The Abolition of Work
Encyclopedia
"The Abolition of Work" is an essay written by Bob Black
in 1985. The essay was part of Black's first book, an anthology of essays entitled The Abolition of Work and Other Essays published by Loompanics Unlimited
. It is an exposition of Black's "type 3 anarchism" – a blend of post-Situationist theory and individualist anarchism
– focusing on a critique of the work ethic. "The Abolition of Work" adopted Situationist tropes that had recently been re-popularized (or recuperated
) by pop bands of the time (Bow Wow Wow
in particular having earlier featured "demolition of the work ethic" and "there's no need to work ever" among similar lines in their lyrics). In attempting to round out the concept from his discovering it in popular culture, Black draws upon certain ideas of Marshall Sahlins
, Richard Borshay Lee
, Charles Fourier
, William Morris
, and Paul Goodman
.
Although "The Abolition of Work" has most often been reprinted by anarchist publishers and Black is well-known as an anarchist, the essay's argument is not explicitly anarchist. Black argues that the abolition of work is as important as the abolition of the state. The essay, which is based on a 1981 speech at the Gorilla Grotto in San Francisco, is informal and without academic references, but Blacks mentions some sources such as the utopian socialist Charles Fourier
, the unconventional Marxists Paul Lafargue
and William Morris
, anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin
and Paul Goodman
, and anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins
and Richard Borshay Lee
.
society, where, Black contends, all of life is devoted to the production
and consumption
of commodities
. Attacking Marxist state socialism
as much as Liberal
capitalism
, Black argues that the only way for humans to be free is to reclaim their time from jobs and employment, instead turning necessary subsistence tasks into free play done voluntarily – an approach referred to as "ludic". The essay argues that "no-one should ever work", because work - defined as compulsory productive activity enforced by economic or political means – is the source of most of the misery in the world. Black denounces work for its compulsion, and for the forms it takes – as subordination to a boss, as a "job" which turns a potentially enjoyable task into a meaningless chore, for the degradation imposed by systems of work-discipline, and for the large number of work-related deaths and injuries – which Black characterizes as homicide
.
He views the subordination enacted in workplaces as "a mockery of freedom", and denounces as hypocrites the various theorists who support freedom while supporting work. Subordination in work, Black alleges, makes people stupid and creates fear of freedom. Because of work, people become accustomed to rigidity and regularity, and do not have the time for friendship or meaningful activity. Many workers, he contends, are dissatisfied with work (as evidenced by absenteeism, goldbricking, embezzlement and sabotage), so that what he says should be uncontroversial; however, it is controversial only because people are too close to the work-system to see its flaws.
Play, in contrast, is not necessarily rule-governed, and is performed voluntarily, in complete freedom, as a gift economy
. He points out that hunter-gatherer
societies are typified by play, a view he backs up with the work of Marshall Sahlins; he recounts the rise of hierarchal societies, through which work is cumulatively imposed, so that the compulsive work of today would seem incomprehensibly oppressive even to ancients and medieval peasants. He responds to the view that "work," if not simply effort or energy, is necessary to get important but unpleasant tasks done, by claiming that first of all, most important tasks can be rendered ludic, or "salvaged" by being turned into game-like and craft-like activities, and secondly that the vast majority of work does not need doing at all. The latter tasks are unnecessary because they only serve functions of commerce and social control that exist only to maintain the work-system as a whole. As for what is left, he advocates Charles Fourier's approach of arranging activities so that people will want to do them. He is also sceptical but open-minded about the possibility of eliminating work through labor-saving technologies, which, in his opinion, have so far never reduced work, and often deskilled and debased workers. As he sees it, the political left has, for the most part, failed to acknowledge as revolutionary the critique of work, as opposed to the critique of wage-labor. The left, he contends, by glorifying workers, has endorsed work itself, and also the work ethic, in the form of "the dignity of labor."
Black, a frequent critic of Marxism
- albeit supporting the attempted synthesis of extreme individualism and egalitarian anarcho-communism espoused by now-defunct collective For Ourselves, which he gave the label Marxism-Stirnerism - parodies Karl Marx
in the final line: "Workers of the world ... relax!"
, who at the time was a leading cyberpunk
science fiction author and called it "one of the seminal underground documents of the 1980s". The essay's critique of work formed the basis for the antilabour faction in Sterling's celebrated 1988 novel Islands in the Net
. In the September/October 1995 issue of Mother Jones, Maya Sinha praised the essay's provocative contention, paying particular note to Black's observation that much of what is termed "free time" is consumed by efforts related to facilitating or recovering from work itself. "The Abolition of Work" has been widely reprinted. It has been translated into French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese (both continental Portuguese and Luso-Brazilian), Swedish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, and probably other languages.
Bob Black
Bob Black is an American anarchist. He is the author of The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, Beneath the Underground, Friendly Fire, Anarchy After Leftism, and numerous political essays.-Writing:Some of his work from the early 1980s includes...
in 1985. The essay was part of Black's first book, an anthology of essays entitled The Abolition of Work and Other Essays published by Loompanics Unlimited
Loompanics
Loompanics Unlimited was an American book seller and publisher specializing in nonfiction on generally unconventional or controversial topics, with a philosophy considered tending to a mixture of libertarian and left wing ideals, although Loompanics carried books expressing other political...
. It is an exposition of Black's "type 3 anarchism" – a blend of post-Situationist theory and individualist anarchism
Individualist anarchism
Individualist anarchism refers to several traditions of thought within the anarchist movement that emphasize the individual and his or her will over external determinants such as groups, society, traditions, and ideological systems. Individualist anarchism is not a single philosophy but refers to a...
– focusing on a critique of the work ethic. "The Abolition of Work" adopted Situationist tropes that had recently been re-popularized (or recuperated
Recuperation
Recuperation, in common usage, refers to a period of recovery. This has many uses, from medicine, in which sense it refers to the process by which medical patients recover from disease, injury, or mental illness, or finance, where it refers to the financial recovery of an individual or company....
) by pop bands of the time (Bow Wow Wow
Bow Wow Wow
Bow Wow Wow were an English 1980s New Wave band created by Malcolm McLaren to promote his and business partner Vivienne Westwood's New Romantic fashion lines.The group's music is described as having an "African-derived drum sound".-History:...
in particular having earlier featured "demolition of the work ethic" and "there's no need to work ever" among similar lines in their lyrics). In attempting to round out the concept from his discovering it in popular culture, Black draws upon certain ideas of Marshall Sahlins
Marshall Sahlins
Marshall David Sahlins is a prominent American anthropologist. He received both a Bachelors and Masters degree at the University of Michigan where he studied with Leslie White, and earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1954 where his main intellectual influences included Karl Polanyi and...
, Richard Borshay Lee
Richard Borshay Lee
Richard Borshay Lee is a Canadian anthropologist. Lee has studied at the University of Toronto and University of California, Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. Presently, he holds a position at the University of Toronto as Professor Emeritus of Anthropology...
, Charles Fourier
Charles Fourier
François Marie Charles Fourier was a French philosopher. An influential thinker, some of Fourier's social and moral views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become main currents in modern society...
, William Morris
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
, and Paul Goodman
Paul Goodman (writer)
Paul Goodman was an American sociologist, poet, writer, anarchist, and public intellectual. Goodman is now mainly remembered as the author of Growing Up Absurd and an activist on the pacifist Left in the 1960s and an inspiration to that era's student movement...
.
Although "The Abolition of Work" has most often been reprinted by anarchist publishers and Black is well-known as an anarchist, the essay's argument is not explicitly anarchist. Black argues that the abolition of work is as important as the abolition of the state. The essay, which is based on a 1981 speech at the Gorilla Grotto in San Francisco, is informal and without academic references, but Blacks mentions some sources such as the utopian socialist Charles Fourier
Charles Fourier
François Marie Charles Fourier was a French philosopher. An influential thinker, some of Fourier's social and moral views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become main currents in modern society...
, the unconventional Marxists Paul Lafargue
Paul Lafargue
Paul Lafargue was a French revolutionary Marxist socialist journalist, literary critic, political writer and activist; he was Karl Marx's son-in-law, having married his second daughter Laura. His best known work is The Right to Be Lazy...
and William Morris
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
, anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin
Peter Kropotkin
Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was a Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, economist, geographer, author and one of the world's foremost anarcho-communists. Kropotkin advocated a communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations between...
and Paul Goodman
Paul Goodman (writer)
Paul Goodman was an American sociologist, poet, writer, anarchist, and public intellectual. Goodman is now mainly remembered as the author of Growing Up Absurd and an activist on the pacifist Left in the 1960s and an inspiration to that era's student movement...
, and anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins
Marshall Sahlins
Marshall David Sahlins is a prominent American anthropologist. He received both a Bachelors and Masters degree at the University of Michigan where he studied with Leslie White, and earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1954 where his main intellectual influences included Karl Polanyi and...
and Richard Borshay Lee
Richard Borshay Lee
Richard Borshay Lee is a Canadian anthropologist. Lee has studied at the University of Toronto and University of California, Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. Presently, he holds a position at the University of Toronto as Professor Emeritus of Anthropology...
.
Synopsis
In the essay Black argues for the abolition of the producer- and consumer-basedConsumerism
Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen...
society, where, Black contends, all of life is devoted to the production
Production, costs, and pricing
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to industrial organization:Industrial organization – describes the behavior of firms in the marketplace with regard to production, pricing, employment and other decisions...
and consumption
Consumption (economics)
Consumption is a common concept in economics, and gives rise to derived concepts such as consumer debt. Generally, consumption is defined in part by comparison to production. But the precise definition can vary because different schools of economists define production quite differently...
of commodities
Commodity
In economics, a commodity is the generic term for any marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Economic commodities comprise goods and services....
. Attacking Marxist state socialism
State socialism
State socialism is an economic system with limited socialist characteristics, such as public ownership of major industries, remedial measures to benefit the working class, and a gradual process of developing socialism through government policy...
as much as Liberal
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
, Black argues that the only way for humans to be free is to reclaim their time from jobs and employment, instead turning necessary subsistence tasks into free play done voluntarily – an approach referred to as "ludic". The essay argues that "no-one should ever work", because work - defined as compulsory productive activity enforced by economic or political means – is the source of most of the misery in the world. Black denounces work for its compulsion, and for the forms it takes – as subordination to a boss, as a "job" which turns a potentially enjoyable task into a meaningless chore, for the degradation imposed by systems of work-discipline, and for the large number of work-related deaths and injuries – which Black characterizes as homicide
Homicide
Homicide refers to the act of a human killing another human. Murder, for example, is a type of homicide. It can also describe a person who has committed such an act, though this use is rare in modern English...
.
He views the subordination enacted in workplaces as "a mockery of freedom", and denounces as hypocrites the various theorists who support freedom while supporting work. Subordination in work, Black alleges, makes people stupid and creates fear of freedom. Because of work, people become accustomed to rigidity and regularity, and do not have the time for friendship or meaningful activity. Many workers, he contends, are dissatisfied with work (as evidenced by absenteeism, goldbricking, embezzlement and sabotage), so that what he says should be uncontroversial; however, it is controversial only because people are too close to the work-system to see its flaws.
Play, in contrast, is not necessarily rule-governed, and is performed voluntarily, in complete freedom, as a gift economy
Gift economy
In the social sciences, a gift economy is a society where valuable goods and services are regularly given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards . Ideally, simultaneous or recurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within the community...
. He points out that hunter-gatherer
Hunter-gatherer
A hunter-gatherer or forage society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species. Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo, and all modern humans were...
societies are typified by play, a view he backs up with the work of Marshall Sahlins; he recounts the rise of hierarchal societies, through which work is cumulatively imposed, so that the compulsive work of today would seem incomprehensibly oppressive even to ancients and medieval peasants. He responds to the view that "work," if not simply effort or energy, is necessary to get important but unpleasant tasks done, by claiming that first of all, most important tasks can be rendered ludic, or "salvaged" by being turned into game-like and craft-like activities, and secondly that the vast majority of work does not need doing at all. The latter tasks are unnecessary because they only serve functions of commerce and social control that exist only to maintain the work-system as a whole. As for what is left, he advocates Charles Fourier's approach of arranging activities so that people will want to do them. He is also sceptical but open-minded about the possibility of eliminating work through labor-saving technologies, which, in his opinion, have so far never reduced work, and often deskilled and debased workers. As he sees it, the political left has, for the most part, failed to acknowledge as revolutionary the critique of work, as opposed to the critique of wage-labor. The left, he contends, by glorifying workers, has endorsed work itself, and also the work ethic, in the form of "the dignity of labor."
Black, a frequent critic of Marxism
Criticisms of Marxism
Criticisms of Marxism have come from the political left as well as the political right. Democratic socialists and social democrats reject the idea that socialism can be accomplished only through class conflict and a proletarian revolution. Many anarchists reject the need for a transitory state phase...
- albeit supporting the attempted synthesis of extreme individualism and egalitarian anarcho-communism espoused by now-defunct collective For Ourselves, which he gave the label Marxism-Stirnerism - parodies Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
in the final line: "Workers of the world ... relax!"
Influence and reception
"The Abolition of Work" was a significant influence on futurist and design critic Bruce SterlingBruce Sterling
Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre.-Writings:...
, who at the time was a leading cyberpunk
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a postmodern and science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech and low life." The name is a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk, and was originally coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story "Cyberpunk," published in 1983...
science fiction author and called it "one of the seminal underground documents of the 1980s". The essay's critique of work formed the basis for the antilabour faction in Sterling's celebrated 1988 novel Islands in the Net
Islands in the Net
Islands in the Net, a 1988 science fiction novel by Bruce Sterling. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1989, and was nominated for both the Hugo and Locus Awards that same year.-Overview:...
. In the September/October 1995 issue of Mother Jones, Maya Sinha praised the essay's provocative contention, paying particular note to Black's observation that much of what is termed "free time" is consumed by efforts related to facilitating or recovering from work itself. "The Abolition of Work" has been widely reprinted. It has been translated into French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese (both continental Portuguese and Luso-Brazilian), Swedish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, and probably other languages.
Related topics
- Anti-workAnti-workThe anti-work ethic states that labor tends to cause unhappiness, and is increasingly challenged by work performed by machines. Therefore, the quantity of labor ought to be lessened...
- Issues in anarchismIssues in anarchismAnarchism is a heterogeneous philosophy with many different tendencies and schools of thought; differences on questions of ideology, values and tactics are common. Ideas about how an anarchist society might work vary considerably, especially with respect to economics...
- He who does not work, neither shall he eatHe who does not work, neither shall he eatHe who does not work, neither shall he eat is a Biblical aphorism derived from II Thessalonians 3:10, which became a slogan for new colonies and socialist societies.-New Testament:...
- Workers of the world, unite!Workers of the world, unite!The political slogan Workers of the world, unite! is one of the most famous rallying cries of communism, found in The Communist Manifesto , by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
- Work, a 2011 examination of the topic from post-left anarchist collective CrimethInc.
External links
- The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, the 1986 collection by Bob Black hosted in it's entirety on Inspiracy.com
- "The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective", chapter thirteen of Women, Race & Class, by Angela Davis.