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 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. 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!