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  • An abridged reading of: The Abolition of Work by Bob Black

  • Video and voiceover by Aaron Moritz

  • No one should ever work.

  • Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world.

  • Almost all the 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 means creating a new way of life based on play.

  • A ludic revolution.

  • A collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance.

  • Now, 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 will want to act.

  • The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality.

  • The gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life

  • that still distinguishes it from mere survival.

  • All the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work.

  • Some, 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.

  • I support the right to be lazy.

  • Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution.

  • I agitate for permanent revelry.

  • But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work

  • - 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.

  • Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives

  • in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price.

  • 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 non-work 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 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.

  • But today 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.

  • The degradation which most workers experience on the job

  • is the sum of assorted indignities called "discipline".

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • To play involves an aristocratic disdain for results.

  • The player gets something out of playing. That's why they play.

  • The core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is).

  • 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 the higher-ups, public or private.

  • Informers report regularly to the authorities and decent and disobedient are punished.

  • 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.

  • 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, prisons and factories came in at about the same time,

  • and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques.

  • After all, 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

  • and talking back is called "insubordination", just as if a worker was a naughty child.

  • 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.

  • Anyone 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.

  • What I've said so far ought not to be controversial.

  • Many workers are fed up with work and 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 is inevitable and necessary.

  • I disagree.

  • At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it.

  • Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance,

  • consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling.

  • Right off the bat, we could liberate tens of milions of

  • salesmen, soliders, managers, cops, stock brockers, clergy men, bankers, lawyers,

  • teachers, landlords, security guards, ad men and everyone who works for them.

  • 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.

  • Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down.

  • Creation could become recreation.

  • No, I don't suggest most work is salvageable in this way, but then,

  • most work isn't worth trying to save as it simply serves

  • the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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,

  • resolves itself practically once the production of use-values is co-extensive

  • 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.

  • Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life.

  • 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!

  • The End

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An abridged reading of: The Abolition of Work by Bob Black

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