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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.
That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things.
It does mean creating anew 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
want to act.
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 "un-employment." 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
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 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 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 some thing) 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, rote-work, 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 gameplaying 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 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 eachother'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. With- out 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 to work from school and bracketed
by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in 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. 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
Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Iran, 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 landlords' 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 to the colonies.
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 in Evolution." (Kropotkin was a scientist 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. 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.
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.
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 25 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. 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 late 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.
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 North American states and in Europe were
worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations
among bureaucrats 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 quali- tative. 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 is 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 wouldn'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 flunkies
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 ensure 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 auto-eroticism 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. 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 and 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, and 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 push button paradise. I don't
want 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. 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 fuelling 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 about
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 theres' 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 en-
riched.
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 brother's Communitas is exemplary for illustrating what
forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to
be gleaned form 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 will 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.