The Abolition of Work

Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair.

To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that “whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.”

The only thing “free” about so-called free time is that it doesn’t cost the boss anything.

Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital.

To be ludic is not to be ludicrous.

Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship.

Work makes a mockery of freedom.

They want your time , enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn’t the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the last sixty years?

Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks around. I refer to housewives doing housework and child-rearing. By abolishing wage-labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor. The nuclear family as we know it is ... See more