<nettime> Piran / Zero Work

[El Iblis Shah <eliblis@t0.or.at>]

Socialdemocrats favor full employment while zero workers favor full
unemployment.
As Bob Black wrote in "The Abolition of Work" :

"....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. I call for a collective
adventure in generalized joy and freely
interdependent exuberance. Play isn't 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. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of
the same debased coin....."
"...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 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...."


El Iblis Shah
eliblis@t0.or.at

Crypto-Immediatist Association 
(CIA)

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