The Abolition of Work

[Bill_Zenn]

I'd be interested in what folks think about the ideas presented in this paper by Bob Black.

"No one should ever work"

Read More:
http://www.zpub.com/notes/black-work.html

[Hypnos]

There's nothing stopping someone who doesn't want to work from not working.

If you starve doing it, don't complain.

[Wilde Mutton]

Hmm... Sounds a lot like what I got out of the essay "The Soul of a Man Under Socialism" (1891) by Oscar Wilde.

[Hypnos]

Hmm... Sounds a lot like what I got out of the essay "The Soul of a Man Under Socialism" (1891) by Oscar Wilde.
Good point -- under socialism, the class-warfare of the conspiracy premise of the essay would make sense.

[Bill_Zenn]

I haven't read "The Soul of a Man Under Socialism", but I'll check it out.

I can say that I don't agree 100% with Black's essay, but certain things about it appeal to me. For one - I have experienced extreme disdain for working office jobs. I can't stand the micro-management. Having to ask to go to the bathroom is degrading and pathetic. Add to that compulsory redundant tasks, inane policies and procedures, etc., and after a short while, I'm feeling "soul-death". I wind up getting frustrated, and quit. But what are my options? Not many. So yeah, I hear you Hypnos on the "you don't have to work, but don't complain if you starve" bit. Yet this is why I feel Black's critique is important. He appears to be pointing to a viable alternative. Did you read the whole essay? He summarizes his theory thusly:

"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."

I think of it as a social critique, one that has rarely been explored, but one whose potential benefits would far exceed the efforts it might take to get there.

Being an INTP, I find it very difficult to match my skills and personality type to any particular "job" or "career" I'm aware of. Black’s theory definitely has some holes in it, but it is interesting to consider, and with some revision, might even be a viable option.

[Shai Gar]

and if you manage to not starve and prosper while not working, even better

[BHZA]

Read More:
http://www.zpub.com/notes/black-work.html

The writer of this article does ramble on a bit, make some ludicrous and unconvincing statements and fail to get to the point.
I do understand however what hew is trying to get at and I agree that currently our society is based on the principles of self-gain, self-importance and greed - exploit the 'exploitable' that is.

Of course the problems that we currently experience in society and those pointed out in this article is not going to change if our underlying principles do not change - something that most likely will not happen as some of it has been hard-coded through ages of evolution.

[kuranes]

"Why can't we play today? Why can't we blow the years away?" Syd Barrett lyrics.

I'm sure we've all thought about this issue. Most people early on decide that it's too much trouble trying to avoid the system completely, by simply ignoring it etc. So they will choose between trying to defer pleasure by either ( A. ) "working their way up the ladder" while employed, or ( B. ) starting their own business to gain some control over leisure time. Being in B. doesn't mean that you get as much leisure time as you might WISH for, but it at least has more potential to do so than many of the A. approaches.

It's been shown that positive reinforcement works better than negative reinforcement, and so that "making a game out of work" or somehow making it fun should be considered a subject related to production improvement, technically. The example the author gave of getting kids interested in making mudpies to clean latrines was a particularly BAD one, I thought; but I could grasp the concept, anyway. The person doing such match-making of "task with type of play desired" would have a rather thankless job themselves, I would think; which might make it hard to fit in to the scheme suggested here. Nevertheless, the basic idea is sound.

Why do people choose to use negative reinforcement to motivate people to work instead? As someone mentioned "because we've always done it that way" so that it is "hard coded" into our psyches.

Those who suffer through the whole thing, and come out on top, through a mixture of their effort ( usually ), their luck, and having been born with more natural talent in skills that the market wants - enjoy looking down from above and saying NOW I GET TO CRACK THE WHIP, or "call the tune", to some extent. They will usually think they got there strictly on the merits of their efforts. ( Some DID, I don't deny it. ) Their peers, looking down with them from on high now, in "the catbird seat", in the various strata, will reassure one another. "Yes, we deserve it. We have now ARRIVED." Don't bother telling some of them that they were born on third base, and so it's maybe not the "home run" they think it is, though. Why not? Because most of them still DID have to work at it. Which is true enough. They believe, therefore, that ANYONE who puts in the same amount of effort, should get similar results. You see this with children of famous people in Hollywood. They always want to reassure everyone that their parents had NOTHING to do with their success. Sure. ( No one can deny that they still had to be there at 5AM for an early shoot etc. )

It's the rare person who is in that catbird seat who tries to really look at what it's like for the people still struggling their way up. I'm sure i've been guilty of this myself. Probably the only example I can offer by way of someone who has made the opposite approach work big time is Riccardo Semler, and his company Semco, in Brazil. He inherited the company from his father, and had to figure out how he was going to put his personal stamp on it. After studying things for a while, he fired most of the middle management types, and empowered the workers so that they felt there was a level playing field, to the extent that this was possible, and gave them "a piece of the action" as incentives, including transparency regarding costs of doing business etc. Even the union liason/reps eventually had to admit that this Ricardo guy was not "the man" as traditionally portrayed. It's all spelled out in his book "Maverick", and did not take place overnight.

I would imagine that this is as close as you are going to get to "having fun" instead of working in the world, for the forseeable future. Maybe some day FAR in the future, with advanced AI robots doing hard labour, and some unimaginable system minimizing human selfish instincts, will there be a day when we can just do whatever the heck we want to without suffering the usual consequences.

But that doesn't mean that we can't occasionally WISH ( like we might think how we would spend lottery winnings if they were to come ) we could play more. Some stoic types and other "puritan ethic" babblers will try to tell you that you shouldn't even WANT to experience that much pleasure. That its . . . BAD for you . . .

THERE may be exceptions to this ( dwindling every day ) on islands where the food grows on trees in abundance, in a limited population, without much contact with the outside world. Perhaps there "manana" still rules a bit. But even there people must still have yearnings that they cannot satisfy at their whim. And once they DO discover the "wonders" of the outside world, you get what are known as "cargo cults" which are highly amusing.

[Star Cannon]

Ideas must be brough into the world, and that is called: "labor".

Feel free to change the system, Bob Black. heh heh heh...

[coffeezombie]

There are many people who do "work" just for the enjoyment with no monetary gain. I would do urban planning for free if I knew that all my needs would be satisfied. Ideally, I support the idea of an "exchange economy" where people just do what they like for society and then exchange it for the works created from what other people enjoy doing. If one removes the wage component from work somehow, it's possible that people could become *more* productive, not less. Unfortunately, we are raised to think that the purpose of work is money, and this separates us from the inherent "joy" of doing work.

I always enjoy reading webcomics and knowing that those people are doing what they do for free and for the love of art and storytelling. It saddens me that we all can't find something similar to do with such passion as these people do.

[Hypnos]

CZ: Gift economies only work when there are low transaction costs, as in GPL'd software and webcomics. This is because the cost of "selfish" use is minimized.

[coffeezombie]

Well, ideally all transaction costs would be covered by someone who enjoys performing such transaction cost for free. If a transaction cost consists of bringing transporting lumber from the mill to one's home, for instance, then the person who does such would be someone who enjoys the act of transporting. I am speaking in idealism here because there's no guarantee that all tasks will be performed in sufficient quantity enough for necessary transfer of goods to be maintained, but I don't think it's out of the question to consider that a transfer/gift economy might be able to be maintained with more productivity, not less. Of course, there may be less overall productivity, but it would be with the benefit of our labor no longer being a commodity for others to exploit. We would be doing what we want because we enjoy it, not because we have to for another person's benefit in order to survive.

[Hypnos]

If gift economies are more efficient, the free market would permit them. You already see this when transaction costs are low: barter systems to avoid state sales taxes, Free software, "creative commons" art.

The reason it doesn't work in most things is precisely what you say: without a pricing mechanism, there is no feedback for allocating resources. You can do your urban planning thing, and I can do my physics thing, and we might starve because the farmer got screwed too many times hauling his goods to market. He, BTW, doesn't give a damn about urban planning on his hundreds of acres of open land; or physics, for that matter.