From: kurt@eskimo.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)
Subject: `The Abolition of Work' by Bob Black, Part 2 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 01:03:37 GMT

#!/bin/sh
# this is abolishWork.02 (part 2 of abolishWork)
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echo "x - Continuing file abolishWork"
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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.
X
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 out
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.  But workers do.  No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his
gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!"
X
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 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*
*regime* wrested substantial time back from their landlord's 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.
X
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.  But
the Indians no more defected to white settlements than 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* *of* *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.
X
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.
X
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) tranquility of
Harvard.
X
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.  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 *Star* *Trek*, "it does not compute."
X
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, a much higher fatality rate than for AIDS, for instance, which
gets so much media attention.  This reflects the unvoiced assumption
that AIDS afflicts perverts who could control their depravity whereas
coal-mining is a sacrosanct activity beyond question.  What the
statistics don't show is that tens of millions of people have heir
lifespans shortened by work -- which is all that homicide means, after
all.  Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their 50's.
Consider all the other workaholics.
X
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.
X
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.
X
Bad news for liberals: regulatory tinkering is useless in this
life-and-death context.  The federal Occupational Safety and Health
Administration was designed to police the core part of the problem,
workplace safety.  Even before Reagan and the Supreme Court stifled it,
OSHA was a farce.  At previous and (by current standards) generous
Carter-era funding levels, a workplace could expect a random visit from
an OSHA inspector once every 46 years.
X
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.
X
ABOLISH_WORK_EOF
echo "End of abolishWork part 2"
echo "File abolishWork is continued in part 3"
echo "3" > shar3_seq_.tmp
exit 0
-- 
kurt@grogatch.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)


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