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---------------------------- I Bleed for This? ------------------------------
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                           The Abolition of Work
                            appreciated by IBFT

by Bob Black
   P.O. Box 2159, Albany NY 12220.
                                       
   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 recovered 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 unemployment. 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 promoting 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 something) 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 subordinates 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 unacceptable 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 consequences, 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 bureaucrats 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
   workplace. The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament
   totalitarianism 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. Without 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 explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us
   than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and
   education. People who are regimented 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 wandered 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 awaiting 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 condition 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
   society." 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 realizes 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 external 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 anomalous, 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 correction 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
   enthusiasm 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
   indirectly, 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, deregulation,
   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 qualitative. 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 minimal 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 average 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 heartless 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 control, 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
   identical 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 historical 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 industrialism 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, technocrats. 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
   speculating 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 audience, 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 enriched.
   
   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. Besides 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 represented 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 theological 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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