Bob Black

The Abolition of Work

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 Cuba or China 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, rotework, 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 gameplaying 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 labeled 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 himself 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 régime
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 climbed 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—a geographer—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. As he put it:
“The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays
when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when
superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity.” (A modern
version—dubiously developmental—is Abraham Maslow’s counterposition of
“deficiency” and “growth” motivation.) 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 signaled not the end of
social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained
and uninformed by ideology. It was Seymour Lipset (in Political Man),
not Bell, who announced at the same time that “the fundamental problems
of the Industrial Revolution have been solved,” only a few years before
the post- or meta-industrial discontents of college students drove
Lipset from UC Berkeley to the relative (and temporary) tranquillity of
Harvard.

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 1970s 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. That problem is the
revolt against work. 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 Lost in Space, “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 twenty-five 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.
Chernobyl and other Soviet nuclear disasters covered up until recently
make Times Beach and Three Mile Island—but not Bhopal—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 argued persuasively that—as antebellum slavery
apologists insisted—factory wage-workers in the Northern American
states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No
rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats and businessmen seems to
make much difference at the point of production. Serious implementation
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 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 shouldn’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.
Thirty 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 sixty 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 pest-holes 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 around. 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, but 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 pushbutton 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.
Karl Marx wrote that “it would be possible to write a history of the
inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital
with weapons against the revolts of the working class.” 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 skeptical 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
fueling 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 there’s 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
brothers’ 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, whom 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!