From: smirzo@example.com   
      
   I don't know to what group this should go.  Given the current low volume   
   of this group and the USENET as a whole, perhaps this is not grave   
   crime.  I also think a lot of people here would enjoy discussing the   
   subject.   
      
                            The Mythology of Work   
                                  2018-09-03   
      
   What if nobody worked? Sweatshops would empty out and assembly lines   
   would grind to a halt, at least the ones producing things no one would   
   make voluntarily. Telemarketing would cease. Despicable individuals who   
   only hold sway over others because of wealth and title would have to   
   learn better social skills. Traffic jams would come to an end; so would   
   oil spills. Paper money and job applications would be used as fire   
   starter as people reverted to barter and sharing. Grass and flowers   
   would grow from the cracks in the sidewalk, eventually making way for   
   fruit trees.   
      
   And we would all starve to death. But we’re not exactly subsisting on   
   paperwork and performance evaluations, are we? Most of the things we   
   make and do for money are patently irrelevant to our survival—and to   
   what gives life meaning, besides.   
      
   This text is a selection from Work, our 376-page analysis of   
   contemporary capitalism. It is also available as a pamphlet.   
      
   That depends on what you mean by “work.” Think about how many people   
   enjoy gardening, fishing, carpentry, cooking, and even computer   
   programming just for their own sake. What if that kind of activity could   
   provide for all our needs?   
      
   For hundreds of years, people have claimed that technological progress   
   would soon liberate humanity from the need to work. Today we have   
   capabilities our ancestors couldn’t have imagined, but those predictions   
   still haven’t come true. In the US we actually work longer hours than we   
   did a couple generations ago—the poor in order to survive, the rich in   
   order to compete. Others desperately seek employment, hardly enjoying   
   the comfortable leisure all this progress should provide. Despite the   
   talk of recession and the need for austerity measures, corporations are   
   reporting record earnings, the wealthiest are wealthier than ever, and   
   tremendous quantities of goods are produced just to be thrown   
   away. There’s plenty of wealth, but it’s not being used to liberate   
   humanity.   
      
   What kind of system simultaneously produces abundance and prevents us   
   from making the most of it? The defenders of the free market argue that   
   there’s no other option—and so long as our society is organized this   
   way, there isn’t.   
      
   Yet once upon a time, before time cards and power lunches, everything   
   got done without work. The natural world that provided for our needs   
   hadn’t yet been carved up and privatized. Knowledge and skills weren’t   
   the exclusive domains of licensed experts, held hostage by expensive   
   institutions; time wasn’t divided into productive work and consumptive   
   leisure. We know this because work was invented only a few thousand   
   years ago, but human beings have been around for hundreds of thousands   
   of years. We’re told that life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and   
   short” back then—but that narrative comes to us from the ones who   
   stamped out that way of life, not the ones who practiced it.   
      
   This isn’t to say we should go back to the way things used to be, or   
   that we could—only that things don’t have to be the way they are right   
   now. If our distant ancestors could see us today, they’d probably be   
   excited about some of our inventions and horrified by others, but they’d   
   surely be shocked by how we apply them. We built this world with our   
   labor, and without certain obstacles we could surely build a better   
   one. That wouldn’t mean abandoning everything we’ve learned. It would   
   just mean abandoning everything we’ve learned doesn’t work.   
      
   One can hardly deny that work is productive. Just a couple thousand   
   years of it have dramatically transformed the surface of the earth.   
      
   But what exactly does it produce? Disposable chopsticks by the billion;   
   laptops and cell phones that are obsolete within a couple years. Miles   
   of waste dumps and tons upon tons of chlorofluorocarbons. Factories that   
   will rust as soon as labor is cheaper elsewhere. Dumpsters full of   
   overstock, while a billion suffer malnutrition; medical treatments only   
   the wealthy can afford; novels and philosophies and art movements most   
   of us just don’t have time for in a society that subordinates desires to   
   profit motives and needs to property rights.   
      
   And where do the resources for all this production come from? What   
   happens to the ecosystems and communities that are pillaged and   
   exploited? If work is productive, it’s even more destructive.   
      
   Work doesn’t produce goods out of thin air; it’s not a conjuring   
   act. Rather, it takes raw materials from the biosphere—a common treasury   
   shared by all living things—and transforms them into products animated   
   by the logic of market. For those who see the world in terms of balance   
   sheets, this is an improvement, but the rest of us shouldn’t take their   
   word for it.   
      
   Capitalists and socialists have always taken it for granted that work   
   produces value. Workers have to consider a different possibility—that   
   working uses up value. That’s why the forests and polar ice caps are   
   being consumed alongside the hours of our lives: the aches in our bodies   
   when we come home from work parallel the damage taking place on a global   
   scale.   
      
   What should we be producing, if not all this stuff? Well, how about   
   happiness itself? Can we imagine a society in which the primary goal of   
   our activity was to make the most of life, to explore its mysteries,   
   rather than to amass wealth or outflank competition? We would still make   
   material goods in such a society, of course, but not in order to compete   
   for profit. Festivals, feasts, philosophy, romance, creative pursuits,   
   child-rearing, friendship, adventure—can we picture these as the center   
   of life, rather than packed into our spare time?   
      
   Today things are the other way around—our conception of happiness is   
   constructed as a means to stimulate production. Small wonder products   
   are crowding us out of the world.   
      
   Work doesn’t simply create wealth where there was only poverty   
   before. On the contrary, so long as it enriches some at others’ expense,   
   work creates poverty, too, in direct proportion to profit.   
      
   Poverty is not an objective condition, but a relationship produced by   
   unequal distribution of resources. There’s no such thing as poverty in   
   societies in which people share everything. There may be scarcity, but   
   no one is subjected to the indignity of having to go without while   
   others have more than they know what to do with. As profit is   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)