Workers of the world...relax

[Gregory]

All of this debate regarding the proper way to institute socialism and
whatnot seems to avoid a critical issue and perhaps the biggest problem all
the variously nuanced ideologies avoid dealing with- WORK. The dreary
reality of performing the same mindless routine for 40 hours or more a week
so someone else can become obscenely wealthy. What would happen if a
movement started to organize around the idea of, say, a 20 hour work week?
Wouldn't that gain more adherents that talking about worker councils and
self-managed assets? Before the  apparatchiks of future world socialism jump
down my throat with "pipe dream", consider this cold hard fact. The
impoverished  2/3's of the world cannot be brought up to Western (and
Japanese) standards of living without massive ecological destruction. If
there is to be anything approaching what could be considered a decent and
sustainable standard of living for the vast majority of humans it is going
to require the "lowering" of living standards for a small percentage of the
very wealthy. The Malthusian "solution" is of course not only racist, it is
not necessary. I am not against commerce or urbanism but having to give up
the empty calories of Coke or the technological onanism of the Game Boy is a
small sacrifice to make to regain something even more important- our lives.
Bob Black's The Abolition of Work
(http://www.zpub.com/notes/black-work.html) makes a lot of good arguments
for this and cites Marx's slacker brother-in-law Paul Lafargue's "The right
to be lazy". Anis Shivani has a recent article at Counterpunch touching on
this through the optic of one of America's greatest 20th century writers
http://www.counterpunch.org/shivani0925.html