Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

Featured Essay The Abolition of Work by Bob Black, 1985

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil youd 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 doesnt 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 childs play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isnt 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 want to act.

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 or 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 Marxs wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists except that Im 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. Theyll 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 dont 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.

You may be wondering if Im joking or serious. Im joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesnt have to be frivolous, although frivolity isnt triviality; very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. Id like life to be a game but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.

The alternative to work isnt just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, its 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 nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is 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 for your alienation and enervation.

I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When 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 minimum 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, its 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 of 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 dont 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 dont) 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, rote-work, 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 dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions, they just didnt 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 its 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. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. 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; thats 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 Huizingas erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel these practices arent rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be played with at least as readily as anything else.

Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who arent 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 higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. 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. There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. 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, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each others control techniques. 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, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called insubordination, just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?

The demeaning system of domination Ive described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes its not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or better still industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are free is lying or stupid.

You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are youll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, theyll likely submit to hierarchy and expertise in everything. Theyre used to it.

We are so close to the world of work that we cant see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the work ethic would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labelled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed (the Calvinist cranks notwithstanding) until overthrown by industrialism but not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets.

Lets pretend for a moment that work doesnt turn people into stultified submissives. Lets pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And lets pretend that work isnt 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 fulfill 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 doesnt 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. Coal and steel dont do that. Lathes and typewriters dont do that. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, Work is for saps!

Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and as a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts him- self in the rank of slaves. His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed to regain the lost power and health. Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to St. Monday thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecration was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancien regime wrested substantial time back from their landlords work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanovs figures from villages in Czarist Russia hardly a progressive society likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.

To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of life in North America, particularly but already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return to the colonies. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than West Germans climb the Berlin Wall from the west.) The survival of the fittest version the Thomas Huxley version of Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book Mutual Aid, a Factor in Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientist whod had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled The Original Affluent Society. They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society. They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were working at all. Their labor, as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schillers definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full play to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required. He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work its rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work but we can.

The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial Europe, among them M. Dorothy Georges England in Transition and Peter Burkes Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Also pertinent is Daniel Bells essay Work and Its Discontents, the first text, I believe, to refer to the revolt against work in so many words and, had it been understood, an important correction to the complacency ordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, The End of Ideology. Neither critics nor celebrants have noticed that Bells end-of-ideology thesis signalled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology.

As Bell notes, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, for all his enthusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smiths modern epigones. As Smith observed: The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations has no occasion to exert his understanding He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized, unorganizable malaise of the 1970s and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEWs report Work in America , the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economist Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner because, in their terms, as they used to say on Star Trek, it does not compute.

If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others which they cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words. Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are killed annually in this country on the job. Over two million are disabled. Twenty to 25 million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus they dont count the half-million cases of occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases which was 1,200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die every year. What the statistics dont show is that tens of millions of people have their lifespans shortened by work which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their late 50s. Consider all the other workaholics.

Even if you arent killed or crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of auto- industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly or indirectly, to work.

Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.

State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything, more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here. Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow subway. Stories reverberate about covered-up Soviet nuclear disasters which make Times Beach and Three Mile Island look like elementary-school air-raid drills. On the other hand, deregulation, currently fashionable, wont help and will probably hurt. From a health and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days when the economy most closely approximated laissez-faire. Historians like Eugene Genovese have argues persuasively that as antebellum slavery apologists insisted factory wage-workers in the North American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious enforcement of even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill. The enforcers apparently appreciate this, since they dont even try to crack down on most malefactors.

What Ive said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are fed up with work. There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. 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 itself is inevitable and necessary.

I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. AT present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldnt make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.

I dont suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isnt worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes.

Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the tertiary sector, the service sector, is growing while the secondary sector (industry) stagnates and the primary sector (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to ensure public order. Anything is better than nothing. Thats why you cant go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasnt the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the last fifty years?

Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend is out of the question. Already, without even trying, weve virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.

Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks. I refer to housewives doing housework and child-rearing. By abolishing wage- labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor. The nuclear family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of labor imposed by modern wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been for the last century or two, it is economically rational for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork and provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called schools, primarily to keep them out of Moms hair but still under control, and incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers. If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of the nuclear family whose unpaid shadow work, as Ivan Illich says, makes possible the work-system that makes it necessary. Bound up with this no-nukes strategy is the abolition of childhood and the closing of the schools. There are more full-time students than full-time workers in this country. We need children as teachers, not students. They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because theyre better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge the generation gap.

I havent as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence should have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly theyll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps theyll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies. Perhaps. I myself am no gadget freak. I wouldnt care to live in a push button paradise. I dont want robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labor-saving inventions ever devised havent saved a moments labor. The enthusiastic technophiles Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B.F. Skinner have always been unabashed authoritarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more than sceptical about the promises of the computer mystics. They work like dogs; chances are, if they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any particularized contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, lets give them a hearing.

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 wont be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.

The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy, it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I dont want coerced students and I dont care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure.

Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy baby-sitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile profoundly appreciate the time to themselves that you free up for them, although theyd get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when theyre just fuelling up human bodies for work.

Third, other things being equal, some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed. This is probably true, to some extent, of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can. Activities that appeal to some people dont always appeal to all others, but everyone at least potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety. As the saying goes, anything once. Fourier was the master at speculating about how aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to use in post- civilized society, what he called Harmony. He thought the Emperor Nero would have turned out all right if as a child he could have indulged his taste for bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse. Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organized in Little Hordes to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding. I am not arguing for these precise examples but for the underlying principle, which I think makes perfect sense as one dimension of an overall revolutionary transformation. Bear in mind that we dont have to take todays work just as we find it and match it up with the proper people, some of whom would have to be perverse indeed.

If technology has a role in all this, it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation. To some extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morris considered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution. Art would be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as a specialized department catering to an elite audience, and its qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from which they were stolen by work. Its a sobering thought that the Grecian urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store olive oil. I doubt our everyday artifacts will fare as well in the future, if there is one. The point is that theres no such thing as progress in the world of work; if anything, its just the opposite. We shouldnt hesitate to pilfer the past for what it has to offer, the ancients lose nothing yet we are enriched.

The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps. There is, it is true, more suggestive speculation than most people suspect. Besides Fourier and Morris and even a hint, here and there, in Marx there are the writings of Kropotkin, the syndicalists Pataud and Pouget, anarcho-communists old (Berkman) and new (Bookchin). The Goodman brothers Communitas is exemplary for illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to be gleaned form the often hazy heralds of alternative/ appropriate/intermediate/convivial technology, like Schumacher and especially Illich, once you disconnect their fog machines. The situationists as represented by Vaneigems Revolution of Everyday Life and in the Situationist International Anthology are so ruthlessly lucid as to be exhilarating, even if they never did quite square the endorsement of the rule of the workers councils with the abolition of work. Better their incongruity, though, than any extant version of leftism, whose devotees look to be the last champions of work, for if there were no work there would be no workers, and without workers, who would the left have to organize?

So the abolitionists will be largely on their own. No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. The tiresome debaters problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values is coextensive with the consumption of delightful play-activity.

Life will become a game,or rather many games, but not as it is now a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play. The participants potentiate each others pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.

Workers of the world RELAX!

This essay as written by Bob Black in 1985 and is in the public domain. It may be distributed, translated or excerpted freely. It appeared in his anthology of essays, The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, published by Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend WA 98368 [ISBN 0-915179-41-5].

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The Abolition of Work Bob Black

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Abolition Of Work | Prometheism.net Part 35 | Futurist ...

NEGRENSES expressed dismay over President Rodrigo Dutertes decision to sign Executive Order (EO) 38, abolishing Negros Island Region (NIR).

Former Interior Secretary Manuel Roxas II, who spearheaded the efforts to create the region, said the development of Negros Occidental and Negros Oriental will be slower not being under one region.

In his social media accounts, Roxas said: Nanugunan gid ako nga waay madayon ang Negros Island Region. Madamo ang magabenepisyo kung ginpadayon ini. Sayang. (Im sad Negros Island Region did not continue. Many would have benefited if it pushed through. What a waste).

Negrenses will be traveling farther and spending more for services, added Roxas, who has roots in Negros Occidental as his mother Judy Araneta-Roxas is from Bago City.

READ: Negrenses upset over Duterte's order dissolving Negros region

On May 29, 2015, Dutertes predecessor, former president Benigno Aquino III, signed the Executive Order 183 creating NIR, which separated Negros Occidental from Western Visayas and Negros Oriental from Central Visayas, to accelerate social and economic development and improve the delivery of public services.

Interior Undersecretary Jesus Hinlo Jr., in a statement, said as a Negrense, he is saddened by the decision of the President.

However, he appealed to his fellow Negrenses to respect the decision.

Although we failed to convince the President to retain the NIR, we have to understand that the administration has priority programs and projects that need funds that compete with the operational existence of the NIR, Hinlo said.

However, Hinlo remained optimistic that the two Negros provinces will continue to prosper with shared tourism, businesses, and trade opportunities.

On Monday, August 7, Duterte signed EO 38, revoking the creation of NIR due to lack of funds.

The establishment of regional offices of departments and agencies in the NIR requires substantial appropriation to be fully operational, thus competing with government priority programs and projects for funding, the EO said.

With the dissolution, the provinces of Negros Occidental and Negros Oriental will now revert to Western Visayas and Negros Oriental to Central Visayas, respectively.

It also abolished the regional offices in NIR, with their personnel ordered to return to their previous units or reassigned to other offices in their respective departments or agencies.

The winding up of the operations of the NIR regional offices, as well as the final disposition of their functions, positions, personnel, assets and liabilities shall be done immediately and completed not later than 60 days from the effectivity of this order, the EO said.

The Department of the Interior and Local Government is also directed to supervise the reversion of the two provinces to its previous regions. Continued collaboration

Negros Occidental Governor Alfredo Maraon Jr. said he is slightly disappointed and dismayed, but had to accept and respect the decision of the President.

The governor said the province will continue to work and collaborate with Negros Oriental headed by Governor Roel Degamo.

Vice Governor Eugenio Jose Lacson echoed the sentiment of the governor, as he proposed to create a special body to continue the cooperation between the two provinces.

NIR is not priority for this administration as can be understood in EO 38, he said. If we step back, we may lose whatever cooperation through NIRs Regional Development Council has gained.

Third District Representative Alfredo Benitez said it is a sad day for Negros.

However, Benitez assured his fellow Negrenses that the lawmakers will try to ensure it will not have a negative consequence to Negros.

We, in Congress, will work hard (so it will have) minimal effect to the island, the solon said.

Sixth District Representative Mercedes Alvarez said the delivery of services of agencies in NIR became more efficient, and through it we were able to strengthen our linkages with all stakeholders.

However, with this development under EO 38, revoking NIR, We place our trust in the wisdom of the President even as we look for ways to improve the delivery of basic services to our people.

We must make the most of what has been achieved to date, and as we transition, I express my deep gratitude to the men and women of the different regional offices of the NIR, Alvarez said.

Capitol consultant and former governor Rafael Coscolluela, member of NIR-Technical Working Group, said he is sad and disappointed, but challenged.

We just need to keep working together as one island, with or without national government support, he said.

For the meantime, we can explore creating a Negros Development Alliance to keep our initiatives going, Coscolluela added.

Second District Board Member Salvador Escalante Jr. said the abolition of NIR only shows that the region is not a priority.

This does not mean the end of NIR. For me, this is a challenge. Probably we have not yet given enough reasons for the President to consider NIR, he said.

Still hopeful

For his part, Bacolod City Mayor Evelio Leonardia urged the Negrenses to respect the decision of the President.

However, the mayor remained hopeful that the Negrenses can still appeal the decision.

With solid and valid justifications, maybe this NIR proposition can still be given a second look by the executive branch, the mayor said.

Meanwhile, let us hope that our congressmen in the NIR territory will pursue and hasten the legislative process to put this issue back into the debating table, he added.

Vice Mayor El Cid Familiaran said the budget requirements of NIR is about P19 billion.

Maybe the passage of free tertiary education in the countrys state colleges and universities outweigh the retention of the region, he added.

Councilor Caesar Distrito said: We lost an opportunity to be known as one separate and distinct region. We will go back to letting our people travel to Iloilo again as the regional center of Region 6 (Western Visayas).

Councilor Renecito Novero said that unless it is reconsidered, we might as well respect it and promptly prepare for readjustments back to our former regional set up.

Life must go on vibrantly, with or without NIR, he said.

Councilor Wilson Gamboa Jr. said: We should not be deterred in pushing for a Negros Federal State considering that the priority of the Duterte government is to change the form of government to federal.

We will just simply, in other words, change our support and trust in pushing for a federal form of government and a separate federal state for Negros Island. The fight continues and nothing is lost yet, he said.

NIR bill

Abang Lingkod partylist Representative Stephen Paduano said he feels hopeless with the bill establishing NIR, which he filed last year.

House Bill 4532 or An act establishing the Negros Island to be known as Region 18" is pending before the House committee on local government.

Paduano assured his fellow Negrenses that they will do their best to work out appropriations for the projects and programs of the two Negros provinces.

Since its creation, the two-year old region had been operating with zero budget, with the funds being sourced from the previous regions of its two provinces. (With reports from Teresa D. Ellera)

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Officials dismayed by abolition of Negros Island Region | SunStar - Sun.Star

Finally, 72 years after the U.S. dropped the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and three days later on Nagasaki, there is hope that we will see the abolition of these most deadly weapons of mass destruction, for this year on July 7 an historic treaty banning nuclear weapons like every other weapon of mass destruction was adopted at the United Nations. Recognizing and responding to the medical and humanitarian consequences of nuclear war, the world has come together and spoken.

In drafting the treaty nations acknowledged the science that proves even a small regional nuclear war using less than percent of the global nuclear arsenals would result in the deaths of two billion people on the planet from blasts, radiation sickness, and the nuclear autumn famine that would follow.

Refusing to be held hostage by the nuclear nations any longer, 122 non-nuclear nations brought forth a bold new vision with the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This treaty sets a new norm of international behavior and responsibility and when ratified, enforces that nations never develop, test, produce, manufacture, acquire, possess, stockpile, transfer, use or threaten to use nuclear weapons. The treaty establishes humanitarian rights for those that have been victims of nuclear weapons or weapons testing including the right to live in an environment that has been cleared from the damage done by them. It notes that women and children are disproportionately harmed by radiation. The treaty opens for signature on September 20, and once 50 nations have signed and ratified, it becomes law 90 days later.

Nations who continue to possess and threaten the use of nuclear weapons will now be outside of international law and norms. The failed theory of nuclear deterrence will be shown for what it is, namely the greatest driver of the arms race with each step in deterrence simply setting the new benchmark which must be exceeded by adversary nations. Deterrence didnt work during the Cold War nor does it work with North Korea or any nation. Only when the U.S. and Russia embrace the reality that individual national security isnt possible without collective security will the rest of the world feel secure in eliminating their arsenals. Now is the time for new thinking.

The Hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bombs, have waited their entire lives for this day. Setsuko Thurlow speaking at the United Nations after the treatys adoption said, I have been waiting for this day for seven decades and I am overjoyed that it has finally arrivedthis is the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons. She concluded by saying, Nuclear weapons have always been immoral, now they are also illegal.

So let us give pause this day of remembrance and recognize the opportunity before us. Each of us has a role to play in demanding that our governments ratify this treaty. Let us begin the hard work in abolishing these weapons forever. The health and future of our children depend upon it.

Robert F. Dodge, M.D., is a practicing family physician, writes for PeaceVoice, was a citizen lobbyist to the UN in June for this treaty, and serves on the boards of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Beyond War, Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles, and Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions.

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Hope this Hiroshima Day | Robert F. Dodge - Bainbridge Island Review (subscription)

The Sun

When is the Notting Hill Carnival 2017 and could it be moved following the Grenfell Tower fire? The Sun Carnivals were a particularly strong tradition in Trinidad and celebrated the abolition of slavery and the slave trade. Having been forbidden to hold festivals ... Making them all is more than one million hours of work. About 30 million sequins, 15,000 ...

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When is the Notting Hill Carnival 2017 and could it be moved following the Grenfell Tower fire? - The Sun

Activists to form legal committee to address potential loopholes resulting from abolition of Article 308 Jordan Times The success of repealing Article 308 and the debate that occurred afterwards are a good lesson for the women's movement and they will allow us to evaluate our work and build on it for the future, Shakhsir told the gathering. Meanwhile, Regional ... and more »

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Activists to form legal committee to address potential loopholes resulting from abolition of Article 308 - Jordan Times

Posted on 04 August 2017.

August 4, 2017

Back in 2012, August 3, we published: Every year for some years now Montserrat observes Emancipation Day, August 1. It does so like many other countries in the Caribbean, but barely, on an annual basis in observance of the abolition of slavery.

Montserrats author and poet, Professor Sir Howard Fergus seemed to lament the lack of celebration in a direct and organised way.

We need to celebrate this day as our folks did, ordinary folk sang first of August come again, Hoorah for Nincum Riley, they were celebrating the literate slaves who reportedly read the emancipation edict, and they were celebrating the measure of independence and freedom that emancipation brought. We must never rest on our laurels, indeed there are not many laurels, because although legally we were emancipated in 1834 or 1838, there continued to be signs of bondage from which some of our people worked hard to liberate us. There are signs that there are certain elements of authoritarianism creeping in and being exercised, which are contrary to the spirit of liberation and emancipation, which the 1st of August suggest.

We raise this issue of Montserrat and Emancipation, the abolishing of Slavery. And we ask the question as the caption for the foregoing: Was slavery ever abolished in Montserrat?

The first Monday of August is observed each year, called for some time now Cudjoe Head Day, (celebrating a slave Cudjoe) but we seldom, many of us anyhow, know or wonder why the day is a holiday. It is sometimes the day Emancipation Day is celebrated in Montserrat, while other Caribbean islands observe August 1, but not necessarily as a holiday.

This brings to mind the questions that continue to surface regarding the St. Patricks Day celebration. As we said before there needs to be a continuing conversation about how they will celebrate or observe 250 years from 1768; and now we also recommend how they can include the conversation of Emancipation Day observation. Events falling 70 years apart.

In the Caribbean this week, several CARICOM states observed Emancipation Day and the theme and sentiments all round were similar. The call for Britain and Europe to pay reparation, with a reminder: At the time of emancipation of slaves in 1834, Britain 20 million to British planters in the Caribbean, the equivalent of some 200 billion ($315 billion) todayreparations must bear a close relationship to what was illegally or wrongly extracted and exploited from the Caribbean by the European colonialists, including the compensation paid to the slave owners at the time of the abolition of slavery.

Jamaicas PM We cannot cede one inch of emancipated Jamaica to any force that would impinge on our freedom. No community in Jamaica today, 179 years after Full Free of 1838, should be under the control of any criminals who dictate peoples movement, he said in a message to mark the occasionWe are not a people who can be kept down forever. Freedom is in our DNA. Ours is a heritage of incredible self-sacrifice, courage, resilience and hope. Today we need to reaffirm these values.

Trinidad President Anthony Carmona: Trinidad and Tobago should support the efforts of Caribbean Community (CARICOM) governments in seeking reparation for the Atlantic slave trade. Great Britain and Europe were the beneficiaries of enrichment from the enslavement of African people, the genocide of the indigenous communities and the deceptive breach of contract and trust in respect of East Indians and other Asians brought to the plantations under indenture, have a case to answer in respect of reparatory justice. Emancipation Day must therefore, be a moment of regeneration, to renew in our lives a purposefulness to lead a life of quality, of sustainable ambition, independence, personal self-worth and vision.

PM Rowley: The stories of our past should not condemn us to the turmoil of acrimony; but rather they should show us a path for achieving the positive and prosperous development of our country now and for the generations to comeWere currently writing new pages in our history. We need to ask ourselves, are we facilitating new prejudices and divisions in our society? Are we perpetuating a mind-set of entitlement claiming rights where instead we should accept personal responsibility? Are we committed to working together in the best interest of our country? Can we look past the me and my group to the bigger picture of nationhood?

Antigua PM Gaston Browne: Our emancipation is therefore ongoing, as our people continue to explore new strategies and mechanisms designed to make life and living better for all our citizens. It is the task of each one of us to think big, aim high and strive for greater productivity in our blessed state of Antigua and Barbuda.

He told citizens that over the past 182 years, we have risen from the ruin and rubble of colonialism and political subjugation to independence, economic and social transformation.

But here is a quote that grabbed us in the context of Montserrat for Emancipation Day: Therefore the celebration of Emancipation must also be seen in the broader context of liberating our societies of poor work attitudes, laziness, corruption, disrespect and violent crime.

August 4, 2017

Back in 2012, August 3, we published: Every year for some years now Montserrat observes Emancipation Day, August 1. It does so like many other countries in the Caribbean, but barely, on an annual basis in observance of the abolition of slavery.

Montserrats author and poet, Professor Sir Howard Fergus seemed to lament the lack of celebration in a direct and organised way.

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We need to celebrate this day as our folks did, ordinary folk sang first of August come again, Hoorah for Nincum Riley, they were celebrating the literate slaves who reportedly read the emancipation edict, and they were celebrating the measure of independence and freedom that emancipation brought. We must never rest on our laurels, indeed there are not many laurels, because although legally we were emancipated in 1834 or 1838, there continued to be signs of bondage from which some of our people worked hard to liberate us. There are signs that there are certain elements of authoritarianism creeping in and being exercised, which are contrary to the spirit of liberation and emancipation, which the 1st of August suggest.

We raise this issue of Montserrat and Emancipation, the abolishing of Slavery. And we ask the question as the caption for the foregoing: Was slavery ever abolished in Montserrat?

The first Monday of August is observed each year, called for some time now Cudjoe Head Day, (celebrating a slave Cudjoe) but we seldom, many of us anyhow, know or wonder why the day is a holiday. It is sometimes the day Emancipation Day is celebrated in Montserrat, while other Caribbean islands observe August 1, but not necessarily as a holiday.

This brings to mind the questions that continue to surface regarding the St. Patricks Day celebration. As we said before there needs to be a continuing conversation about how they will celebrate or observe 250 years from 1768; and now we also recommend how they can include the conversation of Emancipation Day observation. Events falling 70 years apart.

In the Caribbean this week, several CARICOM states observed Emancipation Day and the theme and sentiments all round were similar. The call for Britain and Europe to pay reparation, with a reminder: At the time of emancipation of slaves in 1834, Britain 20 million to British planters in the Caribbean, the equivalent of some 200 billion ($315 billion) todayreparations must bear a close relationship to what was illegally or wrongly extracted and exploited from the Caribbean by the European colonialists, including the compensation paid to the slave owners at the time of the abolition of slavery.

Jamaicas PM We cannot cede one inch of emancipated Jamaica to any force that would impinge on our freedom. No community in Jamaica today, 179 years after Full Free of 1838, should be under the control of any criminals who dictate peoples movement, he said in a message to mark the occasionWe are not a people who can be kept down forever. Freedom is in our DNA. Ours is a heritage of incredible self-sacrifice, courage, resilience and hope. Today we need to reaffirm these values.

Trinidad President Anthony Carmona: Trinidad and Tobago should support the efforts of Caribbean Community (CARICOM) governments in seeking reparation for the Atlantic slave trade. Great Britain and Europe were the beneficiaries of enrichment from the enslavement of African people, the genocide of the indigenous communities and the deceptive breach of contract and trust in respect of East Indians and other Asians brought to the plantations under indenture, have a case to answer in respect of reparatory justice. Emancipation Day must therefore, be a moment of regeneration, to renew in our lives a purposefulness to lead a life of quality, of sustainable ambition, independence, personal self-worth and vision.

PM Rowley: The stories of our past should not condemn us to the turmoil of acrimony; but rather they should show us a path for achieving the positive and prosperous development of our country now and for the generations to comeWere currently writing new pages in our history. We need to ask ourselves, are we facilitating new prejudices and divisions in our society? Are we perpetuating a mind-set of entitlement claiming rights where instead we should accept personal responsibility? Are we committed to working together in the best interest of our country? Can we look past the me and my group to the bigger picture of nationhood?

Antigua PM Gaston Browne: Our emancipation is therefore ongoing, as our people continue to explore new strategies and mechanisms designed to make life and living better for all our citizens. It is the task of each one of us to think big, aim high and strive for greater productivity in our blessed state of Antigua and Barbuda.

He told citizens that over the past 182 years, we have risen from the ruin and rubble of colonialism and political subjugation to independence, economic and social transformation.

But here is a quote that grabbed us in the context of Montserrat for Emancipation Day: Therefore the celebration of Emancipation must also be seen in the broader context of liberating our societies of poor work attitudes, laziness, corruption, disrespect and violent crime.

The rest is here:

Emancipation Day liberate from poor work attitudes, laziness, corruption, disrespect - Montserrat Reporter

August 6, 2017 Hiroshima Day remembrance on New Haven Green. Photo by Art Perlo.

Cities across the country and the world are stepping up their calls for abolition of nuclear weapons in commemoration of the 72nd anniversary of the horrific bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The bombings, which obliterated both cities and have had tragic and lasting effects, took place on August 6 and 9, 1945.

In New Haven, a silent vigil was held on the New Haven Green where a proclamation by Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui was read. Matsui warned against the inhumanity of nuclear weapons, saying that the hell wrought by the bomb could happen again unless nuclear weapons are abolished (full text below).

On July 7, the United Nations adopted a global Treaty to Ban Nuclear Weapons. Over 122 countries took part in negotiations and voted for this legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons. The U.S., the only country that has dropped an atomic bomb on a populace, opposes the treaty and boycotted the negotiations along with other nuclear weapons countries.

Mayor Matsui, also president of Cities for Peace, which includes 7,124 municipalities in 162 countries, greeted the U.N. decision, saying that Reliance on nuclear weapons is not only useless for solving current challenges of international security, but will also endanger the survival of the entire human species. The entire world community, therefore, needs to cooperate and work together to ensure that the new treaty will become a fully effective legal instrument to achieve nuclear abolition.

One week earlier, the U.S. Conference of Mayors had unanimously adopted a resolution welcoming the U.N. negotiations and calling on our government to engage in intense diplomatic efforts with Russia, China, North Korea and other nuclear-armed states and their allies, and to work with Russia to dramatically reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles. (www.usmayors.org)

In addition, the resolution welcomed declarations adopted by five municipalities, including New Haven, urging Congress to cut military spending and redirect funding to meet human and environmental needs.

The final resolve by the U.S. Conference of Mayors was to call on the president and Congress to reverse federal spending priorities and to redirect funds currently allocated to nuclear weapons and unwarranted military spending to restore full funding for Community Block Development Grants and the Environmental Protection Agency, to create jobs by rebuilding our nations crumbling infrastructure, and to ensure basic human services for all, including education, environmental protection, food assistance, housing and health care.

Participants at the vigil in New Haven, initiated by the City of New Haven Peace Commission and the Greater New Haven Peace Council, signed letters to U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, calling on them to support a shift in funding from military to human needs in the current budget fight.

The full text of Mayor Matsuis Hiroshima Day Declaration follows:

Friends, 72 years ago today, on August 6, at 8:15 a.m., absolute evil was unleashed in the sky over Hiroshima. Lets imagine for a moment what happened under that roiling mushroom cloud. Pikathe penetrating flash, extreme radiation and heat. Donthe earth-shattering roar and blast. As the blackness lifts, the scenes emerging into view reveal countless scattered corpses charred beyond recognition even as man or woman. Stepping between the corpses, badly burned, nearly naked figures with blackened faces, singed hair, and tattered, dangling skin wander through spreading flames, looking for water. The rivers in front of you are filled with bodies; the riverbanks so crowded with burnt, half-naked victims you have no place to step. This is truly hell. Under that mushroom cloud, the absolutely evil atomic bomb brought gruesome death to vast numbers of innocent civilians and left those it didnt kill with deep physical and emotional scars, including the aftereffects of radiation and endless health fears. Giving rise to social discrimination and prejudice, it devastated even the lives of those who managed to survive.

This hell is not a thing of the past. As long as nuclear weapons exist and policymakers threaten their use, their horror could leap into our present at any moment. You could find yourself suffering their cruelty.

This is why I ask everyone to listen to the voices of the hibakusha. A man who was 15 at the time says, When I recall the friends and acquaintances I saw dying in those scenes of hell, I can barely endure the pain. Then, appealing to us all, he asks, To know the blessing of being alive, to treat everyone with compassion, love and respectare these not steps to world peace?

Another hibakusha who was 17 says, I ask the leaders of the nuclear-armed states to prevent the destruction of this planet by abandoning nuclear deterrence and abolishing immediately all atomic and hydrogen bombs. Then they must work wholeheartedly to preserve our irreplaceable Earth for future generations.

Friends, this appeal to conscience and this demand that policymakers respond conscientiously are deeply rooted in the hibakusha experience. Lets all make their appeal and demand our own, spread them throughout the world, and pass them on to the next generation.

Policymakers, I ask you especially to respect your differences and make good-faith efforts to overcome them. To this end, it is vital that you deepen your awareness of the inhumanity of nuclear weapons, consider the perspectives of other countries, and recognize your duty to build a world where we all thrive together.

Civil society fully understands that nuclear weapons are useless for national security. The dangers involved in controlling nuclear materials are widely understood. Today, a single bomb can wield thousands of times the destructive power of the bombs dropped 72 years ago. Any use of such weapons would plunge the entire world into hell, the user as well as the enemy. Humankind must never commit such an act. Thus, we can accurately say that possessing nuclear weapons means nothing more than spending enormous sums of money to endanger all humanity.

Peace Memorial Park is now drawing over 1.7 million visitors a year from around the world, but I want even more visitors to see the realities of the bombing and listen to survivor testimony. I want them to understand what happened under the mushroom cloud, take to heart the survivors desire to eliminate nuclear weapons and broaden the circle of empathy to the entire world. In particular, I want more youthful visitors expanding the circle of friendship as ambassadors for nuclear abolition. I assure you that Hiroshima will continue to bring people together for these purposes and inspire them to take action.

Mayors for Peace, led by Hiroshima, now comprises over 7,400 city members around the world. We work within civil society to create an environment that helps policymakers move beyond national borders to act in good faith and conscience for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

In July, when 122 United Nations members, not including the nuclear-weapon and nuclear-umbrella states, adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, they demonstrated their unequivocal determination to achieve abolition. Given this development, the governments of all countries must now strive to advance further toward a nuclear-weapon-free world.

The Japanese Constitution states, We, the Japanese people, pledge our national honor to accomplish these high ideals and purposes with all our resources. Therefore, I call especially on the Japanese government to manifest the pacifism in our constitution by doing everything in its power to bridge the gap between the nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear-weapon states, thereby facilitating the ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. I further demand more compassionate government assistance to the hibakusha, whose average age is now over 81, and to the many others also suffering mentally and physically from the effects of radiation, along with expansion of the black rain areas.

We offer heartfelt prayers for the repose of the atomic bomb victims and pledge to work with the people of the world to do all in our power to bring lasting peace and free ourselves from the absolute evil that is nuclear weapons.

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Cities mark Hiroshima Day with urgent calls to abolish nuclear weapons - People's World

TheRecord.com

Time for Trudeau to get back to work TheRecord.com ... introduction of medicare, Canada Assistance Plan and Canada Pension Plan; unification of the armed forces; patriation of the Constitution; adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms; rewriting of the archaic Divorce Act; abolition of capital ... and more »

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Time for Trudeau to get back to work - TheRecord.com

This weekend, 697 delegates from 49 states are congregating in Chicago for the largest-ever convention of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Socialism is having a moment. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, nearly snagged the Democratic Party nomination last year and is the countrys most popular active politician; socialist Jeremy Corbyn came close to controlling the British government; and young people identify with the ideology at record rates. There is a new and unbridled optimism about socialisms potential.

In the last year alone, DSAs membership has ballooned from 8,000 to 25,000 dues-paying members. DSA boasts that it is now the biggest socialist organization in America since World War II.

Tempering this bubbling excitement around DSA are polls showing that socialism remains as unpopular with the general public as ever, the ongoing weakening of the American labor movement, and, of course, Republicans lock on the federal government. DSA may have a robust and growing social media presence, but its still just a tiny blip in the larger universe of left-leaning advocacy groups. (The National Education Association, for instance, has 3 million dues-paying members.)

After Trumps election, I thought the left would be on the defensive for a few years the way it was when Nixon was in power and when Reagan and George W. Bush were in power, said Michael Kazin, editor of the leftist magazine Dissent and a professor at Georgetown who is himself a DSA member. Some of that has happened. But its also been true that theres a renewed interest in the radical left a fresh possibility that DSA might be able, and will certainly try, to take advantage of.

Like most socialist organizations, DSA believes in the abolition of capitalism in favor of an economy run either by the workers or the state though the exact specifics of abolishing capitalism are fiercely debated by socialists.

The academic debates about socialisms meaning are huge and arcane and rife with disagreements, but what all definitions have in common is either the elimination of the market or its strict containment, said Frances Fox Piven, a scholar of the left at the City University of New York and a former DSA board member.

In practice, that means DSA believes in ending the private ownership of a wide range of industries whose products are viewed as necessities, which they say should not be left to those seeking to turn a profit. According to DSAs current mission statement, the government should ensure all citizens receive adequate food, housing, health care, child care, and education. DSA also believes that the government should democratize private businesses i.e., force owners to give workers control over them to the greatest extent possible.

But DSA members also say that overthrowing capitalism must include the eradication of hierarchical systems that lie beyond the market as well. As a result, DSA supports the missions of Black Lives Matter, gay and lesbian rights, and environmentalism as integral parts of this broader anti-capitalist program.

Socialism is about democratizing the family to get rid of patriarchal relations; democratizing the political sphere to get genuine participatory democracy; democratizing the schools by challenging the hierarchical relationship between the teachers of the school and the students of the school, said Jared Abbott, a member of DSAs national steering committee. Socialism is the democratization of all areas of life, including but not limited to the economy.

DSA does have a history of members who were more likely to consider themselves New Deal Democrats, more interested in creating a robust welfare state than in turning the means of production over to the workers. But David Duhalde, DSAs deputy director, says the overwhelming majority of its current members are committed to socialisms enactment through the outright abolition of capitalism.

DSA traces its ancestry back to the apex of American socialism Eugene Debss Socialist Party of America, which in 1912 received 6 percent of the popular vote in the presidential election.

The energy behind the Socialist Party would be depleted by FDRs New Deal, which incorporated many of its reformist demands, and the unpopularity of Soviet Russia in the US. By the late 1930s, most socialists basically became liberal Democrats, Kazin said. The party was never really a major or even minor factor after that, and then it imploded even further in the early 1970s.

The catalyst for that second implosion was the Vietnam War, which split the vestiges of the Socialist Party. Their rift mirrored that of the Democratic Party, which at the 1968 convention saw divisions between the civil rights movement and antiwar students who opposed Lyndon Johnsons war spill out into the open.

The history here is complicated and bitterly contested, but the upshot is that one faction of socialists in particular, supporters of Max Shachtman and Bayard Rustin opposed unilateral withdrawal of the American military from Vietnam. These leaders saw themselves as spokespeople for the American labor movement, which backed Lyndon Johnson and was generally supportive of the war. (In 1965, AFL-CIO president George Meany declared that the unions would support the Vietnam War "no matter what the academic do-gooders may say. Predominantly black unions were more skeptical of the war, Kazin notes.)

If you were a socialist and working with labor, it was difficult to oppose the Vietnam War, Kazin says.

Meanwhile, a separate faction of socialists associated with Michael Harrington wanted an end to the war and for the American left to align much more closely with the growing radical movements of the 1960s.

Harrington and Irving Howe, another socialist intellectual, realized they had to connect socialism to feminism and black liberation, and were skeptical of the labor movements support for the Vietnam War, Kazin said. They also didnt read Marx as quite the prophet that socialists of Debs's generation had.

In 1973, Harrington made the break official and formed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. Nine years after its forming, DSOC fused with the New American Movement which contained much of the (also diminished from the 1960s) remnants of the campus left and became DSA.

Still, DSA was little more than a group of people who got together and had a convention, Kazin said. I hadnt heard people talking much about it until Bernies campaign.

No.

DSAs ancestor, the Socialist Party of America, really was a political party that ran candidates like Debs and controlled the mayoralty of Milwaukee for years. But the idea that its a political party today is perhaps the biggest misconception about the DSA.

Unlike the Green Party or the Libertarian Party or even the new Moderate Whig Party, the DSA is not registered with the Federal Election Commission as a political party.

Instead, DSA is a 501(c)4 nonprofit. That frees it up to avoid cumbersome paperwork required of those organizations, and focus on what it calls its No. 1 objective building a broad-based anti-capitalist movement for democratic socialism.

Id say that our chapters spend less than 10 percent of their time on electoral politics, said DSAs Abbott. For 22 months of the two-year election cycle, we are almost entirely focused on non-electoral work.

Insofar as DSA has done electoral work, it has traditionally been to pull the Democratic Partys politicians toward its vision of social democracy. That was the original vision of its founder, the theorist and writer Michael Harrington, who saw the Democratic Party as the only realistic vehicle for achieving political change.

"If [Jimmy] Carter wins, he will do some horrendous things I guarantee it. ... [But] the conditions of a Carter victory are the conditions for working-class militancy, and the militancy of minority groups, and the militancy of women, and the militancy of the democratic reform movement, Harrington said in a 1976 speech urging socialists to support the Democratic candidate over Republican Gerald Ford.

Instead, the DSA has served as a signaling device for some Democrats including black politicians from major American cities to distinguish themselves from the partys centrist wing. Brooklyns Rep. Major Owens (D-NY) and David Dinkins, who served as mayor of New York City in the early 1990s, were both DSA members. Current politicians affiliated with DSA include Khalid Kamau, a city council person in South Fulton, Georgia; Renitta Shannon, a Georgia state senator; and Ron Dellums, until recently Oaklands mayor. These candidates technically run either as independents or on the Green Party or Democratic Party ballot line.

Sanderss campaign and DSAs growth have some young socialists dreaming about a powerful third party, separate from Democrats but for now, these dreams remain just that. There are some people in DSA who think we should be a new political party, but the majority of membership believes its too early, Abbott said. Maybe if we keep up our fast growth, that will change. But for now, most think its better for us to focus on being flexible in order to advance our social movement work.

Once you get out of your head the idea that DSA is trying to operate like Jill Stein, its purpose is easier to understand.

But what does a movement for democratic socialism actually mean?

There are roughly three main planks. The first is building up local chapters to wage pressure campaigns that align with DSAs mission pushing officials to adopt single-payer health care, for instance. In Washington, DC, a DSA chapter has launched an education campaign to teach low-income tenants about the rights they have. The Los Angeles DSA has lobbied officials to adopt sanctuary city legislation.

Its direct protest actions, public events, door knocking, phone banking all of the above, Abbott said.

The second is to build up a power center for democratic socialism that can influence elections, often but not exclusively in Democratic primaries, even if DSA is not fielding its own candidates.

The labor movement in the 1930s and the black freedom movement in the 1960s is what made the Democratic Party a vehicle for social democracy, Piven said. If were going to have a new period of reformism, it will surely occur through the transformation of the Democratic Party; hopefully, DSA will be one of the instruments of that transformation.

The last major function of DSA is supporting union organizers, as in Nissan employees current feud with management. As Piven notes, these strategies are aimed at influencing the political system even if they dont take the form of a traditional American political party.

"I dont think working to strengthen labor organizing or creating new unions is a path divergent from electoral politics; in some ways, it's the necessary precondition for successful electoral politics," Piven said, citing the link between union strength and Democratic vote share. "Movement politics ultimately succeed through their interplay with electoral politics."

Some of the economic policies favored by left-wing Democrats are also supported by DSA, and that can make the two occasionally difficult to disentangle.

For instance, DSA is currently planning a Summer for Progress campaign centered on advocating for a platform that calls for a single-payer health care system (which about 60 percent of House Democrats already support); free college tuition (which House Democrats also support); and new Wall Street taxes and criminal justice reforms (which ... yes, dozens of congressional Democrats already support).

Further confusing matters is Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist but supports a policy program that would essentially leave capitalism intact. His candidacy spurred a dramatic growth in DSA membership, and DSA backed him, but the Vermont senator has also referred to himself a New Deal Democrat who views Lyndon Johnson and Franklin D. Roosevelt rather than Karl Marx or American socialist Norman Thomas as his true ideological predecessors.

Many DSA members would go further than any of these New Deal Democrats. One useful distinction is that while progressive Democrats and DSA both believe in welfare state programs as a way to improve capitalism, DSA sees them as just one step toward completely severing the link between human needs and market scarcity.

Examples may help clarify the difference. While both DSA and some left-wing Democrats agree that the government should provide universal health insurance, DSA ultimately wants to nationalize hospitals, providers, and the rest of the health care system as well. While both will work toward higher taxes on Wall Street, DSA ultimately wants to nationalize the entire financial sector. While left-wing Democrats believe in criminal justice reform, some DSA members are calling for the outright abolition of the police and prison systems. While both DSA and left-wing Democrats support reforms to get money out of politics, some in DSA see capitalism as fundamentally incompatible with genuinely free and fair elections. In practice, however, the two wind up ultimately taking the same positions.

"There's a continuum between [Chuck] Schumer and [Nancy] Pelosi and liberal Democrats, who don't want to go further than the expansion of the welfare state, and the center of DSA, who would want everything in a Bernie Sanders program as a starting point and then think about what to do next," Kazin said.

If you spend enough time on Twitter, youll invariably notice that many DSA members have added a small red rose next to their avatars:

The rose traces its roots back to a speech in the early 1900s given by Rose Schneiderman, a socialist and womens rights organizer whom FDR would later appoint to the Labor Advisory Board.

"What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with, Schneiderman said.

The call for bread and roses became famous in 1912, when more than 20,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, went on strike to protest wage cuts that accompanied a shorter workweek. It comes from the rising of working people, and in this case, the rise of working women who were horrifically abused and underpaid, Piven said. I think its the perfect symbol.

Today, DSAs red rose symbolizes just what it did in 1912: the belief that workers deserve not just the necessities to sustain life but the luxuries that will permit them to enjoy it too.

As DSA has grown in stature, some members of the commentariat have argued that the organization is little different from the so-called Bernie Bro stereotype of a Sanders supporter that emerged from his presidential campaign young, white, male, and mad as hell about politics.

Consider the Bernie Bro (Wellus actuallius), an aggressive subgenus of Sen. Bernie Sanders supporters, the Huffington Post said. Herds of Bernie Bros ... have staked out a far more hospitable environment: the Democratic Socialists of America.

In our interview, Abbott didnt deny that the organization has a diversity problem on its hands.

"DSA is still a heavily white and heavily cis male organization, as have been most socialist groups in the history of the United States. That has not really improved, he said.

Abbott said he couldnt provide exact statistics on DSAs racial or gender diversity until after the convention. The percentage of people of color has increased from a relatively low percentage to a somewhat higher percentage, he said.

Still, he noted that DSA has nine full-time staff members and six of them are women. Of those nine, he said, four are people of color. He also said that half of the elected national committee would be composed of women.

Additionally, four of the 10 delegates to DSAs national convention are women, and one out of five is a person of color, according to Duhalde, DSAs deputy director.

Were taking proactive steps to deal with it and do the kinds of work we need to to be strong partners and work in solidarity with all underrepresented and oppressed communities, Abbott said. But we have real challenges here.

Since the 2016 election, scores of profiles in national news outlets have charted DSAs growth. Reuters chronicled the surge in DSA chapters around the country. The Washington Post talked about DSAs war on liberalism, and the Huffington Post did much of the same.

With 25,000 dues-paying members, DSAs recent growth is certainly real. In Florida, DSA now has 10 chapters after only having a handful; in Texas, it has 13. Chapters have emerged this year in unlikely states like Montana, Kansas, and Idaho.

Still, its hard to know how much that growth should really impress us compared with historical trends. Kazin, for instance, notes that Students for a Democratic Society, a now-defunct left-wing campus movement in the 1960s, had upward of 100,000 members at its height.

The growth looks even smaller compared with the uptick in interest in other leftwing groups since Trumps election. UltraViolet, a group that advocates womens reproductive rights, currently has 300,000 members (though they dont pay dues). The group Indivisible didnt exist until after the 2016 election. It now has 3,800 local chapters to DSAs 177. (Though, again, Indivisible members dont have to pay dues.)

DSA members tend to point to the uptick of popularity for those who support their mission the socialist magazine Jacobin, which has about 1 million pageviews a month; the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House, which earns $72,000 a month from tens of thousands of paying subscribers; and politicians like Sanders and Corbyn.

And historians note that socialist movements can influence political parties, even if their electoral clout is diminished. Why socialists have mattered in American history is not because they had power themselves but because they were committed, intelligent activists in other movements, Kazin said. Thats where I would look for DSAs influence: In those movements, are people talking about democratic socialism?

Particularly in online circles, DSA is affiliated with a group of socialists collectively known as the dirtbag left. The dirtbag left is itself most associated with the Chapo Trap House podcast, which delights in sharpening the dividing line between socialists and liberals by ridiculing prominent politicians and journalists associated with the center left.

After the election, for instance, Chapo co-host Felix Biederman mockingly compared Hillary Clinton to Dale Earnhardt, joking that both had crashed because they couldnt turn left. (Earnhardt was killed in a 2001 racing accident.)

Rudeness can be extremely politically useful. There are arguments to be made over who constitutes a valid target, but when crude obscenity is directed at figures of power, their prestige can be tarnished, even in the eyes of the most reverent of subjects, wrote Amber A'Lee Frost, a co-host of Chapo Trap House, in an essay for Current Affairs. Caricature is designed to exaggerate, and therefore make more noticeable, peoples central defining qualities, and can thus be illuminating even at its most indelicate.

DSA has certainly been a beneficiary of the Dirtbag Left and its iconoclastic rage; Chapo Trap House frequently directs its guests to support the socialist organization, and its founders are in Chicago for the DSA convention. Mother Jones called the podcast a gateway drug for democratic socialism, and DSAs leaders recognize thats correct. Even if DSA wont adopt Chapos insult-humor shtick in its official platform, its hard to imagine that some of its beliefs wont seep in some way into the organization through new membership.

Chapos dirtbag politics have alarmed other left-leaning writers. In an essay for the New Republic, Jeet Heer warned against what he called its dominance politics as counterproductive to building a coalition with center-left Democrats.

But in an interview last year, Chapo Trap House co-host Matt Christman countered that Donald Trump had captured the transgressive thrill of defying the cultural expectations of the elite, and that the left would be wise to reclaim it. Incisive put-down humor, he suggested, isnt just useful for amassing a podcast following; it could also be helpful to an ascendant left-wing politics.

The gonad element of politics is now totally owned by the right. All the left has now is charts and data. You cannot motivate people with charts and data and lecturing, Christman said. If were going to win, we cannot allow [right-wing provocateur] Milo Yiannopoulos and all of these carnival-barking Nazis to have all of the fucking fun.

See more here:

9 questions about the Democratic Socialists of America you were too ... - Vox

If you've ever taken the time to read the 1833 act to abolish slavery in the British colonies, you will understand what I mean. The schemers who conceived it were well and truly wicked. The full title of the document is An Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the Industry of the manumitted Slaves; and for compensating the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves. The 19th-century language of the entire act is obscure.

Translating the document into modern English, plain and simple, should be one of the first projects of the newly established Centre for Reparations Research at the University of the West Indies, directed by Professor Verene Shepherd. According to a press release issued last week on the eve of Emancipation Day, the centre "will lead the implementation of CARICOM's Reparatory Justice Programme, which broadly seeks to foster public awareness around the lasting and adverse consequences of European invasion of indigenous peoples' lands, African enslavement and colonialism in the Caribbean; and offer practical solutions towards halting and reversing the legacies of such acts".

The translated Abolition Act should be required reading for every single Jamaican politician. They need to fully understand the fundamental injustice on which 'emancipated' Jamaica was founded. Perhaps, enlightened politicians might be able to see that many of their colleagues are just as wicked as our colonial masters. They do not care about the well-being of the people they are supposed to serve. All they are interested in is using political office to make themselves richer and richer. As Kabaka Pyramid sarcastically puts it, "Well done, Mr Politician." And that includes the women.

The perverse act confirmed in its very title that 'Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves' were to be compensated for loss of service. The amount paid out to enslavers in the Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape was PS20 million. According to an article in the UK Independent newspaper, published on February 24, 2013, "This figure represented a staggering 40 per cent of the Treasury's annual spending budget and, in today's terms, calculated as wage values, equates to around PS16.5b."

The act carefully documents how the British Government intended to fund the payout and administer the compensation scheme. Approximately two-thirds of the 66 sections of the act focus on the complicated financial arrangements. This seems to be the primary concern of the act. As I understand it, the Treasury was going to borrow money and issue annuities to cover the cost of the compensation. And an army of commissioners was going to be employed to oversee operations.

Not one red cent of compensation was to be paid to the enslaved. No money, no land, not a cow, not a sheep, not a goat, nothing! Enslaved Jamaicans were going to be freed with nothing but their two long hands. Fortunately, they had their heads and could figure out how to survive. Since they had no land, they farmed on hillsides. Dem tun hand mek fashion.

What is even worse is that supposedly emancipated Jamaicans were going to be kept in slavery for another six years, under the guise of an 'Apprenticeship' scam. That would mean another 27 million of additional compensation to enslavers. The act declared that emancipated people needed to learn how to be free! So they had to be taught during a period of apprenticeship in which they would continue to work for nothing. What a piece of wickedness!

Now these were people who had relentlessly rebelled against slavery. Freedom was in their DNA. It couldn't be taught by the evil people who had enslaved them. Historians agree that one of the forces that propelled Emancipation was the 1831 Christmas Rebellion led by Sam Sharpe. Enslaved Jamaicans knew there was talk of Emancipation in Britain and rightly feared that they would be kept in slavery after its nominal abolition.

Sharpe seems to have assumed that slavery had already been abolished and led a peaceful general strike to protest working conditions. It soon got violent when plantation owners realised that the sugar crop was not going to be harvested. The striking workers burned the cane. The colonial government brought in the military to end the rebellion. More than 200 protesters were killed and 14 whites. In addition, the government tried, convicted and hanged more than 300 protesters.

Just before Sam Sharpe was executed in 1832, he made the triumphant declaration, "I would rather die among yonder gallows, than live in slavery." He was only 27 years old. Now this is the kind of hero that the unconscionable drafters of the Abolition Act were going to teach how to be free! The act was also concerned with "promoting the Industry of the manumitted Slaves". This was not industry to benefit emancipated Jamaicans. It was to prolong plantation slavery.

The act recognised that "it is also necessary, for the Preservation of Peace throughout the said Colonies, that proper Regulations should be framed and established for the Maintenance of Order and good Discipline amongst the said apprenticed Labourers, and for ensuring the punctual Discharge of the Services due by them to their respective Employers, and for the Prevention and Punishment of Indolence ...".

The Apprenticeship scheme had to be cut short by two years. Emancipated Jamaicans were not prepared to work out their soul case for nothing. Not then, not now!

- Carolyn Cooper is a consultant on culture and development. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and karokupa@gmail.com.

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Carolyn Cooper | Those wicked white people! - Jamaica Gleaner