From: kurt@eskimo.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)
Subject: `The Abolition of Work' by Bob Black, Part 1 of 3 (long)
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Keywords: work,play,slavery,wage-slavery,get-a-life,productivity,production,
Organization: -> ESKIMO NORTH (206) For-Ever <-
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 01:03:29 GMT

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# ============= abolishWork ==============
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X[ This is a typed-in version of Bob Black's 1985 essay, "The Abolition of
X  Work", which appeared in his anthology of essays, "The Abolition of Work
X  and Other Essays", published by Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend WA
X  98368 [ISBN 0-915179-41-5].  The following disclaimer is reproduced from
X  the verso of the title page: "Not Copyrighted.  Any of the material in
X  this book may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted, even without
X  mentioning the source."  Italicised material appears between asterisks.
X  Typos are my own.  Typed in by Kurt Cockrum, noted armchair theorist,
X  anarcho-hedonist dilettante, curmudgeon-philosopher-king of himself
X  and *bon* *vivant*, in the Summer of 1992, in the Duwamish River watershed
X  of Cascadia bioregion. ]
X
X                        THE ABOLITION OF WORK
X
No one should ever work.
X
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.
X
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* 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.  Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of the same debased
coin.
X
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.
X
Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should
end employment.  Conservatives support right-to-work laws.  Following
Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be
lazy.  Leftists favor full employment.  Like the surrealists -- except
that I'm not kidding -- I favor full *un*employment.  Trotskyists
agitate for permanent revolution.  I agitate for permanent revelry.  But
if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because
they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant
to say so.  They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working
conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability.  They'll gladly
talk about anything but work itself.  These experts who offer to do our
thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its
saliency in the lives of all of us.  Among themselves they quibble over
the details.  Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time
of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the
price.  Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats.  Libertarians
think we should be bossed by businessmen.  Feminists don't care which
form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women.  Clearly these
ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the
spoils of power.  Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to
power as such and all of them want to keep us working.
X
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*.
X
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 the time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but
hopeless attempt to forget about work.  Many people return from vacation
so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up.
The main difference between work and leisure is that work at least you
get paid for your alienation and enervation.
X
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 of "Communist," work invariably acquires other
attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.
X
Usually -- and this is even more true in "Communist" than capitalist
countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is
an employee -- work is employment, i. e., wage-labor, which means
selling yourself on the installment plan.  Thus 95% of Americans who
work, work for somebody (or some*thing*) else.  In the USSR or Cuba or
Yugoslavia 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 millenia,
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.
X
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.
X
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.
X
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.
X
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.
X
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 deStalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary
American workplace.  You find the same sort of heirarchy and discipline
in an office or factory as you do in a prison or 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 par-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?
X
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 off to work from
school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home
at the end, are habituated to heirarchy 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 heirarchy and expertise in everything.  They're
used to it.
X
ABOLISH_WORK_EOF
echo "End of abolishWork part 1"
echo "File abolishWork is continued in part 2"
echo "2" > shar3_seq_.tmp
exit 0
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