any such relationship. There should be a
tendency, if Steele is right, for better-paid jobs to be safer that
worse-paid jobs, but coal miners make much more money that janitors and
firemen make much less money than lawyers. Anything to Steele's
correlation, if there _is_ anything to it, is readily explained: elite jobs
are just better in every way than grunt jobs -- safer, better paid, more
prestigious. The less you have, the less you have: so much for
"trade-offs."
Amusingly the only evidence which is consistent with Steele's conjecture is
evidence he elsewhere contradicts. Occupational injuries and fatalities
have increased in recent years, even as real wages have fallen, but Steele
is ideologically committed to the fairy-tale of progress. He says "workers
have chosen to take most of the gains of increased output in the form of
more goods and services, and only a small part of these gains in the form of
less working time." It wasn't the _workers_ who took these gains, not in
higher wages, not in safer working conditions, and not in shorter hours --
hours of work have _increased_ slightly. It must be, then, that in the 80's
and after workers have "chosen" lower wages, longer hours _and_ greater
danger on the job. Yeah, sure.
Steele -- or Ramsey-Steele, as he used to sign off when he used to write of
the hippie paper _Oz_ in the 60's -- is, if often witless, sometimes witty,
as when he calls me "a rope stretched over the abyss between Raoul Vaneigem
and Sid Vicious." My leftist critics haven't done as well. After I called
_Open_Road_ "the _Rolling_Stone_ of anarchism," it took those
anarcho-leftists a few years to call me "the Bob Hope of anarchism,"
obviously a stupendous effort on their part. But Ramsey-Steele can't keep
it up as I can. "The Abolition of Breathing" (what a sense of humor this
guy has!) is, its hamhandedness aside, an especially maladroit move by a
libertarian. I am in favor of breathing; as Ed Lawrence has written of me,
"His favorite weapon is the penknife, and when he goes for the throat,
breathe easy, the usual result is a tracheotomy of inspiration."
As it happens there is light to be shed on the libertarian position on
breathing. Ayn Rand is always inspirational and often oracular for
libertarians. A strident atheist and vehement rationalist -- she felt in
fact that she and three or four of her disciples were the only really
rational people there were -- Rand remarked that she _worshipped_
smokestacks. For her, as for Lyndon LaRouche, they not only stood for, they
_were_ the epitome of human accomplishment. She must have meant it since
she was something of a human smokestack herself; she was a chain smoker, as
were the other rationals in her entourage. In the end she abolished her own
breathing: she died of lung cancer. Now if Sir David Ramsey-Steele is
concerned about breathing he should remonstrate, not with me but with the
owners of the smokestacks I'd like to shut down. Like Rand I'm an atheist
(albeit with pagan tendencies) but I worship nothing -- and I'd even rather
worship _God_ than _smokestacks_.
(1989, 1992)
Steele's pseudo-factual contention assumes the consequent, that what
everybody everywhere wants is higher productivity. Although Steele
characterizes my goal (a little less inaccurately than usual) as something
like anarcho-communism or "higher-stage" communism (he remembers the jargon
of his Marxist phase), it is Steele who sounds like the collectivist,
reifying "humankind" as some kind of organism which "at some stage" _chose_
to go for the gold, to take up the hoe. Just when and where was this
referendum held? Supposing that agricultural societies are more productive
(of what?) per capita, who says the surplus goes to the producers? Steele
may no longer agree with what Engels said in _The_Origin_of_the_Family,_
Private_Property,_and_the_State_ but he surely remembers the issues raised
there and cynically suppresses what _he_ knows but his intellectually
impoverished libertarian readership doesn't. Peasants produced more,
working a lot harder to do it, but consumed less. The wealth they produced
could be stored, sold and stolen, taxed and taken away by kings, nobles and
priests. Since it could be, in time it was -- "at some stage" what was
possible became actual, the state and agriculture, the parasite and its
host. The rest is, literally, history.
If agriculture and the industrial society which emerged from it mark stages
in the progress of liberty we should expect that the oldest agricultural
societies (now busily industrializing) are in the vanguard of freedom. One
stretch of country enjoyed the blessings of civilization twice as long as
the next contender. I speak of course of Sumer, more recently known as
Iraq. Almost as libertarian is the next civilization, still civilized:
Egypt. Next, China. Need I say more?
And once one or more of these agricultural slave societies got going it
expanded at the expense of its stateless workless neighbors whose small
face-to-face societies, though psychologically gratifying and economically
abundant, couldn't defeat the huge slave armies without turning into what
they fought. Thus they lost if they won, like the nomadic armies of the
Akkadians or Mongols or Turks, and they also lost, of course, if they lost.
It had nothing to do with shopping around for the best deal.
Steele fails (or pretends not) to understand why I ever brought up the
primitives at all. It's not because I've ever advocated a general return to
a foraging way of life. If only because the specialized stultification of
the work we have to do unfits us for the variegated _skilled_play_ which
produces the abundance the hunter-gatherers take for granted. Donald Trump
worries a lot more about his economic future than a San mother worries about
hers. A hunter-gatherer grows up in a habitat and learns to read it. I've
quoted Adam Smith to the effect that the division of labor, even if it
enhances productivity, diminishes the human personality. Now if there is
anything in my entire book a libertarian ideologue ought to answer or
explain away it is what the old Adam said about work, but Steele is careful
to cover up this family scandal altogether. (How many libertarians, for
that matter, know that Smith was a Presbyterian minister? Or that
"benevolence" was crucial to his utilitarian ethics? Or that he advocated
compulsory schooling precisely in order to counteract the debasing impact of
work?)
Hunter-gatherers inform our understanding and embarrass libertarians in at
least two ways. They operate the only known viable stateless societies.
And they don't, except in occasional emergencies, _work_ in any sense I've
used the word. They, like we, must produce, but they don't have to work
usually. They enjoy what they do on the relatively few occasions they are
in the mood to do it; such is the ethnographic record. Some primitives have
no words to distinguish work and play because there is no reason to draw the
distinction. We're the ones who need it in order to understand what's
befallen us. Remarkably, I agree with Steele that we moderns cannot
"approximate that lifestyle very closely and still maintain advanced
industry, though we could gradually approach it by reduced hours and more
flexible work schedules, and a few individuals [this is a dig at me]
approximate it fairly closely by a combination of occasional work and living
off handouts." Very well then, let's not "maintain advanced industry." I
want liberty; Steele, in _Liberty_, prefers industry. I think the rag
should rename itself _Industry_ if that's where its deepest loyalty lies.
In "Abolition" I was deliberately agnostic about technology because I meant
to make the abolitionist case in the most universal terms. It is not
necessary to agree with my actual opinions of industrial technology (very
skeptical) to agree with my opposition to work, although it helps. Steele
doesn't trouble to keep his accusations consistent, on one page charging me
with "the ambitious mission of stamping out social cooperation and
technology" thus effectuating "the elimination of more than 95 percent of
the world's population, and the reduction of the remnant to a condition
lower than the Stone Age" (even _lower_!) -- and on the next page saying I
repeat "the usual communist claims" that "'automation' can do almost
anything." What Steele quaintly calls the Stone Age is the one million
years in which all humans lived as hunter-gatherers and we have already seen
there is much to be said for a lifestyle most of us have been unfitted for.
For Steele "the usual communist claims" serve the same diversionary function
"the usual suspects" do when rounded up.
At least two science fiction writers who likely know a lot more about high
tech than Steele does, the cyberpunks Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, have
drawn on "The Abolition of Work" in sketching zero-work lifestyles which
variously turn on technology. In _Islands_in_the_Net_, Sterling
extrapolates from several anti-work stances: the "avant-garde job
enrichment" (as Steele would say) of the laid-back Rhizome multinational;
the selective post-punk high-tech of Singapore's Anti-Labour Party; and the
post-agricultural _guerrilla_ nomadism of Tuareg insurgents in Africa. He
incorporates a few of my phrases verbatim. Shiner in _Slam_ recounts an
individual anti-work odyssey expressly indebted to several Loompanics books,
including "a major inspiration for this novel, _The_Abolition_of_Work_ by
Bob Black." If I am skeptical about liberation through high-tech it mainly
because the techies aren't even exploring the possibility, and if they
don't, who will? They are all worked up over nanotechnology, the
as-yet-nonexistent technology of molecular mechanical manipulation -- that
SF cliche', the matter transformer -- without showing any interest in what
work, if any, would be left to be done in such a hypertech civilization. So
I find low-tech decentralization the more credible alternative for now.
It is false, but truer than most of what Steele attributes to me, that I
think "the tertiary or services sector is useless." I view most of this
sector -- now the largest -- the way a libertarian views most of the
government bureaucracy. Its dynamic is principally its own reproduction
over time. The services sector services the services sector as the state
recreates the state. In _I_Was_Robot_ Ernest Mann carries forth a long
utopian socialist tradition by recounting all the industries which exist
only in order that they and others like them continue to exist and expand.
According to the libertarian litany, if an industry or an institution is
making a profit it is satisfying "wants" whose origins and content are
deliberately disregarded. But what we want, what we are capable of wanting
is relative to the forms of social organization. People "want" fast food
because they have to hurry back to work, because processed supermarket food
doesn't taste much better anyway, because the nuclear family (for the
dwindling minority who have even that to go home to) is too small and too
stressed to sustain much festivity in cooking and eating -- and so forth.
It is only people who can't get what they want who resign themselves to want
_more_ of what they can get. Since we cannot be friends and lovers, we wail
for more candy.
The libertarian is more upset than he admits when he drops his favored
elitist imposture, the lip uncurls, the cigarette holder falls and the
coolly rational anti-egalitarian Heinlein wannabe turns populist demagogue.
In _Scarface_ Edgar G. Robinson snarls, "Work is for saps!" In _Liberty_,
David Ramsey Steele yelps that the _saps_ are for _work_. When it says what
he wants to hear, _Vox_Populi_ is _Vox_Dei_ after all; not, however, when
the talk turns to Social Security, farm subsidies, anti-drug laws and all
the other popular forms of state intervention. Steele assures us that
workers prefer higher wages to job enrichment. This may well be true and it
certainly makes sense since, as I have explained, job enrichment is not the
abolition of work, it is only a rather ineffectual form of psychological
warfare. But how does he know this is true? Because, he explains, there
has been virtually no recent trend toward job enrichment in the American
marketplace. This is blatant nonsense, since for the last fifteen years or
more workers have not had the choice between higher wages and _anything_ for
the simple reason that real wages have fallen relative to the standard of
living. Payback is the kind of trouble the prudent worker does not take to
the counsellors in the Employee Assistance Program.
What I espouse is something that money cannot buy, a new way of life. The
abolition of work is beyond bargaining since it implies the abolition of
bosses to bargain with. By his delicate reference to the standard "job
package" Steele betrays the reality that the ordinary job applicant has as
much chance to dicker over the content of his work as the average shopper
has to haggle over prices in the supermarket check-out line. Even the
mediated collective bargaining of the unions, never the norm, is now
unavailable to the vast majority of workers. Besides, unions don't foster
reforms like workers' control, since if workers controlled work they'd have
no use for brokers to sell their labor-power to a management whose functions
they have usurped. Since the revolt against work is not, could not be,
institutionalized, Steele is unable even to imagine there is one. Steele is
an industrial sociologist the way Gene Autry was a cowboy. He commits
malpractice in every field he dabbles in; he is a Bizarro Da Vinci, a
veritable Renaissance Klutz. Surely no other anthropologist thinks "The
Flintstones" was a documentary.
With truly Ptolemaic persistence Steele hangs epicycle upon epicycle in
order to reconcile reality with his market model. Take the health hazards
of work: "If an activity occupies a great deal of people's time, it will
probably occasion a great deal of death and injury." Thus there are many
deaths in the home: "Does this show that housing is inherently murderous?"
A short answer is that I propose the abolition of work, not the abolition of
housing, because housing (or rather shelter) is necessay, but work, I argue,
is not. I'd say about housing what Steele says about work: if it is
homicide it is justifiable homicide. (Not all of it, not when slumlords
rent out firetraps, but set that aside for now.) And the analogy is absurd
unless _all_ activities are equally dangerous, implying that you might just
as well chain-smoke or play Russian roulette as eat a salad or play
patty-cake. Some people die in their sleep, but not because they are
sleeping, whereas many people die because they are working. If work is more
dangerous than many activities unrelated to work which people choose to do,
the risk is part of the case against work. I have no desire to eliminate
all danger from life, only for risks to be freely chosen when they accompany
and perhaps enhance the pleasure of the play.
Steele asserts, typically without substantiation, that workplace safety
varies directly with income: "As incomes rise, jobs become safer -- workers
have more alternatives and can insist on greater compensation for high
risk." I know of no evidence for any such relationship. There should be a
tendency, if Steele is right, for better-paid jobs to be safer that
worse-paid jobs, but coal miners make much more money that janitors and
firemen make much less money than lawyers. Anything to Steele's
correlation, if there _is_ anything to it, is readily explained: elite jobs
are just better in every way than grunt jobs -- safer, better paid, more
prestigious. The less you have, the less you have: so much for
"trade-offs."
Amusingly the only evidence which is consistent with Steele's conjecture is
evidence he elsewhere contradicts. Occupational injuries and fatalities
have increased in recent years, even as real wages have fallen, but Steele
is ideologically committed to the fairy-tale of progress. He says "workers
have chosen to take most of the gains of increased output in the form of
more goods and services, and only a small part of these gains in the form of
less working time." It wasn't the _workers_ who took these gains, not in
higher wages, not in safer working conditions, and not in shorter hours --
hours of work have _increased_ slightly. It must be, then, that in the 80's
and after workers have "chosen" lower wages, longer hours _and_ greater
danger on the job. Yeah, sure.
Steele -- or Ramsey-Steele, as he used to sign off when he used to write of
the hippie paper _Oz_ in the 60's -- is, if often witless, sometimes witty,
as when he calls me "a rope stretched over the abyss between Raoul Vaneigem
and Sid Vicious." My leftist critics haven't done as well. After I called
_Open_Road_ "the _Rolling_Stone_ of anarchism," it took those
anarcho-leftists a few years to call me "the Bob Hope of anarchism,"
obviously a stupendous effort on their part. But Ramsey-Steele can't keep
it up as I can. "The Abolition of Breathing" (what a sense of humor this
guy has!) is, its hamhandedness aside, an especially maladroit move by a
libertarian. I am in favor of breathing; as Ed Lawrence has written of me,
"His favorite weapon is the penknife, and when he goes for the throat,
breathe easy, the usual result is a tracheotomy of inspiration."
As it happens there is light to be shed on the libertarian position on
breathing. Ayn Rand is always inspirational and often oracular for
libertarians. A strident atheist and vehement rationalist -- she felt in
fact that she and three or four of her disciples were the only really
rational people there were -- Rand remarked that she _worshipped_
smokestacks. For her, as for Lyndon LaRouche, they not only stood for, they
_were_ the epitome of human accomplishment. She must have meant it since
she was something of a human smokestack herself; she was a chain smoker, as
were the other rationals in her entourage. In the end she abolished her own
breathing: she died of lung cancer. Now if Sir David Ramsey-Steele is
concerned about breathing he should remonstrate, not with me but with the
owners of the smokestacks I'd like to shut down. Like Rand I'm an atheist
(albeit with pagan tendencies) but I worship nothing -- and I'd even rather
worship _God_ than _smokestacks_.
(1989, 1992)