The Abolition of Work

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

Work makes a mockery of freedom.

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

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

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.”

Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price.

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.

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

There was a time in our own past when the “work ethic” would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labeled a cult.