https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work
8/11/25
The thesis of this essay seems to be:
- Work is the root of all unpleasant things in the world
- Work is being forced to do anything by carrot or stick
- And the author points out that the carrot is the stick, just a little more convoluted, which I love
- The author points out that leftists and communists and libertarians and feminists alike all want us to work, they just want different people to be responsible for the work
- The author says play is a natural human expression
- The author points out pay is rules-bound games, sure - but it is also travel, conversation, sex, and more
- Author points out that the techniques used to control offices, factories, and jails are all the same playbook. They’re present in democratic and communist societies.
- At one point the author talks about how olden peasants subject too just a simple land tax where their bosses then left them alone starts to look like a better deal than the constant oppressive surveillance we live under at work.
I love this sentence:
Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.
Cicero said that “whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.”
Bringing up the hunter gatherer thing where they work ~4 hours a day and spend a lot of their life in leisure. It is counter to the previous prevailing understanding that hunter gatherer life is “short and brutal”. The author points out that this is authors from that time “autobiographing” on accident to justify their own situation. This is consistent with what I read in The Dawn of Everything.
Author calls work homicide or genocide haha. Pointing out all the workplace related deaths and occupational injuries. Like Kate’s shoulder stuff. Or my neck pain.
Work is 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.
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.
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 shouldn’t 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 don’t suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn’t 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.
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.
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. That’s why you can’t 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 hasn’t the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the last sixty years?
The author is talking about how so much of work is pointless now. The last series of quotes have been on that topic. He talks about how pointless most white collar work is.
John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labor-saving inventions ever devised haven’t saved a moment’s labor.
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.”