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Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead
May 20, 2004
Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsI...ews_detail.asp By* Jeff Stier, Esq. Overhyped stories of danger from fish, underhyped stories of lead in candy -- but are the activists the real threat? Fish consumption by pregnant women may aid late-stage fetal growth, a new study shows (see http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...h_pregnancy_dc ).* If the results of this one study are supported by further research, it is a scary example of the consequences of reckless use of the* precautionary principle *by fish-fear-mongers. "Better to be safe than sorry" -- avoiding even the remotest, hypothetical threat -- say the anti-chemical activists, likely inspiring many women to reduce fish consumption during pregnancy, given all the recent hoopla over* PCBs in salmon *and mercury in tuna. Even if you are not convinced that trace levels of these chemicals are harmful, why take the risk, the prudent person might wonder.* So now, women around the world are reducing fish consumption, a possible fetal growth booster. Isn't it time we held the activists accountable? A similar case of unintended activist fallout faces the people of California.* That state certainly has its hands full.* As leaders in application of the precautionary principle, California officials have to go around protecting consumers from all sorts of things that we don't really have much reason to believe are harmful.* Warning labels on virtually everything are mandated by law in California, as Proposition 65 .* From warning labels on firewood to bans on life-saving brominated fire retardants, you would think Californians are very well protected by their government. So when lead-contaminated candies from Mexico find their way into California, you'd think the state would be there to protect the children from what is indeed a real health threat.* Think again. Crisis manager Jonathan Bernstein (see: http://www.bernsteincrisismanagement...ewsletter.html ) reports: The Orange County Register recently broke a story revealing that more than 100 brands of candy sold in California, most of them from Mexico, have tested positive for dangerous levels of lead over the past decade, and that little has been done about it. State officials claimed they didn't have the resources to handle the problems, didn't have jurisdiction over Mexican manufacturers, and then issued this pip of a statement: "We have a lot more responsibilities than looking for lead in candy," said Jim Waddell, chief of the state Health Department's Food and Drug Branch. Too busy putting labels on everything to attend to real health threats perhaps?* So much for the precautionary principle and Proposition 65!* What have those activists wrought? Again: Isn't it time we held them accountable? Jeff Stier is an associate director of the American Council on Science and Health and raised a similar question -- regarding chemical-fearing breast cancer activists'*failure to laud statins*-- in a prior article .. For more, please see: http://www.acsh.org/about/staffID.2/staff_detail.asp |
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Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead
In 1994 NIOSH completed as study that debunked the early
theories regarding the toxicity, specifically the carginocicity of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). There was actually a large plant in Front Royal VA that employed thousands of workers that had to close and the site was put on the superfund list. The employees lost their jobs and the town and surrounding counties still have not recovered from the horrible economic loss that occured in the 1980s because of the PCB contamination and the EPA mandated shutdown. All of the latest evidence from NIOSH indicates that PCBs are no more carcinogenic than coffee when injected at the same doses into lab rats. So we have spent billions and billions of dollars on remediation, loss of jobs and destroyed local economies because of early indicators that were false positives. Lets try to be more carefull in our studies from here on out! -- Patrick H. Mason M.S. OHST, EMT-CT Certified Safety Engineer Emergency Medical Technician-ALS "jeff stier" > wrote in message om... > May 20, 2004 > > Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead > > http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsI...ews_detail.asp > > By Jeff Stier, Esq. > > > Overhyped stories of danger from fish, underhyped stories of lead in > candy -- but are the activists the real threat? > > Fish consumption by pregnant women may aid late-stage fetal growth, a > new study shows (see > http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...20040512/hl_nm /health_pregnancy_dc > ). If the results of this one study are supported by further > research, it is a scary example of the consequences of reckless use of > the precautionary principle by fish-fear-mongers. > > "Better to be safe than sorry" -- avoiding even the remotest, > hypothetical threat -- say the anti-chemical activists, likely > inspiring many women to reduce fish consumption during pregnancy, > given all the recent hoopla over PCBs in salmon and mercury in tuna. > Even if you are not convinced that trace levels of these chemicals > are harmful, why take the risk, the prudent person might wonder. So > now, women around the world are reducing fish consumption, a possible > fetal growth booster. > > Isn't it time we held the activists accountable? > > A similar case of unintended activist fallout faces the people of > California. That state certainly has its hands full. As leaders in > application of the precautionary principle, California officials have > to go around protecting consumers from all sorts of things that we > don't really have much reason to believe are harmful. Warning labels > on virtually everything are mandated by law in California, as > Proposition 65 . From warning labels on firewood to bans on > life-saving brominated fire retardants, you would think Californians > are very well protected by their government. > > So when lead-contaminated candies from Mexico find their way into > California, you'd think the state would be there to protect the > children from what is indeed a real health threat. Think again. > > Crisis manager Jonathan Bernstein (see: > http://www.bernsteincrisismanagement...ewsletter.html ) reports: > > The Orange County Register recently broke a story revealing that more > than 100 brands of candy sold in California, most of them from Mexico, > have tested positive for dangerous levels of lead over the past > decade, and that little has been done about it. > > State officials claimed they didn't have the resources to handle the > problems, didn't have jurisdiction over Mexican manufacturers, and > then issued this pip of a statement: > > "We have a lot more responsibilities than looking for lead in candy," > said Jim Waddell, chief of the state Health Department's Food and Drug > Branch. > > Too busy putting labels on everything to attend to real health threats > perhaps? So much for the precautionary principle and Proposition 65! > What have those activists wrought? > > Again: Isn't it time we held them accountable? > > Jeff Stier is an associate director of the American Council on Science > and Health and raised a similar question -- regarding chemical-fearing > breast cancer activists' failure to laud statins -- in a prior article > . > > > For more, please see: > http://www.acsh.org/about/staffID.2/staff_detail.asp |
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Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead
(jeff stier) wrote in message . com>...
> May 20, 2004 > > Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead > > http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsI...ews_detail.asp > Want to know more about those ACSH-HOLES? http://www.prwatch.org/improp/acsh.html History ACSH was founded in March 1978. A revealing reference regarding its origins appears in the minutes of a meeting that month of the board of directors of the Manufacturing Chemists' Association (later renamed the Chemical Manufacturers Association, and known today as the American Chemistry Council). The minutes record an appeal by MCA director William J. Driver, who noted that Whelan had founded "a tax-exempt organization composed of scientists whose viewpoints are more similar to those of business than dissimilar. . . . ACSH is being pinched for funds, but in the interest of independence and credibility will not accept support from any chemical company or any company which could even remotely be concerned with the aims of the council." Notwithstanding this desire to make ACSH appear independent, Driver added that "Dr. Whelan would be happy to hear from" MCA members who "are interested in the work of the council and know of possible sources of funds." Shortly after its founding, ACSH abandoned even the appearance of independent funding. In a 1997 interview, Whelan explained that she was already being called a "paid liar for industry," so she figured she might as well go ahead and take industry money without restrictions. .... Other advisors include familiar names from the list of "usual suspects" who appear regularly as scientific experts in a variety of anti-environmental, pro-industry forums: Dennis Avery, Michael Gough, Patrick J. Michaels, Stephen Safe, and S. Fred Singer, to name a few. Several, including Floy Lilley and J. Gordon Edwards, as well as Moghissi, have written articles for 21st Century and Technology, a publication affiliated with lunatic-fringe conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche. ... You can read about ACSH-HOLES S. Fred Singer & Michael Gough back when they were Tobacco Industry covert agents... http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.pht...AL_EXAMINATION http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.pht...S._Fred_Singer http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.pht...licy_ Project |
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Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead
(Collective Farms For The People) wrote in message . com>...
> (jeff stier) wrote in message . com>... > > May 20, 2004 > > > > Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead > > > > http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsI...ews_detail.asp > > > > Want to know more about those ACSH-HOLES? > > http://www.prwatch.org/improp/acsh.html > Want to know about usual greeno-pinkos suspects Rampton and Stauber at prwatch? http://www.activistcash.com/organiza...iew.cfm/oid/12 Center for Media & Democracy 520 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53703 Phone 608-260-9713 | Fax 608-260-9714 | Email The Center for Media & Democracy (CMD) is a counterculture public relations effort disguised as an independent media organization. CMD isn't really a center it would be more accurate to call it a partnership, since it is essentially a two-person operation. Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber operate, as do most self-anointed progressive watchdogs, from the presumption that any communication issued from a corporate headquarters must be viewed with a jaundiced eye. In their own quarterly PR Watch newsletter, they recently referred to corporate PR as a propaganda industry, misleading citizens and manipulating minds in the service of special interests. Ironically, Rampton and Stauber have elected to dip into the deep pockets of multi-million-dollar foundations with special interest agendas of their own. Their books Mad Cow U.S.A. and Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! were produced and promoted using grant monies from the Foundation for Deep Ecology ($25,000) and the Education Foundation of America ($20,000), among others. Along with the more recentTrust Us: We're Experts, these books are scare-mongering tales about a corporate culture out of control, and each implies that the public needs rescuing. Guess who the heroes in this fantasy are? Despite his wild claims that federal agencies have covered up U.S. mad cow disease cases, John Stauber has become a quotable celebrity on the subject. In 1997, at the height of the initial mad-cow panic, a CMD press release warned: Evidence suggests there may already be a mad-cow-type of disease infecting both U.S. pigs and cattle. Rampton and Stauber have never provided any documentation to back up this reckless claim; no cases of mad-cow disease have ever been documented in U.S. livestock. John Stauber was one of only four mad-cow experts offered to reporters by Fenton Communications' media arm, Environmental Media Services. > History > > ACSH was founded in March 1978. A revealing reference regarding its > origins appears in the minutes of a meeting that month of the board of > directors of the Manufacturing Chemists' Association (later renamed > the Chemical Manufacturers Association, and known today as the > American Chemistry Council). The minutes record an appeal by MCA > director William J. Driver, who noted that Whelan had founded "a > tax-exempt organization composed of scientists whose viewpoints are > more similar to those of business than dissimilar. . . . ACSH is being > pinched for funds, but in the interest of independence and credibility > will not accept support from any chemical company or any company which > could even remotely be concerned with the aims of the council." > > Notwithstanding this desire to make ACSH appear independent, Driver > added that "Dr. Whelan would be happy to hear from" MCA members who > "are interested in the work of the council and know of possible > sources of funds." > > Shortly after its founding, ACSH abandoned even the appearance of > independent funding. In a 1997 interview, Whelan explained that she > was already being called a "paid liar for industry," so she figured > she might as well go ahead and take industry money without > restrictions. > > ... Other advisors include familiar names from the list of "usual > suspects" who appear regularly as scientific experts in a variety of > anti-environmental, pro-industry forums: Dennis Avery, Michael Gough, > Patrick J. Michaels, Stephen Safe, and S. Fred Singer, to name a few. > Several, including Floy Lilley and J. Gordon Edwards, as well as > Moghissi, have written articles for 21st Century and Technology, a > publication affiliated with lunatic-fringe conspiracy theorist Lyndon > LaRouche. ... > > > > You can read about ACSH-HOLES S. Fred Singer & Michael Gough back when > they were Tobacco Industry covert agents... > > http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.pht...AL_EXAMINATION > > http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.pht...S._Fred_Singer > > http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.pht...licy_ Project |
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Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead
"W4PHM" > wrote in message hlink.net>...
> In 1994 NIOSH completed as study that debunked the early > theories regarding the toxicity, specifically the carginocicity of > PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). Source? Please see http://www.epa.gov/opptintr/pcb/effects.html "PCBs are one of the most widely studied environmental contaminants, and many studies in animals and human populations have been performed to assess the potential carcinogenicity of PCBs.... EPA's cancer reassessment reflected the Agency's commitment to the use of the best science in evaluating health effects of PCBs. EPA's cancer reassessment was peer reviewed by 15 experts on PCBs, including scientists from government, academia and industry. The peer reviewers agreed with EPA's conclusion that PCBs are probable human carcinogens. "The cancer reassessment determined that PCBs are probable human carcinogens, based on the following information: "There is clear evidence that PCBs cause cancer in animals. EPA reviewed all of the available literature on the carcinogenicity of PCBs in animals as an important first step in the cancer reassessment. An industry scientist commented that "all significant studies have been reviewed and are fairly represented in the document". The literature presents overwhelming evidence that PCBs cause cancer in animals. An industry-sponsored peer-reviewed rat study, characterized as the "gold standard study" by one peer reviewer, demonstrated that every commercial PCB mixture tested caused cancer. " > All of the latest evidence from NIOSH indicates that PCBs are no > more carcinogenic than coffee when injected at the same doses into > lab rats. Source? > So we have spent billions and billions of dollars on remediation, loss > of jobs and destroyed local economies because of early indicators > that were false positives. Lets try to be more carefull in our studies > from here on out! Let's be more careful http://www.epa.gov/opptintr/pcb/effects.html "From Dec.1978 to Sep.1979, a terrible incident happened in central Taiwan, Chang-hua and Tai-chung counties. A brown rice oil maker sold the oil which was contaminated by the heating media containing PCB leak from broken pipe. More than two thousand people fell victims and suffered from serious skin disease because of the poisonous characteristics of PCBs such as its strong persistency and disruption of endocrine. The children born by PCB contaminated mothers are mental retarded and hyperactive." |
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Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead
In article .net>,
"W4PHM" > wrote: >In 1994 NIOSH completed as study that debunked the early >theories regarding the toxicity, specifically the carginocicity of >PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). There was actually a large >plant in Front Royal VA that employed thousands of workers >that had to close and the site was put on the superfund list. The >employees lost their jobs and the town and surrounding counties >still have not recovered from the horrible economic loss that >occured in the 1980s because of the PCB contamination and the >EPA mandated shutdown. > >All of the latest evidence from NIOSH indicates that PCBs are no >more carcinogenic than coffee when injected at the same doses into >lab rats. From http://www.epa.gov/opptintr/pcb/effects.html: "PCBs have been demonstrated to cause a variety of adverse health effects. PCBs have been shown to cause cancer in animals. PCBs have also been shown to cause a number of serious non-cancer health effects in animals, including effects on the immune system, reproductive system, nervous system, endocrine system and other health effects. Studies in humans provide supportive evidence for potential carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic effects of PCBs. The different health effects of PCBs may be interrelated, as alterations in one system may have significant implications for the other systems of the body. "The cancer reassessment determined that PCBs are probable human carcinogens, based on the following information: "There is clear evidence that PCBs cause cancer in animals. EPA reviewed all of the available literature on the carcinogenicity of PCBs in animals as an important first step in the cancer reassessment. An industry scientist commented that "all significant studies have been reviewed and are fairly represented in the document". The literature presents overwhelming evidence that PCBs cause cancer in animals. An industry-sponsored peer-reviewed rat study, characterized as the "gold standard study" by one peer reviewer, demonstrated that every commercial PCB mixture tested caused cancer. The new studies reviewed in the PCB reassessment allowed EPA to develop more accurate potency estimates than previously available for PCBs. The reassessment provided EPA with sufficient information to develop a range of potency estimates for different PCB mixtures, based on the incidence of liver cancer and in consideration of the mobility of PCBs in the environment. "The reassessment resulted in a slightly decreased cancer potency estimate for Aroclor 1260 relative to the 1987 estimate due to the use of additional dose-response information for PCB mixtures and refinements in risk assessment techniques (e.g., use of a different animal-to-human scaling factor for dose). The reassessment concluded that the types of PCBs likely to be bioaccumulated in fish and bound to sediments are the most carcinogenic PCB mixtures. "In addition to the animal studies, a number of epidemiological studies of workers exposed to PCBs have been performed. Results of human studies raise concerns for the potential carcinogenicity of PCBs. Studies of PCB workers found increases in rare liver cancers and malignant melanoma. The presence of cancer in the same target organ (liver) following exposures to PCBs both in animals and in humans and the finding of liver cancers and malignant melanomas across multiple human studies adds weight to the conclusion that PCBs are probable human carcinogens. "Some of the studies in humans have not demonstrated an association between exposures to PCBs and disease. However, epidemiological studies share common methodologic limitations that can affect their ability to discern important health effects (or define them as statistically significant) even when they are present. Often, the number of individuals in a study is too small for an effect to be revealed, or there are difficulties in determining actual exposure levels, or there are multiple confounding factors (factors that tend to co-occur with PCB exposure, including smoking, drinking of alcohol, and exposure to other chemicals in the workplace). Epidemiological studies may not be able to detect small increases in cancer over background unless the cancer rate following contaminant exposure is very high or the exposure produces an very unusual type of cancer. However, studies that do not demonstrate an association between exposure to PCBs and disease should not be characterized as negative studies. These studies are most appropriately viewed as inconclusive. Limited studies that produce inconclusive findings for cancer in humans do not mean that PCBs are safe. "It is very important to note that the composition of PCB mixtures changes following their release into the environment. The types of PCBs that tend to bioaccumulate in fish and other animals and bind to sediments happen to be the most carcinogenic components of PCB mixtures. As a result, people who ingest PCB-contaminated fish or other animal products and contact PCB-contaminated sediment may be exposed to PCB mixtures that are even more toxic than the PCB mixtures contacted by workers and released into the environment. "EPA's peer reviewed cancer reassessment concluded that PCBs are probable human carcinogens. EPA is not alone in its conclusions regarding PCBs. The International Agency for Research on Cancer has declared PCBs to be probably carcinogenic to humans. The National Toxicology Program has stated that it is reasonable to conclude that PCBs are carcinogenic in humans. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has determined that PCBs are a potential occupational carcinogen. " Now, what industry-shill web site did you get your info from? > >So we have spent billions and billions of dollars on remediation, loss >of jobs and destroyed local economies because of early indicators >that were false positives. Lets try to be more carefull in our studies >from here on out! > > |
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Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead
"JohnAndrew" > wrote in message om... > What's particularly nice about Jeff Stiers' rant is the way it > redirects attention away from the mercury and PCBs in the food > to the people who are complaining about the mercury and PCBs > in the food. > > Activists complain about mercury residues in fish making the > fish unsafe to eat - and Stiers is saying, "but fish are good > for you; what are these crazy enviros doing attacking the > eating of fish?" That's not an unreasonable position, IF the risk from PCBs is considerably lower than the health benefits of eating the fish - which is the case. Safe salmon, sick science 1/10/2004 Financial Post Terence Corcoran http://www.canada.com/national/natio...id=c2421896-6a fd-4341-9546-00d07d255eb In a report as balanced as an Al-Jazeera news clip, The National's science beat person, Eve Savory, summarized an international study that Mr. Mansbridge said "found that salmon contains enough toxins to set off alarm bells, especially farmed salmon." Corcoran says that over at The Globe and Mail, one of its vast staff of specialists in the art of producing food and health scares -- Martin Mittelstaedt -- cranked out a five-alarm panic lead: "Farm-raised Atlantic salmon ... are so laced with PCBs and other pollutants that they should be eaten only infrequently because they pose an increased risk of cancer." He said salmon from Toronto supermarkets were so contaminated they shouldn't be eaten more than once every two months. Ms. Savory's CBC report, which set up a Canadian fish farm industry official in a way that made him look guilty of gross bureaucratic evasion, quoted one of the authors of the study to support the idea that Canada's farmed salmon are killers. "These levels (of PCBs, dioxins and other pollutants) are sufficiently high in farmed salmon that unlimited consumption of these salmon is unwise." One serving of salmon once every two months might be safe, he said. There goes the salmon market. Corcoran says that unlimited consumption of anything could kill us, especially warped health stories that make no reasonable attempt to assess the validity of the science being reported. Unverified science news, especially stories that are twisted to fit some other non-scientific agenda, fall into the great bulging global warehouse labeled Junk Science. The other agenda here is the crusade, mounted by the David Suzuki Foundation and others, against the farm fish industry. Suzuki (another CBC creation) funded a wonky study two years ago that claimed B.C. farm salmon posed a health risk. That study, as Charles Santerre of Purdue University found, exaggerated the PCB content of farm salmon by using parts per trillion (ppt) as a base. The salmon therefore contained 50,000 ppt of PCBs. Sounds big, even alarming, especially when the FDA puts the safe level at 2,000 parts per billion. Note the difference: parts per trillion versus parts per billion. In fact, the PCB count found in the salmon equals 50 parts per billion, or a fraction of the safe level. Purdue's Santerre believes the Suzuki-funded study two years ago was written "in such an unconventional manner as to scare consumers away from eating salmon." Looking over the new study, the one the Globe and CBC hyped on Thursday, Mr. Santerre sees some of the same agenda-setting. (Mr. Santerre recently signed on as an occasional consultant to the salmon industry, but will the Suzuki Foundation please not send in a letter condemning his views as tainted.) [I had an earlier article that was lost when my computer disk crashed. It pointed out there would be one death in 70 years from the PCB level in these salmon. On the other hand, the health benefits would save 300 lives every year. I don't recall the consumption levels, but they're not particularly important since both figures were based on the same level.] > Didn't Dante write something about the best place for people > like this to work? > ****** I suppose we should be grateful that the eco-nuts alerted us to the high levels of PCBs in the feed that is causing farm raised salmon to have higher PCB levels than they should. It's an easily correctable problem, and it's already been fixed as far as I know. But their typical over the wall hysteria does more harm than good - as is so often the case. I suppose Dante might have constructed a fitting end for such people where they are subject to even more fanatical Chicken Littles who constantly discover, with great authority, even more dangers in everything they eat or touch. As for me, I still have salmon twice a week when I can get it at a reasonable price. |
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Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead
In article >,
"Founding Father" > wrote: > >"JohnAndrew" > wrote in message . com... >> What's particularly nice about Jeff Stiers' rant is the way it >> redirects attention away from the mercury and PCBs in the food >> to the people who are complaining about the mercury and PCBs >> in the food. >> >> Activists complain about mercury residues in fish making the >> fish unsafe to eat - and Stiers is saying, "but fish are good >> for you; what are these crazy enviros doing attacking the >> eating of fish?" > >That's not an unreasonable position, IF the risk from PCBs is considerably >lower than the health benefits of eating the fish - which is the case. Add in the risk of mercury, dioxin, etc. Check out the EPA. > >Safe salmon, sick science >1/10/2004 >Financial Post >Terence Corcoran I don't recognize this as a scientific or medical source. >http://www.canada.com/national/natio...id=c2421896-6a >fd-4341-9546-00d07d255eb > >In a report as balanced as an Al-Jazeera news clip, The National's science >beat >person, Eve Savory, summarized an international study that Mr. Mansbridge >said >"found that salmon contains enough toxins to set off alarm bells, especially >farmed salmon." > >Corcoran says What are his qualifications? |
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Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead
"Lloyd Parker" > wrote in message ... > In article >, > "Founding Father" > wrote: > > > >"JohnAndrew" > wrote in message > . com... > >> What's particularly nice about Jeff Stiers' rant is the way it > >> redirects attention away from the mercury and PCBs in the food > >> to the people who are complaining about the mercury and PCBs > >> in the food. > >> > >> Activists complain about mercury residues in fish making the > >> fish unsafe to eat - and Stiers is saying, "but fish are good > >> for you; what are these crazy enviros doing attacking the > >> eating of fish?" > > > >That's not an unreasonable position, IF the risk from PCBs is considerably > >lower than the health benefits of eating the fish - which is the case. > > Add in the risk of mercury, dioxin, etc. Check out the EPA. > > > > >Safe salmon, sick science > >1/10/2004 > >Financial Post > >Terence Corcoran > > I don't recognize this as a scientific or medical source. > > >http://www.canada.com/national/natio...?id=c2421896-6 a > >fd-4341-9546-00d07d255eb > > > >In a report as balanced as an Al-Jazeera news clip, The National's science > >beat > >person, Eve Savory, summarized an international study that Mr. Mansbridge > >said > >"found that salmon contains enough toxins to set off alarm bells, especially > >farmed salmon." > > > >Corcoran says > > What are his qualifications? Who cares? The article makes some assertions of fact that are either true or false. 1. The David Suzuki Foundation is behind at least some of these attacks on the salmon industry, and it has a political agenda, making it a questionable source of information. 2. The study [deliberately] exaggerated the PCB content of farm salmon by using parts per trillion (ppt) as a base instead of the usual ppb.. 3. The salmon contained only 50 ppb of PCBs compared to the FDA's safe level of 2,000 parts per billion (not trillion). These statements are either true or false, irrespective of any phony or real "credentials" the author of the article may or may not have. Deal with them. |
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Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead
"Founding Father" > wrote in message ... > 1. The David Suzuki Foundation is behind at least some of these attacks on > the salmon industry, and it has a political agenda, making it a questionable > source of information. It does? What party has it stated it politically supports? You wouldn't be one of those lying Founding Fathers? Would you? |
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Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead
"Vendicar Decarian" > wrote in message ... > > "Founding Father" > wrote in message > ... > > 1. The David Suzuki Foundation is behind at least some of these attacks on > > the salmon industry, and it has a political agenda, making it a > questionable > > source of information. > > It does? What party has it stated it politically supports? So in your little world the only political agendas must involve overt support for a particular political party? Their political agenda is the radical environmentalist movement, which is at its core anti-human, as the co-founder of Greenpeace wrote. Earth Day / Has the environmental movement left the world behind? www.sfgate.com Return to regular view Earth Day Has the environmental movement left the world behind? Patrick Moore, Nick Schulz Thursday, April 22, 2004 ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback | FAQ URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/04/22/EDGKO68MID 1.DTL There is no doubt that the environments of wealthy, developed countries are considerably healthier today than on the first Earth Day. Air and water are cleaner. Human life expectancies are longer. Forests are abundant and growing. Developed countries have wanted improved environments and they have been wealthy enough to afford them. But the story is much different elsewhere. Indeed, for much of the rest of the world, conditions are worse than they should be. Ironically, the very movement that made its presence felt in rallies across this country in 1970 and that thrives in the developed world today must shoulder much of the blame for the developing world's sorry state. It is impeding both economic and environmental progress due to an agenda that is anti- development, anti- technology and, in the final analysis, anti-human. David Suzuki Foundation uses faulty data or distorts data to try to make its case. http://www.greenspirit.com/pinksalmon/index.cfm Not only does it support Kyoto, a fraudulent treaty whose only purpose is to allow America's compactors to gain economic advantage they cannot achieve through the market place, but it even claims Kyoto would save Canada $200 Billion and create jobs. http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2002/10/02/kyoto_suzuki021002 In fact, its report wants at 50% reduction in greenhouse gasses. http://www.davidsuzuki.org/files/Kyoto_Beyond_LR.pdf Its own website recommends the ridiculous film, "The Day After Tomorrow," as "underscoring the fact that climate change is happening now" even as it acknowledges its scientific shortcomings. http://www.davidsuzuki.org/Climate_Change/ I suppose by the same logic, "Armageddon" "underscored the fact that we are at threat from asteroids." Its front group, Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, appears to be trying to destroy the salmon farming industry. http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takea...086256207&sign[partnerID]=1&sign[memberID]=320051748&sign[partner_userID]=320051748 Do a google search on that group and just see all the hysterical warnings that come up. Gee, one would think Canadians are dropping dead in the streets every day from eating farmed fish. > You wouldn't be one of those lying Founding Fathers? Would you? I suppose to a fanatic like you, anyone who prefers actual facts can be labeled a "liar" just like religious extremists label the orthodox as heretics. Having been trained as a real scientist, I hate junk science. |
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Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead
> "Vendicar Decarian" > wrote in message > ... > What party has it stated it politically supports? "Founding Father" > wrote in message ... > So in your little world the only political agendas must involve overt > support for a particular political party? > Their political agenda is the radical environmentalist movement, which is at > its core anti-human, as the co-founder of Greenpeace wrote. I see, so agree that the Suzuki foundation - Run by PHD Biologist David Suzuki - supports no political party. Your view is simply that clean air, clean water, and living within the sustainable boundaries of the natural world is political, in the same way that curing Cancer, developing new Antibiotics, growing Food, is political. "Founding Father" > wrote in message ... > I suppose to a fanatic like you, anyone who prefers actual facts can be > labeled a "liar" just like religious extremists label the orthodox as > heretics. In America these days. Anyone who demands honesty is considered a "fanatic". "Founding Father" > wrote in message ... > Having been trained as a real scientist, I hate junk science. Yes, well your training in the janitorial science hardly count now do they? Calculations illustrate fossil-fuel crisis Plant-to-oil equations point up unsustainable profligacy. 29 October 2003 BETSY MASON If you burned a litre of petrol on the way to work this morning, consider this: it took 23.5 tonnes of ancient, buried plants to produce. That's the equivalent of 16,200 square meters of wheat, roots and stalks included. So says new research that aims to raise awareness about the need to change our energy-consumption habits. The long, slow process that converts plant matter into oil is extremely inefficient, says ecologist Jeff Dukes of Carnegie Institution of Washington, Stanford, who did the calculations. Less than one part in 10,000 of the organic matter becomes oil. "So much carbon is lost back to the atmosphere through decomposition, it's only the residues that are turned into fossil fuels," says Dukes. He warns that less than a tenth of the carbon in plants buried in peat bogs was turned into coal1. In 1997, he points out, we burned fossil fuels equivalent to more than 400 times the amount of plant matter produced on Earth in the same year. Despite these inefficiencies, fossil fuels created over the past 500 million years have given us a relatively inexpensive fuel source for the past 250 years. "It is fantastic stored free energy from the past, but it's not sustainable," Dukes says. Modern ways to convert biomass into fuels such as ethanol are far more efficient. But it would still take nearly a quarter of all the plants on Earth to replace the fuel used in 1997. That's 50% more than humans already remove or pave over each year, says Dukes. "Hopefully we'll use more wind and solar power," he suggests. It's a valid point, says geologist Sandra Neuzil of the US Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia, who studies peat decomposition. But she is cautious about the many unknowns in such equations, saying: "When you start multiplying uncertainties the numbers start to become meaningless." Dukes acknowledges that his calculations have a large degree of uncertainty, but believes he has captured the essence of the process. "I'm hoping that it will make people think," he says. References Dukes, J. S. Burning buried sunshine: Human consumption of ancient solar energy. Climatic Change, published online, (2002). © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003 |
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Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead
In article >,
"Founding Father" > wrote: > >"Vendicar Decarian" > wrote in message ... >> >> "Founding Father" > wrote in message >> ... >> > 1. The David Suzuki Foundation is behind at least some of these attacks >on >> > the salmon industry, and it has a political agenda, making it a >> questionable >> > source of information. >> >> It does? What party has it stated it politically supports? > >So in your little world the only political agendas must involve overt >support for a particular political party? > >Their political agenda is the radical environmentalist movement, which is at >its core anti-human, as the co-founder of Greenpeace wrote. So we can blame all libertarians for Tim McVeigh's crime too? > >Earth Day / Has the environmental movement left the world behind? > www.sfgate.com Return to regular view > Earth Day > Has the environmental movement left the world behind? > Patrick Moore, Nick Schulz > Thursday, April 22, 2004 > ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback | FAQ > URL: Now editorials pass as fact? > >sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/04/22/EDGKO68MID >1.DTL > > There is no doubt that the environments of wealthy, developed > countries are considerably healthier today than on the first > Earth Day. Air and water are cleaner. Human life > expectancies are longer. Forests are abundant and growing. > Developed countries have wanted improved environments and > they have been wealthy enough to afford them. But the story > is much different elsewhere. Indeed, for much of the rest of > the world, conditions are worse than they should be. > Ironically, the very movement that made its presence felt in > rallies across this country in 1970 and that thrives in the > developed world today must shoulder much of the blame for the > developing world's sorry state. It is impeding both economic > and environmental progress due to an agenda that is anti- > development, anti- technology and, in the final analysis, > anti-human. > >David Suzuki Foundation uses faulty data or distorts data to try to make its >case. And corporations never do? > >http://www.greenspirit.com/pinksalmon/index.cfm > >Not only does it support Kyoto, a fraudulent treaty whose only purpose is to >allow America's compactors to gain economic advantage they cannot achieve >through the market place, but it even claims Kyoto would save Canada $200 >Billion and create jobs. OK, you've just lied 3 times in one sentence. >http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2002/10/02/kyoto_suzuki021002 >In fact, its report wants at 50% reduction in greenhouse gasses. >http://www.davidsuzuki.org/files/Kyoto_Beyond_LR.pdf > >Its own website recommends the ridiculous film, "The Day After Tomorrow," as >"underscoring the fact that climate change is happening now" even as it >acknowledges its scientific shortcomings. Are you claiming climate change is not happening? >http://www.davidsuzuki.org/Climate_Change/ > >I suppose by the same logic, "Armageddon" "underscored the fact that we are >at threat from asteroids." > >Its front group, Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, appears to be >trying to destroy the salmon farming industry. Liar. >http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takea...086256207&sign[partn erID]=1&sign[memberID]=320051748&sign[partner_userID]=320051748 >Do a google search on that group and just see all the hysterical warnings >that come up. Gee, one would think Canadians are dropping dead in the >streets every day from eating farmed fish. > >> You wouldn't be one of those lying Founding Fathers? Would you? > >I suppose to a fanatic like you, anyone who prefers actual facts can be >labeled a "liar" just like religious extremists label the orthodox as >heretics. > >Having been trained as a real scientist, I hate junk science. > > You're as close to being a scientist as a creationist is. |
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Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead
"Vendicar Decarian" > wrote:
> You wouldn't be one of those lying Founding Fathers? Would you? You wouldn't happen to be usenet whackmeister Scotty Nudds? Would you? |
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Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead
"bob" > wrote in message om... > You wouldn't happen to be usenet whackmeister Scotty Nudds? Would you? THE ABOLITION OF WORK by Bob Black ================================== 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. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a _ludic_ revolution. By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive. 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. Curiously -- or maybe not -- all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else. Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favour full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favour full _un_-employment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking _and_ serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn't have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn't triviality; very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I'd like life to be a game -- but a game with high stakes. I want to play for _keeps_. The alternative to work isn't just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, it's never more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I promoting the managed time-disciplined safety-valve called "leisure", far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacations so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation. I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is _forced labour_, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it's done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or "communist", work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness. Usually -- and this is even more true in "communist" than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee -- work is employment, _i.e._ wage-labour, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or some_thing_) else. In Cuba or China or any alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions -- Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey -- temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most labourers in the last several millenia, the payment of taxes (=ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. _All_ industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility. But modern work has worse implications. People don't just work, they have "jobs". One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don't) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A "job" that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for fourty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic bungling, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who -- by any rational-technical criteria -- should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control. This degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as "discipline". Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace -- surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn't have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity. Such is "work". Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the "suspension of consequences". This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioural and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; that's why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga (_Homo Ludens_), _define_ it as a game-playing or following rules. I respect Huizinga's erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel -- these practices aren't rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be _played with_ at least as readily as anything else. Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. 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 de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary Western workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or monsatery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or for no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination", just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you from unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work? The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are fascism and oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television. People who are regimented all their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among the 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. We are so close to the world of work that we cant see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the "work ethic" would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labelled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed, the Calvinist cranks notwithstanding, until overthrown by industrialism -- but not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets. Let's pretend for a moment that work doesn't turn people into stultified submissives. Let's pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And let's pretend that work isn't as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would _still_ make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. Socrates said that manual labourers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do, we keep looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labour, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and as a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that "whoever gives his labour for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves". His candour is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a consception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed "to regain the lost power and health". Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to "St. Monday" -- thus establishing a _de facto_ five-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecration -- was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the _ancien regime_ wrested substantial time back from their landlords' work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants' calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov's figures from villages in Czarist Russia -- hardly a progressive society -- likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants' days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited _muzhiks_ would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we. To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes' compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of life -- in North America, particularly -- but already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return to the colonies. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than West Germans climbed the Berlin Wall from the west.) The "survival of the fittest" version -- the Thomas Huxley version -- of Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book _Mutual Aid, A Factor In Evolution_. (Kropotkin was a scientist -- a geographer -- who'd had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography. The anthropologist Marshal Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled "The Original Affluent Society". They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that "hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society." They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were "working" at all. Their "labour", as it appears to us, was skilled labour which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labour on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schiller's definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full "play" to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. As he put it: "The animal _works_ when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it _plays_ when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity." (A modern version -- dubiously developmental -- is Abraham Maslow's counterposition of "deficiency" and "growth" motivation.) Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist panthoen, observed that "the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labour under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required." He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work -- it's rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work -- but we can. The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial Europe. Very pertinent is Daniel Bell's essay "Work and its Discontents", the first text, I believe, to refer to the "revolt against work" in so many words and, had it been understood, an important correction to the complacency ordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, _The End of Ideology_. Neither critics nor celebrants have noticed that Bell's end-of-ideology thesis signalled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology. As Bell notes, Adam Smith in _The Wealth of Nations_, for all his enthusiasm for the market and the division of labour, was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work that Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smith's modern epigones. As Smith observed: "The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding.... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized, unorganizeable malaise of the 1970's and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEW's report _Work in America_, the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. That problem is the revolt against work. It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economist -- Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner -- because, in their terms, as they used to say on _Star Trek_, "it does not compute". If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others which they cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words. Between 14000 and 25000 workers are killed annually in the U.S.A. on the job. Over two million are disabled. Twenty to twenty-five million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus they don't count the half-million cases of occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases which was 1200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4000 die every year. What the statistics don't show is that tens of millions of people have their lifespans shortened by work -- which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their late 50's. Consider all the other workaholics. Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our fourty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing -- or rather, they died trying to get to work. But work is nothing to die for. State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything, more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here. Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow Subway. Chornobyl and other Soviet nuclear disasters covered up until recently make Times Beach and Three-Mile Island -- but not Bhopal -- look like elementary-school air-raid drills. On the other hand, deregulation, currently fashionable, won't help and will probably hurt. From a health and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days when the economy most closely approached laissez-faire. Historians like Eugene Genovese have argued persuasively that -- as antebellum slavery apologists insisted -- factory wage-workers in the North American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats and businessmen seems to make much difference at the point of production. What I've said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are fed up with work. There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work. And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also widespread among workers themselves, is that work itself is inevitable and necessary. I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other. I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work severs any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate many millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, stockbrokers, bankers, lawyers, security guards, ad-men and everybody who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy _implodes_. Fourty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the "tertiary sector", the service sector, is growing while the "secondary sector" (industry) stagnates and the "primary sector" (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to ensure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That's why you can't go home just because you finish early. They want your _time_, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn't the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the last fifty years? Next we can take a meat cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, junk food, luxury consumer goods -- and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Model T may be alright, but the auto-eroticism on which such pest-holes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend is out of the question. Already, without even trying, we've virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems. I haven't as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and technicians and engineers freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence should have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining and manufacturing. Undoubtedly, being creative folk, they'll find other projects to amuse themselves with. I myself am no gadget freak. I wouldn't care to live in a pushbutton paradise. I don't want robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I think, a place for labour-saving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labour-saving inventions ever devised have'nt saved a moment's labour. Karl Marx wrote that "it would be possible to write a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolt of the working-class". The enthusiastic technophiles -- Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B.F. Skinner -- have always been unabashed totalitarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more than skeptical about the promises of the computer mystics. _They_ work like dogs; chances are, if they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any particularized contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, let's give them a hearing. What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation". Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfullt in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the golden age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them. The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy, it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which affect these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I don't want coerced students and I don't care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure. Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy babysitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile profoundly appreciate the time themselves that you free up for them, although they'd get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when they're just fuelling up bodies for work. Third -- other things being equal -- some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are enjoyable, at least for awhile, if these circumstances are changed. This is true of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can. Activities that appeal to some people don't always appeal to all others, but everyone at least potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety. If technology has a role in all this, it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation. To some extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morris considered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution. Art would be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as a specialized department catering to an elite audience, and its qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from which they were stolen by work. It's a sobering thought that the Grecian urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store olive oil. No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not -- as it is now -- a zero/sum game. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps. Workers of the world... _relax_! ********************* Published by Feh! Press, 2226 Hennepin S., #20, Minneapolis MN 55405 January 1992. This essay originated as a speech in 1980; it was revised and enlarged in 1985 and appeared in the author's book _The Abolition of Work and Other Essays_ (Loompanics Unlimited) in 1986. It has also appeared in many periodicals and anthologies including translations into French, Dutch, German and Slovene. No copyright; this essay may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted, even without mentioning the source. Bob Black can be contacted at PO Box 66153, Albany NY 12206 USA. |
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Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead
"Vendicar Decarian" > responded to my question:
> > You wouldn't happen to be usenet whackmeister Scotty Nudds? Would you? with a 300+ line article he cut and pasted. Umm, VD, I knew you were Whackmeister Scotty Nudds. There was no need for you to provide further evidence. |
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Health-Hype Hypocrites on PCBs, Mercury, and Lead
THE ABOLITION OF WORK by Bob Black
================================== 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. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a _ludic_ revolution. By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive. 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. Curiously -- or maybe not -- all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else. Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favour full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favour full _un_-employment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking _and_ serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn't have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn't triviality; very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I'd like life to be a game -- but a game with high stakes. I want to play for _keeps_. The alternative to work isn't just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, it's never more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I promoting the managed time-disciplined safety-valve called "leisure", far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacations so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation. I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is _forced labour_, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it's done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or "communist", work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness. Usually -- and this is even more true in "communist" than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee -- work is employment, _i.e._ wage-labour, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or some_thing_) else. In Cuba or China or any alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions -- Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey -- temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most labourers in the last several millenia, the payment of taxes (=ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. _All_ industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility. But modern work has worse implications. People don't just work, they have "jobs". One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don't) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A "job" that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for fourty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic bungling, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who -- by any rational-technical criteria -- should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control. This degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as "discipline". Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace -- surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn't have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity. Such is "work". Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the "suspension of consequences". This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioural and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; that's why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga (_Homo Ludens_), _define_ it as a game-playing or following rules. I respect Huizinga's erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel -- these practices aren't rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be _played with_ at least as readily as anything else. Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. 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 de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary Western workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or monsatery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or for no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination", just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you from unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work? The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are fascism and oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television. People who are regimented all their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among the 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. We are so close to the world of work that we cant see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the "work ethic" would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labelled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed, the Calvinist cranks notwithstanding, until overthrown by industrialism -- but not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets. Let's pretend for a moment that work doesn't turn people into stultified submissives. Let's pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And let's pretend that work isn't as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would _still_ make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. Socrates said that manual labourers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do, we keep looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labour, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and as a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that "whoever gives his labour for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves". His candour is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a consception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed "to regain the lost power and health". Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to "St. Monday" -- thus establishing a _de facto_ five-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecration -- was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the _ancien regime_ wrested substantial time back from their landlords' work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants' calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov's figures from villages in Czarist Russia -- hardly a progressive society -- likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants' days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited _muzhiks_ would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we. To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes' compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of life -- in North America, particularly -- but already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return to the colonies. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than West Germans climbed the Berlin Wall from the west.) The "survival of the fittest" version -- the Thomas Huxley version -- of Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book _Mutual Aid, A Factor In Evolution_. (Kropotkin was a scientist -- a geographer -- who'd had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography. The anthropologist Marshal Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled "The Original Affluent Society". They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that "hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society." They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were "working" at all. Their "labour", as it appears to us, was skilled labour which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labour on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schiller's definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full "play" to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. As he put it: "The animal _works_ when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it _plays_ when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity." (A modern version -- dubiously developmental -- is Abraham Maslow's counterposition of "deficiency" and "growth" motivation.) Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist panthoen, observed that "the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labour under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required." He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work -- it's rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work -- but we can. The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial Europe. Very pertinent is Daniel Bell's essay "Work and its Discontents", the first text, I believe, to refer to the "revolt against work" in so many words and, had it been understood, an important correction to the complacency ordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, _The End of Ideology_. Neither critics nor celebrants have noticed that Bell's end-of-ideology thesis signalled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology. As Bell notes, Adam Smith in _The Wealth of Nations_, for all his enthusiasm for the market and the division of labour, was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work that Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smith's modern epigones. As Smith observed: "The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding.... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized, unorganizeable malaise of the 1970's and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEW's report _Work in America_, the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. That problem is the revolt against work. It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economist -- Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner -- because, in their terms, as they used to say on _Star Trek_, "it does not compute". If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others which they cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words. Between 14000 and 25000 workers are killed annually in the U.S.A. on the job. Over two million are disabled. Twenty to twenty-five million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus they don't count the half-million cases of occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases which was 1200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4000 die every year. What the statistics don't show is that tens of millions of people have their lifespans shortened by work -- which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their late 50's. Consider all the other workaholics. Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our fourty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing -- or rather, they died trying to get to work. But work is nothing to die for. State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything, more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here. Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow Subway. Chornobyl and other Soviet nuclear disasters covered up until recently make Times Beach and Three-Mile Island -- but not Bhopal -- look like elementary-school air-raid drills. On the other hand, deregulation, currently fashionable, won't help and will probably hurt. From a health and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days when the economy most closely approached laissez-faire. Historians like Eugene Genovese have argued persuasively that -- as antebellum slavery apologists insisted -- factory wage-workers in the North American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats and businessmen seems to make much difference at the point of production. What I've said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are fed up with work. There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work. And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also widespread among workers themselves, is that work itself is inevitable and necessary. I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other. I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work severs any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate many millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, stockbrokers, bankers, lawyers, security guards, ad-men and everybody who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy _implodes_. Fourty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the "tertiary sector", the service sector, is growing while the "secondary sector" (industry) stagnates and the "primary sector" (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to ensure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That's why you can't go home just because you finish early. They want your _time_, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn't the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the last fifty years? Next we can take a meat cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, junk food, luxury consumer goods -- and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Model T may be alright, but the auto-eroticism on which such pest-holes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend is out of the question. Already, without even trying, we've virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems. I haven't as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and technicians and engineers freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence should have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining and manufacturing. Undoubtedly, being creative folk, they'll find other projects to amuse themselves with. I myself am no gadget freak. I wouldn't care to live in a pushbutton paradise. I don't want robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I think, a place for labour-saving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labour-saving inventions ever devised have'nt saved a moment's labour. Karl Marx wrote that "it would be possible to write a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolt of the working-class". The enthusiastic technophiles -- Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B.F. Skinner -- have always been unabashed totalitarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more than skeptical about the promises of the computer mystics. _They_ work like dogs; chances are, if they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any particularized contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, let's give them a hearing. What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation". Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfullt in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the golden age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them. The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy, it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which affect these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I don't want coerced students and I don't care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure. Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy babysitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile profoundly appreciate the time themselves that you free up for them, although they'd get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when they're just fuelling up bodies for work. Third -- other things being equal -- some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are enjoyable, at least for awhile, if these circumstances are changed. This is true of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can. Activities that appeal to some people don't always appeal to all others, but everyone at least potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety. If technology has a role in all this, it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation. To some extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morris considered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution. Art would be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as a specialized department catering to an elite audience, and its qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from which they were stolen by work. It's a sobering thought that the Grecian urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store olive oil. No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not -- as it is now -- a zero/sum game. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps. Workers of the world... _relax_! ********************* Published by Feh! Press, 2226 Hennepin S., #20, Minneapolis MN 55405 January 1992. This essay originated as a speech in 1980; it was revised and enlarged in 1985 and appeared in the author's book _The Abolition of Work and Other Essays_ (Loompanics Unlimited) in 1986. It has also appeared in many periodicals and anthologies including translations into French, Dutch, German and Slovene. No copyright; this essay may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted, even without mentioning the source. Bob Black can be contacted at PO Box 66153, Albany NY 12206 USA. |
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