Hingstman 13 Work Bad K

ADI 2010 Fellows--Zagorin
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Workism K........................................................................................................................................1 Workism 1NC...................................................................................................................................2 Workism 1NC...................................................................................................................................3 Workism 1NC...................................................................................................................................4 Workism 1NC...................................................................................................................................5 Workism 1NC...................................................................................................................................6 Workism 1NC...................................................................................................................................7 Workism 1NC...................................................................................................................................8 2NC Workism ! OV........................................................................................................................10 Ext. Slavery.....................................................................................................................................11 A2: Permutation.............................................................................................................................12 A2: Permutation.............................................................................................................................13 Link: Unemployment Bad Advantage............................................................................................14 Link: Unemployment Bad Advantage............................................................................................15 Link: Market Economics................................................................................................................16 Link: Libertarian Rights.................................................................................................................17 Link: Libertarian Rights [card continued].....................................................................................18 Link: Survivalism...........................................................................................................................19 Link: Revolution............................................................................................................................20 Link: Apocalypse............................................................................................................................21 Misc Alt Solvency...........................................................................................................................22 Ext. Stupidity.................................................................................................................................23 Ext. Stupidity.................................................................................................................................24 2NC Alternative.............................................................................................................................25 2NC Alternative.............................................................................................................................26 2NC Alternative..............................................................................................................................27 2NC Framing.................................................................................................................................28 A2: Extinction Outweighs..............................................................................................................29 Relativism 1NC..............................................................................................................................30 Ext. Relativism...............................................................................................................................31 Ext. Relativism...............................................................................................................................32 Ext. Relativism...............................................................................................................................33 Ext. Relativism...............................................................................................................................34 A2: We Decrease State Power......................................................................................................35 A2: We Decrease State Power......................................................................................................36 A2: We Decrease State Power......................................................................................................37 A2: Commodification.....................................................................................................................38 A2: Work Inevitable.......................................................................................................................39 A2: Virtuous Labor........................................................................................................................40 A2: Socialism..................................................................................................................................41 A2: Socialism.................................................................................................................................42 YMCA.............................................................................................................................................43 AFF2AC Framework OV.............................................................................................................44 AFFConsequentialism Supports Work Orientation...................................................................45 AFFEnd of Work = Social Annihilation......................................................................................46 AFF End of Work K eats the case harms....................................................................................47 AFF--End Of Work Ks Theory of Agency is Reductionist............................................................48 AFF--Our Agency Theory is Reason to Vote for the Perm............................................................49 AFF Hedonic ethical relativism should be rejected as a standard of evaluation 1/2.................50 AFF Hedonic ethical relativism should be rejected as a standard of evaluation 2/2.................51
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Workism 1NC
WORK IS SLAVERY The 1AC is a program for capturing new labor in the prison colonies that we call the field, factory, or office in order to fashion obedient subjects accustomed to tedious domination who will valorize their own subordination and endlessly reproduce vicious hierarchy Black 85 Bob, anarchist intellectual, The Abolition of Work http://www.zpub.com/notes/blackwork.html Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing. And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately deStalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work? The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it.
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Workism 1NC
The ideological supervenience of jobs as a container for human experience instantiate a form of discipline and power relations that makes life worthlessly monotonous and must be opposed Black 85 Bob, anarchist intellectual, The Abolition of Work http://www.zpub.com/notes/blackwork.html I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it's done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist of "Communist," work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness. Usually -- and this is even more true in "Communist" than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee -- work is employment, i. e., wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In the USSR or Cuba or Yugoslavia or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions -- Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey -- temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millenia, the payment of taxes (= ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility. But modern work has worse implications. People don't just work, they have "jobs." One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don't) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A "job" that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who -- by any rational-technical criteria -- should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control. The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as "discipline." Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace -- surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching -in and -out, etc. 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.
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The 1AC exemplifies the cult of efficiency which treats all activities as means to ends and engenders a bad conscience opposed to the enjoyment of life Russell 32, Sir Bertrand, famous philosopher and logician, fellow at the Royal Society, In Praise of Idleness http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and because it brings a money profit. The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy. The butcher who provides you with meat and the baker who provides you with bread are praiseworthy, because they are making money; but when you enjoy the food they have provided, you are merely frivolous, unless you eat only to get strength for your work. Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profitmaking is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.
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The 1AC sees work as the answer to the problems of the worldthis false belief is the ideological creation of the ruling classes during who presided over subsistence labor economies of most of human historythe virtue of work is the morality of slavery and must be rejected Russell 32, Sir Bertrand, famous philosopher and logician, fellow at the Royal Society, In Praise of Idleness http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html All this is only preliminary. I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work. First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising. Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. There are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might therefore be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is only rendered possible by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example. From the beginning of civilization until the Industrial Revolution, a man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was required for the subsistence of himself and his family, although his wife worked at least as hard as he did, and his children added their labor as soon as they were old enough to do so. The small surplus above bare necessaries was not left to those who produced it, but was appropriated by warriors and priests. In times of famine there was no surplus; the warriors and priests, however, still secured as much as at other times, with the result that many of the workers died of hunger. This system persisted in Russia until 1917 [1], and still persists in the East; in England, in spite of the Industrial Revolution, it remained in full force throughout the Napoleonic wars, and until a hundred years ago, when the new class of manufacturers acquired power. In America, the system came to an end with the Revolution, except in the South, where it persisted until the Civil War. A system which lasted so long and ended so recently has naturally left a profound impress upon men's thoughts and opinions. Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system, and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
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Work is an ongoing genocide that makes life meaningless and death pointless Black 85 Bob, anarchist intellectual, The Abolition of Work http://www.zpub.com/notes/blackwork.html If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others which they cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words. Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are killed annually in this country on the job. Over two million are disabled. Twenty to twenty-five million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus they don't count the half million cases of occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases which was 1,200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die every year, a much higher fatality rate than for AIDS, for instance, which gets so much media attention. This reflects the unvoiced assumption that AIDS afflicts perverts who could control their depravity whereas coal-mining is a sacrosanct activity beyond question. What the statistics don't show is that tens of millions of people have heir lifespans shortened by work -- which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their 50's. Consider all the other workaholics. Even if you aren't killed or crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of auto-industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly, or indirectly, to work. Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing -- or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.
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Workism 1NC
Vote negative to reject the 1AC participation in the cult of efficiency; to recognize the pointlessness of enslaving oneself to growth and to abolish work as a social construct Black 85 Bob, anarchist intellectual, The Abolition of Work http://www.zpub.com/notes/blackwork.html What I've said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are fed up with work. There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work. And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also widespread among workers themselves is that work itself is inevitable and necessary. I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes, except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that shouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other. I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing, and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkeys and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the "tertiary sector," the service sector, is growing while the "secondary sector" (industry) stagnates and the "primary sector" (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That's why you can't go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn't the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the past fifty years?
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Refuse the 1AC call to engineer pointless misery in the name of a false future. Life lives in the present and making thought economic only serves as a rationalization for enslaving existence. Abandon the perverse calculations of the cure-all politics of the 1AC and re-claim this space of debate by an insistence on pleasure indifferent to the misery of others and the genocidal attempt to perfect society Vaneigem 79, Raoul, situationist philosopher, leading thinker in the Situationist International The Book of Pleasures trans. John Fullerton, 1983 http://www.scenewash.org/lobbies/chainthinker/situationist/vaneigem/bop/bop.html Freedom has no worse enemy than these cure-all panaceas which claim to transform society. For these veils of exorcist ritual simply serve to smuggle the old world back in. Lawyers for the revolution or sniffers of radical chic, whatever pedigrees these grocers have, they are our adversaries, armourclad in neurosis, and will bear the full brunt of the violence of those who live without restraint. I know well the wise men who denigrate survival, having in many ways been one of them. Under the cassock of that high-brow criticism moves the secular arm of far more pemicious inquisitions. But they merely project the disgust they feel at themselves towards others. Since the system spreads by destroying its producers and thus by destroying itself, the problem is how to avoid becoming an accessory to trade. Those who whimper in pain, unable to relax enough to enjoy themselves, give up extricating their desires out of the mercantile stranglehold, and make money because they cannot make anything else. Such potential suicides are notable for the way they slag the Establishment; but however convinced they seem, they remain its lackeys to be dug back into the social midden. They have grown quite used to suffering because things don't change, and have also grown to respect their neighbours' wish to leave things as they are. You cannot tell apart their funeral dirge from the old world's De Profundis. "Love and friendship are just illusions," they whine, snivelling senilities of the recluse. No doubt that is why we pay them so much attention, these ossified landowners and disillusioned civil servants. Decay ennobles. Toilers for order, toilers for chaos, for inhibition or psychic lib., the autodestructive process of trade programmes the curriculum vitae of inexistence. Death grabs and you stumble from life, wom out with keeping the books and balance-sheets of daily misery, or with strutting your stuff like a ham politician because of the wonderful way you are managing to die. Though you loathe power you revere it nonetheless, for from it you have borrowed that arrogant attitude of rejection which endorses all your contemptible acts. But life mocks those even with the most wonderful theories. Only from pleasures is born audacity and laughter, which rings out at orders and laws and limits; it will fall upon all who still judge, repress, calculate and govern, with the innocence of a child. While intellectuals devise ingenious methods of slipping through the keyhole, those with a world of desires to achieve are breaking down the door, an act of particularly gross behaviour for those fastidious mechanics in social engineering who think they see light at the end of the tunnel. But it is life itself seeking fulfilment. The increasing abstraction of the commercial process has turned our heads into the last place left to hide; but even there all that remains is the shadow of power in a tower of skulls. The scars of age, source of so much nostalgic reminiscence, are the wounds of selfrenunciation, pleasure mutilated and bled to death by a mania for appearances, a need to dominate, and the will to power. Your truths have little but the bitterness which has sown them, their edge honed on generations who learned to accept things only if accompanied by kicks, cuffs and mortification. But all arguments cut both ways and set up their own repression. What is knowledge worth when it is founded on the tacit postulate that oneself is one's own worst enemy? An influential person quickly discovers that though he controls others he has no real existence for them. Should he hope to safeguard this phantom self "for the good of his fellow-men", he loses and deceives himself as well as his public. That is why I do not intend to try to convince you: I do not care to add scorn to whatever contempt you already have for others. However rapt your attention to the various messengers of self-destruction, whom I am sure will repay your attention with interest, I prefer, rather offhandedly, to wait until sooner or later
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you grow deaf to everything that does not increase your pleasure. It is much more the lack of fun which batters us than over-abundance and indulgence. Let the dead bury the living dead. My well-being does not dine upon virtue and certainly not upon revolutionary virtue. I feast upon what is alive and kicking. Dead truths are venomous, as all who give up their desires discover. What's a book worth which does not say more than all the others? What returns each man to himself is written with the taste of plenty, not under the scourge of directives. The 'Book of Pleasures' is bound to be tainted with the life of intellectualism, separate thought which rules over the body and oppresses it. But the lie that we each carry can be dissolved only by doing exactly what we want to do, without qualm or hesitation. May your desires wipe out whatever lies remain here, and efface the grand inquisitor from your brain. In all beings, in all things, in all creation, I take what pleases and leave the rest. Keep away, serious critics! This is not for you. Why should you put up with me if you cannot stand yourselves? I don't give a toss what you think of this book; so what you do with it is up to you. I have nothing to exchange. If you know all this and better, go to it! Whoever learns to love himself is beyond the plots and spells of shame and guilt and the fear of loving; and knows too, that despite my errors I do not veer an inch from my desire to create a society based upon the individual will to live, by globally subverting the society which has stood everything on its head. What could I wish for the present but to take the greatest pleasure in being what I am? To enjoy myself in such a way that never again do I get bogged down in other people's misery. If these righteous citizens knew what dynamite they humped about every step of the way.... Humility's tatters and megalomania's trumpery have between them successfully persuaded the sober how insignificant they are; look at them, they are so graceless, and their eyes are dead to what's left of life beyond affective blocks and compensatory binges. Who will shatter the rock that for millenia has sat upon individual autonomy? For so long now learning to live has meant learning to die. "When I come to make a wheel," said the wheelright. "I can't go at it slowly, or it will turn out weak and uncertain. Whereas if I go hard at it, it'll be firm but grossly proportioned. But if I take it steadily, at my own speed and so that it feels right, it will turn out just as I wish. You can't explain the feel for it in words." The words here begin where my lived experience falls silent. If you take these words so they 'feel right', I get a chance to mesh with every person's experience and go forward with it. Only the individual will to live can make the Book of Pleasures what it is to me, an urge to have fun that nothing and no-one outside myself has imposed on me. I like the Viennese humourist's quip: "There are a lot of people who'd love to hit me, and many who'd like to chat with me for an hour. They are generally the same people." Cut me or lionise me, it's a joke either way! But I can't shield myself from the feeling that whoever represses himself, refusing his own desires and turning towards death, adds a shackle to my emancipation I could well do without . The key is within each of us. No instructions come with it. When you decide to treat yourself as your only point of reference you will cease to be trapped by name-dropping - yours or mine - or by deferring to other people's opinions, or by the particular way they see things. And you will cease to link yourself to the people whose everpresent memories of having taken part in a movement in history still prevent them from deriving any personal benefit from the experience. It is entirely up to us to invent our own lives. We waste so much energy in living vicariously, it is really hard work, when it would be enough, if you love yourself, to apply this energy to the achievement and development of the incomplete being, the child within. I wish to reach the anonymity of desire and be carried away on the flood. In endlessly denaturing what still seemed natural, the history of trade has reached a point where either we perish with it or recreate nature and humanity completely afresh. Beyond the inversion in which death battens on life, life leaps up, and swiftly sketches society where pleasure comes of its own accord. At any one moment, my 'me' is to be found tightly tangled in the detritus of what oppresses me; heated debate erupts in the attempt to
disentangle the twisted filaments and liberate utterly the sexual impulse as the breath that gives life perpetually. It ought never to be stifled. That's why enjoying
yourself also presages the end of work and holding back, exchange, intellectuality, guilt, and the will to power. I see no justification - except economic - for suffering, separation, orders, payments, reproaches or power. My struggle for autonomy is that of the proletarian against his growing proletarianisation, of the individual against the omnipresent dictatorship of goods for sale, the commodity. Life erupting has kicked a breach in your death-oriented civilisation.
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2NC Workism ! OV
The 1AC trafficks in the ideology of wage-slavery which sanitizes the factory fascism of modern work and makes invisible the ongoing violence of work culture which renders existence meaningless. Vote negative to refuse the cult of efficiency and establish a new relationship towards production. Work is the root cause of their impactsall human suffering
Black 85 Bob, anarchist intellectual, The Abolition of Work http://www.zpub.com/notes/blackwork.html No one should ever work. 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; in other words, a ludic conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of the same debased coin. The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for "reality," the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously -- or maybe not -all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.
11 Workism K
Ext. Slavery
Work is the moral equivalent of slavery philosophical consensus Black 85 Bob, anarchist intellectual, The Abolition of Work http://www.zpub.com/notes/blackwork.html Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that "whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves." His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed "to regain the lost power and health." Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to "St. Monday" -- thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecration -- was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancient regime wrested substantial time back from their landlord's work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants' calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov's figures from villages in Czarist Russia -- hardly a progressive society -- likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants' days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we. Work is enslavement comparative surveys demonstrate comparability Black 85 Bob, anarchist intellectual, The Abolition of Work http://www.zpub.com/notes/blackwork.html Historians like Eugene Genovese have argued persuasively that -- as antebellum slavery apologists insisted -- factory wage-workers in the Northern American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats and businessmen seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious enforcement of even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill. The enforcers apparently appreciate this, since they don't even try to crack down on most malefactors.
12 Workism K
A2: Permutation
Justifying the permutation via the affirmative advantages demonstrates precisely economic logic of bare survival which guarantees that they only re-entrench the oppression of work. Only the alternative can allow for transformative liberation. Try or die for the alternative any link means you vote negative
Vaneigem 79, Raoul, situationist philosopher, leading thinker in the Situationist International The Book of Pleasures trans. John Fullerton, 1983 http://www.scenewash.org/lobbies/chainthinker/situationist/vaneigem/bop/bop.html
No-one will right the world upside down with any part of him which is itself upside down. We have fought the economy too much as economists and used this behaviour as an alibi. You don't fight consciously against regimentation by unconsciously regimenting yourself. The development of intellectuality, which is inherent in trade's development, makes everyone willing to criticise the old world with a lucidity they neglect to apply to their own individual destinies. The irony of the world upside down confirms it so well that revolutionary theory's best guard dogs, though never ceasing to bark at the same pitch, are turning into power's best guard dogs. We have lived through the becoming of trade, in a deathly dialectic which is precisely the history of the economy feeding on humanity, the history of an empire which grows and perishes to the exact extent that men produce it and submit to its power, thereby slowly reducing themselves to pure exchange values. Here we all are gathered together, at its extreme and final stage of development, to assist at its demise. We are, however, condemned to die with it, at least if we remain trapped in the trading reflex, if we allow the possibility which is staring us in the face to slip away, to set up a life dialectic, an evolution in which what is human finally escapes the economy completely. Death draws power's lines of perspective so clearly that the feeling for a radically different way of doing things is beginning to catch the enthusiasm of anyone who has not given up living. The feeling starts with private individuals, in their irreducible subjectivity, in that part of life on which encouragement to work and submit to a particular regime only breaks its teeth.
13 Workism K
A2: Permutation
Negotiating the power relations of labor is incommensurate with opposing work itself Black 85 Bob, anarchist intellectual, The Abolition of Work http://www.zpub.com/notes/blackwork.html Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.
14 Workism K
Link: Unemployment Bad Advantage

The 1AC assumption that unemployment is a negative social property represents a fundamental misunderstandingwork is the disease, unemployment is the cure Wilson 80 Robert Anton, author, crazed genius Extracts from the Illuminati Papers http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/rawilson.html
If there is one proposition which currently wins the assent of nearly everybody, it is that we need more jobs. "A cure for unemployment" is promised, or earnestly sought, by every Heavy Thinker from Jimmy Carter to the Communist Party USA, from Ronald Reagan to the head of the economics department at the local university, from the Birchers to the New Left. I would like to challenge that idea. I don't think there is, or ever again can be, a cure for unemployment. I propose that unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society. The inevitable direction of any technology, and of any rational species such as Homo sap., is toward what Buckminster Fuller calls ephemeralization, or doingmore-with-less. For instance, a modern computer does more (handles more bits of information) with less hardware than the proto-computers of the late '40's and '50's. One worker with a modern teletype machine does more in an hour than a thousand medieval monks painstakingly copying scrolls for a century. Atomic fission does more with a cubic centimeter of matter than all the engineers of the 19th Century could do with a million tons, and fusion does even more. Unemployment is not a disease; so it has no "cure." This tendency toward ephemeralization or doing more-with-less is based on two principal factors, viz: The increment-of-association, a term coined by engineer C.H. Douglas, a meaning simply that when we combine our efforts we can do more than the sum of what each of us could do seperately. Five people acting synergetically together can lift a small modern car, but if each of the five tries separately, the car will not budge. As society evolved from tiny bands, to larger tribes, to federations of tribes, to city-states, to nations, to multinational alliances, the increment-of-association increased exponentially. A stone-age hunting band could not build the Parthenon; a Renaissance citystate could not put Neil Armstrong on the Moon. When the increment-of-association increases, through larger social units, doing-more-with-less becomes increasingly possible. Knowledge itself is inherently self-augmenting. Every discovery "suggests" further discoveries; every innovation provokes further innovations. This can be seen concretely, in the records of the U.S. Patent Office, where you will find more patents granted every year than were granted the year before, in a rising curve that seems to be headed toward infinity. If Inventor A can make a Whatsit out of 20 moving parts, Inventor B will come along and build a Whatsit out of 10 moving parts. If the technology of 1900 can get 100 ergs out of a Whatchamacallum, the technology of 1950 can get 1,000 ergs. Again, the tendency is always toward doing-more-with-less. Unemployment is directly caused by this technological capacity to do more-with-less. Thousands of monks were technologically unemployed by Gutenberg. Thousands of blacksmiths were technologically unemployed by Ford's Model T. Each device that does-more-with-less makes human labor that much less necessary. Aristotle said that slavery could only be abolished when machines were built that could operate themselves. Working for wages, the modern equivalent of slavery -- very accurately called "wage slavery" by social critics -- is in the process of being abolished by just such selfprogramming machines. In fact, Norbert Wiener, one of the creators of cybernetics, foresaw this as early as 1947 and warned that we would have massive unemployment once the computer revolution really got moving. It is arguable, and I for one would argue, that the only reason
15 Workism K
Link: Unemployment Bad Advantage

Wiener's prediction has not totally been realized yet -- although we do have ever-increasing unemployment -- is that big unions, the corporations, and government have all tacitly agreed to slow down the pace of cybernation, to drag their feet and run the economy with the brakes on. This is because they all, still, regard unemployment as a "disease" and cannot imagine a "cure" for the nearly total unemployment that full cybernation will create. Suppose, for a moment, we challenge this Calvinistic mind-set. Let us regard wage-work -as most people do, in fact, regard it -- as a curse, a drag, a nuisance, a barrier that stands between us and what we really want to do. In that case, your job is the disease, and unemployment is the cure.
16 Workism K
Link: Market Economics

The 1AC represents a factory-ization of everyday lifecentering politics on technical questions of furthering labor while valorizing the idea that work is necessary and pleasure only consists in the allotment of what is earned destroying the pleasure of living Vaneigem 79, Raoul, situationist philosopher, leading thinker in the Situationist International The Book of Pleasures trans. John Fullerton, 1983 http://www.scenewash.org/lobbies/chainthinker/situationist/vaneigem/bop/bop.html The factory has invaded the territory of everyday life . For years the privileged zone of alienation, factory walls simultaneously bounded the proletariat's prisons and the bourgeoisie's liberties. Those who escaped at nightfall briefly revived in the merrymaking of love and alcohol that vitality which labour's daily constraints had failed to break. Ten hours a day of noise, exhaustion and humiliation were unable entirely to wear them out. It was society's sinister curse which forced them to match their energies to the rhythms and wear and tear of machines. But the employers' profit-seeking and
foetid nets of exploitation did not poison their fundamental welling of desire, their sexual exuberance in life itself and for themselves. The economic crisis still experienced as specifically economic encouraged the proletariat to acquire the means to accede to the pleasures the bourgeoisie had previously reserved for itself. The constant threat of hunger made them overlook the fact that life bought with wealth and power was fundamentally life reduced to economics. The right to pleasure thus appeared as a conquest, although
pleasure had just been taken over as an object of trade. Illicit pleasures are banned until they become profitable. Capitalism's need to expand has transformed the world into one gigantic market in which every one of life's myriad manifestations is reduced to just another sales pitch. In so doing,
capitalism grows but digs its own grave by killing off the producers who make the expansion possible . We all know in what contempt the aristocracy held the work which guaranteed its survival. Where feudalism cared only to see theomorphic shit the bourgeoisie has erected its nutrition centre out of the basic substance of economics, and the bourgeoisie has forcibly exposed the true excrement in both religion and economics. The bourgeoisie redeem work, thanks to which they seize power, but the right they
arrogate to themselves, to rank manual below intellectual work, profitably repeats the hierarchical ritual. Knowledge establishes a new temple of power. Pleasures which over-stepped the limits had previously been expiated with penances, masses and mortification: the bourgeoisie are the first to propose redemption through work. Sin is cheerfully desacralised, given a cash value, and identified with a right to profit. The crime of idleness is absolved when it acts as a stimulus to consume. This ancient antidote to work is here seen transformed back into work what could be more efficient in getting the workers back to the bench than improving access to the factories of "choose your-ownconsumer-goods"? Making pleasure democratically accessible coincides - though it is scarcely coincidence - with the conquest of new markets where simple enjoyment is called comfort and happiness possession. In so doing, however, the bourgeoisie crystallise the inexpiable sin: refusal to pay. So enjoyment outside a transaction is the absolute economic crime. Our apparent freedom to do whatever we like shows how whatever we choose serves the economy. Just as bread earned by work tastes acidly of sweat and wages , marketable pleasures are more tedious than the boredom it costs to produce them. The survival pleasures swindle is part of the lie of abstract freedom. The history we lead with every turn of the wheel is not the history of our desires but rather of a lifeless civilization which is about to bury us under its dead weight. For pleasure has only ever existed by default. To begin with it was shoved into the decent obscurity of night, into the cupboard, into your dreams, the inner world which is not abroad in the light of day, which is the measured light of work-time. But production quotas have ended up subjecting the secret world of desire to the scanners of their self-seeking science and, since it is impossible to abolish desire, economic necessity is instructed to obtain maximum profitable usage.
The transformation, by constraint and work, of actions and behaviour which have long remained outside the immediate orbit of the economy, shows clearly enough that the mercantile process evolves only by appropriating life, and uncovering only what it can exploit. Nothing will
escape its voracious appetite if humanity becomes increasingly strange to itself.
17 Workism K
Link: Libertarian Rights

Libertarian anti-statist ideology produces principles by which the Far Right can enslave most of the population in corporate work spaces demonizing the state itself is a form of complicity in its practices Black 84 Bob, anarchist intellectual The Libertarian as Conservative http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/libertarian.html
I agreed to come here today to speak on some such subject as The Libertarian as Conservative. To me this is so obvious that I am hard put to find something to say to people who still think libertarianism has something to do with liberty. A libertarian is just a Republican who takes drugs. Id have preferred a more controversial topic like The Myth of the Penile Orgasm. But since my attendance here is subsidized by the esteemed distributor of a veritable reference library on mayhem and dirty tricks, I cant just take the conch and go rogue. I will indeed mutilate the sacred cow which is libertarianism, as ordered, but Ill administer a few hard lefts to the right in my own way. And I dont mean the easy way. I could just point to the laissez-faire Trilateralism of the Libertarian Party, then leave and go look for a party. It doesnt take long to say that if you fight fire with fire, youll get burned. If that were all I came up with, somebody would up and say that the LP has lapsed from the libertarian faith, just as Christians have insisted that their behavior over the last 1900 years or so shouldnt be held against Christianity. There are libertarians who try to retrieve libertarianism from the Libertarian Party just as there are Christians who try to reclaim Christianity from Christendom and communists (Ive tried to myself) who try to save communism from the Communist parties and states. They (and I) meant well but we lost. Libertarianism is party-archist fringe-rightism just as socialism really is what Eastern European dissidents call real socialism, i.e., the real-life state-socialism of queues, quotas, corruption and coercion. But I choose not to knock down this libertarian strawman-qua-man whos blowing over anyway. A wing of the Reaganist Right has obviously appropriated, with suspect selectivity, such libertarian themes as deregulation and voluntarism. Ideologues indignate that Reagan has travestied their principles. Tough shit! I notice that its their principles, not mine, that he found suitable to travesty. This kind of quarrel doesnt interest me. My reasons for regarding libertarianism as conservative run deeper than that. My target is what most libertarians have in common with each other, and with their ostensible enemies. Libertarians serve the state all the better because they declaim against it. At bottom, they want what it wants. But you cant want what the state wants without wanting the state, for what the state wants is the conditions in which it flourishes. My (unfriendly) approach to modern society is to regard it as an integrated totality. Silly doctrinaire theories which regard the state as a parasitic excrescence on society cannot explain its centuries-long persistence, its ongoing encroachment upon what was previously market terrain, or its acceptance by the overwhelming majority of people including its demonstrable victims. A far more plausible theory is that the state and (at least) this form of society have a symbiotic (however sordid) interdependence, that the state and such institutions as the market and the nuclear family are, in several ways, modes of hierarchy and control. Their articulation is not always harmonious (herein of turf-fights) but they share a common interest in consigning their conflicts to elite or expert resolution. To
demonize state authoritarianism while ignoring identical albeit contractconsecrated subservient arrangements in the large-scale corporations which control the world economy is fetishism at its worst. And yet (to quote the most
vociferous of radical libertarians, Professor Murray Rothbard) there is nothing un-libertarian about organization, hierarchy, wage-work, granting of funds by libertarian millionaires, and a libertarian party. Indeed.
18 Workism K
Link: Libertarian Rights [card continued]

That is why libertarianism is just conservatism with a rationalist/positivist veneer. Libertarians render a service to the state which only they can provide. For all their complaints about its illicit extensions they concede, in their lucid moments, that the state rules far more by consent than by coercion which is to say, on present-state libertarian terms the state doesnt rule at all, it merely carries out the tacit or explicit terms of its contracts. If it seems contradictory to say that coercion is consensual, the contradiction is in the world, not in the expression, and cant adequately be rendered except by dialectical discourse. One-dimensional syllogistics cant do justice to a world largely lacking in the virtue. If your language lacks poetry and paradox, its unequal to the task of accounting for actuality. Otherwise anything radically new is literally unspeakable. The scholastic A = A logic created by the Catholic Church which the libertarians inherited, unquestioned, from the Randites is just as constrictively conservative as the Newspeak of 1984.
19 Workism K
Link: Survivalism
The survivalist blackmail of the 1AC makes us workers in the corporation of the future, cauterizing all openings for pleasure, coopting sexuality for intellectual wage-slavery Vaneigem 79, Raoul, situationist philosopher, leading thinker in the Situationist International The Book of Pleasures trans. John Fullerton, 1983 http://www.scenewash.org/lobbies/chainthinker/situationist/vaneigem/bop/bop.html We are stricken with survival sickness in a world totally upside down. Man is the only creature capable of realising his desires by changing the world. Yet, until now, all he has realized has been the exchange of his life-force for the production and accumulation of goods. For thousands of years the system governing history has operated on the social need to transform our sexual potential into the energy for work. For as long as there have been kings and priests, in a process as invariable as the inequalities between classes and as progressive as the history of trade, power and economy, like a pair of vampires, have sucked fresh blood to warm their frozen veins. If we are to believe what we're told, the pressure of a hostile natural environment inexorably pushed a fledgling humanity towards exchange, division of labour, class society and mercantile civilization. What a pretty kettle of fish! As far as we are concerned that road stops here, where the killing joke pointing the irony is that amidst all this wealth that could feed every desire for life passion is utterly absent. In a world where the only thing forbidden is the autarkic act, all is permitted except absolute pleasure. Religion viewed all pleasure as sin, so in the heaven of trade, it was translated into the castrating aspect of the need to produce. But profits were such that pleasures managed to emancipate themselves from sin: they redeem themselves by paying up, and their apparent liberty simply reveals the economy's growing influence as it develops its true terrestrial potential. Just like salaried workers, pleasures cost the life of a proletarian.
20 Workism K
Link: Revolution
Revolutions are a lot of work... makes life meaningless...etc Vaneigem 79, Raoul, situationist philosopher, leading thinker in the Situationist International The Book of Pleasures trans. John Fullerton, 1983 http://www.scenewash.org/lobbies/chainthinker/situationist/vaneigem/bop/bop.html
The camp of the official revolution is bureaucracy's court of miracles. There, theologians mull over the Great Night and with subtle discrimination carve up the territory of angels and demons, while the crippled of the next insurrection work out which lines to follow, and the puritans finally resolve to profit from life, since only pleasures count for anything. They rub shoulders with the prosecution extolling the virtues of sin, preaching the duties of refusal, awarding certificates for radicalism, and denouncing the prevailing misery. To these judges reply counsel for daily life, and as scorn and contempt echo hate and derision, there rises from these communal assemblies a stench every bit as piss-ridden and carbolic as those that rise above central committees, G.H.Q's and police barracks. From such assemblies stride those glorious individuals resigned to misery, and the lost souls of terrorist dawns. For the cast of the dice on which you risk your life by doing in some magistrate or other public nuisance is only the harbinger of the final grand devaluation where death will be as nought. The most destitute forms of survival draw from the false freedom of nothingness and the contemplation of it an unlooked-for rise in price. All deaths are paid for in advance at usurious rates.
21 Workism K
Link: Apocalypse
Apocalypse is the only chance for emancipation from the suffering of commodified life
Vaneigem 79, Raoul, situationist philosopher, leading thinker in the Situationist International The Book of Pleasures trans. John Fullerton, 1983 http://www.scenewash.org/lobbies/chainthinker/situationist/vaneigem/bop/bop.html
When emancipation proletarianises, it masks oppression. The moment a person who is ill accepts the illness he is incurable, the moment his will to live tolerates it like a parasitic implantation which only treatment from outside can reabsorb or extirpate. Because the commercial process the ruling class directs and which directs it in turn has such fatal consequences, such also are its remedies. The therapeutic it recognises either cures or kills you. Its final solution to survival sickness hangs on an apocalyptic upheaval of the commodity system world-wide. For the proletarians however, the liquidation of the trading system is only an effect of freeing pleasure. They can take the direct route to the end of proletarianisation - and the end of survival - because they are not the managing directors of their own alienation. They undergo the hustle of life as an oppression emanating from the ruling class, and when they feel the conflict between free sensual gratification and economics, there is nothing to hold them back from jettisoning work, constraint, intellectualism, guilt, or will to power. I want to fight for more fun, not for less pain.
22 Workism K
Misc Alt Solvency

Abolishing work ends assembly-line production which solves environmental destruction Black 85 Bob, anarchist intellectual, The Abolition of Work http://www.zpub.com/notes/blackwork.html Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant -- and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model-T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend on is out of the question. Already, without even trying, we've virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems. Abolishing work solves patriarchy Black 85 Bob, anarchist intellectual, The Abolition of Work http://www.zpub.com/notes/blackwork.html Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks around. I refer to housewives doing housework and childrearing. By abolishing wage-labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor. The nuclear family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of labor imposed by modern wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been for the last century or two it is economically rational for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork to provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called "schools," primarily to keep them out of Mom's hair but still under control, but incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers. If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of the nuclear family whose unpaid "shadow work," as Ivan Illich says, makes possible the work-system that makes it necessary. Bound up with this no-nukes strategy is the abolition of childhood and the closing of the schools. There are more full-time students than full-time workers in this country. We need children as teachers, not students. They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because they're better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge the generation gap.
23 Workism K
Ext. Stupidity
Work is anathema to creativity survivalism holds us hostage to monotonyescape is possible Vaneigem 79, Raoul, situationist philosopher, leading thinker in the Situationist International The Book of Pleasures trans. John Fullerton, 1983 http://www.scenewash.org/lobbies/chainthinker/situationist/vaneigem/bop/bop.html
Work is the opposite of creativity. As human behaviour usually conforms to commercial mechanisms, history has ceaselessly impoverished the part officially set aside for creative people. Artists, craftsmen, sorcerers, poets, composers, visionaries - anyone who arrogates the passion for creating to themselves - have been wrung through the mangle of industrialisation and the breakdown of the artisan class by the marketing of culture and concretisation by trade, and dried out under the ministration of bureaucrats. Creativity is steam-rollered by work just like any other manifestation of life. Seeing how directly it now serves commercial interests shows that its rivalry was only ever tolerated, if repressed and inverted. Our feeling for the past had better not hide the misery and wealth of our present! However moving I find the works of musicians, painters, engravers and builders, I can see all too clearly the signs of passion defeated and involuntary renunciation. The vivid flash of their explosive energy lingers with us; it should never have been fettered by intellect, survival considerations, money or the will to power. What delights me is that you can still feel the sexual impetus when you get close - which is the desire to go further and reverse the inverted world of creation. What is genius, familiar spirit and breath of inspiration? Showcases to which the organisation of labour allows a narrow margin of freedom, a false liberty parodying the autarkic nature of life itself. Perhaps in pre-agrarian eras a primitive creativity existed, involving the whole body, simultaneous and social, channelling natural forces, and of which magic, alchemy, art and inventive deliriums are just memories. What is certain is that the need to produce represses creativity, fragments it, and turns it towards its negation. Creativity is the aborted child which alchemy attempts mystically to bring to life, sensual experience condemned to go into exile in the head as intellectual work escapes from manual work, the unexplained from which the scientific unconscious derives its windfalls and which the economy recuperates. The end of tolerated creativity - the end of all forms of art - nevertheless identifies the passion for creation with free and intense pleasure in life. Upon this rock the fundamental prohibition commercial society has never ceased to build its churches of liberty. The disgust for forced labour and the allure of creative work allows the do-it-yourself trade to turn us each into his own employer. Staining glass, cuisine, distilling liqueurs or arranging flowers, telling stories and singing, relaxing and dreaming are creative pleasures; the imperative to produce has no scope for them. The ideas that to escape survival sickness, one must create, manages to create a void in what could eradicate it. If it is true that a pervasive discontent gnaws at us all, even those who reckon themselves happy; if it is beyond dispute that creativity - by which I mean the construction of life according to our desires - is absent worldwide, you may now rejoice: we are each of us about to be given formal notice of our obligation to produce our own happiness.
24 Workism K
Ext. Stupidity
The cult of work efficiency divides tasks into their simplest components parts and then sets peoples lives to them, which even Adam Smith concedes makes everyone dumb Black 85 Bob, anarchist intellectual, The Abolition of Work http://www.zpub.com/notes/blackwork.html As Bell notes, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, for all his enthusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smith's modern epigones. As Smith observed: "The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized, unorganizable malaise of the 1970's and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEW's report Work in America, the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. That problem is the revolt against work. It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economist -- Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner -- because, in their terms, as they used to say on Star Trek, "it does not compute."
25 Workism K
2NC Alternative
The alternatives opposition to work will create the impetus for society-wide transformation in organizing necessary and the creation of space for human happiness that will make future warfare impossible Russell 32, Sir Bertrand, famous philosopher and logician, fellow at the Royal Society, In Praise of Idleness http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue. Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits. But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.
26 Workism K
2NC Alternative
Society-wide war efforts which enroll huge portions of society in the unproductive labor or slaughter and weapons manufacture demonstrate that only a very small fraction of work is necessary for comfortable life in modern society. The virtues of work are the morality of a slave state which drives wasteful overproduction and appropriates the lives of the workers for pointless and unhappy servitude Russell 32, Sir Bertrand, famous philosopher and logician, fellow at the Royal Society, In Praise of Idleness http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry. This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
27 Workism K
2NC Alternative
We may not know exactly what the world of the alternative will look like but that is precisely why it is necessaryto overcome the ideological terms of the debate which make the horrors of work seem desirable. We know that play works advocating for the abolition of work is a prerequisite for enjoying life Black 85 Bob, anarchist intellectual, The Abolition of Work http://www.zpub.com/notes/blackwork.html So the abolitionists would be largely on their own. No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. The tiresome debater's problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values is coextensive with the consumption of delightful play-activity. Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not -- as it is now - -- a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play, The participants potentiate each other's pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps. No one should ever work. Workers of the world... relax!
28 Workism K
2NC Framing
The notion of the necessity of work is a product of classist ideology, propagated by the elites in order to safeguard their own unearned leisure Russell 32, Sir Bertrand, famous philosopher and logician, fellow at the Royal Society, In Praise of Idleness http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: 'What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.' People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion. Let us, for a moment, consider the ethics of work frankly, without superstition. Every human being, of necessity, consumes, in the course of his life, a certain amount of the produce of human labor. Assuming, as we may, that labor is on the whole disagreeable, it is unjust that a man should consume more than he produces. Of course he may provide services rather than commodities, like a medical man, for example; but he should provide something in return for his board and lodging. to this extent, the duty of work must be admitted, but to this extent only. I shall not dwell upon the fact that, in all modern societies outside the USSR, many people escape even this minimum amount of work, namely all those who inherit money and all those who marry money. I do not think the fact that these people are allowed to be idle is nearly so harmful as the fact that wage-earners are expected to overwork or starve. If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wageearners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons. Oddly enough, while they wish their sons to work so hard as to have no time to be civilized, they do not mind their wives and daughters having no work at all. The snobbish admiration of uselessness, which, in an aristocratic society, extends to both sexes, is, under a plutocracy, confined to women; this, however, does not make it any more in agreement with common sense.
29 Workism K
A2: Extinction Outweighs

Work society is an endless calculation valuing life in terms of profit and rendering existence into a living death. Only a refusal of rational survival itself in the name of true living can break our bondage and expose the possibility of true freedom Vaneigem 79, Raoul, situationist philosopher, leading thinker in the Situationist International The Book of Pleasures trans. John Fullerton, 1983 http://www.scenewash.org/lobbies/chainthinker/situationist/vaneigem/bop/bop.html The long dark night of trade is all the illumination our inhuman history has ever known. It will lift as life dawns. Death stares at our passions and we mute them; we mesh our desires with what is inimical to life; and we base the greater part o f existence on the bloody search for profit and power. We have been doing it for centuries and we have had enough. We have had enough of revolutions dyed in blood by intellectuals. Violence too is changing sides. Survival, going cheap these days in what is left of the exchange market, is the everyday production of misery, a totalitarian industry. It too is in what you call crisis, in fact the death spasm of this whole civilisation. The only human thing this society based on commerce has made is the mould cast in parody of itself, which serves to propagate it world-wide. The fragmentation that exchange value imposes on life can only tolerate fragmented people, embryos shrivelling in society's incubators, creatures never to be masters of themselves, but slaves. Once cloaked in divinity, then fleshed in ideology, power is now revealed in its bare bones: Economics. If this carries all the bets, the game from now on must go against us. Is it true that life makes sense because of death? Or that we have energy in order to work? That sooner or later judgement is passed on everything either by gods or men or history? That everyone has to pay in the end? For one reason or another, or even for no reason? Or is it maybe that existence is precious because nobody exists except behind "I must work" identities? All in all, do authority and money really regulate how lovers kiss or the taste for wine, or your dreams, or the smell of thyme on a mountainside, since they govem what they cost? If it is and they do, then the world is upside down, and I want to set it right. Daylight has not yet dawned on real life. But behind all you shadowy figures, it is pushing through, under my very feet. We are all so sick of the whole shebang that we want to give up dying whilst gesticulating like the living. In the pit of despair the road stops...or climbs. Am I the only one to oppose your society-in which desire turns to rape and the will to live becomes deadly? For me, joy cannot be sold, desire cannot be priced, and I do things because I feel like it, unconstrained by the laws of "scratch-my-back". Even the discouragement and lack of confidence drummed in since childhood have lost their power to persuade me otherwise. And do not kid yourselves that the triumph of commerce can conceal its appalling effects on humanity. For you cannot resist the historical fact of life by processing it simply into profit and loss. Collectively, our will to live will smash the supremacy of senile economics. Everyone is so bored with the pleasures of survival-pleasures of a world upside-down - that we have to open up and free life's pleasures, that they may spill out everywhere. If we give them free rein we demolish the current dominant ethic, but it will not be destroyed till we let desire rip. Revolution no longer lies in refusing to acquiesce and survive but in taking a delight in oneself that everyone conspires to prohibit, particularly the militants... Yet the weapon we can all use to fight the proletarianisation of body and feeling is pleasure unstinted and unopposed. Most people have lived in opposition to the flow of life. Yet it is becoming obvious that this perspective is now being reversed and the architects of topsy-turvy confounded. It announces the end of the economic era and introduces universal self-management. You can hear it in people's heartbeats, it is at the heart of present historical conditions: freedom at last to enjoy so many pleasures. It sabotages the shopkeeper's mentality which paralyses the muscles and grates the nerves and stifles desire in the name of work and duty, compulsion, exchange, guilt, intellectual control and the will to power. By reversing my perspective, I can distinguish between sound reasoning which ends up killing me, from my desire to live, reasoned or not. Refusing to survive is replaced by affirmation: nothing can satisfy my appetite except more life.
30 Workism K
Relativism 1NC
Relativism is inevitable if unconscious and the notion of moral objectivity is socially produced. The affirmatives attempt to define abstract ethical rules is antithetical to human nature Williams 58, Gardner, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toledo, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Feb. 13, 1958), pp. 143-153 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2022262
The majority of people consciously cling to some form of objective ethics, recoiling from the subjectivism of Hedonic Individual Relativism. But nearly all accept the latter subconsciously. They misunderstand their own basic principles of behavior and judgment. An ordinary individual usually judges correctly as to what is in fact right from his own point of view, and he is not aware that the validity of that right depends upon his own point of view. He does not see that that right is his right, and that it may be wrong from some hostile viewpoint. His judgment that the sadistic sex criminal has committed a horrible deed is true. The pervert really has. But the act is horrible and wrong only because of the suffering it causes and the joy it prevents, and only to those who suffer from it and who lose the joy. If this is everybody, or nearly everybody, that kind of universality, or near universality, in no way contradicts the absolute validity of the subjective ethical principle. The deed may be relatively wrong from any number of individual points of view, and still if it were most deeply satisfactory in the long run to the criminal and to his friend who sympathized, then it would not be horrible or wrong to those two. This, of course, is not likely actually to happen. Many who consider the problem may say the words "deeply satisfactory" and "in the long run," without fully realizing what they mean. I use them to mean what they mean in ordinary English. They mean a deep and abiding joy which pervades the personality as long as its selfidentity endures. And many may say "from the criminal's point of view" while they still are judging as to what is right from their own. People are blinded to the truth of ethical subjectivism by several things. One is a man 's need for social corroboration. In order to convince himself that he is right he must feel that others sponsor his moral purposes. His Emersonian self-reliance will be in a measure shaken by any disapproval. He does not wish to believe that anyone is in any way warranted in condemning him. But individual relativism indicates that his victims and certain of his enemies are right, from their points of view, in disparaging his life-effort. He would rather have a theory of objective ethics to tell him that his right, being really right, cannot be in any way wrong.
Refusing relativism causes us to forget about the unique aspects of our own perspectives. Planning engenders a distrust for pleasure which corrupts life Vaneigem 79, Raoul, situationist philosopher, leading thinker in the Situationist International The Book of Pleasures trans. John Fullerton, 1983 http://www.scenewash.org/lobbies/chainthinker/situationist/vaneigem/bop/bop.html Will you now accuse me of being overly subjective? Probably you will; but take care, because one day your own subjectivity may tap you on the shoulder and remind you of the life which you are most lamentably losing. Over your realism my naivety has one incomparable advantage: it is brimming over with most amusing monsters, in contrast to what you call planning and foresight which accustoms you to live with a distrust for pleasure which reaches back thousands of years. Individuals are being born again and I am glad, glad as at spring burgeoning again in the earth. Were I alone in feeling it, the entertaining folly of having desired to conquer death by liberating all desires from it would remain.
31 Workism K
Ext. Relativism
Hedonic relativism is the foundation of all ethical systems their slippery-slope arguments are inevitable and were conducted under absolutist ethical regimes NOT ones which privileged hedonism Williams 58, Gardner, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toledo, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Feb. 13, 1958), pp. 143-153 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2022262 NEARLY everybody thinks that individual ethical relativism is an immoral doctrine whereby, for instance,
Nazis and Communists seek to justify their crimes against humanity. Moreover, when this relativism is combined with the principle that only the joys and pleasures involved in any course of behavior, and in its consequences, can ultimately justify it, the doctrine is thought of as especially degrading. Can hedonic sensuality and lewdness constitute the very foundation of man's moral experience? Freud appears to have thought that it could, and I am at least prepared to defend Hedonic Individual Relativism as the basic principle of duty. I think that it is the solid and ultimate ground of all genuinely binding ethical imperatives. I am therefore concerned about some prevalent misunderstandings of it, one of which is the notion that it means the subjectivity of value judgments. All goods and duties are indeed subjective. They are relative to individual points of view. But all judgments about these, as about all other facts, are either absolutely and universally true or else absolutely and universally false. Reality and the truth about it are objective. Suppose a physicist, A, believes with good reason that it was right for him to help invent and build atom bombs, for the United States Government to use in destroying its enemies. And suppose that somebody else, B, a foreign enemy, thinks, perhaps with good reason, that A was wrong in creating the bomb. Suppose that B's family was annihilated by it. Ethical relativism is erroneously interpreted to mean that here A's judgment can be true for A and false for B. If it could, we would be dealing not with ethical relativism, but with an epistemological relativism of truth and knowledge. I deny that any proposition or judgment can be true for one and false for another. Just be-cause right for one can be wrong for another, it does not follow that the truth about what is right for one can be false from someone else's point of view. We should distinguish the thing from the knowledge of the thing. Right, and the truth about it, are not the same. I shall maintain that if in fact it is right for A, from his own point of view, to invent and help produce atom bombs, then all persons (universally) who judge and assert that it is, assert a proposition which is true; and whoever denies this says what is false. A truth is a proposition which refers to a fact and corresponds to it. The proposition is always the subjective meaning of a complete sentence, and this meaning is a cognitive experience existing in some individual mind. The judgment that "it is right, from A's point of view, for A to invent and produce atom bombs," if true, refers to the fact that the satisfaction, joy, pleasure, or happiness which A will actually experience in the long run, as a result of his work on the bombs, is greater than the satisfaction he would have experienced had he preferred and chosen some alternative course of action which was within his power. With any other job which he could get he might have had a lower standard of living and lower social prestige; the work might have been less interesting; he might have made a less significant contribution to the war effort; also his wife might not have been so adequately provided for, nor his children so well educated and prepared for their careers. Neither his selfish ambition for social status, money, and power, nor his love for his country, his wife, and his children, would have been so adequately fulfilled, and he would not have been so deeply satisfied in the long run. Right, according to Hedonic Individual Relativism, means "coming as near as possible to what is most deeply satisfactory in the long run to an individual." Right means doing what is more satisfactory in the long run than any alternative which he could have performed if he had preferred. If creating atom bombs is more deeply satisfactory to A in the long run than whatever he would have done if he had not created them, then the proposition that "from his own point of view A is right in creating them" is absolutely true no matter who entertains it. It is completely in accordance with the facts to which it refers and it is universally true. If A entertains the proposition, then what he has in mind is a truth. In all cases where anybody entertains the "same" proposition, there is an actual truth present in that person's mind. In this sense, all truths are universal. So are all falsehoods. If any proposition is false when it is entertained in one person's mind, it is universally false in all cases whenever that "same" proposition is entertained in any person's mind.
32 Workism K
Ext. Relativism
Hedonic relativism is a necessary ethical principle because of its universality Williams 58, Gardner, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toledo, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Feb. 13, 1958), pp. 143-153 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2022262
We should note that universality is found not only in the truth about relative goods, but also in the principle of Hedonic Individual Relativism itself, which applies to all conscious individuals, human or otherwise, without exception. Each one ought, from his own point of view, to do that which will be most deeply satisfactory to him in the long run. This principle is the natural moral law, the categorical imperative, and the definition of duty. It is the cor-rect definition because it makes the subject most intelligible to ra-tional beings. It has an absolute logico-spiritual validity. Nothing can be right without coming as near as possible to being in conformity with it. Nothing can be wrong without not coming as near as possible to it. It is still valid even if all people violate it. No-body ever lives in perfect accord with it, due to human frailty or original sin. Its moral authority does not depend upon anybody's knowing about it. Even a dumb animal that cannot grasp its significance ought, from its own point of view, to live in such a way as to be most deeply satisfied in the long run because it will enjoy life more if it does. The hedonic joy principle is axiologically ultimate, whether or not people think about it or know it. The validity of the principle of individual ethical relativism is not rela-tive to any individual point of view. Hedonic relativism provides contextual justifications for equality and justice
Williams 58, Gardner, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toledo, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Feb. 13, 1958), pp. 143-153 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2022262
Finally, the doctrines of objective ethics will be favored by some educators as being most helpful in impressing young people with the awful majesty of moral principles. Tender minds may perhaps take justice, kindness, and honesty more seriously at first if they are taught that these are objectively valid apart from any point of view. And I would say that if teaching objective ethics will help save civilization from destruction then we should teach it. Perhaps if one is dealing with barbarians and trying to build a new civilization, he should teach it. But if our younger genera-tions mature intellectually and find that their teachers deceived them about ultimate principles, they may lose confidence in the ideals of justice, kindness, and honesty also. Enlightened people will adhere more steadfastly to these great ideals if they under-stand truly why, from their own points of view, they ought to do so.
33 Workism K
Ext. Relativism
Ethics should be judged through the test of the categorical imperative. If everybody acts as a hedonists then it changes the definition of long-term fulfillment of satisfied pleasure for individuals. For example, in the instance of pedophiles who achieve satisfaction from molestation, hedonistic ethics justify the sadistic punishments against them which thereby makes fulfilling their sexual desires against their long-term interests given the punishments if they get caught Williams 58, Gardner, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toledo, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Feb. 13, 1958), pp. 143-153 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2022262
There is serious moral objection to this theory because of some other misunderstandings. When those who uphold orderly govern-ment have a felon punished, this may be wrong from the culprit's point of view. Perhaps the week before his designated date of ex-ecution he ought to escape. From his own point of view he ought to if that would be more deeply satisfactory to him in the long run than staying in jail and suffering the last exaction of the law. Then, if our theory implies that it is sometimes right for criminals to break loose, many people will think that there must be something wrong with the theory. A more shocking example of ethical rela-tivism would be its application to the case of a sadistic sex criminal. If he were most deeply satisfied in the long run by killing, and mutilating an innocent little child, he would be right, from his own point of view, in committing this dastardly deed. Then the theory which implies that he would may seem to be incorrect. Such a deed, perhaps, could not be right in any way or from any point of view. P implies Q, implies that not-Q implies not-P. But we are right, from our own points of view, in sadistically iniflicting punishment upon the perverted fiend himself, because by so doing we can very likely in some measure deter him and men like him in the future from committing more such horrid deeds of violence, which interfere with our long-range security and satis-faction. The individualistic principle underlies all our virtues and is universal in scope. We cannot, without inconsistency, refuse to apply it to the satisfied sex pervert, if indeed there be any who are more deeply satisfied in the long run, due to their deviations, than they would have been had they chosen some alternative course of action. That their crime satisfies them at the time they do it is obvious. Everybody does what satisfies him most at the moment, among the alternatives which are within his power. The criminal sadist fulfills his violent drives of strong resentment and perverted sex. Whether such behavior is most deeply satisfactory to him in the long run, and in the light of its consequences, is another matter. If society can catch him, and punish him in a way which really makes him suffer, it makes his act wrong from his point of view; and, from its various individual poinlts of view, it should do this. But it may fail. Sometimes it fails. If it does, could he be ac-tually right from his own point of view? He is not likely to be, because almost any human being feels the sting of a general social condemnation directed at his type of behavior, even if his particular are not known to any other living person. This contributes to his sense of guilt, which tends to make him very unhappy. But the question of whether these consequences do or do not in fact ensue is irrelevant to the validity of the ultimate abstract individ-ualistic theory of ethics, which implies merely that if he were most deeply satisfied in the long run by his dastardly deed, then he would be right, from his own point of view, in committing it.
34 Workism K
Ext. Relativism
Human existence is unethical in a world where all ethical perspectives are considered hedonic relativism is necessary to justify human life Need is want which always supercedes should. We will happily condemn any cruelty other than our own. Williams 58, Gardner, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toledo, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Feb. 13, 1958), pp. 143-153 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2022262 Those who still believe in objective ethics and think that cruelty as such is always wrong in every way, should consider whether they are prepared to give up their own cruelties. In fact, no life can be lived without victimizing some conscious organism. Man is a predatory and a carnivorous animal. He preys upon inferior species. He ruthlessly kills defenseless organisms which oppose his will. He slaughters innocent little lambs and devours their roasted muscle tissue. He crushes mosquitoes which irritate him. He poisons rats which contaminate human food in warehouses. A man who conducts a rat extermination project may consciously believe in objective ethics, and he may be unaware of any inconsistency between this and his actual behavior. He might possibly think one should always act so as to produce the maximum possible satisfaction for all concerned in any given situation. In fact he probably has no concern for the welfare of the rats. But have they no con-cern in this situation? If he earns his salary honestly he will kill them in the cheapest way possible. He will not relent through any compassion for his unfortunate diminutive fellow vertebrate warmblooded mammals. Though he cannot really blame rats for being rats, still their points of view do not count, to him. To the rats, they count. But who cares about the rats? The rats care. Most people do not. When this situation is analyzed, the assumption of individual ethical relativism is as obvious as is the almost total obliviousness of most people to it in their conscious thinking. Men poison rats, and they incarcerate or kill certain human beings who act like rats. Human society produces vicious and sadistic criminals by bad environmental influences, and then it executes them in order to protect itself. It must do away with them or else it will disintegrate in chaos. And if dietatorship-soldiers invade the United States, we will try to kill as many of them as possible, because we think that to do so will be more deeply satisfactory to us in the long run than letting them kill us or establish a tyrannical government over us. And we really will be right, from our points of view, in doing these things, if thereby we are enabled to maintain and enjoy our prosperity and our free institutions; but we will be doing a great wrong to our victims, from their points of view. Those who say that we should never do evil to anyone are like the ancient Hebrews with their commandment "Thou shalt not kill." They never let this interfere with their slaughtering Philistines when conflicts arose between the two nations. Perhaps liquidating Philistines is not really killing, for, in a war, such beings do not count. Who cares about the Philistines? Of course the Philistines care; but God's people do not. The Hebrews actually lived by the principle that one should not kill his fellow men unless he needed to kill them. And that is the principle by which all rational people live. Love is a valid ethical imperative, but need is more basic. "Need" is the equivalent of "most deeply satisfactory in the long run."
35 Workism K
A2: We Decrease State Power

The state is not the problem work is the problem and would exist with or without the statefocusing on the state trades off with more productive resistance against work Black 84 Bob, anarchist intellectual The Libertarian as Conservative http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/libertarian.html
The ideals and institutions of authority tend to cluster together, both subjectively and objectively. You may recall Edward Gibbons remark about the eternal alliance of Throne and Altar. Disaffection from received dogmas has a tendency to spread. If there is any future for freedom, it depends on this. Unless and until alienation recognizes itself, all the guns the libertarians cherish will be useless against the state. You might object that what Ive said may apply to the minarchist majority of libertarians, but not to the self-styled anarchists among them. Not so. To my mind a right-wing anarchist is just a minarchist whod abolish the state to his own satisfaction by calling it something else. But this incestuous family squabble is no affair of mine. Both camps call for partial or complete privatization of state functions but neither questions the functions themselves. They dont denounce what the state does, they just object to whos doing it. This is why the people most victimized by the state display the least interest in libertarianism. Those on the receiving end of coercion dont quibble over their coercers credentials. If you cant pay or dont want to, you dont much care if your deprivation is called larceny or taxation or restitution or rent. If you like to control your own time, you distinguish employment from enslavement only in degree and duration. An ideology which outdoes all others (with the possible exception of Marxism) in its exaltation of the work ethic can only be a brake on anti-authoritarian orientations, even if it does make the trains run on time. My second argument, related to the first, is that the libertarian phobia as to the state reflects and reproduces a profound misunderstanding of the operative forces which make for social control in the modern world. If and this is a big if, especially where bourgeois libertarians are concerned what you want is to maximize individual autonomy, then it is quite clear that the state is the least of the phenomena which stand in your way. Imagine that you are a Martian anthropologist specializing in Terran studies and equipped with the finest in telescopes and video equipment. You have not yet deciphered any Terran language and so you can only record what Earthlings do, not their shared misconceptions as to what theyre doing and why. However, you can gauge roughly when theyre doing what they want and when theyre doing something else. Your first important discovery is that Earthlings devote nearly all their time to unwelcome activities. The only important exception is a dwindling set of hunter-gatherer groups unperturbed by governments, churches and schools who devote some four hours a day to subsistence activities which so closely resemble the leisure activities of the privileged classes in industrial capitalist countries that you are uncertain whether to describe what they do as work or play. But the state and the market are eradicating these holdouts and you very properly concentrate on the almost all-inclusive world-system which, for all its evident internal antagonisms as epitomized in war, is much the same everywhere. The Terran young, you further observe, are almost wholly subject to the impositions of the family and the school, sometimes seconded by the church and occasionally the state. The adults often assemble in families too, but the place where they pass the most time and submit to the closest control is at work. Thus, without even entering into the question of the world economys ultimate dictation within narrow limits of everybodys productive activity, its apparent that the source of the greatest direct duress experienced by the ordinary adult is not the state but rather the business that employs him. Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade. If one looks at the world without prejudice but with an eye to maximizing freedom, the major coercive institution is not the state, its work. Libertarians who with a straight face call for the abolition of the state nonetheless look on anti-work attitudes with horror. The idea of abolishing work is, of course, an affront to common sense. But then so is the idea of abolishing the state. If a referendum were held among libertarians which posed as options the abolition of work with retention of the state, or abolition of the state with retention of work, does anyone doubt the outcome? Libertarians are into linear reasoning and quantitative analysis. If they applied these methods to test their own prescriptions theyd be in for a shock. Thats the point of my Martian thought experiment. This is not to say that the state isnt just as unsavory as the libertarians say it is. But it does suggest that the state is important, not so much for the direct duress it inflicts on convicts and conscripts, for instance, as for its indirect back-up of employers who regiment employees, shopkeepers who arrest shoplifters, and parents who paternalize children. In these classrooms, the lesson of submission is learned. Of course, there are always a few freaks like anarcho-capitalists or Catholic anarchists, but theyre just exceptions to the rule of rule.
36 Workism K

Opposition to state power ignores the symmetry of power relations inside and outside of ideologically constructed organizations; between work and governance, the obedience intrinsic to industry and patriotism and therefore operates to FORCLOSE the possibility of substantive change
Black 84 Bob, anarchist intellectual The Libertarian as Conservative http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/libertarian.html

Unlike side issues like unemployment, unions, and minimum-wage laws, the subject of work itself is almost entirely absent from libertarian literature. Most of what little there is consists of Randite rantings against parasites, barely distinguishable from the invective inflicted on dissidents by the Soviet press, and Sunday-school platitudinizing that there is no free lunch this from fat cats who have usually ingested a lot of them. In 1980 a rare exception appeared in a book review published in the Libertarian Review by Professor John Hospers, the Libertarian Party elder states-man who flunked out of the Electoral College in 1972. Here was a spirited defense of work by a college professor who didnt 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 theyre 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, while their anarcho-syndicalist leaders temporized and cut deals with the government.) Someone, says Hospers, has to make decisions and heres the kicker someone else has to implement them. Why? His precursor Lenin likewise endorsed individual dictatorial powers to assure absolute and strict unity of will. But how can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one. Whats needed to make industrialism work is iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the soviet leader, while at work. Arbeit macht frei! Some people giving orders and others obeying them: this is the essence of servitude. Of course, as Hospers smugly observes, one can at least change jobs, but you cant avoid having a job just as under statism one can at least change nationalities but you cant avoid subjection to one nation-state or another. But freedom means more than the right to change masters. Hospers and other libertarians are wrong to assume, with Manchester industrialist Engels, that technology imposes its division of labor independent of social organization. Rather, the factory is an instrument of social control, the most effective ever devised to enforce the class chasm between the few who make decisions and the many who implement them. Industrial technology is much more the product than the source of workplace totalitarianism. Thus the revolt against work reflected in absenteeism, sabotage, turnover, embezzlement, wildcat strikes, and goldbricking has far more liberatory promise than the machinations of libertarian politicos and propagandists. Most work serves the predatory purposes of commerce and coercion and can be abolished outright. The rest can be automated away and/or transformed by the experts, the workers who do it into creative, playlike pastimes whose variety and conviviality will make extrinsic inducements like the capitalist carrot and the Communist stick equally obsolete. In the hopefully impending meta-industrial revolution, libertarian communists revolting against work will settle accounts with libertarians and Communists working against revolt. And then we can go for the gusto!
37 Workism K

The state is not an entity but an activity co-extensive with the activity of work which socializes the obdience necessary for state authority to exist. Opposing state power without opposing work perpetuates the machine of socialization that allows apparatuses like the state to exist, e.g. like large corporations, prisons and schools Black 84 Bob, anarchist intellectual The Libertarian as Conservative http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/libertarian.html Even if you think everything Ive said about work, such as the possibility of its abolition, is visionary nonsense, the anti-liberty implications of its prevalence would still hold good. The time of your life is the one commodity you can sell but never buy back. Murray Rothbard thinks egalitarianism is a revolt against nature, but his day is 24 hours long, just like everybody elses. If you spend most of your waking life taking orders or kissing ass, if you get habituated to hierarchy, you will become passive-aggressive, sado-masochistic, servile and stupefied, and you will carry that load into every aspect of the balance of your life. Incapable of living a life of liberty, youll settle for one of its ideological representations, like libertarianism. You cant treat values like workers, hiring and firing them at will and assigning each a place in an imposed division of labor. The taste for freedom and pleasure cant be compartmentalized. Libertarians complain that the state is parasitic, an excrescence on society. They think its like a tumor you could cut out, leaving the patient just as he was, only healthier. Theyve been mystified by their own metaphors. Like the market, the state is an activity, not an entity. The only way to abolish the state is to change the way of life it forms a part of. That way of life, if you call that living, revolves around work and takes in bureaucracy, moralism, schooling, money, and more. Libertarians are conservatives because they avowedly want to maintain most of this mess and so unwittingly perpetuate the rest of the racket. But theyre bad conservatives because theyve forgotten the reality of institutional and ideological interconnection which was the original insight of the historical conservatives. Entirely out of touch with the real currents of contemporary resistance, they denounce practical opposition to the system as nihilism, Luddism, and other big words they dont understand. A glance at the world confirms that their utopian capitalism just cant compete with the state. With enemies like libertarians, the state doesnt need friends.
38 Workism K
A2: Commodification
True pleasure cannot be commodified it stands in opposition to the capturing mechanism which modern work represents. Only the alternative solves their turnwe must become free from consequences in our enjoyment Vaneigem 79, Raoul, situationist philosopher, leading thinker in the Situationist International The Book of Pleasures trans. John Fullerton, 1983 http://www.scenewash.org/lobbies/chainthinker/situationist/vaneigem/bop/bop.html Whatever represses pleasure will be destroyed by it. Sabotage, absenteeism, voluntary unemployment, riots, wildcat strikes, stealing for fun and doing things for the hell of it - the ax is laid to the commercial tree and I'm delighted. As sure as work kills pleasure, pleasure kills work. If you are not resigned to dying of disgust, then you will be happy enough to rid your life of the odious need to work, to give orders (and obey them), to lose and to win, to keep up appearances, and to judge and be judged. I am not calling on you to make an effort, but to leave things alone. Because of the tyranny of commercial relations,
pleasure's ways are secretive; but it is still from pleasure that the ground is cut away, where the foundations are sunk and the powerful edifices of State, profit and hierarchical power are erected and decay, and which is at the source of so much error, so many pointless battles. In the search for endless pleasure, the proletariat returns to what it could not take by assault, as jungle invades a town when the structures of state collapse. Working a little to get by, keeping the way I rob the State legal, nervous about touching a girl on the street, or of assaulting the policeman who calls me over, are some of my constraints, society's way of clubbing me over the head and compelling me to do what I don't want to. But power doesn't have me by the short and curlies twenty-four hours out of twenty-four. Why stretch out all day the economist behaviour it demands of me for a few hours? Why move me from one factory to another, set me up in controversy to make money out of me, push my views on the Opinion Exchange, bind me with ties of affection, force me into your rhythms, measure my productivity, tell me 'I must' and stifle 'I want', make me pay for my pleasures and compensate my inevitable frustration with the small change of aggression? Why? Submission to discipline is the strength of the State, and is never so powerful as when it can take advantage of self-denial. But lucidity is more intimate. The enemy is a creature of habit. To prolong the pleasure of writing this book, am I to transform it into drudgery, forced labour, production batches, time schedules, hourly rates? Or worry what you'll think of it, or whether the text does its job and makes sense? I shall be content to throw light on my desires, reinvent those that are cockeyed, reach a free state of spirit and cast this summary in book-form into the shops, where you can steal it, keeping what pleases and throwing out the rest. Every time you work you destroy yourself. The little time I find myself locked up in
barracks, as it were, is always enough to make me desert and create occasions for deserting. I allow myself to be won over by the release from the agreement to do what is boring me. The taste for pleasure without reference to anyone else or their opposition spontaneously renders me perfectly useless to mercantile society, which makes its uselessness to me all the more obvious. Pleasure avoids becoming a commodity on condition that it destroys it. But this it undertakes only if it can escape a while. For it is not the hungriest who have made hunger strikes, nor those who enjoy themselves least who revolt for universal self-management. Any temptation to live is an attempt to do so. Momentarily saved from the grip of the commodity I understand better how to break it. Only my pleasures penetrate my shelter, where l am free of constraint, and exist only for myself, to the delight of whatever attracts me. I do not worry over the consequences. When the struggle against misery becomes the struggle for passionate abundance, you get the reversal of perspective. Doesn't each of us dream of making what gives him intense pleasure the ordinary stuff of his everyday life? As you slide down the slopes of pleasure till you reach the sweet water in which life is reborn do you not feel the old obligations to produce, earn a living, educate yourself generate reputation and promotion, give and take orders? But it is really so easy to turn your back on work, fear, rewards and punishment, to smash the mirror of roles and discover on the other side of the only real truth of life, the overflowing richness of amorous embrace, the exultation in creating, a chance encounter, the changes in organic rhythms, the taste of life restored to whatever you are, free from the merchants of universal blandness. If you reach the heart of yourself you know how to build the world out of the ruins around you.
39 Workism K
A2: Work Inevitable

The notion of the inevitability of work is a product of the economic ideology which makes work seem inevitablecontemporary primitive societies demonstrate that if anything modern wage labor is unnatural Black 85 Bob, anarchist intellectual, The Abolition of Work http://www.zpub.com/notes/blackwork.html To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes' compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of life -- in North America, particularly -- but already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than Germans climb the Berlin Wall from the west.) The "survival of the fittest" version -- the Thomas Huxley version -- of Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientist -- a geographer -- who'd had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled "The Original Affluent Society." They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that "hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society." They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were "working" at all. Their "labor," as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schiller's definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full "play" to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. As he put it: "The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity." (A modern version -- dubiously developmental -- is Abraham Maslow's counterposition of "deficiency" and "growth" motivation.) Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that "the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required." He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work -- it's rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work -- but we can.
40 Workism K
A2: Virtuous Labor

This argument is ridiculous and obviously invented by people who have never had to do manual labor for long periods of time Russell 32, Sir Bertrand, famous philosopher and logician, fellow at the Royal Society, In Praise of Idleness http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth's surface. Neither of these motives makes any great appeal to the actual worker. If you ask him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say: 'I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man's noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.' I have never heard working men say this sort of thing. They consider work, as it should be considered, a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.
41 Workism K
A2: Socialism
Socialism epitomizes the needless glorification of workit has internalized so thoroughly the ideology of the elites that it simply becomes a new way to get people to spend most of their lives in unnecessary servitude Russell 32, Sir Bertrand, famous philosopher and logician, fellow at the Royal Society, In Praise of Idleness http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html The victory of the proletariat in Russia has some points in common with the victory of the feminists in some other countries. For ages, men had conceded the superior saintliness of women, and had consoled women for their inferiority by maintaining that saintliness is more desirable than power. At last the feminists decided that they would have both, since the pioneers among them believed all that the men had told them about the desirability of virtue, but not what they had told them about the worthlessness of political power. A similar thing has happened in Russia as regards manual work. For ages, the rich and their sycophants have written in praise of 'honest toil', have praised the simple life, have professed a religion which teaches that the poor are much more likely to go to heaven than the rich, and in general have tried to make manual workers believe that there is some special nobility about altering the position of matter in space, just as men tried to make women believe that they derived some special nobility from their sexual enslavement. In Russia, all this teaching about the excellence of manual work has been taken seriously, with the result that the manual worker is more honored than anyone else. What are, in essence, revivalist appeals are made, but not for the old purposes: they are made to secure shock workers for special tasks. Manual work is the ideal which is held before the young, and is the basis of all ethical teaching.
42 Workism K
A2: Socialism
Russian socialism demonstrates how finding virtue in hard work as an end in itself leads to various pointless macro-engineering projects that constantly postpone leisure Russell 32, Sir Bertrand, famous philosopher and logician, fellow at the Royal Society, In Praise of Idleness http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html In Russia, owing to more economic justice and central control over production, the problem will have to be differently solved. The rational solution would be, as soon as the necessaries and elementary comforts can be provided for all, to reduce the hours of labor gradually, allowing a popular vote to decide, at each stage, whether more leisure or more goods were to be preferred. But, having taught the supreme virtue of hard work, it is difficult to see how the authorities can aim at a paradise in which there will be much leisure and little work. It seems more likely that they will find continually fresh schemes, by which present leisure is to be sacrificed to future productivity. I read recently of an ingenious plan put forward by Russian engineers, for making the White Sea and the northern coasts of Siberia warm, by putting a dam across the Kara Sea. An admirable project, but liable to postpone proletarian comfort for a generation, while the nobility of toil is being displayed amid the ice-fields and snowstorms of the Arctic Ocean. This sort of thing, if it happens, will be the result of regarding the virtue of hard work as an end in itself, rather than as a means to a state of affairs in which it is no longer needed.
43 Workism K
YMCA
Na na na na na na na na na na na Russell 32, Sir Bertrand, famous philosopher and logician, fellow at the Royal Society, In Praise of Idleness http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.
44 Workism K
AFF2AC Framework OV
Framework- Aff must defend a topical plan as superior to the status quo or a competitive policy option A. Linear clash- there is no agent that can compare the abolition of work with immigration reform B. Limits- the alternative is not predictable from the topic literature and therefore is undebatable C. Voter for fairness No Link- we dont increase the number of jobs, we just allow people working in a different country to come to the US and work. Their evidence doesnt assume globalization. Workplace diversity increases the dignity of workers in comparison to cultural homogeneity Miller 10 Access Date, Chris, Cornell University ILR School Workplace Diversity http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/library/research/subjectguides/workplacediversity.html Workplace diversity is a people issue, focused on the differences and similarities that people bring to an organization. It is usually defined broadly to include dimensions beyond those specified legally in equal opportunity and affirmative action non-discrimination statutes. Diversity is often interpreted to include dimensions which influence the identities and perspectives that people bring, such as profession, education, parental status and geographic location. As a concept, diversity is considered to be inclusive of everyone. In many ways, diversity initiatives complement non-discrimination compliance programs by creating the workplace environment and organizational culture for making differences work. Diversity is about learning from others who are not the same, about dignity and respect for all, and about creating workplace environments and practices that encourage learning from others and capture the advantage of diverse perspectives.
45 Workism K
AFFConsequentialism Supports Work Orientation

Work is actually good for you most people enjoy it and it makes them healthier than indolence Telegraph 9 Work is good for you, especially after retirement study finds http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6334131/Work-is-good-for-youespecially-after-retirement-study-finds.html Older people who hold temporary or part-time jobs after retirement enjoy better physical and mental health than those who stop working entirely, according to the US study, which was released on Tuesday. Those who continue to work in their original field also have better mental health than those who change fields, according to the study published in the October issue of the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, a magazine published by the American Psychological Association. The researchers interviewed 12,189 participants, aged 51 to 61, every
two years over a six-year period beginning in 1992 about their health, finances, employment and retirement. As older people continue to in the face of the economic downturn, the study could
have particular significance, said co-author Mo Wang, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland. "Because of the economy, a lot of people don't have enough money to retire," he said. The retirees who continue to work in temporary or part-time jobs, called bridge employment, suffer 17 per cent fewer major diseases than those who stopped working completely, according to the study. Ranked on a mental health scale, those who continued to work had a 31 per cent higher score than those who stopped working, Mr Wang said. Prefer consequentialism when debating nuclear war Goodin 95 Robert E. Goodin, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Australia, Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy, pg 26 1995 This focus on the moral importance of modal shifts can be shown to have important implications for nuclear weapons policy. The preconditions for applying my argument surely all exist. Little need be said to justify the claim that the consequences in view matter morally. Maybe consequentialistic considerations are not the only ones that should guide our choices, of military policies or any others; but where the consequences in view are so momentous as those involved in an all-out nuclear war, it would be sheer lunacy to deny such considerations any role at all.
46 Workism K
AFFEnd of Work = Social Annihilation

There is no alternative to work other than death the abolition of work results in annihilation. Laziness is easy and inevitablework takes sustained commitment and should be advocated NYT 1899 The Abolition of Work 4/21 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html? res=9A02E6DF1430E132A25752C2A9629C94689ED7CF The ideal of the philosophers who taught their doctrines at the workingmen's dollar dinner is life without work. They are probably unconscious of this underlying motive, but its mastery of them and their theories is evident. They talk glibly of the dignity of labor. They are thinking all the time or the delights of laziness. That is the fundamental concept or the socialistic philosophy that so many professional reformers of human society are now preaching. Work is the great enemy. Wealth is culpable
only because it takes work to produce it, and because its possessors, being popularly supposed to live in laziness, are the objects of furious envy. Here is some of Mr. JOHN BRlSBEN WALKER' s talk at the dinner of the workingmen in honor of JEFFERSON'S birthday: Your presence expresses the belief, long held by many of the world's most earnest thinkers, that the men of the twentieth century will be brethren of a common lot. There will be but one dignity known among them--the dignity of intelligent, cheerful, enthusiastic work. All the glare and vulgarity of what are known to the common mind of to-day as riches will have been relegated to the background. The possesion of money will be able to add little or nothing to the man of 1930. Removed trom the horrors of the fierce competition which beset the man of this day, he will blossom out into a new man. Genius will work with undreamed-of energies. The human mind, with these trammels removed, will rise to intellectual standards such as we can now but faintly imaine." These philosophers get vague and misty when they attempt to describe
their substitute for work, but it appears that they have in view a state of beatitude attained by social co-operation, a blissful condition combining the com plete physical repose of the tramp in his I haymow with the large freedom of Rabelais Abbey of Thelerne and the holy intellectual pleasures of the Brook Farm community. The great
placard that hung behind the speakers at the dinner bore this legend: A system of political economy will yet dawn which will perform as well as promise: which will rain the riches of nature into the laps of the starving poor. The dawn of this system of political economy will be the sunset of Genesis Iii.. 11: .. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground." The mental picture here
suggested is that of perfect indolence. Man lies under the tree, nature does the rest. The fruits rain into his lap, It is a manifest certainty that to the mind that conceived that motto the lazy life of the tropics is a cherished ideal, possibly subconscious; that in all the minds to which the sentiment gave pleasure there subsists an aspiration to come into a ' state where work is no more. This is not strange; it is in nowise reprehensible. The necessity of work is the only thing that keeps the dislike of work from being the ruling passion of man's nature. Laziness is a tremendous factor in human affairs. The tendency to inertia is so strong that it needs no encouragement. The fault we have to find with the preachers of the doctrine of life without work is that they do encourage laziness. They delude those who listen to them into the beliet that the joyful existence they picture forth, where the riches of nature rain into the laps of even the poorest men and women, is a realizable state; and that they are kept out of it now only by the greed and cruel oppressions of the rich. This teaching inevitably does harm, for it tends to make men seek by force to establish the kingdom of the rain-of-riches political economy in place of the kingdom of work, as established by the laws of nature and described in Genesis lit., 11. The horrors of fierce competition which make Mr. JOHN BRISBEN WALKER quite sick at heart in his capacity of dollar dinner orator, although in his capacity of magazine publisher he meets them with intrepid courage and large pecuniary success, are the natural, healthy conditions of the life of man. The only escape from them is death. In fact, the doctrine of the abolition of work is the doctrine of annihilation. Life without work is impossible. In the physical world the extinction of all heat would extinguish all energy, and consequently all motion. The result would be a universal zero. The doctrines of the dollar dinner tend toward the social zero. But the apostles of the abolition of work have chosen wrong paths. It is not through Mr. JOHN BrISBEN WAI,KER'S social reforms, not through Mayor JONES'S municipal ownership of public utilities. Nor yet through BRYAN'S 16 to 1 that men can be quit forever of their burden of toll. The blessed inertia these philosophers dream of is only an ignoble, earthly Nirvana. The short way to it is to quit work and let nature take its course. If the philosophers can persuade everybody to knock off work everybody will presently starve to death, and then the happy state of perfect rest will be attained.
47 Workism K
AFF End of Work K eats the case harms

The case harms result from a lack of recognition of interdependencies. The antiwork attitude perpetuates this misrecognition and reinforces the statism the critique indicts.
Bufe, 87 contemporary Anarchist author who writes most notably on the problems faced
by the modern anarchist movement
Chaz, Listen Anarchist!, http://www.seesharppress.com/listen.html Anti-Work(er) Bias A troubling aspect of the marginalized milieu is the anti-work (and often anti-worker) attitude frequently displayed by the marginals. This is unfortunate for two reasons. One is that work must be performed in order for society to exist, and adoption of in anti-work, anti-worker attitude simply begs the crucial question of how work should be organized. It's all well and good to say that work should be replaced by play, but how do we get from here to there? The other problem is that most able-bodied people work, and it would be difficult to find a more alienating approach to those of us who work than the anti-work attitude, which in effect states: "What you're doing (work) is worse than useless, and you're stupid for doing it," while offering no alternative whatsoever. This problem is aggravated by the fact that some anti-work advocates, who could work but choose not to, practice a form of parasitismthey receive money from the government (extorted from those who work). It's rather difficult to take seriously those who rail against work while grasping a black flag in one hand and a welfare check in the other. (However, these comments should not be construed as an attack on welfare recipients. Unemployment is built into the economy, and it's undeniably fortunate that forms of relief are available to its victims. But for those who most stringently condemn the stateanarchiststo deliberately rely on it as their means of support, robs them of credibility.)
48 Workism K
AFF--End Of Work Ks Theory of Agency is Reductionist

Their qritiqs attempt to characterize power in a particular way (through capital, through knowledge, through psyche, through chaos, through gender) assumes that power is a 'substance' that CAN be characterized. This is FALSE, power is produced by actants [real shit] that exist in relation to one another BEFORE those relations have been defined through power. Their attempt to arbitrarily fit a system to a concept, as proven by centuries of pointless philosophical bickering, inevitably fails Harman 9 Graham, professor of philosophy American University of Cairo, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics p. 22 Even power, that favourite occult quality of radical political critics, is a result rather than a substance (PF, p. 191). The supposed panopticon of modern society stands at the mercy of the technicians and bureaucrats who must install and maintain it, and who may go on strike or do a sloppy job because of bad moods. The police are outwitted by seven-year-olds in the slums. The mighty CIA, with its budget of billions, loses track of mujahideen riding donkeys and exchanging notes in milk bottles. A lovely Chinese double agent corrodes the moral fiber of Scotland Yard true believers. Actants must constantly be kept in line;
none are servile puppets who do our bidding, whether human or nonhuman. The world resists our efforts even as it welcomes them. Even a system of metaphysics is the lengthy result of negotiations with the world, not a triumphant deductive overlord who tramples the details of the world to dust. The labour of fitting one concept to another obsesses a Kant or Husserl for decades, and even then the polished final product will be riddled with errors detectible by a novice. The same is true for our prisons, our gas and water infrastructure, the sale of potato chips, international law, nuclear test bans, and enrollment in universities.
Systems are assembled at great pains, one actant at a time, and loopholes always remain. We are not the pawns of sleek power-machines grinding us beneath their heels like pathetic Nibelungen. We may be fragile, but so are the powerful.
49 Workism K
AFF--Our Agency Theory is Reason to Vote for the Perm

Reject systematic or all-encompassing root cause explanations for human actions Bleiker 3 Roland, Professor of International Relations, University of Queensland Discourse and Human Agency Contemporary Political Theory. Avenel: Mar 2003.Vol. 2, Iss. 1; pg. 25 A conceptualization of human agency cannot be based on a parsimonious proposition, a one-sentence statement that captures something like an authentic nature of human agency. There is no essence to human agency, no core that can be brought down to a lowest common denominator, that will crystallize one day in a long sought after magic formula. A search for such an elusive centre would freeze a specific image of human agency to the detriment of all others. The dangers of such a totalizing position have been well rehearsed. Foucault (1982, 209), for instance, believes that a theory of power is unable to provide the basis for analytical work, for it assumes a prior objectification of the very power dynamics the theory is trying to assess. Bourdieu (1998, 25) speaks of the 'imperialism of the universal' and List (1993, 11) warns us of an approach that 'subsumes, or, rather, pretends to be able to subsume everything into one concept, one theory, one position.' Such a master discourse, she claims, inevitably oppresses everything that does not fit into its particular view of the world. What, then, is the alternative to anchoring an understanding of human agency in a foundationalist master narrative?
How to ground critique, actions, norms and life itself if there are no universal values that can enable such a process of grounding? Various authors have advanced convincing suggestions. Consider the following three examples: de Certeau (1990, 51) attempts to avoid totalitarian thought by grounding his position not in a systematic theory, but in 'operational schemes.' A theory is a method of delineation. It freezes what should be understood in its fluidity. An understanding of operational schemes, by contrast, recognizes that events should be assessed in their changing dimensions. Rather than trying to determine what an event is, such an approach maps the contours within which events are incessantly constituted and reconstituted. Or, expressed in de Certeau's terminology, one must comprehend forms of action in the context of their regulatory environment. Butler (1992, 3-7) speaks of contingent foundations. Like de Certeau, she too believes that the Foucaultean recognition that power pervades all aspects of society, including the position of the critic, does not necessarily lead into a nihilistic abyss. It merely shows that political closure occurs through attempts to establish foundational norms that lie beyond power. Likewise, to reopen this political domain is not to do away with foundations as such, but to acknowledge their contingent character, to illuminate what they authorize, exclude and foreclose. One must come to terms with how the subject and its agency are constituted and framed by specific regimes of power. However, this is not the end of human agency. Quite to the contrary. Butler (1992, 12-14) argues persuasively that 'the constituted character of the subject is the very precondition of its agency.' To appreciate the practical relevance of this claim, one must investigate the possibilities for agency that arise out of existing webs of power and discourse. One must scrutinize how social change can be brought about by a reworking of the power regimes that
Deleuze and Guattari (1996, 3-25, 377) go a step further. Opting for the rhizome, they reject all forms of foundations, structures, roots or trees. The latter three, they say, has dominated much of the Western thought. A tree is a hierarchical system in which ones becomes two, in which everything can be traced back to the same origin. Roots and radicles may shatter the linear unity of knowledge, but they hold on to a contrived system of thought, to an image of the world in which the multiple always goes back to a centred and higher unity. The brain, by contrast, is not rooted, does not strive for a central point. It functions like a
constitute our subjectivity (Butler, 1992, 13). subterranean rhizome. It grows sideways, has multiple entryways and exits. It has no beginning or end, only a middle, from where it expands and overspills. Any point of the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize, is connected to any other. It is a multiplicity without hierarchies, units or fix points to anchor thought. There are only lines, magnitudes, dimensions, plateaus, and they are always in motion. To travel along these lines and dimensions is to engage in nomad thought, to travel along axis of difference, rather than identity. Nomad thought, says one of Deleuze's feminist interpreters, 'combines coherence with mobility,' it is 'a creative sort of becoming, a performative metaphor that allows for otherwise unlikely encounters and unsuspected sources of interaction of experience and of knowledge' (Braidotti, 1994, 21). The extent to which this form
the exploration of difference and multiplicities does not prevent him from taking positions for or against specific political issues. What he does forgo, however, is a central authorial voice -- to the benefit of a polyphonic array of whispers and shouts.
of thinking constitutes a grounding process may be left open to question. Judging from Deleuze's own work it is clear, however, that
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AFF Hedonic ethical relativism should be rejected as a standard of evaluation 1/2

____Ethical relativism is not inevitable. The studies of cultural anthropologists provide counterevidence. OSullivan and Pecorino 02, Professors of Philosophy at SUNY Suffolk Community College and CUNY Queensborough Community College
Stephen and Philip A., Ethics: An Online Textbook. http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/ pecorip/SCCCWEB/ETEXTS/ETHICS/Chapter_3_Relativism/Relativism_Problems.htm Normative ethical relativism is a theory, which claims that there are no universally valid moral principles. Normative
ethical relativism theory says that the moral rightness and wrongness of actions varies from society to society and that there are no absolute universal moral standards binding on all men at all times. The theory claims that all thinking about the basic principles of morality (Ethics) is always relative. Each culture establishes the basic values and principles that serve as the foundation for morality. The theory claims that this is the case now, has always been the case and will always be the case. The theory claims not only that different cultures have different views but that it is impossible for there ever to be a single set of ethical principles for the entire world because there are no universal principles that could apply to all peoples of the earth. The theory holds that all such thinking about ethical principles is just a reflection of the power holders of a particular culture. So, each culture does and always will make its own ethical principles. Any attempt of those from one culture to apply their principles to other peoples of other cultures is only a political move and an assertion of power.
This is a philosophical theory that is NOT well supported by the evidence gathered by cultural anthropologists, nor could science support a theory about the past and future! Further, it is a theory that has evidence against it.
_____Ethical hedonism is incoherent. Living can produce happiness, but personal happiness alone cannot be a guide to living. Once other values are introduced, the standard is no longer hedonic relativism. The gendered language in this evidence is under erasure. Rand 1964, philosopher and novelist
Ayn, http://marsexxx.com/ycnex/Ayn_Rand-The_Virtue_of_Selfishness.pdf, pp. 24-25 The maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not two separate issues. To hold ones own life as ones ultimate value, and ones own happiness as ones highest purpose are two aspects of the same achievement. Existentially, the activity of pursuing rational goals is the activity of maintaining ones life; psychologically, its result, reward and concomitant is an emotional state of happiness. It is by experiencing happiness that one lives ones life, in any hour, year or the whole of it. And when one experiences the kind of pure happiness that is an end in itselfthe kind that makes one think: This is worth living forwhat one is greeting and affirming in emotional terms is the metaphysical fact that life is an end in itself. But the relationship of cause to effect cannot be reversed. It is only by accepting mans life as ones primary and by pursuing the rational values it requires that one can achieve happinessnot by taking happiness as some undefined, irreducible primary and then attempting to live by its guidance. If you achieve that which is the good by a rational standard of value, it will necessarily make you happy; but that which makes you happy, by some undefined emotional standard, is not necessarily the good. To take whatever makes one happy as a guide to action means: to be guided by nothing but ones emotional whims. Emotions are not tools of cognition; to be guided by whimsby desires whose source, nature and meaning one does not knowis to turn oneself into a blind robot, operated by unknowable demons (by ones stale evasions), a robot knocking its stagnant brains out against the walls of reality which it refuses to see. This is the fallacy inherent in hedonismin any variant of ethical hedonism, personal or social, individual or collective. Happiness can properly be the purpose of ethics, but not the standard. The task of ethics is to define mans proper code of values and thus to give him the means of achieving happiness. To declare, as the ethical hedonists do, that the proper value is whatever gives you pleasure is to declare that the proper value is whatever you happen to valuewhich is an act of intellectual and philosophical abdication, an act which merely proclaims the futility of ethics and invites all men to play it deuces wild.
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AFF Hedonic ethical relativism should be rejected as a standard of evaluation 2/2

____Hedonic ethical relativism is consistent with eugenics Williams 58, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toledo,
Gardner, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Feb. 13, 1958), pp. 143-153 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2022262 This is deplorable, from the points of view of the victims and of all who sympathize; and the only way to prevent it is to have eugenics, economic justice, and an improved educational system, so that nobody will ever take up a criminal way of life. Mean-while a relevant and frequently ignored truth will help us to under-stand our present situation. It is that nobody can take any point of view except his own. An individual can love somebody else, sympathize with him, and need him. He can have a point of view which is in harmony with another's. But his love, sympathy, and need are only expressions of his own point of view. No one can merge with any other. And a lawabiding citizen will not usually love or sympathize with either the criminal sadist or the escaping felon. Also he does not need to have them succeed in their nefarious deeds. As long as he does not he will not endorse or sponsor their criminal acts. Even if in fact they are right, from their own points of view, in committing their crimes, still that gives them no claim upon his allegiance. He rightly, from his point of view, repudiates their points of view. And they rightly, if they are right from their points of view, repudiate his. Ilere is a mortal conflict of ultimate rights.
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escape its voracious appetite if humanity becomes increasingly strange to itself.

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Link: Libertarian Rights

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Link: Libertarian Rights [card continued]

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Misc Alt Solvency

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A2: Extinction Outweighs

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A2: We Decrease State Power

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Black 84 Bob, anarchist intellectual The Libertarian as Conservative http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/libertarian.html

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AFFConsequentialism Supports Work Orientation

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