page_title: Refusal of work
section_title: Anti-work
hierarchical_section_title: Refusal of work / Anti-work
caption_attribution_description: Bertrand Russell 1907
context_page_description: Refusal of work is behavior in which a person refuses regular employment.
  As actual behavior, with or without a political or philosophical program, it has been practiced by various subcultures and individuals. Radical political positions have openly advocated refusal of work. From within Marxism it has been advocated by Paul Lafargue and the Italian workerist/autonomists, the French ultra-left; and within anarchism.
context_section_description: The anti-work ethic states that labor tends to cause unhappiness, therefore, the quantity of labor ought to be lessened, and/or that work should not be enforced by economic or political means.  The ethic appeared in anarchist circles and have come to prominence with essays such as In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell, The Right to Useful Unemployment by Ivan Illich, and The Abolition of Work by Bob Black,  published in 1985.
  Friedrich Nietzsche was a notable philosopher who presented a critique of work and an anti-work ethic. In 1881, he wrote:
  The eulogists of work. Behind the glorification of 'work' and the tireless talk of the 'blessings of work' I find the same thought as behind the praise of impersonal activity for the public benefit: the fear of everything individual. At bottom, one now feels when confronted with work – and what is invariably meant is relentless industry from early till late – that such work is the best police, that it keeps everybody in harness and powerfully obstructs the development of reason, of covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes it away from reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love, and hatred; it always sets a small goal before one's eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions. In that way a society in which the members continually work hard will have more security: and security is now adored as the supreme goddess..."
  — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn, p. 173
  The American architect, designer and futurist Buckminster Fuller presented an argument that rejected the notion of it being a necessity for people to be in employment to earn a living, saying:
  "We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
  — Richard Buckminster Fuller,
caption: Bertrand Russell, writer of In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays
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