No One Should Ever Work on Introductions, by Bruce Sterling

Bob’s thesis was that he — and all of us really — existed in conditions of mentally mutilating, systematic oppression. We didn’t know that, because we didn’t dare name our oppressor, any more than Eastern European dissidents living at that time could boldly name the Communist Party and the KGB as the authors of their daily distress. But our oppressor was “work.”

“No one should ever work.” Bob was an essayist of rather broad interests, but this was the flagpole of the Black ideology. No Work. His analysis studied the actual deprivations of our freedom. Not the power-structures within various states, or the rights allegedly guaranteed by constitutions, or the effects of racial or gender prejudice, but really, just, life: the lived hours of your precious days. Where did your lifetime actually go? In the “free world,” most people spent their lifetime working. They were “free” to work.

That’s what this book is about. It is all about how “work” is much better conceived as a malignant, destructive condition called “forced labor.” It’s not that people want to “work,” by their nature. No, they’re cajoled into work by moral suasion, then kept confined within their work by large, cumbersome, irrational, spirit-crushing, economic, legal and police frameworks.

from Bruce Sterling’s Introduction to Instead of Work by Bob Black