A Possible World: Anti-Work

"I have seen more and more research that says people’s work isn’t adding anything. We’re not talking about teachers, police officers, nurses, or cleaners here; we’re talking mostly about people with wonderful LinkedIn profiles".

“Automation throughout history has never meant mass unemployment. We should never underestimate the power of capitalism to come up with more socially useless jobs. Theoretically, it’s possible we will all just be pretending to work.”

- Alex Gray, World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, 2019

"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...

"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 fulfil 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".

- Bob Black, The Abolition of Work

I am against work. More precisely, I am against involuntary work: wage labour. Millions of people spend a large portion of their waking hours doing their jobs: work they would never chose to do for free, but only because they get paid for doing it. They sell the one thing we all have - time - in exchange for the one thing we have been conditioned to believe we "need" - money.

Money is neither good nor bad, but we all know how powerful it can be. There are things we would do for money that we would do in exchange for nothing else, if the price were high enough. That makes it as dangerous as it is liberating. Money is opportunity. People are neither good nor bad either. Let's think about that.

If you genuinely enjoy your work (and the only true measure of enjoyment here is whether you would do it if you weren't being paid) then you are lucky, and you are in a minority. I have no criticism to level against you, and I wish you well.

But the majority of us, let's be honest, hate our jobs. We hate the monotony, the stress, and what the work we do turns us into: sycophants, drones, consumers. We all have dreams. Some of us may, but most of us never come close to living them. Why not? Why don't we live in Utopia?

The UK Department of Education's own Skills and Employment Survey indicates the intensity of work is causing increasingly unbearable stress, most of all in the sectors of the workforce society should support and value the most:

"Teachers and nurses are two professional groups that have experienced especially high levels of required work intensification. By 2017, a remarkable 92 percent of teachers strongly agreed that their job requires them to work very hard, up from 82 percent in 2012. Nine out of ten teachers, and nearly three quarters of nurses report that they often or always come home from work exhausted. Both groups are required to devote a much higher work effort than either other professional groups or the rest of the workforce."

"More than half a million workers in Britain suffer from workplace stress, according to official figures. The single largest cause is high workload, with the consequence that workers are continually having to meet tight deadlines, operate at high speeds, or just generally work intensively with few breaks."

Employment in the UK is on the rise. Between February and April 2017, 1.03 billion hours were worked in the UK, 15.4 million more hours than a year earlier. The average worker worked 32.2 hours per work in the same period. So actual work being done is on the rise too. How many of those hours were worked in happiness? How many of these workers were saying to themselves during even one of those hours, "I love my job"? How much of this "work" really needs doing, not just by humans rather than machines, but at all? These seem like facetious questions, but they are not.

I am convinced that money, and the creation of needs by the economic forces that keep us in the endless pursuit of money, has done as much harm for human beings as it has ever done good. I know there is nothing original about this idea, but what I do know is that we may at last be able to seize the opportunity to move beyond a money-based economy. Technology may finally be about to fulfil its potential, the promise of the industrial revolution: not to create more and more work, as it continues to do now, but to create a world based on leisure rather than on work. It's a world I hope I live to see.

A possible world.

"Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time."

I believe that the phenomenon of bullshit employment can provide us with a window on much deeper social problems. We need to ask ourselves, not just how did such a large proportion of our workforce find themselves laboring at tasks that they themselves consider pointless, but also why do so many people believe this state of affairs to be normal, inevitable—even desirable? More oddly still, why, despite the fact that they hold these opinions in the abstract, and even believe that it is entirely appropriate that those who labor at pointless jobs should be paid more and receive more honor and recognition than those who do something they consider to be useful, do they nonetheless find themselves depressed and miserable if they themselves end up in positions where they are being paid to do nothing, or nothing that they feel benefits others in any way? There is clearly a jumble of contradictory ideas and impulses at play here...When and how did we come to believe that creativity was supposed to be painful, or, how did we ever come up with the notion that it would be possible to sell one’s time? ... There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement. The main political reaction to our awareness that half the time we are engaged in utterly meaningless or even counterproductive activities—usually under the orders of a person we dislike—is to rankle with resentment over the fact there might be others out there who are not in the same trap. As a result, hatred, resentment, and suspicion have become the glue that holds society together. This is a disastrous state of affairs. I wish it to end.

- David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Here's a desktop wallpaper you might like, using the above David Graeber quote, and apparently approved by the man himself: