A manifesto

We refuse to measure human worth by output or obedience. We choose play, voluntary, joyous, meaning making play, as our standard of value. We declare that the world can be organized around participation, not compulsion, around creation, not mere production. We call on each other to stop being spectators of life and to become players in it.

In his 1985 essay, The Abolition of Work, Bob Black proposes, like Johan Huizinga and Paul Lafargue before him, that idleness and play, far from being a sort of unproductive slovenly idleness, are perhaps the most heightened forms of individual and collective expression. Black argues that both corporate oligarchic capitalism on one end and state oligarchic capitalism under the guise of totalitarian collectivism on the other disregard the importance of leisure in the productive, intellectual, and spiritual lives of the people.

With an emphasis on work pressed by the far right, the far left, and the more centrist or reformist elements in between, we are left with no alternative way of theorizing individual and collective worth. In both systems, corporate authoritarianism and state authoritarianism, human dignity is reduced to a productivist calculus, wherein even intellectual, artistic, and imaginative pursuits are rendered as commodities. This is not to say that Marxist analysis is incorrect, indeed, Marxism is at its best when it illuminates the exploitation of workers by their corporate or statist leaders. But the solutions offered by “really existing socialism,” as well as those offered by radical free market doctrines, rarely effect a paradigmatic shift away from modeling human worth in terms of output. The difference, as Black emphasizes, is that “work” is always involuntary, whereas play is by its nature voluntary. Rather than the expectation of a monetary reward for one’s labor, the reward is the experience itself. This stands in stark contrast to the modern workplace in corporatized America, and he surmises that the freedom to pursue leisure in the then de Stalinized Eastern Bloc was perhaps closer to his vision of a hypothetical “State of Leisure”:

“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.”

We live the consequences of this confusion every day. Since Black wrote The Abolition of Work, authority has centralized inside mid size to large corporations. Human Resources departments have become larger and more integrated into corporate schema, under the pretense that they serve the workers’ interests. To a certain degree, this is true, but only insofar as the interests of the human resources align with the best interests of company leadership, who are less beholden to the well being of their workers than to the firm’s fiscal performance. Is an HR dossier or file any different than the file on a subject under surveillance? Black goes on:

“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 hierarchy and expertise in everything. They’re used to it.”

Michel Foucault helps us see the machinery. In Discipline and Punish, he suggests that the disciplinary techniques of schools resemble those of prisons. The methodology at play in the workplace is the same. The impact of attuning workers to a hierarchy has two main effects, first, to increase performance anxiety in order to keep workers complacent and perpetually questioning their job performance and stability, second, to extrapolate this anxiety and scale it across the organization, creating suspicion among lower level workers and destabilizing their ability to work together beyond the basic needs of their employer, for instance, to deter talks of unionization or even genuine friendship between co workers. Is it any real wonder that the social lives of people are declining at a faster rate than at any other time in history?

Economist Joe Cortright of City Observatory has documented the erosion of social capital, less trust, lower participation in civic groups, fewer casual interactions with neighbors, as big business and busy schedules crowd into the spaces that were once the purview of community associations, churches, and volunteer organizations. A line often misattributed to Socrates warns, “Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” Whether or not he said it, the warning resonates.

So we name the enemy, busyness in service of hierarchy. Although seemingly full of content and plans, a busy life is ultimately a placation of the training indoctrinated within us since birth. It sublimates our whims and desires into a kind of religious zeal for so called productivity at the service of profit margins. Non profit organizations too suffer from this emphasis on profitability and the exploitation of their workers for the end goal of fiscal solvency. Even in our free time, we are organized into consumer groups that operate at the service of global conglomerates and their pursuit of growth and profit. Is it simply coincidence that totalitarian socialisms reappeared in forms that pursued infinite productivity, even when aiming at emancipation, because Marx himself could not fully escape a productivist imaginary? Marx said:

“The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases.”

This realm of freedom is, at its core, the freedom from work. We do not need to push capitalism to a breaking point of efficiency to reach it. We could simply stop working. This is not a radical idea. It is perhaps the ultimate question, or, as Heidegger would call it, the question of unconcealment, aletheia. How do we unconceal a world free from hierarchy and labor in service of ever growing productivity? Like Bob Black and Paul Lafargue, we insist that it begins with the abolition of work. Yet we do not stop at critique. We insist on foundations. If play provides the basis for a world without work, then play itself must be revolutionized as a form of rebellion. There is nothing more revelatory than experiencing an event for the sake of being there, as Heidegger would suggest. Let us organize our lives and our communities around that experience.

This idea is old, and it is ours. The Egyptians developed, around 3100 BC, the game Senet. Played on a board reminiscent of checkers, it represented the soul’s journey to the afterlife. Games are not mere diversions. They are narratological apotheoses that allow an individual to displace themselves, physically, psychically, temporally, and spiritually, from the regular day to day. In effect, play is a kind of structured Taoist meditation. Guy Debord, in Society of the Spectacle, reinforces this understanding of leisure:

“Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation.”

We reject the spectator’s seat. Consciousness itself is a game. We are already players with ourselves. A society founded on play elevates this intrinsic reality to the forefront of community. Debord speaks about how the images of spectacle constitute an instrument of collective unification. He cautions, however, that the freedom of libidinal spectacle can be captured by those who wish to use it as a form of social coercion and control. Therefore we must play rather than spectate. Play implies interaction and involvement. Spectacle restrains itself to passivity, relegating human ability to the role of lethargic consumer rather than creator. Debord was aware that passive spectacle mediates human social relations in our era. If we treat social interaction and a life of play as a protest against passivity, we can see how play as rebellion has been purposefully suppressed by those who seek to relegate the many to producers and consumers for fiscal profiteering.

“The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity in terms of the categories of seeing, furthermore, it is based on the incessant spread of the precise technical rationality which grew out of this thought. The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality. The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative universe.”

Therefore, we commit to the following.

We abolish work as compulsion in our own lives wherever we can, and we organize to do it together where we cannot do it alone.
We convert tasks into play, voluntary, participatory, intrinsically rewarding, and we build institutions that protect this conversion.
We replace spectatorship with participation in art, sport, craft, care, and politics.
We reclaim time, sabbaths without shopping lists, hours that belong to no employer, and we defend them for one another.
We build commons for play, makerspaces, game nights, community clubs, open fields, libraries of tools and instruments, and we keep them uncommodified.
We refuse metrics that convert joy into key performance indicators, and we refuse titles that turn neighbors into customers.
We practice friendship as infrastructure, and we unionize not only workplaces, but also leisure, so that no one’s play can be priced or policed out of reach.

If all this is true, the task is clear. Abolish work as compulsion, practice play as rebellion, make participation our politics, and do it together until the world we concealed under productivity reveals itself again.

Play As Rebellion