Abolish Work A Lazy Exposition of Philosophical Ergophobia Culled from the Writings of Nick Ford and Other Slackers We have done this because we love liberty and hate authority Vo ltairine de Cleyre Dedicated to the Undedicated Abolish Work: A Lazy Exposition of Philosophical Ergophobia Edited by Nick Ford Creative Commons @ Q) @ LBC Books 2016 Published by Aragorn Moser Layout by Leona Benton Printed at "The Compound" 1818 Carleton St. Berkeley, CA 94 703-1908 ABOLISH WORK Acknowledgements Foreword David S. D'Amato iii Introduction Nick Ford ix 1. Anti-Work 101 Preface Nick Ford 1 Should We Abolish Work? John Danaher 3 Does Work Really Work? L. Susan Brown 18 8 Hours To o Many? E. Kerr 31 On The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs David Graeber 3 9 Antiwork-A Radical Shift in How we View Jobs Brian Dean 4 7 From the Realm of Necessity to the Realm of Freedom Kevin Carson 5 6 Divesting from the System: Spotlight on Jobs MayMay 62 2. Anti-Work Commentaries Preface Nick Ford 7 3 Thoughts on Employment: "So What Do You Do?" Mr. Wilson 75 To My Potential New Employer Serena Ragia 78 Why I Don't Care About You: an open letter to my employer MayMay 82 I Quit, Because Capitalism MayMay 85 Putting Work on Ice Arlee Fox 97 Should We Have a Right to Not Work? john Danaher 104 Does Work Undermine Our Freedom? john Danaher 115 Inclined Labor GrantA. Mincy 130 Stress, Labor, & Play William Gillis 135 The Ecology of Play GrantA. Mincy 138 3.Anti-Work and Technological Unemployment Preface Nick Ford 147 Are We Heading forTe chnological Unemployment? An Argument John Danaher 149 Capitalism, Not Te chnological Unemployment, is the Problem Kevin Carson 163 The David Autor Series John Danaher • Why Haven't Robots Taken Our Jobs? The Complementarity Effect 168 • Automation and Income Inequality: understanding the polarization effect 180 • Polanyi's Paradox: Will Humans Maintain Any Advantage over Machines? 189 When Jobs Become Obsolete Mr. Wilson 198 The Nicholas Carr Responses, part 3 John Danaher 202 4. Anti-Work and Individualist Anarchism Preface Nick Ford 211 The Individualist Anarchist and Work Nick Ford 213 The Libertarian Virtue of Slack Ryan Calhoun 217 "WORK!" Sheldon Richman 222 Outlining a Story for the Anti- Work Position Nick Ford 2 29 One Your Last Day of Work various 238 Conclusion: An Anti-Work World Nick Ford 2 41 Further Readings and Resources 253 Aclmowledgments My thanks to the lifetime of support from my mother, whom I never call, text, or email enough. Extra thanks to my grandmother who told me I'd be famous someday, sorry nana, not yet. Thanks also go to my aunt for her support over the years and to my uncle who has informed my sense of seriousness and humor, but mostly humor. Friendly thanks to these friends in no particular order: Christine L,Ashley F,Jack S, Red, Kristin H, Theresa E, Marissa C, Charlie W, Ben & Dana, Lis G, and many others for giving me inspiration and support, but mostly for putting up with my sense of humor. Comradely thanks to my friends at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) who have always been very supportive of me in my writing efforts. Contributory thanks go to the wonderful contributors of this book, both living and dead. I'd especially like to thank Kevin Carson, Nathan Goodman, Grant Mincy, Brian Dean, David Graeber, Ryan Calhoun, Sheldon Richman.John Danaher, L. Susan Brown and others for allowing me to use their work. This book wouldn't have been possible without y'all! Special thanks to David S. D'Amato for giving me the web domain Abolish Work.com and also writing the foreword for this book. Many thanks to you, my friend! Egregious amounts of thanks to Little Black Cart for this opportunity. Finally, thanks to all of the "how to write an acknowl­ edgement" articles I looked up online. This impression of what I am supposed to write wouldn't have happened otherwise. Foreword David S. D'Amato (2016) To desecrate the temples ofwork is the goal of this collection. To be clear, the case against work is not one for a shorter workday, forbe tter jobs, working conditions, or benefits, but rather for the enthusiastic retrieval of a kind of autonomy and energy that remains unthinkable as long as work endures.Violently and imperiously, work steals our opportunities forse lf-creation; it forecloses any possi­ bility of Emile Armand's beautifulidea -" personal life as a work of art," whereby life is lived in favor of oneself, not as a funereal exercise in abstention. Humiliation and self-denial are at the center of the agglomeration of activities we call work; the thing can scarcely be imag­ ined without at least implied reference to these. So complete is our tacit acceptance of this fact that once these qualities are severed froma given activity, we accept that it can no longer properly be called work. All the time we hear people make statements like, "Well, I really love what I do, so I can't really even call it work."This is either the truth, which damns work, or else it represents the full obliteration of the individual as a Unique One, a kind of Stockholm Syndrome in which pathetic, traumatized individuals adulate their corporate hellholes and masters. It is, of course, much more often the latter. For the conniving sycophants of the political sphere, the work question is no question at all; work is I I I not only inevitable but desirable, not only desirable but holy. And among those afflicted with the political delusion, whether purportedly worried about coercion against the individual or social and economic justice, the salutary effects of more work-morally, psychologically, physically, etc.-are much touted. How little awareness they show of their shared religion, buried under the slogans of duty and self-denial, of twenty-first century slavery. That few address work with any searching scrutiny should not surprise us. Contemplation of this kind would require a mind quieted by leisure, allowed to think uninterrupted, not barraged with the jarring imperti­ nence of work. As Friedrich Nietzsche noted so percipi­ ently in TheGay Science, we are deeply "ashamed of keeping still; long reflection almost gives people a bad conscience." Afraid of what they might see should they open their eyes, work's prey cower and keep up the pretense of choice. Earnest employees itch to broadcast their schedules, each one more brimful than the last, proud, affected signals ofju st how busy they are. Ni­ etzsche identified this manic cult of busyness and the fe ar of missing out over one hundred and thirty years ago. Premised on what David Graeber accurately calls "a hyper-fetishism of paperwork,'' the bowels of our hellish corporate economy are simply bureaucracy forbureau­ cracy's sake, a moribund world of anxiety and alienation. Quite contrary to the supercilious assurances of capitalist apologetics, work is decidedly not finely tuned for maximum productivity and efficiency;it is a mechanism of control, as concerned with maintaining existing class stratifications and categories as it is with producing IV iPhones and Nikes. We re efficiency (whatever indeed that is) its goal, work would at least appear very different from the bloated, wasteful monstrosity of the existing corporate economy, so dependent on the very kinds of compulsion that advocates of "freetrade " purport to hate. Thus is work necessarily predicated on a disorient­ ing and Orwellian denial of reality. Wa sting away in our etiolated worlds of cubicles, fluorescent lighting, and power strips, we learn a new language-corporatese-a N ewspeak that teaches us to deny everything we know and fe el, that is, to believe that we are happy, free, and making a valuable contribution. What is "professionalism" but the insistence that we hide ourselves, that we conceal the resentment we fe el toward our enslavement and its upholders? As egoists, though, we cannot really damn these esurient pigs that we call managers, supervisors, and executives, can never fullybeg rudge their enjoyment of the spoils in this war called society. As S.E. Parker noted, "It is as natural fora wage-earner to defend his interest as it is fora wage-payer to defend his. This is the fact of the matter and only a foolwould deny it."Tak Kak remarked similarly that those who now rule the world, and who always have, are the true self-conscious egoists. In a characteristically penetrative insight, Parker observed that the fa ct of class struggle is one thing and the theory of it is another, a mere impotent religion, its tedious, lackluster rituals hardening into another idol. We are not fools, and we have no time forcon torted theories that would make claims on our lives just as do the ideologies that buttress work, government, and all other tyrannies. v The dogmatic, workerist main current of anarchism, hopelessly tied to an outmoded, dying language, amounts to a worship of work that would leave its institutions intact. Insofar as the workers own and control the factory, the factory itself is glorious, a hallowed place to which we return devotedly and eagerly each morning. But we know-and have known for some time--that this can't be right, that work is inherently oppressive. In point of fact, work may be the encounter with crushing, dehumanizing power that we know best of all. Wo rk, the reality of corporate feudalism,is immediate and tangible rather than remote and abstract, its daily impositions alienating us from ourselves and humanity in the most obvious ways.