Chapter 9: From Primitive Affluence to Labor-Enslaving Technology

One tendency which surely belongs on the Dean’s enemies short list is zero-work, the critique of work as such, “the notion that the abolition of work is possible and desirable: that genuine, unconditioned needs can be met by voluntary playlike activity enjoyed for its own sake” (Black 1996d: 22). Zero-work may well be the only programmatic position shared by everybody the Dean targets, even L. Susan Brown (1995). The Left That Was not only posited work as a necessity, it regarded it as almost a sacrament. And while zero-work is not the same thing as such Bookchin bugbears as hedonism and primitivism, it complements them nicely. It is an important Bookchin target, but he attacks it with potshots, not the usual scattershot. There may be several reasons for his uncharacteristic circumspection.

In his younger days (“younger” being, of course, a relative term), Bookchin understood that dealing radically with what he called “toil” was a crucial dimension of post-scarcity anarchism: “The distinction between pleasurable work and onerous toil should always be kept in mind” (1971: 92). Even 25 years ago, the productive forces had developed “to a point where even toil, not only material scarcity, is being brought into question” (Bookchin 1970: 53). For the traditional left, the answer to the question of work was to eliminate unemployment, rationalize production, develop the productive forces, and reduce the hours of work. To this program the ultra-left, such as the council communists and the anarcho-syndicalists, added workers’ control of production according to one formula or another. These reforms, even if completely successful on their own terms, fall short of any qualitative transformation of the experience of productive activity. Why doesn’t the Dean just contradict his former opinion without admitting it, as he does with so many others?

It may be because zero-work is one dimension of avant-garde anarchism which on Bookchin’s terms looks progressive not regressive — a double irony, as heterodox anarchists tend to disbelieve in progress. Reduced hours of work is an ancient demand of the left (and of the labor movement [Hunnicutt 1988]). Marx considered it the precondition of passage from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom (1967: 820), just like Bookchin (Clark 1984: 55). Anarchists agreed: “The eight-hour day which we officially enjoy is the cause for which the Haymarket anarchists of 1886 paid with their lives” (Black 1992: 29). Over a century ago, Kropotkin argued that it was then already possible to reduce the working day to four or five hours, with retirement by age 45 or 50 (1995: 96). What would his estimate be today: 40 or 50 minutes? Since the Dean believes (however erroneously) that technological progress reduces “toil,” at least potentially (26), he has to believe that the abolition of work is an ever- increasingly practical possibility. He can only criticize zero-workers, not as reactionaries, but as ahead of their time. And that debunks the whole notion of lifestyle anarchism as a surrender to the prevailing climate of reaction.

The Dean might have other reasons not to be conspicuous or even explicit in his rejection of zero-work. Lifestyle anarchists have supposedly withdrawn “from the social domain that formed the principal arena of earlier anarchists” (2) because lifestyle anarchism “is concerned with a ‘style’ rather than a society” (34). But for an old Marxist like Bookchin, labor is the very essence of the social: “Labor, perhaps more than any single human activity, underpins contemporary relationships among people on every level of experience” (1982: 224). In the importance they attach to the labor process, zero-workers resemble traditional socialists, not “the growing ‘inwardness’ and narcissism of the yuppie generation” (9). Work is about real life, not lifestyle or hairstyle.

Finally, there might be a very personal source of the Dean’s relative reticence. His usual method is to focus on one or two prominent expositors of each malign aspect of lifestyle anarchism. Were he to deal with zero-work that way he would probably have to deal with me. As the author of “The Abolition of Work” (Black 1986: 17–33), a widely read essay which has been published in seven languages, and other zero-work writings (Black 1992: ch. 1; 1996b), I would be the single most convenient whipping-boy. But Bookchin never refers to me with respect to zero-work or anything else. What am I, chopped liver?

I can only speculate why I was spared, except by implication, the Dean’s wrath. The flattering suggestion has been made that he feared my polemic powers and hoped I’d ignore his diatribe unless personally provoked by it (Jarach 1996: 3). If so, he miscalculated. I’m a better friend to my friends than that, and besides, I like a good fight. I’m not the kind of guy who says: “First they came for the anarcho-liberal individualists, but I said nothing, for I was not an anarcho-liberal individualist; next they came for the mystics, but I said nothing, for I was not a mystic; next they came for the primitivists, but I said nothing, for I was not a primitivist,” etc.

If anything, I am peeved to be overlooked. Bookchin’s enemies list looks to be for the anarchists of the ‘90s what Nixon’s enemies list was for the liberals of the ‘70s, an honor roll. I’ve previously flattened a nobody — his name doesn’t matter — who pushed the same line as Bookchin (Black 1992: 181–193; Black & Gunderloy 1992) although that one also happened not to mention my name. For me, the political is the personal. An attack upon all is an attack upon one. Solidarity forever — or make my day! ¡No paserán — baby!

We have already seen (Chapter 9) how the Dean blithely misrepresents the best current understanding of how, and how long, foragers work — if that is even the word for what they do for a living, or rather, for the living that they do. As I’ve summarized the situation in my book Friendly Fire:

In addition to shorter hours, “flextime” and the more reliable “safety net” afforded by food sharing, foragers’ work is more satisfying than most modern work. We awaken to the alarm clock; they sleep a lot, night and day. We are sedentary in our buildings in our polluted cities; they move about breathing the fresh air of the open country. We have bosses; they have companions. Our work typically implicates one, or at most a few hyper-specialized skills, if any; theirs combines handwork and brainwork in a versatile variety of activities, exactly as the great Utopians called for (Black 1992: 33).

I’ve cited ample supporting references in that book (which the Dean is surely familiar with, if less than happy with) as also in this one (cf. Zerzan 1994: 171–185 [Bibliography]). All Bookchin can do is fulminate that the primitive affluence thesis is hippie hokum, an ad hominem insult which is irrelevant as well as untrue.

The Dean is equally wrong about work — and the relationship of technology to work — in other forms of society. In Friendly Fire I summarized some of the evidence (there’s lots more) that as technology advances, the quantity of work increases and the quality of the work experience declines (Black 1992: 19–41). In general, there’s no such thing as labor-saving technology. There’s usually, at best, only labor- rearranging technology, which from the worker’s perspective is sort of like “emigrating from Romania to Ethiopia in search of a better life” (ibid.: 13). Capitalists develop and deploy new technology, not to reduce labor, but to reduce the price of labor. The higher the tech, the lower the wages and the smaller the work-force.

When he descends from declamation to detail, the Dean exposes his ignorance of the real history of work and technology. The two examples he adduces are evidence enough. Here’s his cartoon history of Southern agriculture:

In the South, plantation owners needed slave “hands” in great part because the machinery to plant and pick cotton did not exist; indeed, American tenant farming has disappeared over the past two generations because new machinery was introduced to replace the labor of “freed” black share-croppers (35).

In other words, Bookchin blames slavery on technological backwardness, not on a capitalist world-system which assigned to the South the function of export monoculture. But cotton was of minor importance in the low-tech colonial economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when slaves were raising other export crops such as tobacco, rice and indigo (McCusker & Menard 1985). As every schoolchild knows, technical progress strengthened slavery, which had been languishing, with the conjunction of the cotton gin with the textiles-based Industrial Revolution in Britain (Scheiber, Vatter & Faulkner 1976: 130–134).

If what Bookchin says about slaveholders makes sense, thenevery ruling class is off the hook. The plantation owners “needed” slaves “in great part” because they lacked machines to do their work for them. Presumably industrialists “needed” child labor for the same reason. Athenian citizens “needed” slaves because their technology was inadequate to peel their grapes, give them blowjobs, and satisfy the many other needs of a civic-minded citizenry with aims so lofty that they could not be troubled with earning their own keep. “Need” is socially and economically relative. No doubt the Southern planters and the Athenian citizens needed slaves, but did the slaves need the Southern planters or the Athenian citizens?

The Deans’s other example is also maladroit. It’s that classic instrument of women’s liberation, the washing machine: “Modern working women with children could hardly do without washing machines to relieve them, however minimally, from their daily domestic labors — before going to work to earn what is often the greater part of their households’ income” (49). In other words, the washing machine reinforces the domestic sexual division of labor and enables women to be proletarianized — to enter the paid labor force at the bottom (Black 1992: 29–30). Thanks to technology, modern working women get to do the unpaid drudge-work, the “shadow work” (Illich 1981) of the patriarchal household, plus the underpaid capitalist drudge-work of the office, the restaurant and even the factory. The washing machine, and household technology in general, never saved women any labor-time. It just raised performance standards (with a Maytag, no excuse any more if your laundry’s not brighter than white) or else displaced effort to other tasks like child care (Cowan 1974, 1983). I doubt Bookchin does his own laundry, and not only because he’s always airing his dirty linen in public.

In Bookchin’s civic Utopia, “a high premium would be placed on labor-saving devices — be they computers or automatic machinery — that would free human beings from needless toil and give them unstructured leisure time for their self-cultivation as individuals and citizens” (1989: 197). To believe in that is, for someone as ignorant as Bookchin, an act of faith. In recent decades productivity, driven by high technology far beyond anything the Dean anticipated, has increased prodigiously — more than doubling since 1948 (Schor 1991: 1–2, 5, 29). Oddly enough, not even “material scarcity,” much less “toil,” has diminished. Real income has fallen at the same time hours of work have increased (Black 1994: 31–32; Black 1996b: 45). Even the Dean has noticed, literally on page one, “the growing impoverishment of millions of people” at the same time that “the intensity of exploitation has forced people in growing numbers to accept a work week typical of the last century” (1). What he hasn’t noticed is that the paradox of more progress, more productivity, more poverty and more work calls his essentially Marxist celebration of the development of the productive forces, as he might say, “into question.”

The Dean admits that “many technologies are inherently domineering and ecologically dangerous” (34), but he cannot imagine that they increase and worsen work. Really he just doesn’t care. He hasn’t devoted any sustained attention to work since Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971). After 25 years as a college bureaucrat, the factory is a distant memory. His 1989 primer summarizing his views on remaking society devoted all of two sentences to work with but a perfunctory affirmation of rotation of tasks (1989: 195). All Bookchin cares about any more is politics and ecology, in that order. Provided a technology is neither “domineering” nor “dangerous,” its impact on work means nothing to him.

Nothing better dramatizes the Dean’s self-deception and irrelevance than the contrast between his fervor for politics and his indifference to work. He believes, because he wants to believe, that “seldom in recent memory has there been a more compelling popular sentiment for a new politics” (59). That contradicts his characterization of the epoch as privatistic, personalistic and apolitical. The truth is that seldom in recent memory has there been a more compelling sentiment for no politics.

On the other hand, work is if anything more salient, if less liked, in the lives of ordinary people than it’s been in decades. Longer hours, lower real incomes, and employment insecurity have done nothing to compensate for the joyless and often humiliating experience of the work itself. In the 1960s Bookchin, ever alert to sniffing out potentially revolutionary sources of social malaise, expressed approval of the younger generation’s contempt for the work trap (Bookchin 1970: 54, 61; 1971: 175–176; cf. 1994: 30). But while other Bookchin-approved tendencies, like youth culture, were recuperated, a widening revolt against work became a persistent feature of the American workplace (DeLeon 1996: 196–197; Zerzan 1988: 170–183). Spontaneous and acephalous, it could neither be bought out by bosses nor organized by leftists. The overworked and the unemployed — now there’s a potentially revolutionary force (Black 1996a).