Notices by HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social), page 2

Some people fish for work and some people fish for fun. Some people toil as mechanics and others lovingly restore cars for fun. Some people train until their bodies are breaking to be professional athletes and others play sports for the joy of it. Farming is backbreaking work but I grow my own vegetables in my allotment garden for some reason. Some people take on manual labor because they have no choice but my kids choose to do it for free.

Have you ever seen a Tough Mudder or another extreme obstacle course? They look like a torturous boot camp course for military conscripts. These are allegedly “leisure.”

4/11

Human beings have engaged in productive activity—ie, “labored”—from the very first moment of our species, without compulsion.

Did they experience that activity as *fun* the same way my cat plays at hunting and my kids play at construction? I don’t know! But I have a hunch.

We are encouraged to think of labor and leisure as separate categories, but this becomes difficult when you consider how little distinguishes the substance of the activities that fall into these categories.

3/11

I have been blessed with the chance to watch my own kids play, and let me tell you: a lot of child’s play would be, under other circumstances, be absolutely indistinguishable from the most unappealing manual labor.

I’ve seen them use shovels to fill buckets with rocks and haul them up a jungle gym with pulleys and dump the rocks elsewhere like they’re little corvée conscripts forced to build Mesopotamian city walls. And they love it. Just over and over, hauling rocks around.

2/11

But this is nonsensical if you imagined, say, a fisherman who labored in order to be able to afford a leisurely fishing trip as a consumer good.

Leisure and labor activities do not vary based on the content of the activity. A cat hunts for food and plays at hunting. A person might toil manually, hauling rocks to build structures, while my kids do this for fun.

We must then consider what else varies between these activities: compulsion and supervision. I sincerely doubt my kids would enjoy hauling rocks if I told them they had to in order to receive permission to eat, or if I insisted on directing and monitoring their efforts.

6/11

“Leisure” is a pernicious idea that evolved as a direct consequence of *compulsory* labor. In his book “Human Action,” the pro-fascist “libertarian” Ludwig von Mises* argued that leisure is separate from labor, and that labor, being unpleasant, is something we do only in order to acquire leisure:

“We can express this fact also in calling the attainment of leisure an end of purposeful activity, or an economic good of the first order. In employing this somewhat sophisticated terminology, we must view leisure as any other economic good from the aspect of marginal utility.”

5/11

Is hunting for the hunter-gatherer fun? Is it leisure? Mises would call it “work,” a means to the end of engaging in non-work. But it seems to me that Mises was wrong, in a trivially obvious sense, which one could readily see if one accounted for all the people in capitalist countries who *hunt animals for recreational sport.*

The fact that hunter-gatherers hunt to eat doesn’t seem particularly relevant; nature does not engage in compulsion. Many of our entertainments satisfy our bodily needs. The key distinction is whether someone else is compelling the activity, under threat of violence, and whether someone else is directing the activity.

To be alive is to revel in the exercise of our faculties. Fun, leisure, play: these are not what we labor towards but rather the default of being alive.

9/11

We might consider, then, joy in voluntary activity to be the default, rather than the end product of labor.

Consider this description of hunter-gatherer society from Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall’s “Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy”:

“This economic mobility is apparent in ethnographic descriptions. Woodburn (Woodburn 1968a: 52) writes, ‘Hunting is not a coordinated activity. Men hunt individually and decide for themselves where and when they will go hunting.’ According to Harris (1977: 69), band members, ‘decided for themselves how long they would work on a particular day, what they would work at—or if they would work at all…Neither rent, taxes, nor tribute kept people from doing what they wanted to do.’“

8/11

In contrast to Mises’ definition of leisure as the antithesis of labor, I prefer David Graeber’s take on fun:

“To exercise one’s capacities to their fullest extent is to take pleasure in one’s own existence, and with sociable creatures, such pleasures are proportionally magnified when performed in company. From the Russian perspective, this does not need to be explained. It is simply what life is. We don’t have to explain why creatures desire to be alive. Life is an end in itself. And if what being alive actually consists of is having powers—to run, jump, fight, fly through the air—then surely the exercise of such powers as an end in itself does not have to be explained either. It’s just an extension of the same principle.”

7/11

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun

* As an addendum, here’s another excerpt from Mises’ work:

“The expenditure of labor is deemed painful. Not to work is considered a state of affairs more satisfactory than working. Leisure is, other things being equal, preferred to travail. People work only when they value the return of labor higher than the decrease in satisfaction brought about by the curtailment of leisure. To work involves disutility.

Psychology and physiology may try to explain this fact. There is no need for praxeology to investigate whether or not they can succeed in such endeavors. For praxeology it is a datum that men are eager to enjoy leisure and therefore look upon their own capacity to bring about effects with feelings different from those with which they look upon the capacity of material factors of production. Man in considering an expenditure of his own labor investigates not only whether there is no more desirable end for the employment of the quantity of labor in question, but no less whether it would not be more desirable to abstain from any further expenditure of labor.”

I absolutely love this. Mises declares labor and leisure to be opposing economic categories and asserts this is a priori true. He doesn’t have to explain this; *it just is true.* A great mind at work here, people.

Except that this distinction is trivially easy to disregard! “Labor is painful and people avoid it except when they do literally the same exact activity for fun, without reference to the material output of the activity.” What an absolute clown.

11/11

In capitalist countries, there is an allegedly mysterious decline in leisure going on. Despite all the material wealth our labor produces, we’re able to consume less leisure as a consumer good, to use Mises’ framing.

This is not a mystery! We do not lack for the means to have fun. Kids haul rocks for fun. What we lack is *permission.* Our lives are circumscribed by the state and property. We toil not to buy leisure but to keep the capital class in leisure; every aspect of our lives is hemmed in, directed, monitored, managed, inspected.

We do not grudgingly engage in work so we can afford to joyfully engage in leisure. These are false distinctions. *Life doesn’t have to be this way.*

10/11

https://www.ft.com/content/9df289b9-d425-49e6-899f-c963b458625f