ECONOMICS - LOOKING GLASS NEWS |
THE ABOLITION OF WORK |
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by Bob Black The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension Entered into the database on Sunday, January 01st, 2006 @ 06:58:29 MST |
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No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost all the 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. 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 revolution. By "play"
I mean also festivity, creativity, 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 [will] want [to] act. Oblomovism
and Stakhanovism are two sides of same debased coin. 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—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. 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 unemployment.
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. 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. 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 non-work 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 vacations so beat that they look forward to returning to work so
they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at work
at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation. 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 minimun 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 or "communist," work invariably acquires other
attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness. 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 something) else.
In the USSR or Cuba or Yugoslavia or Nicaragua 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 millennia, 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. 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. 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 tators 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.
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. 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-govemed
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.
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 the 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. 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 de-Stalinized
dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the
same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a
prison or a 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 part-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? 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 hierarchy 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 hierarchy and expertise in everything.
They're used to it. 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 labelled 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. 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 our 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!" 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
as 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 Westem 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. 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 raged 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 govemment 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 West 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—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. 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 intemmittent, 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. 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 signalled 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 metaindustrial discontents
of college students drove Lipset from UC Berkeley to the relative (and temporary)
tranquillity of Harvard. 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 modem 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 hamess,
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." If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists
of a utilitarian or even paternalist tum, 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 occuptional 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 coalmining
is a sacrosanct activity beyond question. What the statistics don't show is
that tens of millions of people have their 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. 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. 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 sixfigure 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. 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. 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 makes 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 its worst in the days when the economy
most closely approximated laissez-faire. 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. 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.
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 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. 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 per cent 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, stockbrockers, 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.
Forty per cent 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 last fifty
years? 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 autoeroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los
Angeles depend 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. 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 childrearing. 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. 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 should 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
want robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I
think, a place for laborsaving 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 moments 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 skeptical 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. 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 airconditioned 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. 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.
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. 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 awhile, 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. 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 Everyday 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 workers' 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?
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
co-extensive with the consumption of delightful play activity. Life will become
a game, or rather many games, but not—as it is now—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. No one should ever work. Workers of the world. . . relax! |