Søren in Norwegen

Na DAS ist doch mal ein feiner Titel.

So geklaut aus Bob Blacks Artikel „The Abolition of Work„.

Ich bin kein Vertreter der Schule des Anarcho-Primitivismus. Allein schon, weil

aus kulturgeschichtlicher Perspektive […] leicht zu belegen [ist,] […] [dass] die größten Kreativitätsschübe […] fast immer in Städten statt[fanden] […].

Verglichen mit „den groszen Geistern“ kann Bob Black weder gut (oder wirklich ueberzeugend) argumentieren, noch wunderschøn mit Sprache umgehen. Und auch seine gewaehlten Beispiele hinken sehr, auch wenn er darauf besteht, dass dies nicht wørtlich genommen werden sollte.

Dennoch stimme ich so sehr mit seinen Thesen ueberein, dass ich nicht umhin komme, umfangreich zu zitieren. Wie immer sind alle Hervorhebungen von mir, soweit nicht anders angegeben.

Weil’s so schøn ist zu lesen nochmal dies:

No one should ever work.

denn …

Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now […]

Oder etwas mehr im Kontext:

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

Er wagt es dies wieder und wieder zu sagen … Chapeau!

Auch so, wie ich es auch schon seit Jahren ausdruecke:

Conservatives support right-to-work laws. […] I support the right to be lazy.

Die Wurzel des Problems liegt (wie so oft) in der Ideologie … ungeachtet welcher Ideologie.

[…] all the ideologues […] advocate work. […] Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival […]. 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. […]

Denn …

[…] none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.

Aber …

The alternative to work isn’t just idleness. […] [I am not] promoting the managed time-disciplined safety-valve called „leisure“ […]Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is the time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work.

[…]

The only thing „free“ about so-called free time is that it doesn’t cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don’t do that. Lathes and typewriters don’t do that. But workers do.

Wichtig! Das hier Geschriebene møge sich jeder mal kurz durch den Kopf gehen lassen.

Im Artikel folgt dann unter welcher Definition von Arbeit der Titel dieses Beitrages zu verstehen ist:

My minimum definition of work is *forced* *labor* [sic!], that is, compulsory production. […] Work is production enforced by economic or political means […]. But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it’s done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it.

Im Groszen und Ganzen denke ich, dass meine Leserschaft da mit geht. Im Artikel von Bob Black steht dann weiter:

[…] most workers experience on the job […] [a] sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as „discipline.“ [sic!] […] surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching -in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible.

Irgendwie finde ich diesen Vergleich gruselig. Das ist naemlich einfach viel zu nahe an der Realitaet. Oder vermutlich doch eher an der Illusion die ich vom „selbstbestimmten Arbeiten“ habe. Aber auch dies drueckt Black viel direkter aus:

Work makes a mockery of freedom. […]

A worker is a par-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called „insubordination,“ [sic!] just as if a worker is a naughty child […].

[This] demeaning system of domination […] rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it’s not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or — better still — industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are „free“ is lying or stupid.

Dann folgert er meiner Meinung nach vøllig zu Recht:

Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.

Kurzer Einschub: wie das bzgl. der „education“ einzuordnen ist, ist zu lang um dies hier zu erørtern. Es gibt mittlerweile deutlich bessere Konzepte als die „klassische Schule“ (vor allem hier in Skandinavien). Ich denke aber, dass meine Leserschaft wiederum einig mit mir ist, dass der grøszte Teil der (nicht nur) øffentlichen Schulen eigtl. nur zur Aufbewahrung der Kinder und zum Eintrichtern von (meist wenig nuetzlichem) Wissen ist.
Einschub zu Ende.

Weiter zur „creeping cretinization all around us“ und warum „Arbeit“ den grøszten Anteil daran traegt.

People who are regimented all their lives, […] are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families *they* [sic!] start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else.

Eigentlich sind dies doch alles sehr einfache, durchaus klare und naheliegende Ansichten auf ein Thema, welches uns tagein, tagaus immerzu beschaeftigt. Warum kommen wir da eigtl. nicht selber drauf?

We are so close to the world of work that we can’t see what it does to us.

Deswegen schlaegt Black vor, andere Gesellschaften bzw. die Historie dazu zu betrachten. Dabei ist nicht zu vergessen, wie er „Arbeit“ weiter oben definiert.

Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. […]

Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century […] [had a] religious devotion to „St. Monday“ — thus establishing a *de* *facto* [six!] five-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecration — [That] was the despair of the earliest factory owners. […]

[…] a fourth of the French peasants‘ calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov’s figures from villages in Czarist Russia […] likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants‘ days devoted to repose.

Und dann zurueck der Weg in die Gegenwart:

Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited *muzhiks* [sic!] would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.

Und selbst so ein beinharter Kapitalist (und „Erfinder“ der „unsichtbaren Hand des Marktes„) wie …

[…] Adam Smith in *The* *Wealth* *of* *Nations* [sic!], 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 [Anm.: da war sie wieder! Diese verbitterte Frau mit ihren menschenfressenden „Ideen“.) or the Chicago economists [Anm.: und da sind auch ihre Schueler] or any of Smith’s modern epigones.

Eine der „duesteren“ Seite der Arbeit ist:

Work is hazardous to your health […]. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide.

Dann laeszt er sich ein bisschen zu Krankheiten aus, die sich direkt/indirekt auf Arbeit zurueckfuehren lassen um dann diesen kurzen Exkurs dazu abzuschliesen mit:

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.

Zurueck zum eigentlichen Thema.

Many workers are fed up with work.

Aber hilft das? Offensichtlich nicht:

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.

Was kønnte man dagegen tun?

I disagree. [Anm.: bzgl. „work itself is inevitable and necessary.“] 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. […] 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 […] 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. […] 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.

Dazu dann ein paar unterstuetzende Argumente.

Twenty years ago, […] [it was] estimated that just five percent of the work then being done […] would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing, and shelter. […] most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. […]

Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. […]

Dies fuehrt natuerlich zu einem in diesem Weblog bereits mehrfach erwaehntem Resultat:

Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That’s why you can’t go home just because you finish early. They want your *time* [sic!], enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn’t the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the past fifty years?

Aber weiter mit den unterstuetzenden Argumenten:

Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant — and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. […] Already, without even trying, we’ve virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.

Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks around. I refer to *housewives* [sic!] doing housework and child-rearing. By abolishing wage-labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor.

Und dann ist natuerlich der technische Fortschritt nicht zu vergessen:

[…] the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence would have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly they’ll find other projects to amuse themselves with.

Und dass der Text schon etwas aelter ist erkennt man bspw. an diesem (aus heutiger Sicht) amuesante Kommentar … tihihi:

Perhaps they’ll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems […].

Es ist genug fuer heute. Ich møchte mit dem folgenden, auszerst positiv in die Zukunft schauenden Zitat diesen Artikel beenden:

The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps.

No one should ever work. Workers of the world… *relax*!