Why Work? The Zero Work movement
CLAWS has devoted this entire web site to the question "why work"? We want to encourage new attitudes about work, leisure, and jobs. This is our main focus, but we realize that to ask the question "why work?" also involves questioning the received wisdom in many seemingly disparate areas of life--money/economics, corporations, the media, our consumerist lifestyles, and so forth, which we cover in other sections of our site. Here's the place to start!
The
Abolition of Work
by Bob Black, 1985
A wonderful article encouraging us to think about alienated labor
and speaking out for the abolition of work as we know it.
We
Don't Want Full Employment, We Want Full Lives!
by Ken Knabb
Documents from recent jobless takeovers of public buildings in
France.
Bob
Black: Abolitionist and Archestrator of the Slack Revolution
by Steve Mizrach
Meet Bob Black, heretic and social critic.
No Future for the Workplace
by Bob Black, 1992
What's
Wrong with This Picture?
A critique of Jeremy Rifikin's book The End of Work by
Bob Black
The Continuum Concept
Work as play among South American Indians
Toil and Trouble: New Labor's Puritan
Agenda
by Molly Scott Cato
Article on the UK New Labor party.
The
Latest on Unemployment in the UK
SchNEWS
CLAWS site features from Anxiety Culture
by Brian Dean:
"Work," referring to what workers do, should not be confused with exertion; play can be more strenuous than work. Work is compulsory production, something done for some other reason than the satisfaction of doing it."
--Bob Black
"It pisses me off every time I think about anybody thinking that work will liberate."
--bell
hooks
"We must seek by our 'positive' propaganda to make people
want freedom--the responsibility of running their own lives, the
leisure to do the things they want to do--or, of course, to do
nothing--in the company of others or in the privacy of their individualistic
refuges."
--unsigned editorial in Freedom, 1961