To grasp the full
enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition
of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered, gathering
and sharing*. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish
and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle
for subsis- tence, 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 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 oppor-
tunity 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 depravation is the mainspring of its activity, and 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 regard 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 Seymore 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)
tran-
quillity 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 best ignored. That problem is the revolt against work.
It does not figure in any test 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
2 million are idsaabled. 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 their lifespans shortened by work - which is all that homicide
means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death
in their 50's. Consider all the other workaholics.
Even if you
aren't killed or crippled while actually working, you very well might be
while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget
about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either
doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those
who do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims
of auto- industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction.
Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable,
directly or indirectly, to work.
Work, then,
institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians
were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different?
The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian
society. We kill people in the 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
reverber- ate 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 ante-bellum 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, stock- brokers, clergymen, bankers,
lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who
works for them. There is a snowball effect since everytime 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 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 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," but incidentally
to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers.
If you would be rid 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 engineer 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 for
found space colonies. Perhaps. I myself am no gadget freak.
I wouldn't care to live in a pushbutton paradise. I don't want robot
slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I
think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modest place. The
historical and prehistorically 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,
make since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons
against the revolts of the working class."
The enthusiastic technophiles
- Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B.F. Skinner - have always been unabashed
authoritarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more
than skeptical about the promises of the computer mystics. They work like dogs; chances are,
if they have their way, wo will the rest of us.
but if they have any particularized
contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than therun
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 form 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 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 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 complay 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 the 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 awhile, if these circumstances are changed. This is probably
true, to some extent, of all work. People deploy their otherwise
wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best
they can. Activities that appeal to some people don't always appeal
to all others, but everyone at least potentilally 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 map. 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 Vaneigen's
Revolution of Everyday Life and in the Situationist International
Anthology - are so ruthlessly lucid as to be exhilarating, even if
they never did quite square the endorsement of the rule of the workers'
councils with the abolition of work. Better their incongruity, though,
than any extant version of leftism, whose devotees look to be the last
champions of work, for if there were no work there would be no workers,
and without workers, who would the left have to organize?
So the abolitionists
would be largely on their own. No one can say what would result from
unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen.
The tiresome debater's problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological
overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values
is 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 beome 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!
