More Time for Leisure

In praise of the national dividend

In their paper “Major Douglas’ Proposals for a National Dividend: A Logical Successor to the Wage” Brian Burkitt and Frances Hutchinson defend Major C.H. Douglas’ idea of a national dividend.

Conventional economies are based on the exponential growth in production from technological change, which with labour-saving inevitably leads to unemployment. To counter this, Douglas proposed placing “every citizen on a level economic playing-field” with a proposal “derived from the view that all social production originates in a common cultural inheritance of past invention, with present individual effort playing a secondary role”.

Why Work Is Turning Into a Nightmare

How would you like to live in an economy where robots do everything that can be predictably programmed in advance, and almost all profits go to the robots' owners?

Meanwhile, human beings do the work that's unpredictable - odd jobs, on-call projects, fetching and fixing, driving and delivering, tiny tasks needed at any and all hours - and patch together barely enough to live on.

Brace yourself.
This is the economy we're now barreling toward.

The decline and fall of work
The obligation to produce alienates
the passion for creation. Productive
labour is part and parcel of the
technology of law and order.
The Working day grows shorter as
the empire of conditioning expands.

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.

What spark of humanity, of possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at six every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures, spun dry by statistical controls, and tossed out at the end of the day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals of departure for the hell of weekdays and the purgatory paradise of weekends, where the crowd communes in a brutish weariness?

The Psychopathology of Work

Depersonalization and alienation from our deepest desires is implanted during childhood via school, church, movies, and TV, and soon reaches the point where an individual's desire is not only a net of contradictions, but also a commodity like all the others.

Work, now? Never,
never. I'm on strike.
—Arthur Rimbaud

"True life" always seems to be just a bit beyond what a weekly paycheck and credit card can afford, and is thus indefinitely postponed. And each postponement contributes to the reproduction of a social system that practically everyone who is not a multimillionaire or a masochist has come to loathe.

That is the problem facing us all: How to break the pattern of work — of week-to-week slavery, that habit of habits, that addiction of addictions; how to detach ourselves from the grip of Self-Defeating Illusions For Sale, Inc., a.k.a, the corporate consumer State.

Especially ingrained is that pattern of working for someone else: making someone else's "goods", producing the wealth that someone else enjoys, thinking someone else's thoughts (sometimes actually believing them one's own), and even dreaming someone else's dreams — in short, living someone else's life, for one's own life, and one's own dream of life, have long since been lost in the shuffle.

The Work 'Ethic'

Reconsidering work and 'leisure time'

Did you ever wonder why your parents act so disoriented when it comes to 'leisure' activities? Why they start one little hobby, and either fail to follow through with it or become pathologically obsessed with it... even though it doesn't seem to have anything to do with their lives?

Maybe they seek to lose themselves in gardening or following the exploits of some basketball team. Maybe your father buys all sorts of fancy tools (the kind of tools many men his age have), but only uses them for a few days before setting them aside — and then buys a lot of skiing equipment the next month.

Or perhaps they just spend their time trying figure out how to pay off the debt they owe for that wide screen television they spend the rest of their time watching.

And — have they ever been honest with you about their jobs? Do they enjoy them? Is their work the most fulfilling thing they could be doing, are they able to achieve every goal they always wanted to? Do they feel heroic or proud every day as they return home — or are they exhausted? Do they turn that wide screen television on as soon as they come in the door? Do they have the energy to do anything else?

Did you ever wonder if there might be a better way for them, for you

The Cult of the Job
cult of job 01 700

On The Leisure Track

I am job-free. Out of the rat race. Unemployed, as they say, but definitely by choice. My self-esteem is intact, thank you, I'm not "in transition", and I have no intention of getting a job again.

That's right – I'm on the leisure track permanently. I don't have a cushy nine-to-five job with profit-sharing, "security", stock options, health insurance, advancement opportunities, or free parking.

Beyond Capitalism

Classified top secret report of the last Bilderberg meeting

My dear contarians, my dear contrarians!

This is a special edition, very special that I propose today. I would like you to understand the real ways of the world, the world in which we live but more likely for very long time.

I reproduce in lines below the exclusive report of the last meeting of Bilderberg, this meeting which is held every year and which attend personalities of very high level of all the countries of the world. It is in this kind of inner circle set that, for decades, shapes the world of tomorrow.

The Abolition of Work

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world.

  • Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work.
  • In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play. In other words, a *ludic* conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art.

  • There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance.
  • Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us [will] want to act.
  • Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of the same debased coin.
Revolt Against Work    Source
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Karl Marx once said that the working class is the only class capable of self-emancipation. But how are workers supposed to free themselves when they are divided by unionization, occupation, income, sex and race? Where will the force, let alone the desire for freedom come from if industrial and agricultural workers shrink to a small percentage of the total workforce? And how can rebellious intellectuals be included in the worker's struggle for freedom? Marx's ideas about the political party, the importance of industrial workers, and the unity of communist militants were meant to answer these questions from the viewpoint that human identity and community are the products of human work.

Zero-Hour Day, Zero-Day Workweek    Source

Are the executives of oil steel aluminum plastic military industrial capitalism to be looked up to as Great Men and Women to be held as fitting examples of enlightened human beings? Or are they miserable failures of greed who betray the Earth and the promise of America? Is who invented napalm to be honored? Is who invented nerve gas to be honored? Slavery did not end. Almost eneryone enslaved to earthdeath accomplish jobs.

A new Emancipation Proclamation is needed. Liberation from an 8 hour day 5 day workweek to a 5 hour day 1 day workweek getting paid the same amount.

Aphorisms Against Work    Source
aaw zombies

Suggestions to the Slacker Generation on Commencing a Post-Workerist Revolution

Humans are congenitally allergic to work - they don't want to work whenever they have a chance not to work.

The sacrosanct notion of work is the cause of most of humanity's woes. Never trust the priests of work because they've poisoned their minds with it. For example, the quantity of economically necessary work declines, yet politicians and economists tell us that the only way to end unemployment is with more useless work. Why couldn't more people do much less?