The Abolition Of Work

THE ABOLITION OF WORK

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 *un*employment. 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