"Much of work" as proportion may consist of unpleasant yet irreducible tasks, but how much work has to be done in all depends on how the work is consumed. One of the fundamental facts of slavery, which still appears in capitalism, is the production of a surplus, that is, goods or services which the workers themselves don't need or want. This surplus provides the means of preserving and advancing the powers of the ruling class -- it buys and supplies armies and cops for the slavemasters, for instance. Under capitalism, the surplus becomes truly baroque and the workers must be gotten to help use it up, but it has many of the old functions, too, as the fresh ghosts in Afghanistan or Serbia could tell you.
It seems to me that if at any given point the lash were removed, that is, workers tasked themselves to work only for what they needed and desired at the time they were doing the work, they would not tend to accumulate big surpluses. Once they thought they had enough, they'd probably prefer to take time off and engage in more entertaining practices. Hence I think an actually socialist or communist economy, not being threatened by war, would grow more slowly than a capitalist or fascist one. One does not observe a nation-sized socialist or communist polity in history which has not been threatened by war, but one can observe more or less unattacked cooperatives and communes in some liberal countries which seem to get along comfortably but not expand very rapidly. I take this as tentative empirical confirmation of my simple-minded theory.
Historically, then, it seems that a good deal of technological progress, which is usually a kind of surplus, must have been produced by literal slavery or its somewhat metaphorical forms in capitalism. I suppose this is why several people on this list, when confronted by objections to work fetishism, began to deride some of the objecters as primitivists. However, so far I have been unsuccessful at getting any of the deriders to put the shoe on the obvious other foot, that is, expand upon the possibility that high technology and progress can be produced only by coercion, as they imply but do not say.
I don't think this is the case, but I do think an economy which responded to people's actual desires rather than false and artificial ones would probably grow more slowly than a capitalist one. Of course one can argue at length over what an "actual" desire is. Do people really, really want to kill lots of Iraqis and Afghans? Would they work extra hours for extra bombs? I don't know.
-- Gordon