A new app for smart phones, Mappiness, clinches the science re polling people about how happy they are. With the free app, the participant receives a random call anytime during the day to record exactly how they feel at that particular moment. With this software in place, researchers at the London School of Economics (who are promoting the app) were able to determine that when queried at work, respondents universally registered “unhappy.”

Do we need further proof of the obvious? No, I’d say. Nonetheless, an academic, not affiliated with LSE we must note, questions the validity of this study:

The point I would make is that work means more to us than just the money it brings. Work can be a source of creative expression and a route to self-realisation. Even where work lacks creativity it can still bring the benefits of social interaction. The problem with seeing work as just a disutility [this is economic-speak for a ‘drag’] is that it fails to capture the dual-sided nature of work in human life. It misses the worth of work both as a means to an end and an end in itself.

OK, we can dismiss these comments as abstractions without much relevance. But then further we have this:

To be sure, work is often endured by workers but this does not reflect anything intrinsic to work as such, rather it reflects on the way that work is organised. To see work as just a disutility is to abstract from the influence of the structure and organisation of work on the way that workers experience work.

First, let’s be clear that the LSE research simply determined that at work, folks were unhappy. Now maybe they didn’t poll academics, bank managers or dentists who would register a high “happiness” quotient, but the larger issues re work were not polled.

The question of the intrinsic value of work is too complicated to explore in a brief comment. [ See my Introduction to Paul Lafargue’s essays collected in The Right to be Lazy .] However, the organization of work demands a comment, especially in the light of Michael Seidman’s book Workers Against Work on the resistance to work by workers in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and likewise by the Parisian workers during the Popular Front days.

I come to these comments after years in worker-controlled enterprises in Chicago (a very small co-op print shop) and in Berkeley (at a much larger commercial printing plant). In both places, the work was usually under pressure of deadlines and with very narrow economic margins (an error was costly to the co-op, not the customer – unlike from what I gather is the case with government contracts!). The actual mechanics of the job were the same as in capitalist enterprises that I worked in, but there were some very important differences that made the work more tolerable in the co-ops.

In worker-managed situations, gratuitous regimentation was absent, so, for example, a radio could be played (with earplugs, or with speakers after collective agreement, of course) and discussions with fellow workers could be conducted. These things lowered the level of stress. Another difference was the customer base. For the most part the customers were non-profits and activist groups who printed useful material, not trash advertisements, or worse.

One further point to register here, and one that is a bit more elusive to any one outside the actual work situation, was the camaraderie amongst the worker/members. That camaraderie, which was built on a broadly compatible politics, formed the foundation for solidarity that cushioned the stress of the daily routine. A common complaint of many workers in traditional worksites is that they have to put up with their co-workers besides a sociopathic boss.

All that said, the way we all work, no matter the conditions, may never be elevated to a state of bliss, but for a very narrow spectrum of the population, work can be a fulfilling experience. And trying to achieve fulfillment motivates many to “strike out on their own” and become their “own bosses.”

The vast majority of jobs, however, will always be drudgery, even if mechanization can be introduced on an unprecedented scale. Despite the ancillary conditions of employment, the only recourse is to limit the amount of time devoted to such work and, consequently, to spread it around, to “communalize” it.

There is more to be said regarding work that verges on utopian speculation, but not to be dismissed for that reason. This refers back to the old saw used against anarchist theory – Who will do the dirty work? “We have a revolution and somebody bloody needs to take out the garbage,” as a somewhat bloated British Marxist once blurted into my face.

Several years ago, while discussing the concept of “zero-waste” with a friend who was trying to secure municipal funds for a complete recycling/reuse center, that antagonistic question came back to me. “After the Revolution there will be No Garbage,” came the reply, decades late.

Work as the name for monetarily enforced behavior is culturally specific. Cavemen didn’t work, the Iroquois didn’t work and for a goodly number of years I didn’t work. That said, of course, stuff would still need to be done after the revolution. Stuff that may take some considerable effort, and yet we have all had the experience, I hope, of expending considerable effort on some project that we would not consider work. Maybe we would not say it was play, but then what would we call it?

I think here we have a real conundrum: what do we call work that is not work? Activity that is done voluntarily, preferably with friends for social benefit and that we have a great deal of control over – is that work? Further, if we manage to do that activity within a festival-like context, like the old barn raisings of the agricultural era, is that work?

It is not enough to organize work, as we have it today, on a democratic basis – it needs be limited (as mentioned) and communalized, but also transformed wherever feasible. The transformation of work has several aspects, the common denominator of which is to limit work to a measure of social usefulness. Saying this conjures up images of supermarkets filled with only one detergent, one breakfast cereal and one brand of beer. While maybe we could live with one brand of laundry soap (though I doubt that), the proliferation of microbreweries, however, testifies to the creativity of work freed from the domination of corporate conglomerates and expands the notion of utility beyond strictly market parameters. I mean by this that often the beginnings of a microbrewery is someone’s hobby that becomes commoditized because the time for hobbies cannot expand much outside the confines of the daily grind. The temptation, again, to succeed as one’s “own boss” demands that the hobbyist be transformed into an entrepreneur, there isn’t much of a third choice.

In another context, one wonders what all those scientists hired to fine tune the chemistry of laundry detergents would do if allowed to expand their research as they might have imagined while college students. This question probably nags scientists in all fields, and maybe most those with Defense Department grants.

It comes down to this: the crux of the system that dominates us is work. Whether we thrive or starve hinges on it. Whether the society functions at its current minimum for our welfare hinges on it. And finally, and this is the radicality behind abolishing work – all the catastrophes we face demand for their resolution that we overthrow the obedience that comes with the work that creates the conditions for catastrophes in the first place.