Why Work?: Arguments for the Leisure Society

214 Pages·1997·10.81 MB·English

by  Vernon Richards (ed.)

Leisure
What is this life if, full of care
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
and watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
W.H.Davies
(1870-1940)
WHY WORK?
Arguments
yorthe
LeiresS uociety
Bertrand Russell Denis Pym John Hewetson
William Morris. Cliff Harper Peter Kropotkin
George Woodcock Colin Ward Tony Gibson
Camillo Berneri Les Gibbard Gaston Leval
Ifan Edwards W. H. Davies August Heckscher
Vernon Richards (Editor)
"No working ideal for machine production can be
based solely on the gospel of work; still less can it be
based upon an uncritical belief in constantly raising
the quantitative standard of consumption. If we are
to achieve a purposive and cultivated use of the
enormous energies now happily at our disposal, we
must examine in detail the processes that lead up to
the final state of leisure, free activity, creation. It is
because of the lapse and mismanagement of these
processes that we have not reached the desirable end;
and it is because of our failure to frame a comprehen­
sive scheme of ends that we have not succeeded in
achieving even the beginnings of social efficiency in
the preparatory work. "
LEWIS MUMFORD
Technics & Civilisation (1934)
FREEDOM PREss 1997
First published
1983
by FREEDOM PRESS
84B Whitechapel High St
London E.1.
Reprinted 1987, 1990, 1997
All rights reserved
ISBN 0 900384 25 5
To the Memory of
JOAN TONER
(1892 -1978)
a generous
Friend of Freedom Press
and
JACK ROBINSON
(1913 - March 20 1983)
a good comrade of the
Freedom Press group
Printed by Aldgate Press in Angel Alley 84B Whitechapel High St London E.l
CONTENTS
Leisure W.H. Davies inside front cover
Why Work? Editor's Preface 5
Call of the Wild Les Gibbard 8
1. INTRODUCTION
In Praise of Idleness Bertrand Russell 25
Useful Work versus Useless Toil William Morris 35
2. PROBLEMS AND PLEASURES OF WORK
Tyranny of the Clock George Woodcock 53
Why Work? S.L. Lowndes 58
The Problem of Work Camillo Berneri 59
The Art of Shovelling /fan Edwards 83
Measuring Misery John Hewetson 91
The Wage System Peter Kropotkin 93
"Who will do the Dirty Work?" Tony Gibson 108
3. ALTERNATIVES AND FUTURES
Reflections on Utopia S.F. 115
Collectives in Spain Gaston Leval 115
Significance of the Self-Build Movement 124
Leisure in America August Heckscher 129
The Other Economy as a Social System Denis Pym 137
Visions: 6 drawings by Cliff Harper. Commentary by
Colin Ward 149
4. PRODUCTION FOR USE
VERSUS PRODUCTION FOR PROFIT Vernon Richards
1. Reflections on Full Employment 155
2. Supply & Demand 158
3. Capitalism or the Survival of the Richest 161
4. More Parasites than Workers 165
5. Workers Wake Up! 169
6. Wasted Manpower 173
7. Nationalisation of Leisure 177
8. A Bit of Indigestion 180
9. Financial Crisis 1961 184
10. Blessings of Prosperity 186
3
11. Unemployment Again �92
12. Redundancy & Revolution 97
13. "Abundance may Compel Social Justice" 201
14. The Wind of Small Change 205
15. Time is Life 209
About Freedom Press inside back cover
We know what we should do, but we do not do it. We prefer to remain not so
much in our outer darkness, for the lights of wisdom blaze round us; but in a
bemused euphoria of a material 'progress' that offers mankind a high standard
of living in exchange for his spiritual freedom.
HERBERT READ
( The Truth of a few Simple Ideas 1967)
Let us take supply-side theory at its face value, however modest that may be.
It holds that the work habits of the American people are tied up irrevocably
to their income, though in a curiously perverse way. The poor do not work
because they have too much income; the rich do not work because they do
not have enough income. You expand and revitalise the economy by giving
the poor less, the rich more.
J.K. GALBRAITH
The Rich get even Richer (Observer 17 /1/82)
I was interested to read the article on wealth in last week's Sunday Times as
I recently totalled the worth of all my possessions if they were sold. It came
to about £400. The most expensive item was a radio-cassetted recorder (£70)
followed by my tent (£65) and rucksack (£50). I live comfortably in a bed-sit
and work in a London hotel. I would not fit anywhere on your wealth chart,
but I certainly do not feel poor. I consider poor to be the countries of the
Third World, where to have a day's food is to be rich.
I think it is a rather sad comment on our society that a person who owns
£10,000 worth of possessions is considered "fairly poor" by 32 per cent of
your survey.
DEREK BAKER
How do you test wealth. Letter in S. Times 1982
4
EDITORS PREFACE
Why Work?
For three-quarters of the world's teeming billions our question
would be considered a rhetorical one. The figures speak for them­
selves: 84 percent of the working population in Bangladesh work
on the land; 62 percent do in China; 80% in Egypt, 65% in India,
83% in Tanzania, 56% in Nigeria, 72% in Vietnam. And it is no less
a fact of life in Zaire, Zambia and Zimbabwe where food production
statistically is a mere 15% of the Gross National Product (GNP)1•
Compare these figures with those of the "developed" nations of
the world, the producers of the so called "food surpluses". And I
will start with our own country which has now proudly joined the
grain exporting nations and contributed to the Common Market's
wheat, barley and butter intervention "mountairrs" (while at the
same time importing manioc - a cheap source of protein for
animal feed - from the Far East and butter from New Zealand).
Less than 3 percent of this country's workforce is engaged in agri­
culture but produces more than 60% of the food consumed. A lot
more people are engaged in processing and generally messing about
with it, packaging, advertising, marketing, transporting it as well as
making a lot of money in the commodity markets. The U.S.A.,
largest producer of food in the world and the number one exporter
of cereals also employs only 3 percent of its workforce on the land
and what they produce represents only 3 percent of the GNP.
France, the fifth largest producer of cereals in the world, as well as
the second largest of sugar beet, not to mention its pre-eminence
as a producer of fruit, dairy produce, root crops and meat requires
only I 0% of its working population to do so and in all it represents
a modest 5 percent of GNP. Even those countries one thinks of as
the granaries of the world, such as Australia and Canada, employ
1. I have used the GNP to make comparisons between the material standards
of the Affluent and Third worlds, though I agree when Schumacher declares
in Good Work (Abacus 1980) that "this concept of GNP means nothing to
me . . . b ecause it's a purely quantitative concept . .. The quality of life
-­
not the quantity - yes that's what matters". On the other hand it is under­
standable that the hungry should confuse these two concepts. The quality of
life can only have meaning when the basic necessities of life have been
satisfied.
6 WHY WORK'! ARGUMENTS FOR THE LE!SURE SOCIETY
just 6 percent of their workforces on the land and production is
8% and 4% respectively of GNP. And today even the Mediterranean
countries, such as Spain and Italy, which one associates with sun­
shine, food and drink, food production represents a mere 9% of
GNP and occupies 19% and 13% respectively of their work forces.2
Thus in the "affluent" quarter of the world our question is far
from being a rhetorical one. Though the work ethic remains
dominant, a growing minority of working people are asking them­
selves this very question. After all not only do most people live
and work in towns and cities and are completely divorced from
the land; we have now reached the point where more than half the
population is either too old, too young, too sick or too rich to be
included on the pay roll3 , or are part of the army of the unpaid
(housekeepers, allotment holders, voluntary workers of all kinds
none of whom figure in the statistics of GNP). Furthermore
producers now represent much less than half the workforce and
though much of what they produce keeps the wheels of industry
and business ticking over very profitably, they use up valuable
sources of raw materials and fossil energy wastefully, while adding
very little to the quality of life. The latest available figures for the
United States, the undisputed world leader in our consumerist
society are that 75% of the work force are white collar and 25%
production workers. About 8% of the workforce 12 million) are
(
unemployed, with or without the dole, but all assured of either
Uncle Sam's renowned soup kitchens and poor houses, or Salvation
Army charity4.
2. All the statistics have been taken from Atlaseco (Paris 1980 edition).
3. Harford Thomas in his ever interesting and valuable Alternatives Notebook
quotes (Guardian March 13 1982) from Leisure and Work that 9% of our
available time was taken up in 1981 by work (including travel to and from),
31 % by leisure and 37% by sleep. "These figures are arrived at by aggregating
the living time of the whole population including children and retired people
and then totting up the time spent in work, leisure, sleep and other essential
activities and converting to percentages". See also the Editor's computation
on pp 170-171.
4. Buffalo, once a thriving industrial centre on the banks of Lake Erie, now
has, thanks to Reaganomics, unemployment figures of 15.3% for whites and
double for blacks. With the Federal government's withdrawal from many
social services much of the burden for assistance falls on the Salvation Army
and other charitable groups. According to Alex Brummer in the Guardian
(31 Jan 1983) in the last year 20,176 individuals sought some kind of
assistance from the S.A. compared with 9,609 a year earlier.
EDITORS PREF ACE 7
A large proportion of existing services and industries in the
affluent society could be dispensed with without society being any
the poorer. A simple test is to ask oneself the question: "What
would most disrupt your life? A strike by miners of Fleet Street
print workers; farmworkers or workers in the arms industry;
Health workers or journalists; transport workers or salesmen;
water, gas and electricity workers or stockbrokers, Members of
Parliament and Company Directors; postal services or advertising
services; dustmen or asset strippers; grave diggers or underwriters?"
You can check your answers quite simply. When government and
Media, and the idle rich, attack striking workers for "holding the
nation to ransom" and for being "greedy", you can be sure they
are workers doing a worthwhile job for society. In most cases they
are among the lower paid. Is it not ironical for instance that a higher
proportion of farmworkers in full time employment are entitled
to Supplementary Benefit than in any other industry?
The media for a few days exploited the mass exodus of sorne
1Yi m. Ghanaians from Nigeria for all they were worth. T .V. was prov-
ided with a Hollywood spectacular in full technicolour for free.
But fascinating as the logistics of this army of the hungry is for the
cameras and the journalists, how much more socially important is
the fact that over a period of years nearly a sixth of the population
of Ghana had made its way on foot, by truck or by boat to oil-rich
Nigeria in search of the means of existence (yes, and perhaps
dreams of El Dorado. Why not?) while Ghana's ruling group was
much more concerned with the old worldly struggle for power and
pelf.5 One can only see the "problem" of unemployment in the
over-affluent West in its true context by comparing the material sit­
uation of those Ghanaians with that of the 28 million unemployed
in the industrialised countries of the OECD. 53% of Ghana's labour
force work on the land which produces 48% of the GNP. How can
1 Yz million returnees be fed and sheltered and absorbed into the
economy overnight? In the affluent West not only can they afford
to keep 28 million skilled and unskilled, willing and unwilling work­
i� ialeness, they can also afford a multi-billion dollar "Defence"
�rs
budget and embark on costly military adventures .. They can afford
5. Arms sales to the Third World from all sources peaked in 1980 totalling
£23,600 million, an increase of £7 ,800m over the previous year (Reuter
quoted in Guardian 3. 2. 82). Food exports to the Third World were much
lower, at £16,000m.
Call of the Wild
by Gibbard