Anti-Work

Reading Bob Herbert's column today in the New York Times got me thinking about anti-work philosophy (especially my hero Rick Roderick - whose philosophy only exists in video and audio form and away from the Internet - so I cannot post them in totality).

But, here are two of my favorite excerpts from some anti-work essays on the internet.. since it is Tuesday I guess.

The most common answer, that "people need to earn a living," is obviously tautologous. It is simply an undisguised value judgment which does not even attempt to address the issue of why people "need" to earn a living in a world of increasing material abundance. Despite its total philosophical vacuity, the ubiquitous statement is usually delivered with a granite-like sense of finality, as if it were the sort of truth that is simply unimpeachable, to be challenged only by fools and madmen. But why should people need to earn a living?

http://naturyl.humanists.net/synthesis/freedom.html

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The other essay I enjoy is a bit longer, and although the last section is a bit nonsensical, I especially like this part:

The consumer must be conditioned from birth to hand over the "excess" wage in exchange for the excesses of capitalist production. In the early twentieth century the new requirement of capitalism became the total cultural control of workers outside the workplace (when their role changed to that of consumers), through the new advertising industry, as well as in it. Advertising is perhaps the most obvious mode of spectacular ideology. The spectacle holds workers in thrall, teaching them in what is called their "free" time that their desires can be satisfied through consumption. The upkeep of the capitalist economic system thus finally encroaches on all our waking hours.

Half a century after the development of advertising and consumerist ideology, the situationists held that the "society of the spectacle" (commodities, art-as-commodity, the mass media, the entertainment industry) alienates its "spectators," who are condemned to do nothing more than watch themselves, experiencing satisfaction (but not really) only through the mediation of the commodity. The spectacle steals every experience and sells it back to us, but only symbolically, so that we are never satisfied: via this mechanism we support the machine of endless consumption over and over.

Play is thought of as the opposite of "work." Yet under the existing order play is officially allowed only children and the workers of play-as-spectacle, which is not play. It is reified through the professionalization of select people as "athletes," "artists" or "entertainers." These physical, creative activities are reserved for "professionals," who must sell the product of their "play" as spectacle. As observed by the Bureau of Control (pamphleteers from Houston, Texas), in the realm of "art" behavior is tolerated that would not be in the "real world." Play in the "working world" is diverted, channeled off as "art," contained as decadent behavior in the mainstream of life. Children are punished in school for playing except at scheduled break time, as training for the radical split between what one is ordered to do and what one might like to do.

http://cultronix.eserver.org/martz/

Too philosophical? I hope not. Back to work!