NEGATIVE - CRITIQUE - CRITIQUE OF WORK 329

SOLVENCY: REPLACEMENT OF WAGE SLAVERY IS FEASIBLE

WE COULD ALL SURVIVE JUST FINE ON 5% OF CURRENT WORK

Bob Black, the abolition of work, 1992, FringeWare Review, 01:25 Bob Black, PO Box 2159, Albany, NY 12220; http://www-personal.usyd.edu.au/~sfraser/cat/dwu/ // acs

Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes.

THERE ARE FEASIBLE ALTERNATIVES TO THE WAGE SLAVERY SYSTEM

L. Susan Brown, Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, 1993; Does Work Really Work? Kick It Over #35 // acs

It doesn't have to be this way. There is nothing sacred about the employment contract that protects it from being challenged, that entrenches it eternally as a form of economic organization. We can understand our own unhappiness as workers not as a psychological problem that demands Prozac, but rather as a human response to domination. We can envision a better way of working, and we can do so now, today, in our own lives. By doing so we can chisel away at the wage slavery system; we can undermine it and replace it with freer ways of working.

WORK IS RAPIDLY BECOMING REDUNDANT

Leisure Party, 1999; Beyond the Work Ethic http://freespace.virgin.net/sarah.peter.nelson/menu3a.html // acs

Unemployment is rising all over the world. Even in Japan the lifetime employment system is under threat. Most governments have given up even the pretence that they can do anything about it, even though they acknowledge that it is one of the major problems facing society. Every year the unemployment total increases inexhorably. The reality is that work is rapidly becoming redundant.