[ 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."  Italicised material appears between asterisks.  Typos are my own.  Typed in by Kurt Cockrum, noted armchair theorist,  anarcho-hedonist dilettante, curmudgeon-philosopher-king of himself  and *bon* *vivant*, in the Summer of 1992, in the Duwamish River watershed  of Cascadia bioregion. ]                        THE ABOLITION OF WORKNo one should ever work.Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world.  Almost anyevil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a worlddesigned 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 anew way of life based on play; in other words, a *ludic* conviviality,commensality, and maybe even art.  There is more to play than child'splay, as worthy as that is.  I call for a collective adventure ingeneralized joy and freely interdependent exuberance.  Play isn'tpassive.  Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth andslack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, butonce recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us wantto act.  Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of the same debasedcoin.The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality.  So muchthe worse for "reality," the gravity hole that sucks the vitality fromthe little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival.Curiously -- or maybe not -- all the old ideologies are conservativebecause they believe in work.  Some of them, like Marxism and mostbrands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because theybelieve in so little else.Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we shouldend employment.  Conservatives support right-to-work laws.  FollowingKarl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to belazy.  Leftists favor full employment.  Like the surrealists -- exceptthat I'm not kidding -- I favor full *un*employment.  Trotskyistsagitate for permanent revolution.  I agitate for permanent revelry.  Butif all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only becausethey plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctantto say so.  They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, workingconditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability.  They'll gladlytalk about anything but work itself.  These experts who offer to do ourthinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all itssaliency in the lives of all of us.  Among themselves they quibble overthe details.  Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the timeof our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over theprice.  Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats.  Libertariansthink we should be bossed by businessmen.  Feminists don't care whichform bossing takes so long as the bosses are women.  Clearly theseideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up thespoils of power.  Just as clearly, none of them have any objection topower 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 befrivolous, although frivolity isn't triviality: very often we ought totake frivolity seriously.  I'd like life to be a game -- but a game withhigh stakes.  I want to play *for* *keeps*.The alternative to work isn't just idleness.  To be ludic is not to bequaaludic.  As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, it's nevermore 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 buthopeless attempt to forget about work.  Many people return from vacationso 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 youget paid for your alienation and enervation.I am not playing definitional games with anybody.  When I say I want toabolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean bydefining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways.  My minimum definition ofwork is *forced* *labor*, that is, compulsory production.  Both elementsare essential.  Work is production enforced by economic or politicalmeans, by the carrot or the stick.  (The carrot is just the stick byother means.)  But not all creation is work.  Work is never done for itsown sake, it's done on account of some product or output that theworker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it.  This is whatwork necessarily is.  To define it is to despise it.  But work isusually even worse than its definition decrees.  The dynamic ofdomination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration.  Inadvanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societieswhether capitalist of "Communist," work invariably acquires otherattributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.Usually -- and this is even more true in "Communist" than capitalistcountries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone isan employee -- work is employment, i. e., wage-labor, which meansselling yourself on the installment plan.  Thus 95% of Americans whowork, work for somebody (or some*thing*) else.  In the USSR or Cuba orYugoslavia or any other alternative model which might be adduced, thecorresponding figure approaches 100%.  Only the embattled Third Worldpeasant bastions -- Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey -- temporarilyshelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate thetraditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millenia,the payment of taxes (= ransom) to the state or rent to parasiticlandlords in return for being otherwise left alone.  Even this raw dealis beginning to look good.  *All* industrial (and office) workers areemployees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.But modern work has worse implications.  People don't just work, theyhave "jobs."  One person does one productive task all the time on anor-else basis.  Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (asincreasingly many jobs don't) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivitydrains its ludic potential.  A "job" that might engage the energies ofsome people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just aburden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say inhow it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothingto the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreadingthe work among those who actually have to do it.  This is the real worldof work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment anddiscrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating theirsubordinates who -- by any rational-technical criteria -- shouldbe calling the shots.  But capitalism in the real world subordinates therational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies oforganizational control.The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum ofassorted indignities which can be denominated as "discipline."  Foucaulthas complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough.  Disciplineconsists 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 theoffice and the store share with the prison and the school and the mentalhospital.  It is something historically original and horrible.  It wasbeyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero andGenghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible.  For all their bad intentions theyjust didn't have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughlyas modern despots do.  Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modernmode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdictedat 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.  Thepoint is not that play is without consequences.  This is to demeanplay.  The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous.Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral andtransactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct.  They sharean aristocratic disdain for results.  The player gets something out ofplaying; that's why he plays.  But the core reward is the experienceof the activity itself (whatever it is).  Some otherwise attentivestudents of play, like Johan Huizinga (*Homo* *Ludens*), *define* it asgame-playing or following rules.  I respect Huizinga's erudition butemphatically reject his constraints.  There are many good games (chess,baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-governed but there is muchmore to play than game-playing.  Conversation, sex, dancing, travel --these practices aren't rule-governed but they are surely play ifanything is.  And rules can be *played* *with* at least as readily asanything else.Work makes a mockery of freedom.  The official line is that we all haverights and live in a democracy.  Other unfortunates who aren't free likewe are have to live in police states.  These victims obey ordersor-else, no matter how arbitrary.  The authorities keep them underregular surveillance.  State bureaucrats control even the smallerdetails of everyday life.  The officials who push them around areanswerable only to higher-ups, public or private.  Either way, dissentand disobedience are punished.  Informers report regularly to theauthorities.  All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modernworkplace.  The liberals and conservatives and libertarians who lamenttotalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites.  There is more freedom inany moderately deStalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinaryAmerican workplace.  You find the same sort of hierarchy and disciplinein 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 aboutthe same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from eachother's control techniques.  A worker is a par-time slave.  The bosssays when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime.  Hetells you how much work to do and how fast.  He is free to carry hiscontrol to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, theclothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom.  With a fewexceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason.  He has youspied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on everyemployee.  Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a workeris a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies youfor unemployment compensation.  Without necessarily endorsing it forthem either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in schoolreceive much the same treatment, justified in their case by theirsupposed immaturity.  What does this say about their parents and teacherswho work?The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half thewaking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men fordecades, for most of their lifespans.  For certain purposes it's nottoo misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- betterstill -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism andoffice oligarchy.  Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying orstupid.  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 muchbetter explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us thaneven such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work fromschool and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing homeat the end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved.Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedomis among their few rationally grounded phobias.  Their obediencetraining at work carries over into the families *they* start, thusreproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, cultureand everything else.  Once you drain the vitality from people at work,they'll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything.  They'reused to it.We are so close to the world of work that we can't see what it does tous.  We have to rely on outside observers from other times or othercultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our presentposition.  There was a time in our own past when the "work ethic" wouldhave been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something whenhe tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emergedtoday instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriatelybe labeled a cult.  Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon thewisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective.  The ancients saw workfor what it is, and their view prevailed, the Calvinist cranksnotwithstanding, until overthrown by industrialism -- but not beforereceiving the endorsement of its prophets.Let's pretend for a moment that work doesn't turn people into stultifiedsubmissives.  Let's pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology andthe ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation ofcharacter.  And let's pretend that work isn't as boring and tiring andhumiliating as we all know it really is.  Even then, work would *still*make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, justbecause it usurps so much of our time.  Socrates said that manuallaborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time tofulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship.  He wasright.  Because of work, no matter what we do we keep looking at outwatches.  The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that itdoesn't cost the boss anything.  Free time is  mostly devoted to gettingready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering fromwork.  Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factorof production not only transports itself at its own expense to and fromthe workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenanceand repair.  Coal and steel don't do that.  Lathes and typewriters don'tdo that.  But workers do.  No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of hisgangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!"Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share withhim an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as acitizen and a human being.  Herodotus identified contempt for work as anattribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture.  Totake only one Roman example, Cicero said that "whoever gives his laborfor money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves."  Hiscandor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we arewont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightenedWestern anthropologists.  The Kapauku of West Irian, according toPosposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work onlyevery other day, the day of rest designed "to regain the lost power andhealth."  Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century whenthey were far along the path to our present predicament, at least wereaware 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 -- wasthe despair of the earliest factory owners.  They took a long time insubmitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock.In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult maleswith women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded tofit industrial needs.  Even the exploited peasants of the *ancien**regime* wrested substantial time back from their landlord's work.According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants' calendar wasdevoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov's figures from villages inCzarist Russia -- hardly a progressive society -- likewise show a fourthor fifth of peasants' days devoted to repose.  Controlling forproductivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies.  Theexploited *muzhiks* would wonder why any of us are working at all.  Soshould we.To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider theearliest condition of humanity, without government or property, whenwe wandered as hunter-gatherers.  Hobbes surmised that life was thennasty, brutish and short.  Others assume that life was a desperateunremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Naturewith death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequalto the challenge of the struggle for existence.  Actually, that was alla projection of fears for the collapse of government authority overcommunities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbesduring the Civil War.  Hobbes' compatriots had already encounteredalternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of life -- inNorth America, particularly -- but already these were too remote fromtheir experience to be understandable.  (The lower orders, closer to thecondition of the Indians, understood it better and often found itattractive.  Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlersdefected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return.  Butthe Indians no more defected to white settlements than Germans climb theBerlin Wall from the west.)  The "survival of the fittest" version --the Thomas Huxley version -- of Darwinism was a better account ofeconomic conditions in Victorian England than it was of naturalselection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book *Mutual* *Aid,**A* *Factor* *of* *Evolution*.  (Kropotkin was a scientist -- ageographer -- who'd had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldworkwhilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about.)  Like mostsocial and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors toldwas really unacknowledged autobiography.The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporaryhunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled"The Original Affluent Society."  They work a lot less than we do, andtheir work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play.  Sahlinsconcluded that "hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and ratherthan a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisureabundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime percapita per year than in any other condition of society."  They worked anaverage of four hours a day, assuming they were "working" at all.  Their"labor," as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised theirphysical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any largescale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism.  Thusit satisfied Friedrich Schiller's definition of play, the only occasionon which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full "play" toboth 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 modernversion -- dubiously developmental -- is Abraham Maslow's counterpositionof "deficiency" and "growth" motivation.)  Play and freedom are, asregards production, coextensive.  Even Marx, who belongs (for all hisgood intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that "the realmof freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor underthe compulsion of necessity and external utility is required."  He nevercould quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as whatit is, the abolition of work -- it's rather anomalous, after all, to bepro-worker and anti-work -- but we can.The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work isevident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrialEurope, among them M. Dorothy George's *England* In* *Transition* andPeter Burke's *Popular* *Culture* *in* *Early* *Modern* *Europe*.  Alsopertinent is Daniel Bell's essay, "Work and its Discontents," the firsttext, I believe, to refer to the "revolt against work" in so many wordsand, had it been understood, an important correction to the complacencyordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, *The**End* *of* *Ideology*.  Neither critics nor celebrants have  noticedthat Bell's end-of-ideology thesis signaled not the end of socialunrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained anduninformed by ideology.  It was Seymour Lipset (in *Political* *Man*),not Bell, who announced at the same time that "the fundamental problemsof the Industrial Revolution have been solved," only a few years beforethe post- or meta-industrial discontents of college students droveLipset from UC Berkeley to the relative (and temporary) tranquility ofHarvard.As Bell notes, Adam Smith in *The* *Wealth* *of* *Nations*, for all hisenthusiasm 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 theChicago economists or any of Smith's modern epigones.  As Smithobserved: "The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarilyformed by their ordinary employments.  The man whose life is spent inperforming a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert hisunderstanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it ispossible for a human creature to become."  Here, in a few blunt words,is my critique of work.  Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age ofEisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified theunorganized, unorganizable malaise of the 1970's and since, the one nopolitical tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEW'sreport *Work* *in* *America*, the one which cannot be exploited and sois ignored.  That problem is the revolt against work.  It does notfigure in any text by any laissez-faire economist -- Milton Friedman,Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner -- because, in their terms, as theyused to say on *Star* *Trek*, "it does not compute."If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuadehumanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are otherswhich they cannot disregard.  Work is hazardous to your health, toborrow a book title.  In fact, work is mass murder or genocide.Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read thesewords.  Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are killed annually in thiscountry on the job.  Over two million are disabled.  Twenty totwenty-five million are injured every year.  And these figures are basedon a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-relatedinjury.  Thus they don't count the half million cases of occupationaldisease every year.  I looked at one medical textbook on occupationaldiseases which was 1,200 pages long.  Even this barely scratches thesurface.  The available statistics count the obvious cases like the100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die everyyear, a much higher fatality rate than for AIDS, for instance, whichgets so much media attention.  This reflects the unvoiced assumptionthat AIDS afflicts perverts who could control their depravity whereascoal-mining is a sacrosanct activity beyond question.  What thestatistics don't show is that tens of millions of people have heirlifespans shortened by work -- which is all that homicide means, afterall.  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 verywell might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work,or trying to forget about work.  The vast majority of victims of theautomobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities orelse fall afoul of those who do them.  To this augmented body-countmust be added the victims of auto-industrial pollution and work-inducedalcoholism and drug addiction.  Both cancer and heart disease are modernafflictions normally traceable, directly, or indirectly, to work.Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life.  People thinkthe Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we anydifferent?  The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred,of an egalitarian society.  We kill people in the six-figure range (atleast) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors.  Ourforty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, notmartyrs.  They died for nothing -- or rather, they died for work.  Butwork is nothing to die for.Bad news for liberals: regulatory tinkering is useless in thislife-and-death context.  The federal Occupational Safety and HealthAdministration 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) generousCarter-era funding levels, a workplace could expect a random visit froman OSHA inspector once every 46 years.State control of the economy is no solution.  Work is, if anything, moredangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here.  Thousandsof Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow subway.Stories reverberate about covered-up Soviet nuclear disasters whichmake Times Beach and Three-Mile Island look like elementary-schoolair-raid drills.  On the other hand, deregulation, currentlyfashionable, won't help and will probably hurt.  From a health andsafety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days whenthe economy most closely approximated laissez-faire.Historians like Eugene Genovese have argued persuasively that -- asantebellum slavery apologists insisted -- factory wage-workers in theNorthern American states and in Europe were worse off than Southernplantation slaves.  No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats andbusinessmen seems to make much difference at the point of production.Serious enforcement of even the rather vague standards enforceable intheory by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill.  Theenforcers apparently appreciate this, since they don't even try to crackdown on most malefactors.What I've said so far ought not to be controversial.  Many workers arefed up with work.  There are high and rising rates of absenteeism,turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overallgoldbricking on the job.  There may be some movement toward a consciousand not just visceral rejection of work.  And yet the prevalent feeling,universal among bosses and their agents and also widespread amongworkers themselves is that work itself is inevitable and necessary.I disagree.  It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofaras it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of freeactivities.  To abolish work requires going at it  from two directions,quantitative and qualitative.  On the one hand, on the quantitativeside, 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 ofit.  On the other hand -- and I think this the crux of the matter andthe revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful workremains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like andcraft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes,except that they happen to yield useful end-products.  Surely thatshouldn't make them *less* enticing to do.  Then all the artificialbarriers of power and property could come down.  Creation could becomerecreation.  And we could all stop being afraid of each other.I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way.  But thenmost work isn't worth trying to save.  Only a small and diminishingfraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defenseand reproduction of the work-system and its political and legalappendages.  Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated thatjust 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 mainpoint is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves theunproductive purposes of commerce or social control.  Right off the batwe can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops,stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, securityguards, ad-men and everyone who works for them.  There is a snowballeffect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkeysand underlings also.  Thus the economy *implodes*.Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whomhave some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted.  Entireindustries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consistof nothing but useless paper-shuffling.  It is no accident that the"tertiary sector," the service sector, is growing while the "secondarysector" (industry) stagnates and the "primary sector" (agriculture)nearly disappears.  Because work is unnecessary except to those whosepower it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful torelatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order.Anything is better than nothing.  That's why you can't go home justbecause you finish early.  They want your *time*, enough of it to makeyou theirs, even if they have no use for most of it.  Otherwise whyhasn't the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in thepast fifty years?Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself.  No more warproduction, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant -- andabove all, no more auto industry to speak of.  An occasional StanleySteamer or Model-T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on whichsuch pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend on is out of thequestion.  Already, without even trying, we've virtually solved theenergy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insolublesocial problems.Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, theone with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedioustasks around.  I refer to *housewives* doing housework andchild-rearing.  By abolishing wage-labor and achieving full unemploymentwe undermine the sexual division of labor.  The nuclear family as weknow it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of labor imposed bymodern wage-work.  Like it or not, as things have been for the lastcentury or two it is economically rational for the man to bring home thebacon, for the woman to do the shitwork to provide him with a haven in aheartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youthconcentration camps called "schools," primarily to keep them out ofMom's hair but still under control, but incidentally to acquire thehabits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers.  If youwould be rid of patriarchy, get rid of the nuclear family whose unpaid"shadow work," as Ivan Illich says, makes possible the work-system thatmakes *it* necessary.  Bound up with this no-nukes strategy is theabolition of childhood and the closing of the schools.  There are morefull-time students than full-time workers in this country.  We needchildren as teachers, not students.  They have a lot to contribute tothe ludic revolution because they're better at playing than grown-upsare.  Adults and children are not identical but they will become equalthrough interdependence.  Only play can bridge the generation gap.I haven't as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down onthe little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it.  All thescientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with warresearch and planned obsolescence would have a good time devising meansto 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-mediacommunications systems or found space colonies.  Perhaps.  I myself amno gadget freak.  I wouldn't care to live in a pushbutton paradise.  Idon't what robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself.There is, I think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modestplace.  The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging.When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agricultureand on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determinationdiminished.  The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated whatHarry Braverman called the degradation of work.  Intelligent observershave always been aware of this.  John Stuart Mill wrote that all thelabor-saving inventions ever devised haven't saved a moment's labor.Karl Marx wrote that "it would be possible to write a history of theinventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capitalwith weapons against the revolts of the working class."  Theenthusiastic 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 thecomputer mystics.  *They* work like dogs;  chances are, if they havetheir way, so will the rest of us.  But if they have any particularizedcontributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the runof high tech, let's give them a hearing.What I really want to see is work turned into play.  A first step is todiscard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation."  Even activities thatalready have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced tojobs which certain people, and only those people are forced to do to theexclusion of all else.  Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfullyin the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekendand putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry,we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put theRenaissance to shame.  There won't be any more jobs, just things to doand 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 thatvarious people at various times in fact enjoy doing.  To make itpossible for some people to do the things they could enjoy it will beenough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions whichafflict these activities when they are reduced to work.  I, forinstance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I don'twant coerced students and I don't care to suck up to pathetic pedantsfor 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 enjoybaby-sitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, butnot as much as their parents do.  The  parents meanwhile, profoundlyappreciate the time to themselves that you free up for them, althoughthey'd get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long.  Thesedifferences among individuals are what make a life of free playpossible.  The same principle applies to many other areas of activity,especially the primal ones.  Thus many people enjoy cooking when theycan practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when they're justfueling up human bodies for work.Third -- other things being equal -- some things that are unsatisfyingif done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of anoverlord are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances arechanged.  This is probably true, to some extent, of all work.  Peopledeploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the leastinviting drudge-jobs as best they can.  Activities that appeal to somepeople don't always appeal to all others, but everyone at leastpotentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety.  Asthe saying goes, "anything once."  Fourier was the master at speculatinghow aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to use inpost-civilized society, what he called Harmony.  He thought the EmperorNero would have turned out all right if as a child he could haveindulged his taste for bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse.  Smallchildren who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organizedin "Little Hordes" to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medalsawarded to the outstanding.  I am not arguing for these precise examplesbut for the underlying principle, which I think makes perfect sense asone dimension of an overall revolutionary transformation.  Bear in mindthat we don't have to take today's work just as we find it and match itup with the proper people, some of whom would have to be perverseindeed.  If technology has a role in all this it is less to automatework out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation.  Tosome extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morrisconsidered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution.  Artwould be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as aspecialized department catering to an elite audience, and its qualitiesof beauty and creation restored to integral life from which they werestolen by work.  It's a sobering thought that the grecian urns we writeodes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to storeolive oil.  I doubt our everyday artifacts will fare as well in thefuture, if there is one.  The point is that there's no such thing asprogress in the world of work; if anything it's just the opposite.  Weshouldn't hesitate to pilfer the past for what it has to offer, theancients 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 peoplesuspect.  Besides Fourier and Morris -- and even a hint, here and there,in Marx -- there are the writings of Kropotkin, the syndicalists Pataudand Pouget, anarcho-communists old (Berkman) and new (Bookchin).  TheGoodman brothers' *Communitas* is exemplary for illustrating what formsfollow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to begleaned from the often hazy heralds ofalternative/appropriate/intermediate/convivial technology, likeSchumacher and especially Illich, once you disconnect their fogmachines.  The situationists -- as represented by Vaneigem's*Revolution* *of* *Daily* *Life* and in the *Situationist**International* *Anthology* -- are so ruthlessly lucid as to beexhilarating, even if they never did quite square the endorsement of therule of the worker's councils with the abolition of work.  Better theirincongruity, though than any extant version of leftism, whose devoteeslook to be the last champions of work, for if there were no work therewould be no workers, and without workers, who would the left have toorganize?So the abolitionists would be largely on their own.  No one can say whatwould 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 practicallyonce the production of use-values is coextensive with the consumption ofdelightful 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 ofproductive play,  The participants potentiate each other's pleasures,nobody keeps score, and everybody wins.  The more you give, the more youget.  In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the betterpart of daily life.  Generalized play leads to the libidinization oflife.  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 putinto it; but only if we play for keeps.No one should ever work.  Workers of the world... *relax*!