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. . . . 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.
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. . . . Some [conservative old ideologies], like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.
But is that really what Marxism believes in? For one thing, Marx doesn’t binarize work and play so absolutely—a rhetorically effective but conceptually simplistic move. And Marx wants to get rid of alienated labor, since it’s the effect of exploitation, but then
sensuous human activity includes what Black means by play, I think. Also, I’ve found laziness an effective tactic.
