Essay About Abolition Of Work And New Way Of Life

The Abolition Of Work
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THE ABOLITION OF WORK
No one should ever work.
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any
evil youd 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 doesnt 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 childs
play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in
generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isnt
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 Marxs wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be
lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists — except
that Im 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. Theyll 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 dont 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 Im joking or serious. Im joking *and*
serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesnt have to be
frivolous, although frivolity isnt triviality: very often we ought to
take frivolity seriously. Id like life to be a game — but a game with
high stakes. I want to play *for* *keeps*.
The alternative to work isnt just idleness. To be ludic is not to be
quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, its 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, its done on account of some product or output that the
worker