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Title: Smokestack Lightning
Author: Bob Black
Language: en
Topics: anti-civ, anti-work, critique
Source: Retrieved on April 22, 2009 from http://primitivism.com/smokestack-lightning.htm
Notes: An essay from the Bob Black anthology Friendly Fire

Bob Black

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

(they 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 age, just where my

ideas (he warns) would land the handful of humans who might survive the

abolition of work.

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 called for 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 sadly 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 “workershave 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.

[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.