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
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.
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 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 manage- ment 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 for 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 recover-
ing from work 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 at work at least you
get paid for your alienation and enervation.
I'm 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 it 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 - who perpetuate the traditional arrangement
of most laborers in the last several mellennia, 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 it's obligatory exclusivity drains it's 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 harrassment and discrimination, of
bone-head bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordi-
nates who - by any rational technical
criteria - should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real
world subordinates the rational maximization of product- ivity 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 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 unaccept-
able 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 conse- quences, 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 deep 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
de-Stalized 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 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 cloths 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 y snitches a 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 apppreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position.
There was a time in our own past when the "work ethic" whold have been
incomprehen- sible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied
its ap pearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead
of four centureis 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 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 attrigute
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 opon haave provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists.
The Kapaku 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 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.
