Work is required to get energy to support our dissipative structure, something that would if you are an American would only require some 2 hours a day.
Besides our struggle for subsistence, the economic problem, the usefulness of work is dependent on the goals that we set. Work is not good per se (just one example working on making an atomic bomb maybe is not that good) even if God or society for a long time have tried the hardest to makes us believe it. And boy do people believe now! Work have been revered as an impeccable institution by a lot of people from the left to right leading to an amnesia regarding it’s tainted history and peoples historically coy interest in it.
Believe it or not work was considered something you were forced to by nature or other people and it was detested as a distraction from what really mattered in life by the great ancient Greeks. Industrialization took over the idolization of work from the church and in the Spring time of the people, the revolution of 1848, the labour movement was duped into turning work into a right.
With a little more imagination and little disobedience to the one-dimensional norms we can do what Kropotkin acutely suggested they should have done back in 1848, to demand the right to bread or right to wealth instead of right to work. But it is never to late to change. We can still do it.
We have to do it because work cannot be the solution to distribution as it is part of the problem with our planet destroying economy. The planet cannot take more and more trucks, televisions, mobile phones or guns and therefore we cannot continue the absurdity of creating torpid work. We have to stop the mix up of means with ends. Economy and work are means to achieve certain ends, for example prospering within limits, and not ends in themselves.
More of means, no matter how hard we try, doesn’t make it end!
We and our planet have reached the end of more, we have reached our limits, and we cannot take more anymore. As can be seen in the amount of food and other things produced, accessed by only some few of us, we have theoretically solved Keynes economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, but by not distributing the bread we have turned the economic problem into a fairness problem.
So let us share the bread … and the wine, share the well-being, share the work that helps prosper within limits, and more importantly share the free time and share the enjoyment of it so we avoid a nervous-breakdown!