The Abolition of Work

Workers of the world... relax!

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

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?

Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted.

Creation could become recreation.

On the other hand—and I think this the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure—we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products.

At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it.

the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full “play” to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling.

Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.