From:  (A@a.cl.mnsu.edu)
Newsgroups: soc.men
Subject: Bob Black/Abolition of Work
Date: 12 Aug 92 22:13:41 GMT
Organization: The computer in the back row

Robert Bly said that the social bond most damaged by the industrial 
revolution was the the father-son bond.  Most of the angry men on this
group resent being used as military or industrial robots.  Carl Jung
said that American marraiges (sp?) were the most unhappy because the man
does all of his fighting at the office.  So I think the following is relevant.
Reprinted without anything resembling permission

-----CUT HERE--------------

 9006040087J
WALL STREET JOURNAL (J), PAGE R17
6/4/90
Copyright
(c) 1990 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
LABOR
   Workplace (A Special Report): Where We'll Be
   ----
   All Play and No Work:
   One Critic Believes That the Future
   Belongs to the Zero-Work Movement
   ----
   By Bob Black


   THE BEST FUTURE for the workplace is none at all.
   With belated notice taken of a crisis in the workplace,
consultants are coming forth with faddish reforms that have
one thing in common: They do nothing to excite interest among
the workers themselves.
   And little wonder. Done to -- and not for -- workers, the
reforms are business as usual, part pep rally, part
painkillers. They may raise productivity temporarily, but
only until the novelty wears off. For tinkering with the who,
what, when and where of work doesn't touch the source of the
malaise. That is, work itself.
   Consider working at home. Moving your work from the office
to the home is like emigrating from Romania to Ethiopia in
search of a better life. Or take flextime. As the office joke
goes, it's for professionals who now can work any 60 hours a
week they like. Flextime also does little for the vast number
of service-sector workers -- the short-order cook who would
like to avoid the lunch-hour shift, or the bus driver who
prefers not to drive at rush hour.
   Such "job-enrichment" schemes are too little, too late.
Disenchantment with work runs as deeply here as
disenchantment with communism does in Eastern Europe. How
else to explain the market for tranquilizers such as flextime
or working at home? How else to explain absenteeism,
job-jumping, the theft of goods and services, and efforts at
work so perfunctory as to verge on sabotage? These are the
ways the little fish emulate the big fish who market junk
bonds and loot savings and loans. What if there was a general
strike -- and it proved permanent because it made no demands,
it was already the satisfaction of all demands?
   Don't be fooled by the techno-futurologists, whose
predictions take work for granted. That's reason enough to be
skeptical. They never yet foresaw a future that came to pass.
They talked of moving sidewalks and single-family air-cars,
not computers and recombinant DNA.
   Futurologists are always wrong because they are only
extrapolators, limiting their vision to more of the same. But
history is filled with discontinuities, with surprises such
as Eastern Europe. Listen to the utopians instead. Since they
believe life could be different, what they say just might be
true.
   What they say is that the future, if we have one, belongs
to the zero-work movement -- but only if the abolition of
work is as practical as it is popular. Considering how
workers feel about work, popularity will follow from
publicity. But would the abolition of work, so to speak,
work? Is it possible?
   Let's hope so. Now our waking hours are divided between
work and leisure -- the latter being nonwork for the sake of
work, a rest stop.
   Yet when we work, we produce without pleasure so as to
consume without creating -- containers drained and filled,
drained and filled. Work devalues life by appropriating
something so priceless it cannot be bought back no matter how
high the GNP is.
   "Work," referring to what workers do, should not be
confused with exertion. Play can be more strenuous than work.
Work is compulsory production, something done for some reason
other than the satisfaction of doing it. Life enrichment, on
the other hand, consists of getting rid of many jobs, and
turning into play those jobs that are intrinsically enjoyable
-- if not to everyone at all times, then for some people at
some times. There is nothing genuinely indispensable to
survival that isn't recreation for someone. Play can be
productive, so forced labor may not be necessay. It's "work"
if farm workers toil for the lowest legally allowable pay,
for long hours; it's "gardening" if you go out and do it
after a long day trading bonds.
   With many jobs, of course, there is no point even trying
to turn them into pleasing pastimes. An example is bossing:
the work of making others work. Or selling; why stimulate
needs we would have to work to satisfy?
   But hobbies from hunting to handicrafts are already
productive play. It's just a matter of deciding what we
really need to have and what we really want to do -- and
matching them up.
   The improvement in our lives would be dramatic. Work
standardizes people. It wastes effort. It submerges our
talents and passions. In a zero-work world, our aptitudes and
appetites would multiply; each day would be a wonder of great
variety, an invitation to new adventures. Zero work would
disclose desires now suppressed. Wants would be greater, in
some ways, and different, as some current artificially
induced wants are sloughed off.
   You say you love your job? Fine. Keep doing it. Your sort
will help to tide us over during the transition. We feel
sorry for you, but we respect your choice.
   We also, however, suspect that it's rooted in a refusal to
admit that your present efforts have made life no better,
they only make life seem to go faster. You are coping in your
own way, trying to get it over with.
   As for the rest of us, we'll be much too busy to work.
   ---
   Mr. Black, an unemployed lawyer in Albany, N.Y., is the
author of "The Abolition of Work and Other Essays".
Newsgroups: soc.men,soc.women,alt.censorship