From: kurt@eskimo.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)
Subject: "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black, Part 3 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 01:03:46 GMT

#!/bin/sh
# this is abolishWork.03 (part 3 of abolishWork)
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# file abolishWork continued
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if touch 2>&1 | fgrep 'amc' > /dev/null
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 else TOUCH=true
fi
if test ! -r shar3_seq_.tmp; then
	echo "Please unpack part 1 first!"
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 if test "$Scheck" != 3; then
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echo "x - Continuing file abolishWork"
sed 's/^X//' << 'ABOLISH_WORK_EOF' >> abolishWork &&
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 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.
X
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.
X
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.
X
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 flunkeys
and underlings also.  Thus the economy *implodes*.
X
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 assure 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
past fifty years?
X
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 on 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.
X
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 to 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.
X
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 would 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 what 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 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.
X
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.
X
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.
X
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.
X
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
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.
X
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 from 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* *Daily* *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 worker's 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?
X
So the abolitionists would 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.
X
Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not -- as it is now
X-- 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.
X
No one should ever work.  Workers of the world... *relax*!
ABOLISH_WORK_EOF
echo "File abolishWork is complete" &&
$TOUCH -am 0729095192 abolishWork &&
chmod 0400 abolishWork ||
echo "restore of abolishWork failed"
set `wc -c abolishWork`;Wc_c=$1
if test "$Wc_c" != "41603"; then
	echo original size 41603, current size $Wc_c
fi
rm -f shar3_seq_.tmp
echo "You have unpacked the last part -- the md4 checksum for abolishWork"
echo 'should be 8ff3674a68ae9a25101d20df23559ddc'
exit 0
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