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Tuesday, February 27, 2024

SCI-FI, UTOPIAS, AND SOCIALISM

We have described a World-in-which-we’d-love-to-live… The way we see it, this is a world where creative labour is the ultimate satisfaction and the source of happiness for people. Everything else is built on the foundation of this principle. People are happy there when they manage to actualise this main principle. Friendship, love and work are the three main pillars that support the happiness of such humankind. We could not imagine anything better than that, and why would we want to?
Boris Strugatsky

01 September 2021

What kind of society would appeal to a socialist? What kind of life would we actually enjoy once the logic of capitalism driving the world of today releases its grip not only on the resources of Earth – material or human – but also on the minds of its inhabitants? I believe that in order to promote the socialist cause we need to have a clearer understanding of answers to these questions. There is a caveat there, of course: what is appealing to people today may not appeal to people in the future.

Dystopias

I have to confess, I am a sucker for sci-fi. And when it comes to sci-fi, I am omnivorous, reading and watching anything I can get my hands on. There is probably a hidden yearning for a better future in this passion, as I am particularly interested in the fiction about Earth-like worlds, especially those that are more developed than ours. But I have recently noticed an interesting feature of the vast majority of the sci-fi visions of the future: they are overwhelmingly dark, presenting rather a failed world than a successfully developed civilisation. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, Evgeny Zamyatin’s We, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or his post-World War II fascist America in The Man in the High Castle… Cyberpunk is a good example of a genre that produced enormous quantities of dark sci-fi works, and post-apocalyptic fiction writers have been prolific on this topic as well. Seems like the future people foresee in fiction as the most likely is not very bright at all. Beginnings like ‘after an ecological catastrophe wipes out most of humanity…’ or ‘It’s the future, and the planet is a dusty, radioactive wasteland…’ sound like a cliché in a film about the future. And technological breakthroughs gone horribly wrong are a really popular theme, with many examples brilliantly shown in the Black Mirror series.

Of course, there is a sub-genre that focuses specifically on the stories about ‘perfect’ worlds – Utopias. Ironically, when searching for utopias on Google, it is quite hard to find any – the search engine stubbornly shows ‘best dystopias’, and even articles on utopias often discuss mostly dystopian books and films. My first several ‘utopian books’ searches returned the Vulture’s 100 Great Works of Dystopian Fiction, Tales About A World Gone Wrong and a BBC article Science Fiction: How Not To Build A Future Society. Maybe a good drama needs suffering, and this is why tragedies have always enjoyed more popularity than comedies? Whatever the reason, the number of utopian worlds seems to be surprisingly small. Do any of them offer appealing visions of a socialist or a socialist-like world?

There are some notable examples, such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. These and some other novels describe interesting social innovations, which are often very close to socialist ideals. For instance, the utopian world in Woman on the Edge of Time promotes such values as common ownership and (gender) equality; the inhabitants of the Walden Two community are free to choose their vocation and have no police force that could enforce their will through violence; and on the moon of Anarres in The Dispossessed, everyone is free to start their own productive enterprise, where there is no incentive to grow production or compete since there is no market, so all production is aimed solely to fulfil everyday needs.

While many ideas described in these and other books are worth discussing and thinking about, some details are questionable or even disturbing. For example, Skinner’s Walden community has a set of guardians who are somehow wiser than the ‘common people’. Skinner himself believed in the need for elitist rule: ‘We must delegate control of the population as a whole to specialists – to police, priests, teachers, therapies…’ (John Staddon, The New Behaviorism, 2014, p.125). The utopian agrarian community of Piercy’s Mattapoisett (Woman on the Edge of Time) shows a governmentally decentralised egalitarian society, mostly based on feminist and anarchist ideals. The world of Mattapoisett at times comes through as a fantasy, a feverish dream in the mind of a person in a mental institution under the influence of heavy tranquillisers, propelled by the feelings of powerlessness and grief. We are never told in the book if the visions the protagonist had are true or not. Would I want to live in Mattapoisett? Probably not. It seems quite focussed on offering the alternative to the patriarchal and exploitative capitalist ways of life, but more in the way of renouncing something negative rather than by offering something viable and attractive in its own right.

Importantly, it is still not clear on how this set of communities (or the one on Anarres in The Dispossessed) is supposed to work: both rely on self-governance and the structures of meeting and discussion, which might function well on the level of a town but certainly not a planet. Ursula Le Guin is perhaps more realistic in her novel, because Anarres in The Dispossessed is not shown as a Garden of Eden. It is a barren and dirty world, where life is decidedly hard for its inhabitants. Do any of them offer appealing visions of a socialist or a socialist-like world? They also have problems with their PDC (Production and Distribution Coordination), which exhibits some signs of government. In any case, it is probably not the best example to illustrate the advantages of a socialist society. But I guess my biggest problem with most utopias is that they simply don’t appeal to me; I wouldn’t want to live there myself.

I understand, writing utopias is hard. Unlike dystopias, it is not as simple as to show some horrors of destruction or societal decay (which could be easily borrowed from a daily tabloid). New ideas have to be created and, on top of this, put together in a coherent system that would look realistic. When thinking them up, authors would undoubtedly lean on their own life experiences, environment and cultural upbringing. For many of them, the best vision of a progressive society not corrupted by consumerism or greed would be inspired by communities in the countryside, or perhaps by stereotypes of preindustrial self-sufficient settlements. Many utopias share these elements of ‘environmental wisdom’ or even a pre-technological biblical paradise, for example, in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, citizens aim for a balance between themselves and nature. Callenbach himself said of his book, in relation to Americans: ‘It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now… [But] we’d better get ready. We need to know where we’d like to go.’

‘Noon Universe’

There are a couple of authors – two brothers – who borrowed their ideas from a different cultural environment: that of the post-war Soviet Union, and about how their utopian world came out different as a result.

The Strugatsky brothers, Boris and Arkady, wrote their books collaboratively. They needed to pass Soviet censorship in order to get published, so they came up with an ‘approved’ setting for many of their books, called ‘Noon Universe’, in which communism has triumphed globally. Of course, they both loathed the constraints of state capitalism and totalitarianism on the lives of Soviet people, so their utopias went much further, painting a world free of money or coercion – a world where they would themselves want to live and work. Most of those books were written in the 60s and 70s, but to this day a more compelling, believable fictional world of the future where people are happy and lead dynamic lives has yet to be written – at least in the Russian science-fiction literature.

The Noon Universe, named after Noon: 22nd Century, chronologically the first novel from the series, also features in the following books: Hard to Be a God, The Inhabited Island, Space Mowgli, Beetle in the Anthill, and The Time Wanderers, among others. To give you an idea of some features of the future social organisation Arkady and Boris Strugatsky presented in their Noon Universe, without giving away any spoilers, here is a brief overview:unequivocal victory of socialism: no monetary system, all production for common goodabsence of institutionalised coercion, such as police or militaryadvanced technological progress, ubiquitous robotic assistanceeveryone is engaged in a profession that inspires them

This fairly common set of features then goes on, now with a somewhat different focus:the system of education is given utmost importance: students spend at least as much time or more at school than at home; they have very small class sizes and have personal Mentors that lead them on the path of learning about both the world and themselves; they must reach a high level of scientific knowledge, societal responsibility and creativity (arts and humanities)ethics/morality is given a very important role, on a par with technological competencea new kind of human (intellectually and ethically superior to most modern humans; importantly, much more socially responsible) is raised, who deeply cares about the planet and all its life forms, and is thus willing to both drive and accept societal progress

Finally, what makes this world both believable and appealing, is this combination of on the one hand a democratic and science-based social system without exploitation, and on the other, individuals raised to support such socialist society:this way of raising responsible individuals makes it possible to avoid coercion and resolve issues collaboratively, based on evidence and rationalitythis society does have some structure / governance where a number of meritocratic High Councils composed of the world’s leading scientists in each particular field of specialisation provide guidance and rules of functioning

Unfortunately, apart from The Gulag Archipelago, the legacy of Soviet literature is largely unknown in the Western cultural sphere, and the Noon Universe with its bright and highly optimistic vision of the future has not been popularised through films or comic books. I have tried to search for similar utopian universes in English or American books, or shown in films, but, as described in the beginning, found mostly dystopian sci-fi or stories of societies that went backwards ‘to the cradle of nature’ in their attempts to invent a fairer and wiser world. Perhaps the closest to the creation of the Strugatsky brothers comes the Earth in Star Trek: The Original Series, and even that is rife with militaristic and patriarchal themes.

From the vantage point of the 21st century, there are several issues that could also be improved in the Noon Universe, of course. For example, we might want to introduce some features of Marxist feminism and gender equality, and environmental considerations could have been described more convincingly. But the main features seem to all be there: technological progress comes hand in hand with societal progress, which is in turn driven by personal betterment of every member of that society. It might seem utopian, but I think it is fully socialist in spirit, more coherent and credible, and it really makes me want to step into that world and start living there right now.

SOURCE

This is the text of a talk given by Leon Rozanov at the SPGB Summer School in August 2021 and published in the September 2021 issue of The Socialist Standard.


THE SPACE-AGE COMMUNISM OF IVAN YEFREMOV

01 September 2021 

Ivan Yefremov (1907--1972) was by original profession a paleontologist. His first stories, on the life of explorers, were published in 1944. Andromeda -- in Russian-language editions The Andromeda Nebula -- is his best-known science fiction novel. Not coincidentally, it was written in 1956, the year of the first sputnik (Soviet artificial earth satellite).

This third English-language printing contains an introduction written shortly before the author's death. Here Yefremov explains how he came to write sci-fi and the purposes he thinks sci-fi should serve. For him sci-fi is not a light-hearted genre in which the fantasy is given free rein, but a serious medium for exploring new scientific ideas and their social implications. Its task is also to portray the communist future of mankind. (In this piece "communism" has the same meaning as in Soviet ideology: it refers to the future culmination of social development, NOT the historical forms of the Soviet system, which are called "socialism.")

Indeed, Andromeda is set in a society -- let's call it Yefremia for convenience -- in which communism is already a mature society, several centuries old. Poverty, greed, and heavy toil are things of the distant past; "knowledge and creative labor have freed Earth from hunger, overpopulation, infectious diseases, and harmful animals" (p. 181). A greatly reduced population is concentrated in a temperate zone, mainly around the Mediterranean Sea, between the intensely forested and cultivated (by automation) tropics and the newly wild prairie. An atmosphere is being created on Mars to prepare that planet too for human settlement. Space expeditions penetrate ever further into the galaxy, and the first contacts with extraterrestrial civilizations have been established. Yefremia fuses Marx' vision of earthly communism with Tsiolkovsky's vision of mankind's cosmic destiny. (1)

What of the people who inhabit this utopia? The Yefremians have a great deal of freedom: they travel at will, choose new professions, seek love relationships, initiate projects. At the same time, they are highly socially conscious and self-disciplined, even mildly ascetic. They derive satisfaction mainly from creative work in the arts and sciences and the full development of their intellectual and emotional capacities.

Coercion has not disappeared totally, as there is a small minority of egoistic throwbacks ("bulls"): they may be banished to the Island of Oblivion, or should they conspire to disrupt society eliminated by the "destroyer battalions." (I suppose something like the KGB is still needed to spot "bulls" and pre-empt their conspiracies, though this is nowhere spelt out.)

Yefremia was very much in tune with the spirit of the Khrushchev era, with its naive faith in rapid Soviet-led progress in two closely connected dimensions: scientific progress, symbolized by the new space program; and social progress -- "Our children will live under communism," promised Nikita Sergeyevich. Khrushchev's successors had no such faith and shifted the focus of official ideology from communism, relegated to an indefinitely distant future, to "actually existing socialism" (i.e. the Soviet status quo). In his 1972 introduction, Yefremov admits that many people no longer believe in a communist future. He still believes because the sole alternative is the self-destruction of mankind. The logic here goes as follows: Yes, A is highly implausible, but if not A then B, and B is simply too awful to contemplate, therefore A is inevitable.

How are decisions taken in Yefremia? One of the advantages of the fictional method of presenting utopias is that you never have to explain EXACTLY how they work. But we learn that leadership is shared among a number of councils: the Economic Council, the Astronautical Council, the Health Council, and so on. These councils are advised by an array of scientific institutions, my own favorites being the Academy of the Bounds of Knowledge and the Academy of Sorrow and Joy.

The various councils cooperate on an equal basis: none is supposed to be subordinate to another. Yet the Economic Council does occupy a crucial niche, if only because "nothing big can be undertaken" unless it allocates the necessary resources. It is indeed "the planet's central brain." And there is also the Control of Honor and Justice, "the guardian of every person on the planet," the ultimate judicial authority. (2) Parallels with really existing socialism readily come to mind. However distant the future ostensibly being portrayed, many of the author's assumptions reflect the society in which he really lives. Of course, the one is supposed to be the precursor of the other.

While I have nothing against communism as such, I wouldn't want to live in Yefremia. There is too much tension and heroism for my taste; life is too strenuous -- physically, intellectually, emotionally. I prefer the gentler utopian visions of William Morris' "News from Nowhere" and Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed (in which an anarcho-communist society has been set up on the moon Anarres). Surely, once mankind gets past the unavoidable turmoil of class struggle, war and revolution and reaches mature communism it is entitled at long last to a bit of relaxation? After all, it was Marx' son-in-law Paul Lafargue who published a pamphlet entitled The Right To Be Lazy. Those of us who prefer the simple life can, it is true, go fishing on the Island of Oblivion, but in so doing we expose ourselves to abuse at the hands of the "bulls." Why can't we have an island of our own?

But Yefremov's workaholic ("strugglaholic" -- how's that for a neologism?) heroes and heroines have a grand excuse for not letting themselves relax: that cosmic destiny of mankind! The abundance of high-tech low-population communism is drained away by the exorbitant resource demands of ambitious cosmic projects. "We are going to ask mankind to curtail consumption for the year 809 of the Great Circle Era," says the president of the Astronautical Council (p. 330). Now where have we heard this before? No more enemies on earth, at least not to speak of? Never mind, let's go and fight mysterious beings in outer space. The struggle continues! Without end in sight. Space plays the same socially and esthetically conservative role in Yefremov's communism as did the arms race in actually existing socialism.

NOTES

(1) Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857--1935). See pp. 258-281 in Russkii kosmizm [Russian Cosmism] (Moscow: Pedagogika-Press, 1993).

(2) Actually there are two Controls of Honor and Justice, one for the northern hemisphere and one for the southern. Each has 11 members. Cases concerning the whole planet are heard in joint session.

SOURCE

Ivan Yefremov, Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980). Translated by George Hanna. The book can be read on-line here or with multicolored illustrations here.

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

BEIN VUE - ABOLISH WORK
French have got even lazier, study shows


Henry Samuel
Mon, November 14, 2022 

The French have lost the will to work, according to a new study - Marc Piasecki/Getty Images Europe

Famed for their marathon holidays, extended lunches and 35-hour working week, the French have long basked in the enviable image of enjoying life’s pleasures while, somehow, getting the job done.

But the Covid pandemic has taken the French view of a proper work-life balance to new extremes, with a new study claiming that France has succumbed to a “laziness epidemic” in which swathes of the country say they "can't be bothered" to work hard, go out or even socialise.

Many people in France are quite happy to work fewer hours even if that means earning less money, according to findings by Ifop and the Jean-Jaurès foundation.

In 1990, some 60 per cent of French people said work was “very important” in their life, compared to 31 per cent for leisure. Today, those who view work as a high priority has plummeted to 24 per cent while 41 per cent view leisure as very important.


Since the Covid pandemic subsided, 37 per cent of French say they are less motivated to work. The figures vary widely according to political persuasion, with supporters of Leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon being more than twice as likely to say they have lost their will to work than supporters of Emmanuel Macron - 61 per cent to 28 per cent respectively.

Overall, two-thirds are happy to work less to earn less today. By comparison, in 2008 two-thirds of French said they were happy to “work more to earn more”, the presidential campaign slogan of conservative then French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Many workers questioned the meaning of their professional lives when 11 million people were furloughed during the pandemic and benefited from one of the world’s most generous state Covid compensation schemes.

Home working

Home working exacerbated the problem, the study found, because it has entitled an “exhaustion and laziness epidemic when a part of the French want to slow down”.

This unwillingness to work at all costs has seen a huge shortage of labour in various sectors from hospitality to haulage but also teaching and nursing.

The report’s findings suggest many compatriots agree with recent controversial claims by Green MP Sandrine Rousseau that the French deserve a special “right to idleness”.

In September, the radical eco-feminist sparked a furore for claiming that working hard was “essentially a Right-wing value” and that taking breaks and being less productive was a far healthier objective for the Left.

'Right to idleness'

“We have the right to idleness. We have the right to change professions, we also have the right to take breaks in our life and, above all, we need to regain time, a sense of sharing and a four-day week,” she said.

That put her at loggerheads with France’s Communist Party leader, Fabien Roussel, who declared: “The Left must defend work and not be the Left of handouts and social welfare.”

Another recent Ifop study found that four out of ten people who voted Green or for Mr Mélenchon’s France Unbowed party define themselves as “rarely or not hard-working”, compared to a quarter of French of other political persuasions.



Dominique Seux, an economic commentator on France Inter radio, on Monday said that mass French lethargy posed a small “problem" as it risked cutting productivity at a time when the French “are unhappy with their purchasing power and the state of public services”.

He also pointed to one “massive paradox”, namely that “according to all the OECD’s indisputable data, France is the country that works the least, all ages combined”.

























Monday, January 17, 2022

The Refusal of Work:
From the Post emancipation Caribbean
to Post-Fordist Empire

Christopher Taylor


The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics.—Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire

In 1880, the mixed-race Cuban Marxist Paul Lafargue published The Right to Be Lazy: Being a Refutation of the “Right to Work” of 1848

Lafargue’s witty and counterintuitive pamphlet argues that a “love” and “furious passion for work” has colonized revolutionary projects for liberation, leading revolutionaries to imagine “the worst sort of slavery” as the best kind of freedom.

Standing the “dogma of work” on its head, Lafargue asserts that freedom consists in expanding the time of nonwork, an expansion epitomized in the possibility of being lazy.

Although Lafargue’s radicalization of laziness had a precedent in Karl Marx’s own writing, and although Lafargue was himself Marx’s son-in-law, Lafargue’s “hedonist Marxism” failed to exert much influence on Lafargue’s father was the son of a Frenchman and a Haitian mulatto, Catalina Piron, who had sought refuge in Cuba during the Haitian Revolution. His maternal grandfather was a Jewish Frenchman, whose attempts to avoid the upheavals of revolution brought him from Haiti to France and from France to Jamaica. In Jamaica, he would have a daughter, Lafargue’s mother, with Maragarita Fripie, a Carib Indian. In his late teens Lafargue moved to Paris to study medicine, and he became involved with Lasallean and Proudhonist radicals and the burgeoning student movement of the time. Upon expulsion from medical school, Lafargue moved to London to continue his studies. There he met Karl Marx, whose daughter Laura he would marry. 

The twenty-first century already promises to be kinder to Lafargue’s memory. Recent theorists of antiwork Marxism have positioned the creole’s pamphlet as a “precursor” to the politics of refusal and fight popularized in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire and theorized more robustly in Negri’s work of the past three decades.

Yet—despite the history of racial slavery that Lafargue embodied, despite the centrality of the figure of slavery to Lafargue’s pamphlet, despite the pamphlet’s intervention into a discursive environment that spawned both “right to work” revolutionary discourses in Paris and plutocratic discourses in the post emancipation Antilles—Lafargue’s critique of work is never put in relation to his Caribbean genealogy.

The reduction of Lafargue’s creole roots to an accidental biographical datum indexes a broader marginalization of Caribbean histories of slavery and emancipation in genealogies of
antiwork Marxism. Consider the epigraph to this essay: Hardt and Negri’s qualification of “work and authority” as a relation of “voluntary servitude” effectively distinguishes their antiwork politics from historical refusals of in voluntary servitude, from refusals of slavery. This hesitation over slavery, I suggest, amounts to a symptom of disavowal, an attempt to exorcise the specter of a Caribbean past that haunts the structures of rule and refusal constitutive of post-Fordist Empire. Caribbean histories of slavery and emancipation constitute the political unconscious of anti-work Marxism. If, as Kathi Weeks suggest, antiwork politics is “both a practical demand and a theoretical perspective,” creoles have always served as both subject and object of this gaze.

In contrast to productivist Marxisms, which celebrates labor and the laborer, antiwork Marxism describes labor itself as the site and source of human bondage.

While attending to the various ways laborers refuse work—strikes, slowdowns, walkouts, theft, demands for a basic guaranteed income, and so on—antiwork Marxism also articulates a vision of “a potential mode of life that challenges the mode of life now dened by and subordinated to work.”

This essay explores how Caribbean histories speak in and through radical imaginings of postwork forms of life. In the narrative that I offer, the Caribbean serves a crucial locale—a kind of “laboratory,” to borrow Hardt’s description of Italy—in which the epistemologies and practices of antiwork Marxism were first elaborated.

Yet the spatial and temporal scales adopted by antiwork theory typically elide the formative influence of Caribbean history: antiwork Marxism typically codes itself as a politics for, and the product of, the post-Fordist global North.


SEE

Monday, January 10, 2022

Working was pointless at best and 'degrading, humiliating and exploitative' at worst, says Reddit moderator behind the influential 'antiwork'

sjones@insider.com (Stephen Jones)
© Provided by Business Insider The reasons driving the Great Resignation transcend much more than simply a desire to work less. SrdjanPav/Getty Images

The moderator of a viral, "anti-work" Reddit thread said most work is pointless, and humiliating.
Doreen Ford is a moderator of r/antiwork, which has gained 1.4 million users since October 2020.
"There's a lot of positions that just don't make any sense," Ford told the FT.

A moderator of a viral "anti-work" Reddit thread has said she left traditional employment because much of her work was "degrading, humiliating and exploitative."

The thread – r/antiwork – has nearly 1.6 million members and is part of a movement towards the "antiwork" rejection of the traditional idea of a nine-to-five job in favor of more leisure and fulfilment.


"I think there's a lot of positions that just don't make any sense, that do not have to exist," Doreen Ford, a moderator of the channel, told the FT.

"You're just pushing around papers for no good reason. It doesn't really help anybody," she said.

Ford, 30, spent 10 years working in retail, but left her job in 2017 after her grandmother advised her to follow her passion for dogs.

She now walks dogs part time and has never been happier, she told the FT.

"Usually, at best, [working was] pointless," said Ford. "And at worst it was degrading, humiliating and exploitative."

She added: "Most of us are just normal people. We have jobs that we don't like, which is the whole point of why we're in the movement to begin with."

The thread, whose the full name is "Antiwork: Unemployment for all, not just the rich!", was started in 2013.

For years its membership numbered in the low thousands, before growing exponentially since the onset of the pandemic, which fueled a reassessment of work and its value and prompted a "Great Resignation" of resignations.

The Reddit thread now receives an average of 1,500 posts a day, in which members – so-called "Idlers" – share accounts of bad bosses and encourage each other to quit, similar to the Tang ping movement in China.

 
© Subreddit Stats Membership of r/antiwork has grown exponentially since the beginning of the pandemic. Subreddit Stats

Insider's Hilary Hoffower reported how Gen Z and millennial workers were leading the way by trading in bad jobs for careers that offer greater purpose and meaning — while many older workers are choosing to switch to self-employment or early retirement.

A record 4.5 million Americans quit their job in November.

The reasons driving the great resignation transcend much more than simply a desire to work less.

Kentuckians, whose state is at the epicenter of America's Great Resignation, outlined fears over the Omicron variant, a dearth of accessible childcare and social inequalities as among the reasons to Insider's Juliana Kaplan, Hillary Hoffower, and Madison Hoff.

The Right To Be Lazy - The People
www.slp.org/pdf/others/lazy_pl.pdf · PDF file
The Right To Be Lazy BEING A REPUDIATION OF THE “RIGHT TO WORK” OF 1848 By Paul Lafargue Translated and adapted from the French by Dr. Harriet Lothrop. Published by the

By work we mean what Bob Black says in his classic essay, The Abolition of Work, “Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick.” In other words, we are against the notion that people should be structurally limited and optioned out of a better, more peaceful and playful life by the powers that be.
About - Abolish Work
abolishwork.com/about/

The Abolition of Work - The Anarchist Library

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work

2020-11-28 · Bob Black 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



















The Right to Be Greedy: Theses on the Practical Necessity of Demanding Everything


Publication date 1974The Right To Be Greedy: Theses On The Practical Necessity Of Demanding Everything is a book published in 1974 by an American Situationist collective called "For Ourselves: Council for Generalized Self-Management". 

Post-left anarchist Bob Black describes it in its preface as an "audacious attempt to synthesize a collectivist social vision of left-wing origin with an individualistic (for lack of a better word) ethic usually articulated on the right".

Its authors say that "[t]he positive conception of egoism, the perspective of communist egoism, is the very heart and unity of our theoretical and practical coherence". It is highly influenced by the work of Max Stirner. A reprinting of the work in the eighties was done by Loompanics Unlimited with the involvement of Bob Black who also wrote the preface to it.

Most libertarians think of themselves as in some sense egoists. If they believe in rights, they believe these rights belong to them as individuals. If not, they nonetheless look to themselves and others as so many individuals possessed of power to be reckoned with. Either way, they assume that the opposite of egoism is altruism. The altruists, Christian or Maoist, agree. A cozy accomodation; and, I submit, a suspicious one. What if this antagonistic intedependence, this reciprocal reliance reflects and conceals an accord? Could egoism be altruism's loyal opposition? Yes, according to the authors of this text. What's more, they insist that an egoism which knows itself and refuses every limit to its own realization is communism.

Contents:
Preface by Bob Black
1. Wealth
2. Individualism and Collectivism
3. The Dialectic of Egoism
4. The Resonance of Egoisms
5. Communist Society
6. Radical Subjectivity
7. Pleasure
8. Sexuality
9. Authority
10. Morality
11. Revolution
Appendix: Preamble to The Founding Agreements of For Ourselves: Council for Generalized Self-Management


Wednesday, December 15, 2021

Some Chinese shun grueling careers for 'low-desire life'













1 / 13

In this photo released by Guo Jianlong, Guo reads a book at the balcony of his home in Dali in southwestern China's Yunnan province on June 29, 2021. Guo joined a small but visible handful of Chinese urban professionals who are rattling the ruling Communist Party by choosing to "lie flat," or reject grueling careers for what they call a "low-desire life." That is clashing with the ruling party's message of success and consumerism as its celebrates the 100th anniversary of its 1921 founding. 
Guo Jianlong via AP

JOE McDONALD and FU TING

BEIJING (AP) — Fed up with work stress, Guo Jianlong quit a newspaper job in Beijing and moved to China’s mountain southwest to “lie flat.”

Guo joined a small but visible handful of Chinese urban professionals who are rattling the ruling Communist Party by rejecting grueling careers for a “low-desire life." That is clashing with the party's message of success and consumerism as its celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding.

Guo, 44, became a freelance writer in Dali, a town in Yunnan province known for its traditional architecture and picturesque scenery. He married a woman he met there.


“Work was OK, but I didn’t like it much,” Guo said. “What is wrong with doing your own thing, not just looking at the money?”

“Lying flat” is a “resistance movement” to a “cycle of horror” from high-pressure Chinese schools to jobs with seemingly endless work hours, novelist Liao Zenghu wrote in Caixin, the country’s most prominent business magazine.

“In today’s society, our every move is monitored and every action criticized,” Liao wrote. “Is there any more rebellious act than to simply ‘lie flat?'”

It isn’t clear how many people have gone so far as to quit their jobs or move out of major cities. Judging by packed rush hour subways in Beijing and Shanghai, most young Chinese slog away at the best jobs they can get.

Still, the ruling party is trying to discourage the trend. Beijing needs skilled professionals to develop technology and other industries. China’s population is getting older and the pool of working-age people has shrunk by about 5% from its 2011 peak.

“Struggle itself is a kind of happiness,” the newspaper Southern Daily, published by the party, said in a commentary. “Choosing to ‘lie flat’ in the face of pressure is not only unjust but also shameful.”

The trend echoes similar ones in Japan and other countries where young people have embraced anti-materialist lifestyles in response to bleak job prospects and bruising competition for shrinking economic rewards.

Official data show China’s economic output per person doubled over the past decade, but many complain the gains went mostly to a handful of tycoons and state-owned companies. Professionals say their incomes are failing to keep up with soaring housing, child care and other costs.

In a sign of the issue’s political sensitivity, four professors who were quoted by the Chinese press talking about “lying flat” declined to discuss it with a foreign reporter.

Another possible sign of official displeasure: T-shirts, mobile phone cases and other “Lie Flat”-themed products are disappearing from online sales platforms.

Urban employees complain that work hours have swelled to “9 9 6,” or 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.

“We generally believe slavery has died away. In fact, it has only adapted to the new economic era,” a woman who writes under the name Xia Bingbao, or Summer Hailstones, said on the Douban social media service.

Some elite graduates in their 20s who should have the best job prospects say they are worn out from the “exam hell" of high school and university. They see no point in making more sacrifices.

“Chasing fame and fortune does not attract me. I am so tired,” said Zhai Xiangyu, a 25-year-old graduate student.

Some professionals are cutting short their careers, which removes their experience from the job pool.

Xu Zhunjiong, a human resources manager in Shanghai, said she is quitting at 45, a decade before the legal minimum retirement age for women, to move with her Croatian-born husband to his homeland.

“I want to retire early. I don’t want to fight any more,” Xu said. “I’m going to other places.”

Thousands vented frustration online after the Communist Party's announcement in May that official birth limits would be eased to allow all couples to have three children instead of two. The party has enforced birth restrictions since 1980 to restrain population growth but worries China, with economic output per person still below the global average, needs more young workers.

Minutes after the announcement, websites were flooded with complaints that the move did nothing to help parents cope with child care costs, long work hours, cramped housing, job discrimination against mothers and a need to look after elderly parents.

Xia writes that she moved to a valley in Zhejiang province, south of Shanghai, for a “low-desire life” after working in Hong Kong. She said despite a high-status job as an English-language reporter, her rent devoured 60% of her income and she had no money at the end of each month.

She rejects the argument that young people who “lie flat” are giving up economic success when that's already is out of reach for many in an economy with a growing gulf between a wealthy elite and the majority.

“When resources are focused more and more on the few people at the head and their relatives, the workforce is cheap and replaceable,” she wrote on Douban. “Is it sensible to entrust your destiny to small handouts from others?”

Xia declined an interview request.

Guo, the writer in Dali, said he puts in more hours as a freelancer than he did at a newspaper. But he is happier, and life is more comfortable: He and his wife eat breakfast on their breezy sixth-floor apartment balcony with a view of trees.

“As long as I can keep writing, I’m very satisfied,” Guo said. “I don’t feel stifled.”

A handful who can afford it withdraw from work almost entirely.

A 27-year-old architect in Beijing said she started saving as a teenager to achieve financial freedom.

“From last September, when I saw all my savings had reached 2 million (yuan) ($300,000), I lay down,” said the woman, who would give only the name Nana, in an interview over her social media account.

Nana said she turned down a job that paid 20,000 yuan ($3,000) per month due to the long hours and what she saw as limited opportunities for creativity.

“I want to be free from inflexible rules,” said Nana. “I want to travel and make myself happy.”

___

Fu reported from Bangkok. Associated Press researcher Chen Si in Shanghai contributed to this report.

  1. The Right To Be Lazy

    www.slp.org/pdf/others/lazy_pl.pdf · PDF file

    The Right To Be Lazy BEING A REPUDIATION OF THE “RIGHT TO WORK” OF 1848 By Paul Lafargue Translated and adapted from the French by Dr. Harriet Lothrop. Published by …




















Sunday, September 12, 2021

The lazy-worker test 

has arrived


·Senior Columnist
YAHOO FINANCE

If you believe Republican governors, some 11 million jobless Americans will now be racing to fill the many job openings businesses say they can’t fill. That’s on top of 3.5 million idle workers who were supposed to start clamoring for jobs during the last couple of months.

Nearly 15 million Americans have now lost federal jobless benefits that Congress initially established in the CARES Act of 2020. Several follow-on coronavirus relief bills extended those benefits, including the American Relief Plan, which Congress passed this past March. Most of those benefits expired on Sept. 6, including an extra $300 per week in traditional jobless aid and other amounts for gig workers and others who don’t have a regular employer. The Sept. 6 expiration affects 11.3 million Americans, according to Oxford Economics.

Republican governors in 25 states ended those federal benefits early during the summer, claiming they were hurting businesses by paying people more to stay home than to work. That took roughly two months’ of federal benefits away from another 3.5 million Americans or so.

The math suggests the disincentive to work could be legitimate. The average state unemployment payout is about $400 per week, or $1,700 per month. Add another $1,200 in monthly federal aid, and the two combined might equal nearly $3,000 in monthly income. That’s equivalent to roughly $19 per hour (for a 40-hour-per-week job). So somebody who could only find work paying less than that might be better off taking the benefits instead.

That simple accounting leaves out many other factors, however, such as the fact that all jobless aid ends and most workers will need a job eventually. Many potential workers still worry about getting COVID-19 on the job. Some working parents still have their hands full with kids doing remote or hybrid schooling. Some older workers have retired early instead of hassling with the workplace in the time of COVID.

Several studies found that only a fraction of unemployed workers—probably no more than 15%—would rather accept benefits than work for a living. In July, Yahoo Finance interviewed a variety of workers in Republican states who lost federal aid early, and found a much more common problem was that people couldn’t find work in their field that paid enough to cover their bills. Some could have taken lower-paying, lesser-skilled jobs in other fields, but they viewed that as a career setback that might keep them from getting ahead indefinitely. 

Lazy-worker theory

Employment trends in the GOP states that cut off benefits now show that the lazy-worker theory is mostly misguided. There’s been no notable boost in hiring or employment in those states, compared with states that continued the benefits. The early cutoff may even have hurt those states a little, because they gave up federal money that boosted incomes and would have cost them nothing.

Congress has made no move to extend jobless benefits again. The Biden administration hasn’t asked for an extension, and polls show Americans generally think it’s time for supplemental jobless benefits to end. That removes one variable from a puzzling labor market in which joblessness remains high even though employers struggle to fill existing openings.

Muhlenberg, PA - August 26: A help wanted sign that reads
Muhlenberg, PA - August 26: A help wanted sign that reads "Now Hiring!" in the window of the PetSmart location along 5th Street Highway in Muhlenberg Twp. Thursday morning August 26, 2021. (Photo by Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images)

The latest data shows a record-high 10 million jobs available in the US economy. Half of small businesses say they have jobs they can’t fill, the largest portion on record. Yet 8.4 million Americans are out of work and millions more qualified for federal jobless aid because they lost gig work or income in ways that don’t officially count as “unemployed” in the fairly narrow way the Labor Dept. defines it.

Shouldn’t all those unemployed people be filling all those open jobs? It might seem like it, except there are many mismatches in the labor market. The open jobs aren’t always where the job seekers are. The open jobs require qualifications the unemployed don’t have. Some posted jobs are probably employers fishing for overqualified workers they can get for cheap. Some employers simply can't or won't raise pay: While some big companies say they’re boosting wages, other data shows no notable jump in pay for workers both staying in their current jobs and moving to new ones.

Job-market trends for the next few months will begin to clarify whether federal jobless aid was too generous or should have ended sooner. If hiring jumps and employers finally fill some of those 10 million open jobs, that will be good news, but it may lead to tighter benefits the next time around. It seems more likely we’ll continue to have a stutter-step recovery with big job gains in some months, and disappointment in others. If lazy workers are a problem, they're probably not the biggest one.

  1. The Right To Be Lazy

    www.slp.org/pdf/others/lazy_pl.pdf · PDF file

    The Right To Be Lazy BEING A REPUDIATION OF THE “RIGHT TO WORK” OF 1848 By Paul Lafargue Translated and adapted from the French by Dr. Harriet Lothrop. Published by …



Friday, September 10, 2021

REVOLUTION IS AGAINST BOREDOM

Too much free time may be almost as bad as too little


Using excess discretionary time on productive activities can help bolster well-being, study says

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

As an individual’s free time increases, so does that person’s sense of well-being – but only up to a point. Too much free time can be also be a bad thing, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

“People often complain about being too busy and express wanting more time. But is more time actually linked to greater happiness? We found that having a dearth of discretionary hours in one’s day results in greater stress and lower subjective well-being,” said Marissa Sharif, PhD, an assistant professor of marketing at The Wharton School and lead author of the paper. “However, while too little time is bad, having more time is not always better.”

The research was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Researchers analyzed the data from 21,736 Americans who participated in the American Time Use Survey between 2012 and 2013. Participants provided a detailed account of what they did during the prior 24 hours -- indicating the time of day and duration of each activity – and reported their sense of well-being. The researchers found that as free time increased, so did well-being, but it leveled off at about two hours and began to decline after five. Correlations in both directions were statistically significant.

The researchers also analyzed data from 13,639 working Americans who participated in the National Study of the Changing Workforce between 1992 and 2008. Among the survey’s many questions, participants were asked about their amount of discretionary time (e.g., “On average, on days when you’re working, about how many hours [minutes] do you spend on your own free-time activities?”) and their subjective well-being, which was measured as life satisfaction (e.g., “All things considered, how do you feel about your life these days? Would you say you feel 1=very satisfied, 2=somewhat satisfied, 3=somewhat dissatisfied, or 4=very dissatisfied?”)

Once again, the researchers found that higher levels of free time were significantly associated with higher levels of well-being, but only up to a point. After that, excess free time was not associated with greater well-being.

To further investigate the phenomenon, the researchers conducted two online experiments involving more than 6,000 participants. In the first experiment, participants were asked to imagine having a given amount of discretionary time every day for at least six months. Participants were randomly assigned to have a low (15 minutes per day), moderate (3.5 hours per day), or high (7 hours per day) amount of discretionary time. Participants were asked to report the extent to which they would experience enjoyment, happiness and satisfaction.

Participants in both the low and high discretionary time groups reported lower well-being than the moderate discretionary time group. The researchers found that those with low discretionary time felt more stressed than those with a moderate amount, contributing to lower well-being, but those with high levels of free time felt less productive than those in the moderate group, leading them to also have lower well-being. 

In the second experiment, researchers looked at the potential role of productivity. Participants were asked to imagine having either a moderate (3.5 hours) or high (7 hours) amount of free time per day, but were also asked to imagine spending that time in either productive (e.g., working out, hobbies or running) or unproductive activities (e.g., watching television or using the computer). The researchers found participants with more free time reported lower levels of well-being when engaging in unproductive activities. However, when engaging in productive activities, those with more free time felt similar to those with a moderate amount of free time.   

“Though our investigation centered on the relationship between amount of discretionary time and subjective well-being, our additional exploration into how individuals spend their discretionary time proved revealing,” said Sharif. “Our findings suggest that ending up with entire days free to fill at one’s discretion may leave one similarly unhappy. People should instead strive for having a moderate amount of free time to spend how they want. In cases when people do find themselves with excessive amounts of discretionary time, such as retirement or having left a job, our results suggest these individuals would benefit from spending their newfound time with purpose.” 

Article: “Having Too Little or Too Much Time is Linked to Lower Subjective Well-Being,” by Marissa Sharif, PhD, University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, and Cassie Mogilner, PhD, and Hal Hershfield, PhD, University of California Los Angeles. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published online Sept. 9, 2021.

Contact: Marissa Sharif, PhD, can be reached via email at masharif@wharton.upenn.edu