THE ABOLITION OF WORK

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any
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* 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 want
to act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of the 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 -- or 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.

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I hear Mr Magoo's footsteps coming in this direction...

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[ 05 July 2005: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

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Coyote: Essentially, such philosophies are a denial of society and civilization. As such, Mr. Black should avoid the use of all language - let alone an alphabet - for the sake of consistency.

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You forgot to mention, Coyote, that he should then disappear up his own asshole.

[ 05 July 2005: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

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Originally posted by Vigilante:
With reasoning like that from Coyote I should also add that anti-capitalists should cease to be because they have to take hold of the capitalist aparatus on some level(ie spend money).

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Coyote:
Capitalism and Socialism are both theories as to how society and civilization should be constructed. As such, they presuppose an engagement with society as it is, in order to change it.

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Coyote:
But that's just it. Civilization is in constant flux, as new ideas (or old ideas, even) enter the public discourse and form and shape a social consensus. The denial of that, the desire to destroy that, is a denial of what it means to be human.

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It is in flux and as that flux goes on it is becoming more and more destructive with each passing age. And it is the case simply for the reason that it is based on war power and domination. This is an antagonism that is irriversable at the end of the day. As for denying humantity, good. Human is a construct to begin with. It was originally made for and by the masters. Using Hegelian terms one was human, then some, then all. This does not change the deep illigtimacy of this very construct. I refuse being and rather seek to constantly become. I do this through my own radical subjectivity.

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There is nobility in work, in labour, in thought and discussion. They are all, in their way, reinforcements of our inter-connectedness.

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Nobility huh, tell that to the Chinese miner who's about to die of cancer. Work within a natural self-sufficiant or autonomous mindset of anykind is one thing, doing it in the name of a totalising system is another. And this idea of interconnectedness is another myth for the simple fact that we have all been forced together by hegemonic means. The reinforcement is anything but consenting or egalitarian.

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Mr Magoo:
For what it's worth, and while I'd love a world of pure leisure, I think it's hard not to notice that almost every animal has something it has to do in order to promote its own survival. Some hunt, some graze, some migrate. Some build little nets to trap bugs. Some lumber through the oceans and collect plankton. All have something they have to do, whether they really derive joy from doing it or not. The exceptions to this are the parasites.

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Well if I'm gonna have a boss let it be nature and biology. That's at least non-alienating. When your surviving on your own terms their a fullfuling feeling that comes of that.

As for robotics, movies like the terminator get made for a reason you know.

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ronb:
However, there is the break a leg and die of gangrene downside to consider.

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Well if I'm gonna have a boss let it be nature and biology.

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That's who it is, unless you've chosen to work for someone else. Many people choose not to, and you can be one of them.

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As for robotics, movies like the terminator get made for a reason you know.

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Yes, to earn a profit. And what better way than with an "evil machines enslave mankind" story? You'll never go broke flogging those.

Funny thing. Teams of very skilled, very dedicated scientists have been trying for decades to create artificial intelligence in a computer. On a very good day they get a computer that's capable of learning a few basic shapes or navigating an unknown room.

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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.

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Gwynne Dyer made a similar point, saying that it is only in modern times that wage labour is considered significantly different than chatel slavery.

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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.

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Exactly. In the late 1980's and early to mid 90's, a practise called business process re-engineering was all the rage. Essentially, it consisted of taking a set of business processes (say procurement) and identifying the bare essentials in terms of activities that needed to be done to achieve the goal.

If we applied the same thinking to capitalism it would disappear and something radically different would take its place.

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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.

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Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any
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.

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Robert Black could not be further from the truth. Capitalism and Capitalist exploitation of workers are the sources of nearly all the misery in the world, not work itself. By refusing to acknowldge capitalism as the source of the evils in the world, Black is able to posit the absurd notion that we can transform society simply by removing the word 'work' from our discourse. This is both a negation of the indispensible contribution that workers make to our society, and a negation of the class struggle need to truly transform society and give workers control over their own labour.

[ 09 July 2005: Message edited by: Left Turn ]

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Perhaps someday, as promised by the Jetsons, machines will do all the drudge work.

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