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.
That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play
The Abolition of Work | The Anarchist Library
. Modern anarchism as something with a continuing history is the idea of Proudhon, who was as much an intellectual as he was a worker, and who was not engaged in class struggle or even thinking about it in 1840.
“The outstanding anarchist thinkers, Bakunin, Kropotkin and others,” discovered the idea of anarchism in the masses (15–16) — an extraordinary feat of clairvoyance, since the masses had no idea the idea was theirs.
If Bakunin got the idea of anarchism from the struggling masses, it took him long enough. Kropotkin got the idea from the Swiss workers in the Jura Federation, who got their anarchism from Bakunin. As he writes in his Memoirs, the egalitarianism — he doesn’t mention class struggle — more than anything else, won him over to anarchism.
Here was a spirited defense of work by a college professor who didn’t have to do any. To demonstrate that his arguments were thoroughly conservative, it is enough to show that they agreed in all essentials with Marxism-Leninism.
Hospers thought he could justify wage-labor, factory discipline and hierarchic management by noting that they’re imposed in Leninist regimes as well as under capitalism. Would he accept the same argument for the necessity of repressive sex and drug laws? Like other libertarians, Hospers is uneasy — hence his gratuitous red-baiting — because libertarianism and Leninism are as different as Coke and Pepsi when it comes to consecrating class society and the source of its power, work. Only upon the firm foundation of factory fascism and office oligarchy do libertarians and Leninists dare to debate the trivial issues dividing them. Toss in the mainstream conservatives who feel just the same and we end up with a veritable trilateralism of pro-work ideology seasoned to taste.
Hospers, who never has to, sees nothing demeaning in taking orders from bosses, for “how else could a large scale factory be organized?” In other words, “wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself.” Hospers again? No, Frederick Engels! Marx agreed: “Go and run one of the Barcelona factories without direction, that is to say, without authority!” (Which is just what the Catalan workers did in 1936
