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THE ABOLITION OF WORK by Bob Black
No one should ever work.
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any
evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed
for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.
That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new
way of life based on play; in other words, a _ludic_ revolution. By "play" I
mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art.
There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a
collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance.
Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and
slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once re-
covered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.
The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the
worse for "reality," the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in
life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously -- or maybe not
-- all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of
them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more
fiercely because they believe in so little else.
Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end
employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's
wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor
full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor
full _un_employment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for
permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and
not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely
reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working
conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about
anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us
rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of
all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management
agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival,
although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by
bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists
don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly
these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils
of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and
all of them want to keep us working.
You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking _and_ serious. To
be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn't have to be frivolous, although
frivolity isn't triviality; very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I'd
like life to be a game -- but a game with high stakes. I want to play
_for_keeps_.
The alternative to work isn't just idleness. To be ludic is not to be
quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, it's never more
rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I pro-
moting the managed, time-disciplined safety-valve called "leisure"; far from
it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is time spent recovering
from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many
people return from vacations so beat that they look forward to returning to work
so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at
work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation.
I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to
abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining
my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is _forced_
_labor_, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is
production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick.
(The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work.
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. This is
what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually
even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to
work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies,
including all industrial societies whether capitalist or "communist," work
invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.
Usually -- and this is even more true in "communist" than capitalist
countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an
employee -- work is employment, i.e. wage-labor, which means selling yourself on
the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or
some_thing_) else. In the USSR of Cuba or Yugoslavia or Nicaragua or any other
alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches
100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions -- Mexico, India, Brazil,
Turkey -- temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who
perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several
millennia, the payment of taxes (= ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic
landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is
beginning to look good. _All_ industrial (and office) workers are employees and
under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.
But modern work has worse implications. People don't just work, they have
"jobs." One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis.
Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs
don't) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A
"job" that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited
time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty
hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who
contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or
spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real
world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and
discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordi-
nates who -- by any rational/technical criteria -- should be calling the shots.
But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of
productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.
The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of
assorted indignities which can be denominated as "discipline." Foucault has
complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the
totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace -- surveillance, rote-work,
imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and -out, etc. Discipline
is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the
school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and
horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero
and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions, they
just didn't have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern
despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control,
it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest
opportunity.
Such is "work." Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What
might otherwise be play is work if it's forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de
Koven has defined play as the "suspension of consequences." This is unaccept-
able if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is
without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the conse-
quences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they
are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-
instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets
something out of playing; that's why he plays. But the core reward is the
experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive
students of play, like Johan Huizinga (_Homo_Ludens_), _define_ it as game-
playing or following rules. I respect Huizinga's erudition but emphatically
reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly,
bridge) which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-
playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel -- these practices aren't rule-
governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be _played_
_with_ at least as readily as anything else.
Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have
rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are
have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how
arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureau-
crats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push
them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way,
dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the
authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern work-
place. The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament totalitarian-
ism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately de-
Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You
find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do
in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons
and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously
borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave.
The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He
tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to
humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or
how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any
reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he
amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination,"
just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it
disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. With- out necessarily endorsing
it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive
much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity.
What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?
The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the
waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades,
for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to
call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but
its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these
people are "free" is lying or stupid.
You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are
you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better ex-
planation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such signifi-
cant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regi-
mented all their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by the family
in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy
and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that
their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their
obedience training at work carries over into the families _they_ start, thus
reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and
everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely
submit to hierarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it.
We are so close to the world of work that we can't see what it does to us.
We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to
appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a
time in our own past when the "work ethic" would have been incomprehensible, and
perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion,
Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would
immediately and appropriately be labelled a cult. Be that as it may, we have
only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The
ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed (the Calvinist cranks
notwithstanding) until overthrown by industrialism -- but not before receiving
the endorsement of its prophets.
Let's pretend for a moment that work doesn't turn people into stultified
submissives. Let's pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the
ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character.
And let's pretend that work isn't as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all
know it really is. Even then, work would _still_ make a mockery of all
humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our
time. Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens
because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and
citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do, we keep
looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that
it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready
for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free
time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not
only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes
primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't
do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in
one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!"
Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him
an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and
as a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the
classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example,
Cicero said that "whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts him-
self in the rank of slaves." His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive
societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have
enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to
Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every
other day, the day of rest designed "to regain the lost power and health." Our
ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the
path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten,
the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to "St. Monday" --
thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150-200 years before its legal
consecration -- was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long
time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In
fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women
accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial
needs. Even the exploited peasants of the _ancien_regime_ wrested substantial
time back from their landlords' work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the
French peasants' calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov's
figures from villages in Czarist Russia -- hardly a progressive society --
likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants' days devoted to repose. Controlling
for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The
exploited _muzhiks_ would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.
To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the
earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wan-
dered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and
short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for
subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster await-
ing the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for
existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of
government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the
England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes' compatriots had already
encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of life
-- in North America, particularly -- but already these were too remote from
their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the con-
dition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive.
Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes
or, captured in war, refused to return to the colonies. But the Indians no more
defected to white settlements than West Germans climb the Berlin Wall from the
west.) The "survival of the fittest" version -- the Thomas Huxley version -- of
Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than
it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book
_Mutual_Aid,_a_Factor_in_Evolution_. (Kropotkin was a scientist who'd had ample
involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he
was talking about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and
his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.
The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary
hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled "The
Original Affluent Society." They work a lot less than we do, and their work is
hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that "hunters
and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the
food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of
sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of so-
ciety." They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were "working"
at all. Their "labor," as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised
their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale,
as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied
Friedrich Schiller's definition of play, the only occasion on which man realiz-
es his complete humanity by giving full "play" to both sides of his twofold
nature, thinking and feeling. Play and freedom are, as regards production,
coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the
productivist pantheon, observed that "the realm of freedom does not commence
until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and ex-
ternal utility is required." He never could quite bring himself to identify this
happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work -- it's rather anom-
alous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work -- but we can.
The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is
evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial Europe,
among them M. Dorothy George's _England_in_Transition_ and Peter Burke's
_Popular_Culture_in_Early_Modern_Europe_. Also pertinent is Daniel Bell's essay
"Work and Its Discontents," the first text, I believe, to refer to the "revolt
against work" in so many words and, had it been understood, an important cor-
rection to the complacency ordinarily associated with the volume in which it
was collected, _The_End_of_Ideology_. Neither critics nor celebrants have
noticed that Bell's end-of-ideology thesis signalled not the end of social
unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed
by ideology.
As Bell notes, Adam Smith in _The_Wealth_of_Nations_, for all his en-
thusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to (and more
honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or
any of Smith's modern epigones. As Smith observed: "The understandings of the
greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The
man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion
to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as
it is possible for a human creature to become." Here, in a few blunt words, is
my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower
imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized,
unorganizable malaise of the 1970's and since, the one no political tendency is
able to harness, the one identified in HEW's report _Work_in_America_, the one
which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. It does not figure in any text by
any laissez-faire economist -- Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner
-- because, in their terms, as they used to say on _Star_Trek_, "it does not
compute."
If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade
humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others which they
cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In
fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill
most of the people who read these words. Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are
killed annually in this country on the job. Over two million are disabled.
Twenty to 25 million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a
very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus
they don't count the half-million cases of occupational disease every year. I
looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases which was 1,200 pages
long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the
obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000
die every year. What the statistics don't show is that tens of millions of
people have their lifespans shortened by work -- which is all that homicide
means, after all. COnsider the doctors who work themselves to death in their
late 50's. Consider all the other workaholics.
Even if you aren't killed or crippled while actually working, you very well
might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to
forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either
doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do
them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of auto- industrial
pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart
disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly or indir- ectly, to
work.
Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the
Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different?
The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian
society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big
Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway
fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing -- or rather, they
died for work. But work is nothing to die for.
State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything, more
dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here. Thousands of Russian
workers were killed or injured building the Moscow subway. Stories reverberate
about covered-up Soviet nuclear disasters which make Times Beach and Three Mile
Island look like elementary-school air-raid drills. On the other hand, deregu-
lation, currently fashionable, won't help and will probably hurt. From a health
and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days when the
economy most closely approximated laissez-faire. Historians like Eugene Genovese
have argues persuasively that -- as antebellum slavery apologists insisted --
factory wage-workers in the North American states and in Europe were worse off
than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats
seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious enforcement of
even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory by OSHA would probably
bring the economy to a standstill. The enforcers apparently appreciate this,
since they don't even try to crack down on most malefactors.
What I've said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are fed
up with work. There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee
theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. There
may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work.
And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also
widespread among workers themselves, is that work itself is inevitable and
necessary.
I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as
it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To
abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and quali-
tative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively
on the amount of work being done. AT present most work is useless or worse and
we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the
crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what
useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and
craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except
that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldn't make them
_less_ enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property
could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being
afraid of each other.
I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most
work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work
serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the
work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and
Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done
-- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our min-
imal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but
the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the
unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can
liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers,
clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and
everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you
idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the
economy _implodes_.
Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have
some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries,
insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but
useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the "tertiary sector," the
service sector, is growing while the "secondary sector" (industry) stagnates and
the "primary sector" (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is
unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from
relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to ensure
public order. Anything is better than nothing. That's why you can't go home just
because you finish early. They want your _time_, enough of it to make you
theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn't the aver-
age work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the last fifty years?
Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war
production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant -- and above
all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model T
might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit
and Los Angeles depend is out of the question. Already, without even trying,
we've virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted
other insoluble social problems.
Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one
with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks. I
refer to _housewives_ doing housework and child-rearing. By abolishing wage-
labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor.
The nuclear family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of
labor imposed by modern wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been for the
last century or two, it is economically rational for the man to bring home the
bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork and provide him with a haven in a heart-
less world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps
called "schools," primarily to keep them out of Mom's hair but still under con-
trol, and incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so
necessary for workers. If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of the nuclear
family whose unpaid "shadow work," as Ivan Illich says, makes possible the work-
system that makes _it_ necessary. Bound up with this no-nukes strategy is the
abolition of childhood and the closing of the schools. There are more full-time
students than full-time workers in this country. We need children as teachers,
not students. They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because
they're better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not ident-
ical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge
the generation gap.
I haven't as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the
little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists
and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned
obsolescence should have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and
tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly they'll find other
projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps they'll set up world-wide all-
inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies. Perhaps. I
myself am no gadget freak. I wouldn't care to live in a push button paradise. I
don't want robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is,
I think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modest place. The his-
torical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive technology
went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased
while skills and self-determination diminished. The further evolution of indus-
trialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work.
Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote
that all the labor-saving inventions ever devised haven't saved a moment's
labor. The enthusiastic technophiles -- Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B.F. Skinner
-- have always been unabashed authoritarians also; which is to say, techno-
crats. We should be more than sceptical about the promises of the computer
mystics. _They_ work like dogs; chances are, if they have their way, so will the
rest of us. But if they have any particularized contributions more readily
subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, let's give them a
hearing.
What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to
discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already
have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain
people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is
it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-
conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens?
Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the
dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't 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
to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various
people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people
to do the things they could enjoy, it will be enough just to eradicate the
irrationalities and distortions which afflict these activities when they are
reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much)
teaching, but I don't want coerced students and I don't care to suck up to
pathetic pedants for tenure.
Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but
not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy baby-sitting
for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their
parents do. The parents meanwhile profoundly appreciate the time to themselves
that you free up for them, although they'd get fretful if parted from their
progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life
of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of
activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they
can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when they're just fuelling
up human bodies for work.
Third, other things being equal, some things that are unsatisfying if done
by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are
enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed. This is
probably true, to some extent, of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted
ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can.
Activities that appeal to some people don't always appeal to all others, but
everyone at least potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in
variety. As the saying goes, "anything once." Fourier was the master at specula-
ting about how aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to use in post-
civilized society, what he called Harmony. He thought the Emperor Nero would
have turned out all right if as a child he could have indulged his taste for
bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse. Small children who notoriously relish
wallowing in filth could be organized in "Little Hordes" to clean toilets and
empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding. I am not arguing for
these precise examples but for the underlying principle, which I think makes
perfect sense as one dimension of an overall revolutionary transformation. Bear
in mind that we don't have to take today's work just as we find it and match it
up with the proper people, some of whom would have to be perverse indeed.
If technology has a role in all this, it is less to automate work out of
existence than to open up new realms for re/creation. To some extent we may want
to return to handicrafts, which William Morris considered a probable and
desirable upshot of communist revolution. Art would be taken back from the snobs
and collectors, abolished as a specialized department catering to an elite audi-
ence, and its qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from
which they were stolen by work. It's a sobering thought that the Grecian urns we
write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store
olive oil. I doubt our everyday artifacts will fare as well in the future, if
there is one. The point is that theres' no such thing as progress in the world
of work; if anything, it's just the opposite. We shouldn't hesitate to pilfer
the past for what it has to offer, the ancients lose nothing yet we are en-
riched.
The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps.
There is, it is true, more suggestive speculation than most people suspect. Be-
sides Fourier and Morris -- and even a 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 Goodman brother's _Communitas_
is exemplary for illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes),
and there is something to be gleaned form the often hazy heralds of alternative/
appropriate/intermediate/convivial technology, like Schumacher and especially
Illich, once you disconnect their fog machines. The situationists -- as repre-
sented by Vaneigem's _Revolution_of_Everyday_Life_ and in the _Situationist_
_International_Anthology_ -- are so ruthlessly lucid as to be exhilarating, even
if they never did quite square the endorsement of the rule of the workers'
councils with the abolition of work. Better their incongruity, though, than any
extant version of leftism, whose devotees look to be the last champions of work,
for if there were no work there would be no workers, and without workers, who
would the left have to organize?
So the abolitionists will be largely on their own. No one can say what
would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can
happen. The tiresome debater's problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theo-
logical overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values
is coextensive with the consumption of delightful play-activity.
Life will become a game,or rather many games, but not -- as it is now -- a
zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play.
The participants potentiate each other's pleasures, nobody keeps score, and
everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best
of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads
to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and
desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of
life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.
Workers of the world... RELAX!
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footnote
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This essay is in the public domain. It may be distributed, translated
or excerpted freely. This ASCII file version was produced by Tangerine
Network. Contacts as of April 1989:
Bob Black can be reached at P.O. Box 2159, Albany NY 12220.
Tangerine Network can be reached at P.O. Box 547014, Orlando FL 32854.
EOF