Showing posts with label Opinion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Opinion. Show all posts
Monday 1 June 2015
Wednesday 20 May 2015
It Is Better Than Ten Guilty Persons Escape Than That One Innocent Suffers...
Originally posted on Darryl Westell: Fathers' rights; re-shaping UK Family Law through Equality, Transparency and Justice. :
In his Commentaries on the laws of England first published in 1765, William Blackstone, an English jurist laid one of the foundations of our cherished principles of due process, along the lines of the universally understood maxim that all free men are innocent until proven guilty, by including in his manifesto (still the cornerstone of the principles of British Justice) that “it is better that 10 guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”.
In 1785 Benjamin Franklin, clearly wishing to underline and solidify this remarkable principle once and for all (as if there might be those who wished one day to bend it) left us in little doubt over his sentiment when he raised the ratio, declaring“that it is better that 100 guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should suffer.”
The principle is one that cannot be argued, one that cannot, by any reasonable person at least. We all get it, don’t we? For as bad as it may be to allow the guilty to walk, the idea of being the one wrongly condemned is unbearable. For all of us. And so we have safeguards, the principles of justice that guard against the unthinkable happening to us.
Staggering then, and actually unbelievable, that these principles are not only thrown out of the window when you open the door to the family court, but that this beautiful principle is actually demolished, with no trace of shame, or even recognition that the reversal of this principle might be, it may just be, the worst possible scenario for all concerned; that reversing it may lead to the most devastating and catastrophic and miserable miscarriage of justice; an almost routine conveyor belt of miscarriages of justice.
Now here’s the punchline to this brutal joke: what’s the worst, I mean the very worst imaginable thing that could happen to you? Ask this question to any parent, and the answer would invariably be one concerning the loss of one’s children, the harm of our kids. Just consider: how many parents would die for their children?
Death is preferable than losing them, and we instinctively get that, for it’s the rule of biology, the fabric of our being, the root of our DNA: survival, the perpetuation of the species, at the cost, if necessary, to our own mortality. Scientifically it is perfectly obvious, from the biological imperative, it makes perfect sense. Emotionally, it is no less pertinent.
We only live once, and anyone who supposes otherwise simply does not have evidence on their side, and extraordinary claims must require extraordinary evidence.
But I’ll offer a single caveat to this observable fact: we do live beyond our own demise: only once; through our children. We carry on, literally. Our genes survive into the unknown; this force is the most spectacular of forces, and the impulse to see this happen has driven the evolution of not just our species, but all species, and driven the delirious plethora of life on earth for hundreds of millions of years. To stop ourselves from living this impulse is impossible, it cannot be done. Nature takes care of our survival for us, like breathing, it is not voluntary, it is life.
And in the arena of family court; we are asked to stop living.
We are demanded to stop under penalty of losing our children, which often happens even if we concede defeat. The impossible is demanded of us, and it is done under the wretched 1989 Children Act which failed to get its ducks in a row and define exactly what its holy grail was when it neglected to be specific with its paramountcy principle: that of the ‘best interest of the children being’….blah blah blah.
And it is blah blah because nothing adds up, ever. Either we have principles of justice, or we do not. Either we have a line that cannot be crossed on principle, or we do not. The law has to be black and white, even if each case is different; for every murder is ‘different’ but the law must remain the same. The principle is the thing, and within that safeguard, we all have a chance of living without being molested by the long arm of the state.
Blackstone and Franklin would have been disgusted at the casual breaking of this rule, and how the principles of family law mutated and disfigured themselves into the complete antithesis of the maxim of universal, human justice.
For if a man, any man, any father in the UK is ‘safe’ from the routine miscarriages of justice in family law, well then I demand to see the evidence. Let us assume his innocence to a criminal standard of proof: innocent of any offence that might result in the loss of his essential freedoms, those enshrined in article 8 of the Human Rights Act, that being ‘The right to a family life’.
He is not safe. If his wife, or partner, or simply the mother of his children wished to remove said children from his life, and declare that he never see them again, then she can. Any father, no matter how secure they perceive themselves to be in their fatherhood, can , and routinely does, lose his children.
And not a shred of evidence is required on her part. But the family court side-steps this inconvenient little problem by simply re-writing the principle of innocent until proven guilty: guilt is assumed from the start. Funnier still, as if this weren’t hilarious enough, the very notion of ‘guilt’ is re-written too, to really tie the applicant father up in knots, and expensive legal counsel too.
For ‘guilt’ metamorphasises into the ‘best interests of the child’ principle, and no one likes to argue with that, for it sounds so reasonable. It is anything but. ‘Guilt’ now means anything and everything. And nothing. They have it at their discretion, and if we argue the toss, we are guilty of being angry and misguided and volatile and dangerous, because in the family court, these are crimes, and no proof is required to make them stick.
Cafcass are usually ready and waiting to set the wheels of presumed guilt into motion when they write their ‘reports’ their ‘finding of fact’ essays- there is no irony here. Cafcass approach each and every report in the following way: to assess if there is any ’cause for concern’ that the court ought to be aware of when making decisions about child access arrangements. No matter if there never were any in the first place, or that none have ever been suggested in the first place. That is their job: to assess the danger to the child, the possible ramifications and consequences of allowing ‘contact’ to take place.
Well, I never needed a report when my child was born, nor when I took my baby home from hospital, or to Spain, or the park, or to my dad’s for lunch. Now I need a report? What on earth? Why? Because I’m separating from his mum, and entering the family court and its attendant services? The ones where everything concerning natural justice, and the tenants of innocence are exactly upside down, inside out and back to front? Exactly.
The ‘Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service’ didn’t used to be so called. They used to be the plain old Probationary Service. They assessed convicted criminals on their release from prison, and made the necessary adjustments required to facilitate their return to society. Which is why Cafcass do what they do: because it’s who they are.
In 2001, under Labour, the service was streamlined, and the P.S became Cafcass; a sideways move into a new area of criminal practice: that of the father, and his assumed guilt of everything and anything. They all kept their jobs but had a re-branding. But this is in their DNA: ‘protecting’ society, especially children from the dangerous and the nefarious; the target had just been widened to catch Harriet Bin Harman’s new, more cunning criminal: the wolf in sheep’s clothing. The Father.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Therefore, “what can be asserted without evidence, can also be dismissed without evidence” as Christopher Hitchens understood. What records then do the family courts keep on the outcomes for children whom they have decided the fate of? What outcomes do Cafcass keep in the same instances? How do they know what the outcomes are if they keep no records, have never kept any records? Ever? How can they inform best practice? How can they, with such confidence, such outrageous arrogance, make their decisions? How can they call that which is not based on evidence (since the family court has never required or insisted on any when making the ultimate decision) a decision that is in anyone’s best interests?
Let alone in the interests of the principle laid down by Blackstone two and a half centuries ago?
The rhetorical questions are too easy aren’t they? But is it not our right, our duty, our obligation to demand answers to them nonetheless; or at least demand that the family courts stop exactly where they are, and urgently re-assess their principles?
Those that govern every other facet of law in this country, and moreover the principles that govern a healthy and humane society? The principles that were recognised centuries ago as men emerged from the backward, the stunted, the terrified, the clawing dark ages into the age of reason, of due process, of truth and of justice and of light?
Let us hope for our children and our children’s children’s sake that it does not take another weighty, cumbersome legal tome, and another 250 years of enlightenment, for family law to live by the principles of decent, good human beings everywhere and emerge from the dark ages of fear and stupidity and prejudice that so retarded our civilisation for such an unforgivably drawn out period of time. ch'lo vintage chlo shabby chic
In 1785 Benjamin Franklin, clearly wishing to underline and solidify this remarkable principle once and for all (as if there might be those who wished one day to bend it) left us in little doubt over his sentiment when he raised the ratio, declaring“that it is better that 100 guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should suffer.”
The principle is one that cannot be argued, one that cannot, by any reasonable person at least. We all get it, don’t we? For as bad as it may be to allow the guilty to walk, the idea of being the one wrongly condemned is unbearable. For all of us. And so we have safeguards, the principles of justice that guard against the unthinkable happening to us.
Staggering then, and actually unbelievable, that these principles are not only thrown out of the window when you open the door to the family court, but that this beautiful principle is actually demolished, with no trace of shame, or even recognition that the reversal of this principle might be, it may just be, the worst possible scenario for all concerned; that reversing it may lead to the most devastating and catastrophic and miserable miscarriage of justice; an almost routine conveyor belt of miscarriages of justice.
Now here’s the punchline to this brutal joke: what’s the worst, I mean the very worst imaginable thing that could happen to you? Ask this question to any parent, and the answer would invariably be one concerning the loss of one’s children, the harm of our kids. Just consider: how many parents would die for their children?
Death is preferable than losing them, and we instinctively get that, for it’s the rule of biology, the fabric of our being, the root of our DNA: survival, the perpetuation of the species, at the cost, if necessary, to our own mortality. Scientifically it is perfectly obvious, from the biological imperative, it makes perfect sense. Emotionally, it is no less pertinent.
We only live once, and anyone who supposes otherwise simply does not have evidence on their side, and extraordinary claims must require extraordinary evidence.
But I’ll offer a single caveat to this observable fact: we do live beyond our own demise: only once; through our children. We carry on, literally. Our genes survive into the unknown; this force is the most spectacular of forces, and the impulse to see this happen has driven the evolution of not just our species, but all species, and driven the delirious plethora of life on earth for hundreds of millions of years. To stop ourselves from living this impulse is impossible, it cannot be done. Nature takes care of our survival for us, like breathing, it is not voluntary, it is life.
And in the arena of family court; we are asked to stop living.
We are demanded to stop under penalty of losing our children, which often happens even if we concede defeat. The impossible is demanded of us, and it is done under the wretched 1989 Children Act which failed to get its ducks in a row and define exactly what its holy grail was when it neglected to be specific with its paramountcy principle: that of the ‘best interest of the children being’….blah blah blah.
And it is blah blah because nothing adds up, ever. Either we have principles of justice, or we do not. Either we have a line that cannot be crossed on principle, or we do not. The law has to be black and white, even if each case is different; for every murder is ‘different’ but the law must remain the same. The principle is the thing, and within that safeguard, we all have a chance of living without being molested by the long arm of the state.
Blackstone and Franklin would have been disgusted at the casual breaking of this rule, and how the principles of family law mutated and disfigured themselves into the complete antithesis of the maxim of universal, human justice.
For if a man, any man, any father in the UK is ‘safe’ from the routine miscarriages of justice in family law, well then I demand to see the evidence. Let us assume his innocence to a criminal standard of proof: innocent of any offence that might result in the loss of his essential freedoms, those enshrined in article 8 of the Human Rights Act, that being ‘The right to a family life’.
He is not safe. If his wife, or partner, or simply the mother of his children wished to remove said children from his life, and declare that he never see them again, then she can. Any father, no matter how secure they perceive themselves to be in their fatherhood, can , and routinely does, lose his children.
And not a shred of evidence is required on her part. But the family court side-steps this inconvenient little problem by simply re-writing the principle of innocent until proven guilty: guilt is assumed from the start. Funnier still, as if this weren’t hilarious enough, the very notion of ‘guilt’ is re-written too, to really tie the applicant father up in knots, and expensive legal counsel too.
For ‘guilt’ metamorphasises into the ‘best interests of the child’ principle, and no one likes to argue with that, for it sounds so reasonable. It is anything but. ‘Guilt’ now means anything and everything. And nothing. They have it at their discretion, and if we argue the toss, we are guilty of being angry and misguided and volatile and dangerous, because in the family court, these are crimes, and no proof is required to make them stick.
Cafcass are usually ready and waiting to set the wheels of presumed guilt into motion when they write their ‘reports’ their ‘finding of fact’ essays- there is no irony here. Cafcass approach each and every report in the following way: to assess if there is any ’cause for concern’ that the court ought to be aware of when making decisions about child access arrangements. No matter if there never were any in the first place, or that none have ever been suggested in the first place. That is their job: to assess the danger to the child, the possible ramifications and consequences of allowing ‘contact’ to take place.
Well, I never needed a report when my child was born, nor when I took my baby home from hospital, or to Spain, or the park, or to my dad’s for lunch. Now I need a report? What on earth? Why? Because I’m separating from his mum, and entering the family court and its attendant services? The ones where everything concerning natural justice, and the tenants of innocence are exactly upside down, inside out and back to front? Exactly.
The ‘Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service’ didn’t used to be so called. They used to be the plain old Probationary Service. They assessed convicted criminals on their release from prison, and made the necessary adjustments required to facilitate their return to society. Which is why Cafcass do what they do: because it’s who they are.
In 2001, under Labour, the service was streamlined, and the P.S became Cafcass; a sideways move into a new area of criminal practice: that of the father, and his assumed guilt of everything and anything. They all kept their jobs but had a re-branding. But this is in their DNA: ‘protecting’ society, especially children from the dangerous and the nefarious; the target had just been widened to catch Harriet Bin Harman’s new, more cunning criminal: the wolf in sheep’s clothing. The Father.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Therefore, “what can be asserted without evidence, can also be dismissed without evidence” as Christopher Hitchens understood. What records then do the family courts keep on the outcomes for children whom they have decided the fate of? What outcomes do Cafcass keep in the same instances? How do they know what the outcomes are if they keep no records, have never kept any records? Ever? How can they inform best practice? How can they, with such confidence, such outrageous arrogance, make their decisions? How can they call that which is not based on evidence (since the family court has never required or insisted on any when making the ultimate decision) a decision that is in anyone’s best interests?
Let alone in the interests of the principle laid down by Blackstone two and a half centuries ago?
The rhetorical questions are too easy aren’t they? But is it not our right, our duty, our obligation to demand answers to them nonetheless; or at least demand that the family courts stop exactly where they are, and urgently re-assess their principles?
Those that govern every other facet of law in this country, and moreover the principles that govern a healthy and humane society? The principles that were recognised centuries ago as men emerged from the backward, the stunted, the terrified, the clawing dark ages into the age of reason, of due process, of truth and of justice and of light?
Let us hope for our children and our children’s children’s sake that it does not take another weighty, cumbersome legal tome, and another 250 years of enlightenment, for family law to live by the principles of decent, good human beings everywhere and emerge from the dark ages of fear and stupidity and prejudice that so retarded our civilisation for such an unforgivably drawn out period of time. ch'lo vintage chlo shabby chic
Wednesday 13 May 2015
Sunday 19 April 2015
Thinking About You
Dear x & x,
Hi! It feels like a million years since I last saw you! I hope you and x are doing well. Do you ever wonder about me? Because I think about you every single day!
Remember how I said we'd see each other soon? Well, it's taking a little bit longer than I thought, but I promise we will be reunited before you know it. I know you can be patient because you're both so good at it!
At Christmas, you wanted to come home with me, and I really wished you could too! I have your presents with me, and they're feeling a bit lonely without you. I'm going to try my best to send them to you, so they can be played with and have some fun!
When you were born, I promised to never leave you, but things didn't quite work out that way. I'm so sorry for that, but I want you to know that I love you with all my heart. We will be together again soon, and until then, just remember that I'm thinking about you all the time.
Lots of love,
Daddy xx
Monday 13 April 2015
Some Important Statistics
1. 90% of homeless children are from fatherless homes
2. 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes
3. 80% of suicides are by men
4. 85% of all children who exhibit behavioural disorders come from fatherless homes
5. 85% of all youths in prison come from fatherless homes
6. 90% of the homeless are men
7. 90% of divorce applications are from women
8. Primary care is given to only 10% of men in court rulings
Source: avoiceformen.com
The statistics are not pretty, but they are eye-opening. The numbers show us that the lack of a father figure has a devastating impact on children, particularly boys.
The facts are hard to ignore: 90% of homeless children come from fatherless homes, and 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes. This is not just a coincidence. These numbers are a clear indication of how much a father’s presence in a child’s life can make a difference.
The numbers don't lie. 80% of suicides are by men, and 90% of the homeless are men. There is a clear correlation between fatherless homes and men's struggles in society. But what can we do about it?
One solution is shared parenting. If both parents have an equal amount of time with their children, it can create a more stable and nurturing environment. It also means that both parents can be actively involved in their child's life, which is especially important during the critical developmental years.
It's time to change the way society views fathers. The court system needs to provide primary care to both parents in a divorce case, not just one. The fact that primary care is only given to 10% of men in court rulings is unacceptable. This needs to change.
Fathers should be given the opportunity to be active participants in their children's lives. Children who grow up with both parents present in their lives have better outcomes in life. It's not about who is right or wrong; it's about creating a stable and nurturing environment for our children.
Let us all advocate for shared parenting and give our children the best chance at a healthy and happy life.
Monday 30 March 2015
Lost Contact
The clock ticks down. In less than two days, all communication with my children will be lost forever.
My mind races with unanswered questions. Why have my children been kept from me? Why am I being accused of these heinous crimes? The accusations are endless, ranging from domestic violence to drug abuse. I have been to court seventeen times, facing these accusations without legal representation. I have been thrown in jail for ten days, with no evidence to justify the imprisonment.
For three long years, my children have been living with their mother, with only minimal contact with me. I have continued to make my monthly payments, hoping for a chance to have a say in their upbringing. But all my efforts have been in vain.
The truth is shrouded in darkness. I am lost and confused, not knowing what to believe. Was this all part of some twisted plan? Why has this happened to me?
But one thing is certain. I will never give up. I will keep fighting, keep searching for answers. The truth will be revealed, and I will be reunited with my children. I will not rest until justice is served.
Sunday 15 March 2015
Friday 13 March 2015
Broken Promises: A Father's Agony
All night long, I stayed by her bedside, holding her hand. As dawn broke, our daughter came into this world. The moment I cradled her in my arms, I was smitten, head over heels in love. And I vowed, right then and there, that I would always be there for her, come what may. But fate had other plans, and someone else broke that promise for me. My little girl was taken away, and I was powerless to stop it.
Now, day in and day out, I carry an unspeakable pain, a weight on my heart that never lifts. I catch only brief glimpses of my children, if at all, exchanging nothing more than holiday greetings. They're out there somewhere, living their lives, but I have no idea where, with whom, or how they're doing. I can't reach out to them, can't whisper in their ears that I love them. It's an agony that never lets up.
Happy Mother's Day.
Saturday 28 February 2015
Tuesday 28 October 2014
This Will Make You Think
I'm currently knee-deep in preparations for two looming court appearances. It's a personal matter, and one that I feel extremely passionate about.
It's no secret that our society views violence by women against men in a completely different light than the reverse. As evidenced in a viral video, when a man hits a woman, good Samaritans rush to the woman's aid, as they should. But when the roles are reversed, bystanders smirk and jeer, assuming that the man must have provoked the attack. No one rushes to help him.
Shocking statistics reveal that violence against men accounts for a staggering 40% of all reported incidents of domestic violence, and that number is likely much higher due to the stigma and shame surrounding male victims. It's a pervasive attitude that will take generations to shift, much like the fight for women's liberation in the workplace. While women had to work harder to prove themselves competent, men face a similar uphill battle when it comes to domestic violence. It's time for attitudes to change.
Wednesday 1 October 2014
Never Give Up
On September 29th, a glimmer of hope shone through the bleakness of recent days. As I stepped out of my abode, the scent of fresh air enveloped me, and the promise of a new day filled me with a sense of well-being. For the first time in a long while, I was reacquainted with the beauty of each day and its boundless potential.
As I sauntered up the road, I encountered a familiar homeless man, whom I had seen many times before. Despite his repeated requests for money, I had always been unable to assist him, as I, too, was in dire straits. Nevertheless, his persistent pursuit of my help touched my heart, and I longed to extend a helping hand.
I stopped in my tracks and turned back, offering the destitute man a five-pound note. As we sat down on the pavement together, a moment of understanding and shared experience ensued. He confided in me that he was not a drug addict, but rather someone who had once lived a life similar to my own. However, he had lost everything, and his current situation was a result of that tragedy.
During our conversation, we both acknowledged the pain of being subjected to disapproving looks from passers-by. Yet, our human connection and the ability to share our experiences with each other was worth far more than any amount of money.
On that fateful day, I learned that never giving up can lead to extraordinary moments of connection and understanding.
Thursday 25 September 2014
Navigating Grief: The Loss of My Kids and Best Friend
Becoming a father was the most significant decision of my life. I grew up not knowing my own dad and haven't seen or spoken to him in over twenty-five years. My stepfather was an admirable man who raised me as his own. He did everything he could for me; he was the most selfless person I have ever known. I couldn't have asked for a better role model as a father. However, the love, respect, and admiration I felt for him could not cover the emptiness of not knowing my biological father.
I often wondered why my father didn't want to see me. Did he hate my mother or do something terrible to her? Maybe I was a mistake he wished he could forget. The truth is, I don't know, and I don't think I ever will. Whatever the reason, I always felt like I had done something wrong. Even though I had a happy childhood, I knew something was missing.
Growing up, I saw that relationships come and go, and it's rare for a couple to stay together forever. Most of my friends' parents were divorced or separated, and I didn't want my children to grow up without both parents. I knew the impact that could have, and I didn't want my kids to feel the way I did. So, I took the responsibility of parenthood very seriously. I spent my twenties in a happy relationship but didn't start a family. I knew the person I had children with had to be special.
After three years of being with Natascha, I knew she was that person. We were friends for a long time before things got serious. She was much more than my girlfriend; she was my best friend. I trusted her, and that was why I wanted her to have my children. It wasn't because she was pretty, talented, kind, or strong; it was because we had something deep, meaningful, and strong. I knew I had a friend for life, and she felt the same way. We were not rushing things, and we had something special that went beyond love.
However, eight weeks after the birth of our second child, Natascha fell out of love with me and destroyed our friendship. I am not angry with her; I am a realist, and I know falling out of love can happen. But, I am upset that she insisted we never see each other again. Becoming a parent isn't easy, and if she loved me, wouldn't she give it a little bit longer than eight weeks? Especially when our children's futures depend on it?
I still love her, and I always will. I thought I would love her for the rest of my life. I loved her not because she was gorgeous or loved me more than other girls had, but because of how I felt when I was with her. Being with her felt right, and we fit together perfectly. We used to call each other 'puzzle,' and I long for her company now. Even though she doesn't love me anymore, it doesn't stop me from loving her. I wish it would sometimes, but it doesn't.
If she doesn't want to be with me, I accept that, but I don't understand why we can't be friends. I can't force her to be with me, and I don't want to be with a woman who doesn't want to be with me.
Saturday 19 July 2014
Becoming A Freethinker And A Scientist
By Albert Einstein
Taken from: Albert Einstein's Autobiographical Notes
Open Court Publishing Company,
LaSalle and Chicago, Illinois, 1979. pp 3-5.
When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. The stomach might well be satisfied by such participation, but not man insofar as he is a thinking and feeling being.
As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted into every child by way of the traditional education-machine. Thus I came - though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents - to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment-an attitude that has never again left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections.
It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the "merely personal," from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings. Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned as a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in its pursuit. The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of our capabilities presented itself to my mind, half consciously, half unconsciously, as a supreme goal. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights they had achieved, were the friends who could not be lost. The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it.
When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. The stomach might well be satisfied by such participation, but not man insofar as he is a thinking and feeling being.
As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted into every child by way of the traditional education-machine. Thus I came - though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents - to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment-an attitude that has never again left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections.
It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the "merely personal," from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings. Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned as a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in its pursuit. The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of our capabilities presented itself to my mind, half consciously, half unconsciously, as a supreme goal. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights they had achieved, were the friends who could not be lost. The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it.
Friday 18 July 2014
Nobody Is Smarter Than You Are
"Ideology is only going to get in your way. Nobody is smarter than you are." - Terence Mckenna
Wednesday 16 July 2014
The Mainstream Media Can Be Honest. . .
...and it sounds so, so good.
Honest, brave and most importantly 100% correct. Imagine if people like this ran the world. . .
The Abolition of Work
The passage below was written way back in 1985 by the American author and anarchist Bob Black. His words seem all the more relevant today ...
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 revolution. By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, 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.
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 time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacations so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at 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 or "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 Nicaragua 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 millennia, 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, rote-work, 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 de-Stalinized 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 a 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 to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy 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.
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 labelled 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. 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 as 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 him- self 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 ancien regime wrested substantial time back from their landlords' 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 to the colonies. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than West 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 in Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientist 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. 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 signalled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology.
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. 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 25 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. What the statistics don't show is that tens of millions of people have their lifespans shortened by work -- which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their late 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.
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 argues persuasively that -- as antebellum slavery apologists insisted -- factory wage-workers in the North American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats 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 wouldn'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 flunkies 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 ensure 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 last 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 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. 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 and 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, and 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 should 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 push button 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. 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 fuelling 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 about 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 theres' 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 brother's Communitas is exemplary for illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to be gleaned form 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 Everyday 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 workers' 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 will 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.
Workers of the world... RELAX!
This essay as written by Bob Black in 1985 and is in the public domain. It may be distributed, translated or excerpted freely. It 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].
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 revolution. By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, 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.
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 time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacations so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at 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 or "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 Nicaragua 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 millennia, 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, rote-work, 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 de-Stalinized 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 a 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 to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy 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.
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 labelled 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. 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 as 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 him- self 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 ancien regime wrested substantial time back from their landlords' 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 to the colonies. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than West 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 in Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientist 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. 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 signalled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology.
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. 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 25 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. What the statistics don't show is that tens of millions of people have their lifespans shortened by work -- which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their late 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.
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 argues persuasively that -- as antebellum slavery apologists insisted -- factory wage-workers in the North American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats 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 wouldn'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 flunkies 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 ensure 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 last 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 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. 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 and 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, and 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 should 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 push button 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. 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 fuelling 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 about 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 theres' 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 brother's Communitas is exemplary for illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to be gleaned form 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 Everyday 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 workers' 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 will 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.
Workers of the world... RELAX!
This essay as written by Bob Black in 1985 and is in the public domain. It may be distributed, translated or excerpted freely. It 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].
Tuesday 15 July 2014
Insane Words Of Wisdom
An interview with a homeless man in New York City beautifully reveals the meaning of life.
(Transcript below)
(Interviewer)
What do you think the meaning of life is?
(Homeless man)
To live in the mystery and to find purpose.
And to live in the now.
Magic.
Love.
Now
What's your most adventurous memory?
This, I remember this.
This is an adventure.
This is the memory.
What advice do you have for younger generations?
What advice do I have for younger generations?
Live in the moment.
Don't get old.
Don't judge people, because you can't be free if you judge people.
Love. Now.
Create.
Inspire.
How do you define freedom?
By doing what you love.
What do you love?
This. The moment.
Love. Now.
It repeats.
What other advice do you have for us?
That you're always doing what's in your heart.
You can't get away from your heart.
Because life is a paradox.
It's a mirror of confusion.
So, love, now.
Who do you love?
I love all of you.
Monday 14 July 2014
The Happiness Paradox: Why Money Can't Buy Joy
We are a society of consumption, brainwashed from an early age to believe that the more we consume, the happier we will be. But what does this lifestyle of constant acquisition really cost us?
For many, the answer is time. We sell our time to employers who dictate what we do, all in pursuit of a lifestyle we believe will bring us happiness. We buy things we don't need in order to keep up with the Joneses, but deep down we know these things won't bring us any real joy.
Even those who love their jobs would rather work less. There's not a person yet who's lied on their deathbed wishing they'd spent more time at work. So why do we continue to prioritize the accumulation of wealth and material possessions over our own well-being?
It's time to reassess our values and ask ourselves what we truly want out of life. Is it the latest gadgets and luxury items, or is it more time with our loved ones, pursuing our passions and living in the moment?
Let's break free from the cycle of consumption and focus on what really matters. After all, at the end of the day, it's not the things we own that define us, but the experiences we have and the relationships we form.
Saturday 19 November 2011
Children in Need
It's not the Lady Gaga-clad newsreaders that irk me. It's the millionaire celebrities hounding us, the recession-ridden masses, to donate to their cause, all while they and their TV executives rake in massive salaries on our dime. I'm a compassionate person. I care about children in need, but there's something here that reeks of hypocrisy and injustice.
I watched Children in Need last night, from beginning to end. The music and dance was, for the most part, tolerably entertaining. But the brief clips of children in need were truly heart-wrenching. I can't deny that shining a light on the struggles some children in this country face brings awareness and a much-needed dose of perspective to our own problems. That aspect of the show is crucial. But the relentless appeals for donations are at best, disconcerting. The fact that they come from an organization marred by allegations of institutional child abuse is all the more disturbing.
If we, as a nation, truly want to help our Children in Need, we could raise far more by implementing a progressive charity tax. One that would see contributions made proportionally to earnings, say, 0.5% of annual salary. I'd pay about twenty-five pounds. Wogan and Cotton would each pay a couple of thousand. That seems fairer, and I'm confident the amount raised would be much higher.
The Children in Need program could still continue, dedicating even more time to awareness and, if desired, fancy dress cabaret acts. And we could all watch, free from the guilt trip of relentless pleas for donations.
Even better, why not have all Premier League footballers donate a week's salary? Then, we'd surpass the billion-pound mark.
Thursday 17 November 2011
Sepp Blatter And Twitter Chatter
Blatter's remarks about racism in football have caused a commotion globally. But what did he actually say? He declared that racism wasn't a major issue in the sport and that post-game handshakes could fix on-field racism. This sparked outrage from players, the media, and the public, leading to calls for his resignation.
However, I view the situation differently. Is racism a problem in football and society? Absolutely. But I believe that racism in daily life is far more significant than what happens on the football field. I've heard various insults on the pitch and terraces, but why is it acceptable for those to be brushed off with a handshake while racist slurs are not? By being overly sensitive to racism, are we not perpetuating the problem?
Insulting someone due to their race is not worse than doing so because of their weight, religion, or sexuality. Calling someone a "black c*nt" on the pitch doesn't automatically make someone racist. In football, insults are used to unsettle opponents, and the specific insult used may not reflect the player's views on race.
For instance, I don't think John Terry is a racist, but I do think he called Anton Ferdinand a "black c*nt". The real racists would never be so open with their declarations.
Blatter should step down for other reasons, not because of these comments. His hesitation on goal-line technology, FIFA corruption, and his re-election without opposition are more significant issues. The X-Factor generation is quick to jump on a witch hunt, and Blatter is the perfect target.
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