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almost a good idea: bob black and the end of work by Nick Mamatas (Laddertrick@gvny.com) - May 30, 2001 |
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| My father knew the score. Every day, when he would come from work at the docks, where he was a longshoreman, my mother would ask him how his day went. Most days he simply said "Terrible," and he meant it. After all, he risked his life on huge cranes every day, in all types of weather, and had all the rights and human dignity of the Mr. Coffee in the break room. One day he came home early, and instead of reporting a terrible day, he said nothing at all. One of his co-workers, who had long ago grown immune to the alarm bells that sound when the huge container cranes moved down their tracks, had been crushed to death by one of them. Other workers were assigned to help the police by scraping up the mess with snow shovels and then hose the remaining corpsemeat off the cranes. Half a day off, come in tomorrow at 7AM sharp. Mandatory overtime to make up for the delay. This is when I decided to become a Web writer instead of a longshoreman. (Yeah, this was a decade before the Web started, so what?) Enter Bob Black. Bob Black is a "Watsonian anarchist," an attorney, a former sub-Genius, a well-known participant in feuds within the marginals milieu and a leading proponent of ending all work. Not workers power, not sharing the work, just plain ol' stopping all work. What do you do instead? Whatever you like, mostly! The notion of zerowork, as it is called, suggests replacing forced labor (and labor done under the free market is just as forced as labor done in prison camps) with non-forced labor. Neither market-driven nor state-mandated labor will survive in a zerowork economy. Some work can be easily transformed into play (I'm playing right now, whee!) but a lot of the work that is currently being done will just have to be eliminated entirely. Who will clean the toilets, you ask? Bob Black might answer, "What toilets?" Black and other zeroworkers look to what Engels called the "primitive communism" of hunter-gatherer societies as a potential model from a post-industrial/post-information. Confusingly, while looking to the short working days of hunter-gatherers and simultaneously suggesting closing all the schools, Black also suggests "cybernizing" some of the remaining essential work functions with advanced technology. "But but but . . ." you say. "Yes yes, I know it won't work either," I respond. No use telling Bob Black though. Bob Black's arguments can't help but be compelling. His writing, nearly always polemical, is sometimes tedious and often unrealistic, but is shot through with stunning insights and turns of phrase which can't help but resonate with anyone who has ever had to get up in the morning to avoid starvation or arrest. In zerowork, only people who like getting up in the morning would need to. But who would take on the distasteful jobs, like proctologist? Probably some assfreaks from Dayton, the kind of guys who buy Big Buns magazine to read the articles. If nobody likes working on an assembly line, commodity production will go out the window. Black's ideals haven't seeped into the mainstream yet, in spite of the fact that over a dozen Americans find themselves ground into corpsemeat, or otherwise die, at work every day, and even though their friends still have to show up the next morning. Instead, Black takes his argument to the fringe. His feuds with the information worker zine Processed World, the last dregs of America's once mighty anarcho-syndicalist movement, and everyone else in arm's reach of his zines and books, fuel both his discontent and his prose. And it beats hosing the meatsauce that was once your friend off the wheels of industry. If only Bob would take a day off from his battles with the rest of the marginal milieu. The views expressed above represent the writer and not necessarily those of The Disinformation Company Ltd. |
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Afterword To The Feh! Press Edition Of The Baby And The Bathwater Bomb 'Em If They Can't Take A Joke Hogshire On Black Author Of Opium For The Masses Arrested For Possessing Poppies Listen, Anarchist! My Date With Jim Hogshire (Version 2.1) Whywork.org: Creating Livable Alternatives To Wage Slavery What Is Wrong With This Picture? The Libertarian As Conservative Bob Black |
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