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  • THE ABOLITION OF WORK

    From the page: "it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or%u2014better still%u2014industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do... more

    Reviewed by katfrin Nov 10 2005, 08:59pm ( 295 reviews ) • deoxy.org

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  • Reviewed by xerichx07 on Nov 02, 6:20am

    How doo I get mah cazh money?

  • Rated by lotyrin on Aug 21, 4:30pm

    I like some of the puns, the idea is nice (and one I've played with myself), unfortunately it got a bit tl;dr toward the end.

  • Rated by Roy-G-Biv on Aug 19, 11:45am

    Ridiculous. What the author of this essay doesn't seem to realize is that the entire world is economically interconnected like never before. This means that we are also interdependent like never before. Even the simplest of products often is a cooperative effort by as many as six different countries. The world economy is more efficient than it was ever been, despite the fact that the poor aren't served well by the system. But if everyone stopped working, the poor would be 100 times worse off. Anarchism as an economic theory is not fully developed enough to have a solution for this dilemma. All anarchism would achieve is a drastic reduction in the efficient distribution of goods and services. The system we have now is failing spectacularly and needs to be reformed. But anarchism would be 100 times worse.

  • Reviewed by PurposefulStride on Aug 14, 8:28pm

    The author is correct, to an extent: for environments that can support relatively small groups of humans, an agrarian lifestyle actually allows less free time than that experienced by the members of hunter-gatherer societies (see, as a citation, primary accounts of the aboriginal groups in Australia). The issue is that all human civilization is based on the mass-cultivation and production of sustenance, such that giant populations of humans can live in highly engineered, relatively isolated environments. If the human-made supply lines of food directly produced by farms and ranches were to fail (or were disrupted by many people choosing not to work), our engineered habitats would collapse--resulting in starvation, conflict, cannibalism, and other population-dwindling behaviors observed when an animal population lives in an unsustainable environment (see: history of the agrarian-based society on Easter Island as its production of sustenance collapsed, and the cannibalism of other animals during food shortages (crocodiles, lions, chimpanzees)). At the present moment, billions of lives are being sustained by the agricultural-cultivation edifice that has been constructed over the course of recorded history, instead of the management provided by external interactions of animals, plants, and weather, under which humankind was controlled until recently. If large groups of people seek to reverse the foundations of a society built upon agrarian production and give more control back to the larger life cycle of the earth, there is no way to avoid massive reduction in human populations. This doesn't necessarily mean numerous premature deaths, however. Of course, I believe the reality is that humanity will continue to build upon our self-engineered foundations of civilization, until homo sapiens sapiens aborts itself through an inability to micromanage all the details that 'nature' has evolved, as a system, to tune. The fact that agrarian-based society has existed for a scant 1% of the average lifespan of mammalian species (1 million years, according to pbs.org) should be a humbling fact to those that believe 10,000 years of growth is indicative of anything other than an interesting anomaly in organic life on the planet (pbs article: The Current Mass Extinction http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/2/l_032_04.html).

  • Reviewed by Ognamus on Aug 12, 1:09am

    I'd give it a thumbs up... but the guy never really managed to say anything, and a lot of his points were outright wrong. I have a suspicious feeling that this guy has never done any sort of skilled labor before, given the fact that he states that after agriculture and industry... personal skill decreased, while everything says to the contrary. Originally, agriculture and such freed up many individuals to be able to specialize in fields of their intellectual interest, rather than having to focus on finding food. Hell, even farmers who toil in the soil don't farm all year round, animals excluded. The issue isn't work, but rather the society which utterly rapes and enslaves the workers. The average person actually earns ten percent OR LESS of their actual value to their employer. Even that n00b down at burgerking handing you a hamburger is only making about five to ten percent of the actual profit his work brings in for his employer. If things were fair to the working man, he wouldn't have to slave away just to survive.

  • Reviewed by GentleArt on Aug 08, 12:19pm

    Very well written and many compelling points made, but it really doesn't make any practical sense. Yes there are vast inefficiencies and redundancies in the world of work. The author does not present a practical solution, and misidentifies 'work' as the problem. Work is a by-product of our desires. We want something, so we take action to acquire it. There is not always incentive to make that action 'playful', but we do it anyway because we want the reward. Already work is being done. You cannot get through your life without working, so work however you like. The rest of the world isn't going to change for you. I just read the whole thing, and now I wish I'd spent it working on something.

  • Rated by suavnitebeest on Aug 02, 2:20am

    Interesting with a hint of bullshit.

  • Rated by Rraken on Jul 27, 7:41pm

    I am liking this mostly because I am severly over-worked at a tiring job and have mostly just my legs to transport my body. It's very exhaustive.