Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Working

The Abolition of Work by Bob Black

"No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d 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 doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. 
...

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. 

Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul 
Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. 

Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists — except that I’m not kidding — I favor full unemployment. 

Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. 

But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work — and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs — they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They’ll gladly talk about anything but work itself. 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 don’t 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 I’m joking or serious. I’m joking and serious." - excerpt from Bob Black's "The Abolition of Work," found at the Anarchist Library 

(I separated the paragraphs into individual sentences to emphasize points)


As a frugal filly, who tends to go on and on about savings and money, I like to read ideas of abolishing the very things I fret over. Vandwelling, the Tiny House movement, mmlism and frugality is eliminating parts of society that we don't need in exchange for freedom. Unfortunately freedom usually means the strict control of finances and refusing to accept the consumer sedatives of corporatocracy.

This article reminded me off a speech by John Cleese, on creativity.


Somewhere out there, there is a world that you can make for yourself, with your own rules, limits, hours, in and out put. If you dedicate every moment of your time and money penny you can save to create a work environment that isn't a work environment, but one where you can be ludic in your labors.

 I guess that's what inspires me about the online webcomic, etsy shop owner, full-time blogger, vlogger, internet renaissance folks.

They worked their asses off after years of having normal jobs, lives and what not.

Through a mixture of luck, hard work and consistency they rose from having a hobby to having a career.

What have I been doing? Making ends meet, just to be slightly averagish at college, while maintaining my HEMA fancies and trying to build friendships.

I always feel like I'm not doing enough. Everyone is at college (this is a campus after all). Everyone has a crappy job they hate.

I need to rise above that. Somehow, between work, school and hobbies, I need to produce more, do better.




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