The Abolition of Work | Marxism | Occupational Safety And …

sier on every employee. Talking backis called nsubordination,just as if aworker is a naughty child, and it notonly gets you red, it disqualies youfor unemployment compensation. Wi-thout necessarily endorsing it for themeither, it is noteworthy that children athome and in school receive much the sa-me treatment, justied in their case bytheir supposed immaturity. What doesthis say about their parents and tea-chers who work?The demeaning system of dominati-on Ive described rules over half the wa-king hours of a majority of women andthe vast majority of men for decades,for most of their lifespans. For certainpurposes its not too misleading to callour system democracy or capitalism or better still industrialism, but its re-al names are factory fascism and oceoligarchy. Anybody who says these peo-ple are frees lying or stupid. You arewhat you do. If you do boring, stupidmonotonous work, chances are youllend up boring, stupid and monotonous.Work is a much better explanation forthe creeping cretinization all around usthan even such signicant moronizingmechanisms as television and educati-on. People who are regimented all theirlives, handed o to work from schooland bracketed by the family in the be-ginning and the nursing home at theend, are habituated to heirarchy andpsychologically enslaved. Their aptitu-de for autonomy is so atrophied thattheir fear of freedom is among theirfew rationally grounded phobias. Theirobedience training at work carries overinto the families

they

start, thus repro-ducing the system in more ways thanone, and into politics, culture and ever-ything else. Once you drain the vitalityfrom people at work, theyll likely sub-mit to heirarchy and expertise in ever-ything. Theyre used to it.We are so close to the world of workthat we cant see what it does to us.We have to rely on outside observersfrom other times or other cultures toappreciate the extremity and the pa-thology of our present position. Therewas a time in our own past when thework ethic would have been incom-prehensible, and perhaps Weber was onto something when he tied its appea-rance to a religion, Calvinism, which ifit emerged today instead of four cen-turies ago would immediately and ap-propriately be labeled a cult. Be thatas it may, we have only to draw uponthe wisdom of antiquity to put work inperspective. The ancients saw work forwhat it is, and their view prevailed, theCalvinist cranks notwithstanding, untiloverthrown by industrialism but notbefore receiving the endorsement of itsprophets.Lets pretend for a moment thatwork doesnt turn people into stulti-ed submissives. Lets pretend, in de-ance of any plausible psychology andthe ideology of its boosters, that it hasno eect on the formation of charac-ter. And lets pretend that work isntas boring and tiring and humiliatingas we all know it really is. Even then,work would

still

make a mockery ofall humanistic and democratic aspira-tions, just because it usurps so muchof our time. Socrates said that manu-al laborers make bad friends and badcitizens because they have no time tofulll the responsibilities of friendshipand citizenship. He was right. Becauseof work, no matter what we do we keeplooking at out watches. The only thingfreeabout so-called free time is that itdoesnt cost the boss anything. Free ti-me is mostly devoted to getting rea-dy for work, going to work, returningfrom work, and recovering from work.Free time is a euphemism for the pecu-liar way labor as a factor of productionnot only transports itself at its own ex-pense to and from the workplace butassumes primary responsibility for itsown maintenance and repair. Coal andsteel dont do that. Lathes and typewri-ters dont do that. But workers do. Nowonder Edward G. Robinson in one ofhis gangster movies exclaimed, Workis for saps!Both Plato and Xenophon attribu-te to Socrates and obviously share withhim an awareness of the destructive ef-fects of work on the worker as a citizenand a human being. Herodotus identi-ed contempt for work as an attributeof the classical Greeks at the zenith oftheir culture. To take only one Romanexample, Cicero said that whoever gi-ves his labor for money sells himself andputs himself in the rank of slaves.Hiscandor is now rare, but contemporaryprimitive societies which we are wontto look down upon have provided spo-kesmen who have enlightened Westernanthropologists. The Kapauku of WestIrian, according to Posposil, have a con-ception of balance in life and accor-dingly work only every other day, theday of rest designed to regain the lostpower and health.Our ancestors, evenas late as the eighteenth century whenthey were far along the path to our pre-sent predicament, at least were awareof what we have forgotten, the undersi-de of industrialization. Their religiousdevotion to SSt. Monday- thus esta-blishing a

de facto

ve-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecration was the despair of the earliest fac-tory owners. They took a long time insubmitting to the tyranny of the bell,predecessor of the time clock. In fact itwas necessary for a generation or two toreplace adult males with women accu-stomed to obedience and children whocould be molded to t industrial needs.Even the exploited peasants of the

an-cient regime

wrested substantial timeback from their landlords work. Accor-ding to Lafargue, a fourth of the Frenchpeasants calendar was devoted to Sun-days and holidays, and Chayanovs -gures from villages in Czarist Russia hardly a progressive society likewiseshow a fourth or fth of peasants daysdevoted to repose. Controlling for pro-ductivity, we are obviously far behindthese backward societies. The exploited

muzhiks

would wonder why any of usare working at all. So should we.To grasp the full enormity of our de-terioration, however, consider the ear-liest condition of humanity, without go-vernment or property, when we wande-red as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmi-sed that life was then nasty, brutish andshort. Others assume that life was adesperate unremitting struggle for sub-sistence, a war waged against a harshNature with death and disaster awai-ting the unlucky or anyone who was un-equal to the challenge of the struggle forexistence. Actually, that was all a pro-3

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The Abolition of Work | Marxism | Occupational Safety And ...