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From: Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: the mythology of work
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2025 19:55:47 -0300
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I don't know to what group this should go.  Given the current low volume
of this group and the USENET as a whole, perhaps this is not grave
crime.  I also think a lot of people here would enjoy discussing the
subject.

                         The Mythology of Work
                               2018-09-03

What if nobody worked? Sweatshops would empty out and assembly lines
would grind to a halt, at least the ones producing things no one would
make voluntarily. Telemarketing would cease. Despicable individuals who
only hold sway over others because of wealth and title would have to
learn better social skills. Traffic jams would come to an end; so would
oil spills. Paper money and job applications would be used as fire
starter as people reverted to barter and sharing. Grass and flowers
would grow from the cracks in the sidewalk, eventually making way for
fruit trees.

And we would all starve to death. But we’re not exactly subsisting on
paperwork and performance evaluations, are we? Most of the things we
make and do for money are patently irrelevant to our survival—and to
what gives life meaning, besides.

This text is a selection from Work, our 376-page analysis of
contemporary capitalism. It is also available as a pamphlet.

That depends on what you mean by “work.” Think about how many people
enjoy gardening, fishing, carpentry, cooking, and even computer
programming just for their own sake. What if that kind of activity could
provide for all our needs?

For hundreds of years, people have claimed that technological progress
would soon liberate humanity from the need to work. Today we have
capabilities our ancestors couldn’t have imagined, but those predictions
still haven’t come true. In the US we actually work longer hours than we
did a couple generations ago—the poor in order to survive, the rich in
order to compete. Others desperately seek employment, hardly enjoying
the comfortable leisure all this progress should provide. Despite the
talk of recession and the need for austerity measures, corporations are
reporting record earnings, the wealthiest are wealthier than ever, and
tremendous quantities of goods are produced just to be thrown
away. There’s plenty of wealth, but it’s not being used to liberate
humanity.

What kind of system simultaneously produces abundance and prevents us
from making the most of it? The defenders of the free market argue that
there’s no other option—and so long as our society is organized this
way, there isn’t.

Yet once upon a time, before time cards and power lunches, everything
got done without work. The natural world that provided for our needs
hadn’t yet been carved up and privatized. Knowledge and skills weren’t
the exclusive domains of licensed experts, held hostage by expensive
institutions; time wasn’t divided into productive work and consumptive
leisure. We know this because work was invented only a few thousand
years ago, but human beings have been around for hundreds of thousands
of years. We’re told that life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short” back then—but that narrative comes to us from the ones who
stamped out that way of life, not the ones who practiced it.

This isn’t to say we should go back to the way things used to be, or
that we could—only that things don’t have to be the way they are right
now. If our distant ancestors could see us today, they’d probably be
excited about some of our inventions and horrified by others, but they’d
surely be shocked by how we apply them. We built this world with our
labor, and without certain obstacles we could surely build a better
one. That wouldn’t mean abandoning everything we’ve learned. It would
just mean abandoning everything we’ve learned doesn’t work.

One can hardly deny that work is productive. Just a couple thousand
years of it have dramatically transformed the surface of the earth.

But what exactly does it produce? Disposable chopsticks by the billion;
laptops and cell phones that are obsolete within a couple years. Miles
of waste dumps and tons upon tons of chlorofluorocarbons. Factories that
will rust as soon as labor is cheaper elsewhere. Dumpsters full of
overstock, while a billion suffer malnutrition; medical treatments only
the wealthy can afford; novels and philosophies and art movements most
of us just don’t have time for in a society that subordinates desires to
profit motives and needs to property rights.

And where do the resources for all this production come from? What
happens to the ecosystems and communities that are pillaged and
exploited? If work is productive, it’s even more destructive.

Work doesn’t produce goods out of thin air; it’s not a conjuring
act. Rather, it takes raw materials from the biosphere—a common treasury
shared by all living things—and transforms them into products animated
by the logic of market. For those who see the world in terms of balance
sheets, this is an improvement, but the rest of us shouldn’t take their
word for it.

Capitalists and socialists have always taken it for granted that work
produces value. Workers have to consider a different possibility—that
working uses up value. That’s why the forests and polar ice caps are
being consumed alongside the hours of our lives: the aches in our bodies
when we come home from work parallel the damage taking place on a global
scale.

What should we be producing, if not all this stuff? Well, how about
happiness itself? Can we imagine a society in which the primary goal of
our activity was to make the most of life, to explore its mysteries,
rather than to amass wealth or outflank competition? We would still make
material goods in such a society, of course, but not in order to compete
for profit. Festivals, feasts, philosophy, romance, creative pursuits,
child-rearing, friendship, adventure—can we picture these as the center
of life, rather than packed into our spare time?

Today things are the other way around—our conception of happiness is
constructed as a means to stimulate production. Small wonder products
are crowding us out of the world.

Work doesn’t simply create wealth where there was only poverty
before. On the contrary, so long as it enriches some at others’ expense,
work creates poverty, too, in direct proportion to profit.

Poverty is not an objective condition, but a relationship produced by
unequal distribution of resources. There’s no such thing as poverty in
societies in which people share everything. There may be scarcity, but
no one is subjected to the indignity of having to go without while
others have more than they know what to do with. As profit is
accumulated and the minimum threshold of wealth necessary to exert
influence in society rises higher and higher, poverty becomes more and
more debilitating. It is a form of exile—the cruelest form of exile, for
you stay within society while being excluded from it. You can neither
participate nor go anywhere else.

Work doesn’t just create poverty alongside wealth—it concentrates wealth
in the hands of a few while spreading poverty far and wide. For every
Bill Gates, a million people must live below the poverty line; for every
Shell Oil, there has to be a Nigeria. The more we work, the more profit
is accumulated from our labor, and the poorer we are compared to our
exploiters.

So in addition to creating wealth, work makes people poor. This is clear
even before we factor in all the other ways work makes us poor: poor in
self-determination, poor in free time, poor in health, poor in sense of
self beyond our careers and bank accounts, poor in spirit.

“Cost of living” estimates are misleading—there’s little living going on
at all! “Cost of working” is more like it, and it’s not cheap.

Everyone knows what housecleaners and dishwashers pay for being the
backbone of our economy. All the scourges of poverty—addiction, broken
families, poor health—are par for the course; the ones who survive these
and somehow go on showing up on time are working miracles. Think what
they could accomplish if they were free to apply that power to something
other than earning profits for their employers!

What about their employers, fortunate to be higher on the pyramid? You
would think earning a higher salary would mean having more money and
thus more freedom, but it’s not that simple. Every job entails hidden
costs: just as a dishwasher has to pay bus fare to and from work every
day, a corporate lawyer has to be able to fly anywhere at a moment’s
notice, to maintain a country club membership for informal business
meetings, to own a small mansion in which to entertain dinner guests
that double as clients. This is why it’s so difficult for middle-class
workers to save up enough money to quit while they’re ahead and get out
of the rat race: trying to get ahead in the economy basically means
running in place. At best, you might advance to a fancier treadmill, but
you’ll have to run faster to stay on it.

And these merely financial costs of working are the least expensive. In
one survey, people of all walks of life were asked how much money they
would need to live the life they wanted; from pauper to patrician, they
all answered approximately double whatever their current income was. So
not only is money costly to obtain, but, like any addictive drug, it’s
less and less fulfilling! And the further up you get in the hierarchy,
the more you have to fight to hold your place. The wealthy executive
must abandon his unruly passions and his conscience, must convince
himself that he deserves more than the unfortunates whose labor provides
for his comfort, must smother his every impulse to question, to share,
to imagine himself in others’ shoes; if he doesn’t, sooner or later some
more ruthless contender replaces him. Both blue-collar and white-collar
workers have to kill themselves to keep the jobs that keep them alive;
it’s just a question of physical or spiritual destruction.

Those are the costs we pay individually, but there’s also a global price
to pay for all this working. Alongside the environmental costs, there
are work-related illnesses, injuries, and deaths: every year we kill
people by the thousand to sell hamburgers and health club memberships to
the survivors. The US Department of Labor reported that twice as many
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