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 19 Apr 2005 @ 16:06, by Flemming Funch
In 1985 Bob Black wrote a brilliant essay called "The Abolition of Work". A monumentally brilliant manifesto, in my opinion. Suggesting, as it says, that we abolish work all together, and instead live playful lives. He outlines in colorful ways the tyranny of work, and the insanities we're putting up with in the name of work. And he outlines the faulty foundation the whole scheme is based on. I will include the whole essay in the "More" link as it isn't copyrighted. So just one quote here: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 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 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. 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 heirarchy 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. He's right. However, what he is saying is ironically also so radical that few people will be able to understand it. Most people will come up with a lot of "but... but... but..."s, trying to justify why they're wasting their lives. Well, it mostly adds up to "because we have to", which is exactly what makes work be work. Because the cards are stacked in such a way that we apparently have to work in order to eat, unless we're very lucky, or very smart, so we can manage to arrange things so we don't.
As he points out, most work is useless, non-sensical, wasted. But the people who do it have a lot invested in claiming otherwise. All the stuff we need could be produced by probably less than 5% of the effort we expend at work. And that is not even getting to the cool, new, interesting, different things we could do if we actually had fun and acted playfully instead of as slaves. And how much more productive we could be, ironically.
It probably isn't going to change before somebody demonstrates that clearly enough and often enough. And it might ironically be quite likely that it will be businesses who figure out how to produce much more by being playful rather than work oriented, and who therefore will gain an advantage.
THE ABOLITION OF WORK
by Bob Black
No one should ever work.
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 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 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 the time spent recovering from work and 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 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 of "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 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 -- temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millenia, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 heirarchy 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 heirarchy 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 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 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 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 ancient regime wrested substantial time back from their landlord's 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. 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 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. As he put it: "The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it 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 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 signaled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology. It was Seymour 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) tranquility 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 ignored. That problem is the revolt against work. 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 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 heir 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 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 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 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 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, 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!
[ This is a typed-in version of Bob Black's 1985 essay, "The Abolition of Work", which appeared in his anthology of essays, "The Abolition of Work and Other Essays", published by Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend WA 98368 [ISBN 0-915179-41-5]. The following disclaimer is reproduced from the verso of the title page: "Not Copyrighted. Any of the material in this book may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted, even without mentioning the source." ]
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Category: Systems Thinking
19 comments
20 Apr 2005 @ 02:18 by astrid : Nothing changes
UNTILL we stop using the Official Money! GET THIS TRUTH through your head!!! WAKE UP to the MOST PROFOUND SOCIAL NEWS since MOSES came down from the MOUNTAIN top 3500 years ago... and found The Golden Calf and His People "dancing around it", this being the ALLEGORY put forth about a group of very HIGH Consciousness People to boot( Children of Israel) As a Group "walking through the Desert for 40 years; (The Wanderers, the Sages, Nomads etc; next UP from Genius )
'Desert' = the Metaphors for the "space" for cleansing/ shedding of old traditions and confusions from a lower vibration in order to enter the next higher.
"40" has throughout the Ages been the Nr for cleansing /healing and similar!
Moses had gone to a too high of a vibration (the Mountain Top) for the Children to follow Him. They made a tremendous effort (40) "YEARS" (is the Metaphor for their effort and struggle to reach His level). When the gap never closed, they 'chose' to fall back to a lower cnsciousness; they chose the Monetary System... as "dancing around the Calf", which I don't believe being the accurate description (sounds so blasphemous, doesn't it.I think itr was wise choise THEN, but Times change and we all have to learn to go with the New Flow of incoming Energy!
I think they tried and tried and Things just started to fall apart and the Belief in POVERTY and Life-Is-Hard and Struggle and Suffering became ever more their Daily experience... And THAT is when the Monetary System came in handy and saved them from ANNIHILATION. I think that group of Localized, isolated People handled their newly established Monetary System just like Itacha in New York State handles THEIR Monetary System; the Itacha Hours, http://www.ithacahours.com/home.html that I have been talking about so much: LOCAL AND FOR EVERYBODY'S BENEFIT!
And then eventually; slowly but surely as Peoples from other Locales started to show interest in the Money system did it change into a little bit more unfair, with every new Episode of New Rules.
Bernard Litaer tells us that each Monetary Rule Package lasts appr,20-25 years before it has fallen apaet so bad so it needs to be re-newed. http://www.transaction.net/money/cc/cc01.html
There is absolutely NO proof that The Children of Israel made the Money/ Monetary System evil. That I belive came into the System as the interest among ALL Peoples towards using it grew.
I personally believe it all became much more evil when The Roman Emipre was at its peak and yes, then there was a group of Slimy Buziness men the so called Zionists, --( and we find these "slimy" buziness men among ALL groups of people today )-- from the Original Children of Israel, who joined the 'BULLIES' from ROME, 'cause 'they' turned out to be really good at handling the Tresures of ROME = The STOLEN MONEY & PROPERTY that RCC hid in their vaults!... And besides, THAT WAS THEN and this NOW.
Since The Whole World today is involved in the Monetary System, we ALL must now do that Healing, that was started 3500 years ago by the Children of Israel, according to the Bible...: EFFORTS TO RAISE TO MOSES' level of consciousness!
We ALL have come to the "same" DESERT-SPOT, so to speak, and hence we ALL need to repeat the Healing that went "wrong" then and in that effort today; THAT OLD MONETARY SYSTEM HAS TO GO TOGETHER WITH THE BELIEF and FEAR that Life is nothing but struggle, poverty, plus the rest ot the ERRONEOUS Beliefs. It has served its function well, but it has been OVER-USED and DISTORTED FROM ITS ORIGINAL, beyond recognition and as far as Times go , it is faaar overdue!
We ALL share accountability for what evil can be put forth through a TWISTED GAME; The Money Monopoly.... mainly put together to support three distinct very small groups of people: The RCC, with Jesuites being the Top guys, making you believe that only the Church can save you from yourself and a life in/of Struggle, when in fact they do all they can to perpetuate it for their own advantage.
The Merovingians, "The BlueBloods" do their part of this scam in the name of JESUS!... Jesus wants them to bring peace through WAR/MURDER/ MAYHEM... ( ...and very good for the CASH FLOW!...) and all the while The Bankers("ZIonists" as they like to call themselves, so that they can hide behind the Children of Israel. Well, they can't! ) are doing their part with the Moneysystem they keep in place... and THIS part of the scam is the only truly WORLD-WIDE( though the RCC would love it to be only THEM who were the only World wide!... and of course the BlueBloods would like themselves/their scams = CRUELTY, to be the only truly world wide!!!)... so... THIS has to be rejected by us FIRST!!!
Once that happens, the People, who gave their power to the Church start healing and doing good SPONTANEOUSLY! Once that happens, the People who believed in the goodness of EVIL (WAR/The Power of CRUELTY) will start seeing that PEACE comes SPONTANEOUSLY when you stop fighting! Dah!
ALL Hu/Man's NATURAL state of being is LOVING, CARING, SHARING, CO- OPERATIVE, SYMBIOTIC and all things Life affirming -UNLESS deceived to think otherwice!
So, CHANGE/THROW AWAY A FAULTY MONETARY SYSTEM!...Then the rest of the so called Patriachal System follows automatically, giving ALL the People FREE at last!
20 Apr 2005 @ 19:15 by astrid : Ov gave us this site
http://www.worklessparty.org/ long time ago.Did you check it out???....
21 Apr 2005 @ 17:59 by @209.217.93.202 : This makes me seriously think about
Quitting my stupid job. Yeah, I'd like to quit my job and live like this Essay says would be the natural human way of living. I'm just scared. I need to conquor my fear and "become the change I wish to see". And stop using money. I've just got to implement my own money system for fun. Fun money. Funny?
I've also been damaging bank notes. For fun. Rip up a $10 note so much that its barely in one piece. Hahah. And grafitti it.
21 Apr 2005 @ 18:09 by EdKnight @68.160.121.29 : Work
One of my favorite quotes about work is by Bucky Fuller.
"The hydrogen atom doesn't have to work for a living." In Critical Path, he gives some insights into the "how" of not having to work for a living, involving a concept called Precession. I've read it many times and still get a bit confudido at points. DE-SOVEREIGNIZE!
21 Apr 2005 @ 18:19 by EdKnight @68.160.121.29 : and another thing
A while back, I read George Meagan's " The Longest Walk." This man WALKED from the southernmost tip of South America, north through Panama, on to Washington DC, then further still north to the northernmost point of Alaska. Upon relaying this to several worker bee types, the comments were almost invariably the same...."That's not very responsible." "What did he do for money?" "That's crazy, he must not have had a family." When I pointed out that he did indeed have a wife and two small children who at times accompanied him, the response was "Well they were crazy too." What is it in the worker mentality that prompts such a strong almost universally negative attitude when confronted with an act or idea that runs counter to their work ethic?
21 Apr 2005 @ 19:33 by Quirkeboy @209.92.185.200 : This may be too crazy also..
As techology progesses .. it will save us from working. This is supposed to be a good thing.. but then this is happening across the country right now as peoples jobs are taken away by technology.
Under capitalism.. workers will need money to buy the technology to make work obsolete.. but theyve already lost their jobs to technology and cant afford to buy the stuff to make work obsolete. Do you see what I mean.. its a circle we are already spiraling down.
Imagine our country progressing towards a "work free" environment. How do we get there without giving up money?
Under our current system there will be a few very rich people who produce and buy the technology available. .. And jobless poor people who cant afford to buy the products that will save them from domestic work.
Whats the solution? Open source?
21 Apr 2005 @ 20:51 by @209.217.93.202 : Money solution
One reason money is good is the accounting -- making sure that records are kept of what work has been done and what resources are used. So I like that aspect, but I dont like that its always someone else who already HAS money that we need to appeal to in order to be employed and GET the money. We should be able to create our own money. Only nobody trusts anyone. Openness and open source systems to implmenet this alternate money system could help people trust each other enough to co-operate and build: a quarry, a mill, ore processing facility, area for crops, and all the other stuff we need to build the stuff we need to survive.
22 Apr 2005 @ 00:35 by astrid : How about open up
The Itacha Hours link I gave?.....
22 Apr 2005 @ 10:56 by Vector8 @212.85.12.219 : Off work or no work?
I've always believed that people should do what they love whether you are paid or not and trust in Source to take care of your needs.
I believe if people were open to the idea of doing what they love and knowing that your needs will be taken care of, society will organise itself to attract only people in various positions who love those jobs. People will realise what it feels like to lead a meaningful life and how each individual is an important part of the whole.
It's time people moved away from the "by the sweat of your brow" mentality and be the joy that they are.
Thanks for posting this essay.
22 Apr 2005 @ 13:36 by : What is Work?
Work is a means for us to express our creativity. It is very unusual to find a position that encourages or allows us to do this in our society. It is no wonder that so many people are depressed and hate to go to work every day. Like the saying goes..."another day another dollar." School work is also another story that must be told. God knows, most older kids hate school and drop out before graduation.
23 Apr 2005 @ 20:21 by Chris Hagglund @24.141.159.103 : Ithaca Hours
I've read about the Ithaca Hours. I think its a neat idea, but at the same time I dont think it goes nearly far enough. As I understand it, with that system an hour is an hour is an hour. That doesnt work for me as I have found different types of work to have a different value to me. Also, the administration of that system seems to be way too manual. I want something that can be as automated as possible and not rely on printed notes to be exchanged ... more like digitally signed IOU notes. Or, more accurately, digitally signed I-owe-the-trading-network notes with copies stored in a triple entry system. Where all transactions are publicly viewable. And you can quickly find someones give/take ratio. And I realise that this wont work in areas of low tech -- thats fine, since I'm a high tech guy and connectivity to the electronic network is vital for the system I envision to be able to work at all. Is there a hightech version of Ithaca hours that is easy to implement?
25 Apr 2005 @ 14:31 by : Money
I think as well that money is a key piece of the puzzle. At least in a transition period. Ultimately it shouldn't be necessary. But in the meantime, we probably can't get from here to there without being able to account for the value of various things. Even if it were just a system of voting for what we like and what we don't like.
Nobody has sofar come up with a good enough replacement for the centralized banking money. OK, there are big problems with that money, and that is a long story in itself. Like, it is created by banks and lent out, and needs to be returned with interest. It is not per definition created by doing good work or doing things that others find valuable. It remains tied to having to be lent out by a bank somewhere in the chain, and having to produce a return, so that the bank can be paid the extra interest. It is a crazy pyramid scheme when you get right down to the math of it, but it somehow keeps working because it is opaque enough that few people understand it, and as long as the overall system keeps growing, and most of the balls are kept in the air.
But a system like Ithaca Hours has some problems too. I think it is a great project, but it isn't perfect. The money is produced by a centralized authority, and there tends to be a scarcity of it. You can't just create it by doing an hour of work, unless there's an Ithaca Hour available to pay for it. And, ok, they solved the problem of different types of work having different values by allowing that some people, say a doctor, might charge several Ithaca Hours for an hour of his time. Anyway, the system works, but only to some degree, as a complement to regular money. So it is a bit like a lot of rebate coupons being in circulation. I.e. some vendors will allow part of a purchase to be made with Ithaca Hours, but you can't really do all your business that way.
Most people who're into what used to be called Alternative Currencies are now calling them Complementary Currencies. I.e. they don't replace dollars, they are just a complement or supplement. Just like rebate coupons or frequent flier miles are. Yeah, you can gather some together and maybe even get a free flight to Hong Kong if you have a lot, but generally you can't do without the "real" money, and they're still tied together.
I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be possible to make a better system. It seems terribly logical that it should be easy to do better. The central banking money is continuously being eroded away by interest and taxes and so forth, and it is hard to come by, and most people never have enough. It would only make sense that if you made a currency that could be created when the need was there, and that didn't get eaten away by a central authority, we ought to be able to interact with each other in better ways. It is just that nobody has succeeded yet.
We're maybe thinking too much in the same paths. Maybe it should be a different kind of thing, which doesn't just look like another currency. Like, on the net, the number of hits your website gets, or the number of incoming links you have from other sites - that's a currency. And in the open source world, the number of people who use your software, or the good reputation you have - that's currency. You can't directly buy anything for any of them, but they can be converted to other types of value. They can't easily be bought for money, though. We need something with that kind of leverage. A way of counting real value, which can't be corrupted by being bought for money.
28 Apr 2005 @ 21:01 by taranga @81.157.102.3 : the value of real work
Brilliant essay and it raise in my mind several related points; 1. the natural society that is most efficient is the australian aboriginal nomads who only had to 'work' for 3 hours a week to provide for their physical needs, the rest of their time was spent on social activities, art or meditation. I lived for a year on a central pacific island where basic food [fish and coconuts] was very plentiful and if there was a need to solve a social problem through extended discussion the whole village would spend up to a week or two working it through and be easily fed by 3 or four fisherman spending a few houors fishing for everone's benefit. Where the main resources are impossible to own in any meaningful manner the idea of the market becomes meaningless. As no one had a fridge let alone a freezer and every fishing trip resulted [usually] in a considerable surplus it was inevitable that people took it in turns and shared their catch.
The controlling aspects of the market can only kick in with scarcity and [often artificially generated] demand. the best form of sustainability has to have a balance of want [real needs are tiny] and supply.
2. the controlling aspects of school and society
any ageing hippies remember ivan illich and 'the deschooling of society' which explored this area. The still is a truly [supposedly] democratic school called summerhill in East Anglia uk founded back before the war by A.S.Neil where children were/are encouraged to manage their own learning and run the school through a sort of parliament. The various ex pupils if have met have said how great it was as a kid but how unprepared they were for the big bad unreformed world outside when they finally left.
3. other utopia visions eg Island by Aldous Huxley and News from Nowhere by William Morris [in this large areas of london have been reforested, citizens have craft fairs where they give away their creations as the final part of the creative process, citizens also compete for the honour of doing manual work and the houses of parliament have been converted to a manure store!
29 Apr 2005 @ 13:52 by : Duh hahahah
I agree with the essay. Money started as 'military script' long ago, and has become the greatest control system for slaves every devised. Behind every dollar bill is a man with a gun, making sure it is used. The American natives were handed two ultimatiums; give up sovernity and use money. When they didn't do that, they were almost exterminated.
The multitude of social control algorythems and socially instilled unexamined axioms work together to close the minds of the slaves, to make them think they are free, to have them stay busy so the powerful can feel 'special'!
There is so much more to humans than they can possibly imagine, it is a terrible waste to tie their minds down to control systems. And, unfortunately, it means humans are destroying their own nest, their own natural life support system. It will change, I know, because it will eventually be so bad everyone will start questioning their own convictions and free themselves. Or humanity and all life on this planet will die out.
98% of what people believe and follow in their lives is untrue. That is the sad truth which binds men's souls. Unbind you soul, reconsider everything in your head. Read my essays on http://geocities.com/RainForest/Andes/3262/index.htm, (an old site I cannot change anymore) and read the pages on Geodemocracy. I am working on another site now, an update, but someday the Geodemocracy will be the global system of decision making and both money and slavery will end on this planet.
Peace,
Roan Carratu
3 May 2005 @ 23:18 by Astrid @64.30.218.174 : Abolition of Work/ Hey Chris,
I personally dream of a Society where we do Things because we WANT to and because they need to be done!...and EVERYBODY has their needs met, just because they are born!....Humans, Animals, and Plants alike!
http://www.transaction.net/money/timedollars/index.html
http://www.madisonhours.org/
Ming, what's this weird comment box all about and when did you put this in???!!...and for Heaven's sake WHY?????
4 May 2005 @ 00:30 by Astrid @64.30.218.174 : What if?....
..... I need to do some corrections in spelling or change a word???... there's no way I can do it now....
Vector8, I like your comment: "I've always believed that people should do what they love whether you are paid or not and trust in Source to take care of your needs."
I'm sure you are aware, that there's been such Times and Places on Earth when that is exactly how Life was lived. Hey, right here in the Good ol'America, before The White MAn came with the Bible... The Natives then had the Land and cared for it with Love and Respect. Now the NAtive has the Bible, foced upon them by the White Man, and White Man has all the Land, and doesn't give a shit about the Land, other than what HE can GET OUT OF IT for own amusement!...( in other words: FAAAR beyond what he needs to have a good life... UNLESS one ABSOLUTELY HAS TO go dune bugging weekends, for instance, in order to feel fulfilled as a Cosmic Being in a Bigger Unity of Life!... WHY do I have diffuclties in believing that to be ANYBODY's genuine Truth?... The Native never did any dune bugging, did they?...
SKIP CORPORATE EMPLOYMENT. SKIP THEIR MONEY!... THINGS WILL START TO RATTLE & SHAKE IF/WHEN MANY ENOUGH DO THAT!!!
7 Mar 2007 @ 01:14 by arts @124.197.26.116 : So Far In The Rabbit Hole
The Way I see it is that for far too many years people have been ranking each other and discriminating. The only way for "Slave" Work to be obliterated is for every single person to come together and build a society based on the, "every man is equal before he has learned anything" fact. Almost all people that i have talked to say that each person starts off with their own advantages, and these advantages are either taken for granted by the general populace of "slave owning governments", thus removing the individuality that is needed to create such a system where one person, or one group of people, are able to say, "This is another person, just as I am, before I knew how to create MY society. Do i have room for him?" And the answer is most often a NO or Not unless they slave for me. Which is sad. Generosity is going to have to play a big part!!
Everyone at the moment has to do something to get to where they have a normal life, with a few exceptions. And what denotes a normal life. Well to me its as simple as having a dwelling that can be private, Food on the table, and the opportunity to better ones own situation. Is there a chance for any of us when our very own neighbour is screaming out GREED?
Is state housing an answer? although with state housing society might balance out slightly until there comes a point where those who decide they are superior, through work, decide that things that are in their possession will never become their neighbours. life would have to be based on the opposite, that anything that is possessed, will only be that way for a short time, so sharing selflessly is the only answer to get the most out of materials.
What a job it would be though to keep track of everything....
People would all live in similar dwellings, housing size only changing where family sizes differ. Less people will feel hopeless because there is a base that can be called "Neutral". The only problem would be that the government or "state" would seem like they are in charge. But if a common ground could be reached, where all housing is FREE no matter who you are, at least that is a first step toward having a Free country and world. People would only be graded on how they treat their environment, not how much work or money they can pump out through "Slavery". Although "Slavery" would be used to get to this plateau.
I'm not saying that this way is the only way, or that in your eyes it seems right... i'm just trying to say that if our governments had really looked after its peoples in the first place, would there even be all this conflict?
28 Apr 2016 @ 21:42 by Makailah @188.143.232.32 : yuLJfEQzLfZONHAgd
This Christmas I have made a needlebook and pin cushion set, framed applique pictures and some personalised Xmas decorations! I'm sorry I don't have any links as I don't have my own blog yet!Lovely and very generous giveaway though X Gemma X gelm@oganhhotaaim.com
29 Apr 2016 @ 04:57 by Latrice @188.143.232.32 : aqaPGyYpyfVGDFqNd
Your wedding was absolutely beautiful. I love the backyard wedding and the detnracioos and food look fabulous. You made a gorgeous bride truly breath taking.
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4 May 2008 @ 01:08: System Oriented Modelling Paradigm - Brainstorming notes 03
25 Apr 2008 @ 11:32: System Oriented Modelling Paradigm
23 Apr 2008 @ 09:25: Pascal's Triangle, Self-similarity and Phi
13 Apr 2008 @ 09:47: Phi is the constant of Self-Similarity
1 Dec 2007 @ 16:36: considering options
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