The Slavery of Work?

Through a post on MetaFilter I found an essay called The Abolition of Work by Bob Black. It turns out it was originally written and published in 1985, but it seems very fresh and relevant. It is extremely interesting, but long and pretty dense in places. His thesis statement is as follows:

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

So we see immediately that the author is building on a different foundation than we as Christians do. Our foundation, of course, is Jesus Christ, and the Bible tells us that the source of all misery is our fall, our separation from God. However, Jesus also said that "the love of money is the root of all manner of evils" and money is, after all, why most of us work. It can also be said that work was ordained as part of the curse after the fall, so in a sense he isn't miles away from reality. The following quote is also pretty wild:

Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions, they just didn't have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.

I'm sure any of us that aren't in their "dream job" can relate to the sentiment of work being like a prison, but to compare it to Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible is off the charts! For all his interesting points, the author cannot overcome the simple fact that what he is proposing is not practical.

Another interesting thing to note is that Black lays a measure of blame on the "Protestant work ethic" and Calvinism. He even goes so far as to say that if Calvinism were being introduced today instead of being a centuries old theology that it would be labelled a cult. Pretty harsh words. On the subject of the protestant work ethic, I found via Josh Claybourn an article in the New York Times discussing how that work ethic is the reason America Outpaces Europe in industrial measures.

Posted by John Hawbaker at June 7, 2003 12:53 PM | TrackBack