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. 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 nonwork 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 vacation so
beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The
main difference between work and leisure is that 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 minimum 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 of "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 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 millenia, 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 dictators 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. This is
to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. 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-governed 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 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 deStalinized 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 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 par-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 heirarchy 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 heirarchy 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 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. 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!" 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 ancient 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 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. 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. 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. 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." 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. 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 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. 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
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. 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
free 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 percent
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, stockbrokers, 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 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. 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 past 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 auto-eroticism on which such
pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend on 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
child-rearing. 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 would 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 what robot slaves to do everything;
I want to do things myself. There is, I think, a place for labor-saving
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 moment's 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 sceptical 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 air-conditioned 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 a while, 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 Daily 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 worker's 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 coextensive 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! |