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 George's England In Transition
and Peter Burke's Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Also
pertinent is Daniel Bell's 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 Bell's end-of-ideology thesis signaled not the end of
social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase
unconstrained and uninformed by ideology. It was Seymour Lipset
(in Political Man), not Bell, who announced at the same time that
"the fundamental problems of the Industrial Revolution have been
solved," only a few years before the post- or meta-industrial
discontents of college students drove Lipset from UC Berkeley to
the relative (and temporary) tranquility of Harvard.
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 Smith's 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 1970's and since, the one no political tendency is
able to harness, the one identified in HEW's report Work in
America, the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. That
problem is the revolt against work. 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
twenty-five million are injured every year. And these figures are
based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a
work-related injury. Thus they don't 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, a much higher fatality rate
than for AIDS, for instance, which gets so much media attention.
This reflects the unvoiced assumption that AIDS afflicts perverts
who could control their depravity whereas coal-mining is a
sacrosanct activity beyond question. What the statistics don't show
is that tens of millions of people have heir lifespans shortened by
work -- which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the
doctors who work themselves to death in their 50's. Consider all the
other workaholics.
Even if you aren't 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.
Bad news for liberals: regulatory tinkering is useless in this
life-and-death context. The federal Occupational Safety and Health
Administration was designed to police the core part of the problem,
workplace safety. Even before Reagan and the Supreme Court
stifled it, OSHA was a farce. At previous and (by current standards)
generous Carter-era funding levels, a workplace could expect a
random visit from an OSHA inspector once every 46 years.
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, won't 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 argued persuasively that --
as antebellum slavery apologists insisted -- factory wage-workers in
the Northern American states and in Europe were worse off than
Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among
bureaucrats and businessmen 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 don't even try to crack down on most
malefactors.
What I've 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 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 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.