Name: 全世界的工人...放鬆！ (Workers of the world... Relax!)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T07:00:55.000Z
Duration: 10 min 7 s
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An abridged reading of: The Abolition of Work by Bob Black

Work 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 means creating a new way of life based on play.

A collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance.

Now, 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.

The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality.

The gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life

that still distinguishes it from mere survival.

All the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work.

Some, 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.

Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution.

But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work

- 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.

Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives

in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price.

The alternative to work isn't just idleness.

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 non-work for the sake of work.

Leisure is the time spent recovering from work,

and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work

many people return from 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

But today 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.

The degradation which most workers experience on the job

is the sum of assorted indignities called "discipline".

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.

Such is "work". Play is just the opposite.

What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced. This is axiomatic.

To play involves an aristocratic disdain for results.

The player gets something out of playing. That's why they play.

The core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is).

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 the higher-ups, public or private.

Informers report regularly to the authorities and decent and disobedient are punished.

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.

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, prisons and factories came in at about the same time,

and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques.

After all, 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

and talking back is called "insubordination", just as if a worker was a naughty child.

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.

Anyone 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.

What I've said so far ought not to be controversial.

Many workers are fed up with work and 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 is inevitable and necessary.

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全世界的工人...放鬆！ (Workers of the world... Relax!)

discipline

fatigue

experience

permanent