[paimei01]

"Work for all !" ?? How did this become a slogan ? What is that "work for all" ? Why ? Because most people do not think more than a tree or a rock !
"Work=food and work=stuff I can get, so work is good ! Work for all is good ! And besides that, all must work and have a hard life if I have a hard life !"
So new slogan "Hard life for all ! Work for all !"
This is a slave's slogan. Too afraid or stupid to imagine another life, he wants "work" because it gets him feed. He does not care about the slave next to him that is given no work, "fuck him !" he does not care if someone needs or not what he produces.
Work is not something material. Is a tool. It's not something to aim for. Do not be afraid, you can always dig holes with a toothpick forever if you can't live without work. I won't stop you.

"Let's all be slaves and compete among us in selling our time ! We will have 2 days a week when we can be free and enjoy life ! The rest - work ! For all ! Does not matter if there is need or not, we must work ! Some other slave must buy our products, then throw them away ,then buy them again ! If that does not happens we should die, we are useless ? And in the process destroy our planet. And ourselves. No longer humans but "consumers" and "workers", each for himself.
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/ ... ticle/2962
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')nstead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but higher productivity and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.

[kpeavey]

work will set you free

[frankthetank]

Less you buy, less you own, less you eat, the less you need to work... More free time and you'll probably be healthier, happier in the end... To each his own, however...

[TWilliam]

No one should ever work.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')ork is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost all the 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 [will] want [to] act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of same debased coin.

The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for "reality," the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously—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...

{Emphasis in original}

[bodigami]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('paimei01', '(')...)
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '&')quot;When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten and the last stream poisoned, then you will realize that you cannot eat money." ~ Cree Indian proverb

[paimei01]

TWilliam, nice site. Something similar here :
http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/chapter4-2.php
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')e can get together and talk, we can get together and eat and talk, we can get together and drink and talk. We can watch a movie or a concert together and be entertained. There are many opportunities for joint consumption but few for joint creativity, or for doing things together about which we care intensely. At most we might go sailing or play sports with friends, and at least we are working together toward a common purpose, but even so we recognize it as a game, a pastime. The reason adult friendships seem so superficial is that they are superficial. The reason we can find little to do besides getting together and talking, or getting together to be entertained, is that our society's specialization has left us with little else to do. Thus the teenager's constant refrain: "There's nothing to do." He is right. As we move into adulthood, in place of play we are offered consumption, in place of joint creativity, competition, and in place of playmates, the professional colleague.

[SeaGypsy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('paimei01', 'T')William, nice site. Something similar here :
http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/chapter4-2.php
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')e can get together and talk, we can get together and eat and talk, we can get together and drink and talk. We can watch a movie or a concert together and be entertained. There are many opportunities for joint consumption but few for joint creativity, or for doing things together about which we care intensely. At most we might go sailing or play sports with friends, and at least we are working together toward a common purpose, but even so we recognize it as a game, a pastime. The reason adult friendships seem so superficial is that they are superficial. The reason we can find little to do besides getting together and talking, or getting together to be entertained, is that our society's specialization has left us with little else to do. Thus the teenager's constant refrain: "There's nothing to do." He is right. As we move into adulthood, in place of play we are offered consumption, in place of joint creativity, competition, and in place of playmates, the professional colleague.

[mos6507]

Work is a broad term. Some people actually enjoy their work. When people retire they don't know what the hell to do with themselves. God forbid what my dad will do when he retires. It gives him a reason to get up each morning, and some structure. Work doesn't have to be a 4-letter word. Post peak we're all going to have work to do just to keep the doomstead running.

[TWilliam]

Paimai thanks, I actually have that site open in another tab; I've been working slowly through that book. Screen reading of book-length texts is hard on my eyes tho'...

Mos & SG, you should read the essay that I quoted in its entirety; it addresses your objections quite thoroughly imo.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')hen 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 minimun 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, rotework, 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 tators 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. 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-govemed 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.

{Emphasis in original}

[bodigami]

TWilliam, the essay you posted is one of the best I have read in a while, thanks for the find and sharing.

[paimei01]

Mentally sane and mentally insane groups of people.

Logical and natural sharing of necessary work :
A group of sane Homo Sapiens of the 21 century on a mountain trip. In the evening someone gathers wood, someone cooks, next evening another and so on. Then all eat. Or they all go after some wood each evening, and take turns to cook, means less work for all. That is nice.

Now let's see how insane people organize themselves:
A group of mentally ill escaped from some hospital on a mountain trip : in the evening someone gathers wood, someone cooks, then they are the only ones that eat. Same thing next evening. The group is large, they can't fit all together near the pot , so they cannot all cook. They can all gather wood but there is no need.
So they being as crazy as they are say "who does not work does not eat !". No matter that there is no need for all to work, and not even that, sometimes there is no room enough. They decide "all who want food must work ! whatever , we don't care !" So some crazy people start cutting the forest to make wooden easter bunnies, some are sent to dig holes then fill them up again, some run around just being crazy, and so on.
The idea of dividing the necessary work to all, gaining lots of free time for all cannot pass trough their minds. Free time in which they can obtain other non essential stuff as they wish. They are crazy after all, hate each other, and they hate happy people with nothing to do the most. What can you ask..

If I add the money system ? The insane people get complicated start printing little green papers, play a game called "economy". They trash the mountain, playing the game, working to produce garbage, but because of the rules of the game they get more and more green papers, which they can trade for food.
All is well until some "crisis" appears in their over complicated system, and the ones doing non essential work are again left without food, someone among them decided that. Being crazy they can eat their pieces of green paper, that is an advantage.

How did we as a civilization got to fear free time ? All the inventions we made, were they not meant to free us from work ? To help us work less ? Yes they were, and the first organization - the one of the sane people was what the inventors had in mind if they were thinking of more free time for the poor workers. But no, we being crazy have chosen the second way to organize ourselves, making all the inventions useless. More and more work, trash the planet ! All must work !

[SeaGypsy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('paimei01', 'M')entally sane and mentally insane groups of people.

Logical and natural sharing of necessary work :
A group of sane Homo Sapiens of the 21 century on a mountain trip. In the evening someone gathers wood, someone cooks, next evening another and so on. Or they all go after some wood each evening, and take turns to cook, means less work for all. That is nice.

Now let's see how insane people organize themselves:
A group of mentally ill escaped from some hospital on a mountain trip : in the evening someone gathers wood, someone cooks, then they are the only ones that eat. Same thing next evening. The group is large, they can't fit all together near the pot , so they cannot all cook. They can all gather wood but there is no need.
So they being as crazy as they are say "who does not work does not eat !". No matter that there is no need for all to work, and not even that, sometimes there is no room enough. They decide "all who want food must work ! whatever , we don't care !" So some crazy people start cutting the forest to make wooden easter bunnies, some are sent to dig holes then fill them up again, some run around just being crazy, and so on.
The idea of dividing the necessary work to all, gaining lots of free time for all cannot pass trough their minds. Free time in which they can obtain other non essential stuff as they wish. They are crazy after all, what can you ask..
If I add the money system ? The insane people get complicated start printing little green papers, play a game called "economy". They trash the mountain, playing the game, working to produce garbage, but because of the rules of the game they get more green papers, which they can trade for food.
All is well until some "crisis" appears in their over complicated system, and the ones doing non essential work are again left without food. Being crazy they can eat their pieces of green paper, that is an advantage.

[Ludi]

Truly excellent post, paimei.

I think people should work as little as possible, or as much as they want to.

This should average about 4 hours per day if we aspire to the amount of leisure enjoyed by most hunter-gatherers.

[Byron100]

Highly agreed....that's the best analogy I've seen yet that explains the insanity of our modern-day economy. That posts says it all, it really does.

Whoever invented the laws of "economics" anyhow? Back in the days that MrBill used to hang out on this board, I was constantly mystified by his steadfast, unrelenting beliefs in "economic laws", as if they were physical laws of nature or something. Guess it's no different than having religious beliefs...having "faith" that these "laws" are immutable facts of nature.

I tell you what, though, I have a whole lot easier time having faith in the Big Man upstairs than I do for a bunch of silly rules concocted by cigar-smoking old men in wood-paneled meeting rooms...LOL.

[TWilliam]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', 'T')his should average about 4 hours per day if we aspire to the amount of leisure enjoyed by most hunter-gatherers.

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TWilliam', ' ')He points out that chiefs typically created various forms of 'public works' as a means of distracting the people from what would otherwise be their favored pastime when in close proximity to other, non-related tribes, namely warfare/murder (the number one cause of death in tribal societies).

[TWilliam]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', 'S')ome tribes who weren't chiefdoms worked out largely ritualistic warfare, which resulted in fewer deaths.

[ReverseEngineer]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TWilliam', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', 'S')ome tribes who weren't chiefdoms worked out largely ritualistic warfare, which resulted in fewer deaths.

[Byron100]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')nyhow, in some fashion you have to ritualize death in order to keep the population in check. That is why I favor the "Test of Survival" at Puberty. This way, only a few come out the other end to reproduce, and you don't overtax the resources.

[SeaGypsy]

There was a lot of discussion on this convolutedly on the racism thread, you'll need to dig back a few hundred posts; or RE might like to elaborate again/ update?