Basically by workers' self-management of production and community control of the means of production. It is hardly in the interests of those who do the actual "work" to have bad working conditions, boring, repetitive labour, and so on. Therefore, a key aspect of the liberation from work is to create a self-managed society, "a society in which everyone has equal means to develop and that all are or can be at the time intellectual and manual workers, and the only differences remaining between men [and women] are those which stem from the natural diversity of aptitudes, and that all jobs, all functions, give an equal right to the enjoyment of social possibilities." [Errico Malatesta, Anarchy, p. 40]
Essential to this task is decentralisation and the use of appropriate technology. Decentralisation is important to ensure that those who do work can determine how to liberate it. A decentralised system will ensure that ordinary people can identify areas for technological innovation, and so understand the need to get rid of certain kinds of work. Unless ordinary people understand and control the introduction of technology, then they will never be fully aware of the benefits of technology and resist advances which may be in their best interests to introduce. This is the full meaning of appropriate technology, namely the use of technology which those most affected feel to be best in a given situation. Such technology may or may not be technologically "advanced" but it will be of the kind which ordinary people can understand and, most importantly, control.
The potential for rational use of technology can be seen from capitalism. Under capitalism, technology is used to increase profits, to expand the economy, not to liberate all individuals from useless toil (it does, of course, liberate a few from such "activity"). As Ted Trainer argues:
"Two figures drive the point home. In the long term, productivity (i.e. output per hour of work) increases at about 2 percent per annum, meaning that each 35 years we could cut the work week by half while producing as much as we were at the beginning. A number of OECD . . . countries could actually have cut from a five-day work week to around a one-day work week in the last 25 years while maintaining their output at the same level. In this economy we must therefore double the annual amount we consume per person every 35 years just to prevent unemployment from rising and to avoid reduction in outlets available to soak up investable capital.
"Second, according to the US Bureau for Mines, the amount of capital per person available for investment in the United States will increase at 3.6 percent per annum (i.e. will double in 20-year intervals). This indicates that unless Americans double the volume of goods and services they consume every 20 years, their economy will be in serious difficulties.
"Hence the ceaseless and increasing pressure to find more business opportunities" ["What is Development", p 57-90, Society and Nature, Issue No. 7, p. 49]
And, remember, these figures include production in many areas of the economy that would not exist in a free society - state and capitalist bureaucracy, weapons production, and so on. In addition, it does not take into account the labour of those who do not actually produce anything useful and so the level of production for useful goods would be higher than Trainer indicates. In addition, goods will be built to last and so much production will become sensible and not governed by an insane desire to maximise profits at the expense of everything else.
The decentralisation of power will ensure that self-management becomes universal. This will see the end of division of labour as mental and physical work becomes unified and those who do the work also manage it. This will allow "the free exercise of all the faculties of man" both inside and outside "work." [Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, p. 148] The aim of such a development would be to turn productive activity, as far as possible, into an enjoyable experience. In the words of Murray Bookchin it is the quality and nature of the work process that counts:
"If workers' councils and workers' management of production do not transform the work into a joyful activity, free time into a marvellous experience, and the workplace into a community, then they remain merely formal structures, in fact, class structures. They perpetuate the limitations of the proletariat as a product of bourgeois social conditions. Indeed, no movement that raises the demand for workers' councils can be regarded as revolutionary unless it tries to promote sweeping transformations in the environment of the work place." [Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 146]
Work will become, primarily, the expression of a person's pleasure in what they are doing and become like an art - an expression of their creativity and individuality. Work as an art will become expressed in the workplace as well as the work process, with workplaces transformed and integrated into the local community and environment (see section I.4.15 — What will the workplace of tomorrow be like?). This will obviously apply to work conducted in the home as well, otherwise the "revolution, intoxicated with the beautiful words, Liberty, Equality, Solidarity, would not be a revolution if it maintained slavery at home. Half [of] humanity subjected to the slavery of the hearth would still have to rebel against the other half." [Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, p. 128]
In other words, anarchists desire "to combine the best part (in fact, the only good part) of work — the production of use-values — with the best of play . . . its freedom and its fun, its voluntariness and its intrinsic gratification" — the transformation of what economists call production into productive play. [Bob Black, Smokestack Lightning]
In addition, a decentralised system will build up a sense of community and trust between individuals and ensure the creation of an ethical economy, one based on interactions between individuals and not commodities caught in the flux of market forces. This ideal of a "moral economy" can be seen in both social anarchists desire for the end of the market system and the individualists insistence that "cost be the limit of price." Anarchists recognise that the "traditional local market . . . is essentially different from the market as it developed in modern capitalism. Bartering on a local market offered an opportunity to meet for the purpose of exchanging commodities. Producers and customers became acquainted; they were relatively small groups . . . The modern market is no longer a meeting place but a mechanism characterised by abstract and impersonal demand. One produces for this market, not for a known circle of customers; its verdict is based on laws of supply and demand." [Man for Himself, pp. 67-68]
Anarchists reject the capitalist notion that economic activity should be based on maximising profit as the be all and end all of such work (buying and selling on the "impersonal market"). As markets only work through people, individuals, who buy and sell (but, in the end, control them — in the "free market" only the market is free) this means that for the market to be "impersonal" as it is in capitalism it implies that those involved have to be unconcerned about personalities, including their own. Profit, not ethics, is what counts. The "impersonal" market suggests individuals who act in an impersonal, and so unethical, manner. The morality of what they produce, why they produce it and how they produce it is irrelevant, as long as profits are produced.
Instead, anarchists consider economic activity as an expression of the human spirit, an expression of the innate human need to express ourselves and to create. Capitalism distorts these needs and makes economic activity a deadening experience by the division of labour and hierarchy. Anarchists think that "industry is not an end in itself, but should only be a means to ensure to man his material subsistence and to make accessible to him the blessings of a higher intellectual culture. Where industry is everything and man is nothing begins the realm of a ruthless economic despotism whose workings are no less disastrous than those of any political despotism. The two mutually augment one another, and they are fed from the same source." [Rudolph Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, p. 11]
Anarchists think that a decentralised social system will allow "work" to be abolished and economic activity humanised and made a means to an end (namely producing useful things and liberated individuals). This would be achieved by, as Rudolf Rocker puts it, the "alliance of free groups of men and women based on co-operative labour and a planned administration of things in the interest of the community." [Op. Cit., p. 62]
However, as things are produced by people, it could be suggested that a "planned administration of things" implies a "planned administration of people" (although few who suggest this danger apply it to capitalist firms which are like mini-centrally planned states). This objection is false simply because anarchism aims "to reconstruct the economic life of the peoples from the ground up and build it up anew in the spirit of Socialism" and, moreover, "only the producers themselves are fitted for this task, since they are the only value-creating element in society out of which a new future can arise." Such a reconstructed economic life would be based on anarchist principles, that is "based on the principles of federalism, a free combination from below upwards, putting the right of self-determination of every member above everything else and recognising only the organic agreement of all on the basis of like interests and common convictions." [Op. Cit., p. 61 and p. 53]
In other words, those who produce also administer and so govern themselves in free association (and it should be pointed out that any group of individuals in association will make "plans" and "plan," the important question is who does the planning and who does the work. Only in anarchy are both functions united into the same people). Rocker emphasises this point when he writes that:
"Anarcho-syndicalists are convinced that a Socialist economic order cannot be created by the decrees and statutes of a government, but only by the solidaric collaboration of the workers with hand and brain in each special branch of production; that is, through the taking over of the management of all plants by the producers themselves under such form that the separate groups, plants, and branches of industry are independent members of the general economic organism and systematically carry on production and the distribution of the products in the interest of the community on the basis of free mutual agreements." [Op. Cit., p. 55]
In other words, the "planned administration of things" would be done by the producers themselves, in independent groupings. This would likely take the form (as we indicated in section I.3) of confederations of syndicates who communicate information between themselves and respond to changes in the production and distribution of products by increasing or decreasing the required means of production in a co-operative (i.e. "planned") fashion. No "central planning" or "central planners" governing the economy, just workers co-operating together as equals (as Kropotkin argued, free socialism "must result from thousands of separate local actions, all directed towards the same aim. It cannot be dictated by a central body: it must result from the numberless local needs and wants." [Act for Yourselves, p. 54]).
Therefore, an anarchist society would abolish work by ensuring that those who do the work actually control it. They would do so in a network of self-managed associations, a society "composed of a number of societies banded together for everything that demands a common effort: federations of producers for all kinds of production, of societies for consumption . . . All these groups will unite their efforts through mutual agreement . . . Personal initiative will be encouraged and every tendency to uniformity and centralisation combated." [Peter Kropotkin, quoted by Buber in Paths in Utopia, p. 42]
In response to consumption patterns, syndicates will have to expand or reduce production and will have to attract volunteers to do the necessary work. The very basis of free association will ensure the abolition of work, as individuals will apply for "work" they enjoy doing and so would be interested in reducing "work" they did not want to do to a minimum. Such a decentralisation of power would unleash a wealth of innovation and ensure that unpleasant work be minimised and fairly shared (see section I.4.13).
Now, any form of association requires agreement. Therefore, even a society based on the communist-anarchist maxim "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" will need to make agreements in order to ensure co-operative ventures succeed. In other words, members of a co-operative commonwealth would have to make and keep to their agreements between themselves. This means that the members of a syndicate would agree joint starting and finishing times, require notice if individuals want to change "jobs" and so on within and between syndicates. Any joint effort requires some degree of co-operation and agreement. Moreover, between syndicates, an agreement would be reached (in all likelihood) that determined the minimum working hours required by all members of society able to work. How that minimum was actually organised would vary between workplace and commune, with work times, flexi-time, job rotation and so on determined by each syndicate (for example, one syndicate may work 8 hours a day for 2 days, another 4 hours a day for 4 days, one may use flexi-time, another more rigid starting and stopping times).
As Kropotkin argued, an anarchist-communist society would be based upon the following kind of "contract" between its members:
"We undertake to give you the use of our houses, stores, streets, means of transport, schools, museums, etc., on condition that, from twenty to forty-five or fifty years of age, you consecrate four or five hours a day to some work recognised as necessary to existence. Choose yourself the producing group which you wish to join, or organise a new group, provided that it will undertake to produce necessaries. And as for the remainder of your time, combine together with whomsoever you like, for recreation, art, or science, according to the bent of your taste . . . Twelve or fifteen hundred hours of work a year . . . is all we ask of you. For that amount of work we guarantee to you the free use of all that these groups produce, or will produce." [The Conquest of Bread, pp. 153-4]
With such work "necessary to existence" being recognised by individuals and expressed by demand for labour from productive syndicates. It is, of course, up to the individual to decide which work he or she desires to perform from the positions available in the various associations in existence. A union card would be the means by which work hours would be recorded and access to the common wealth of society ensured. And, of course, individuals and groups are free to work alone and exchange the produce of their labour with others, including the confederated syndicates, if they so desired. An anarchist society will be as flexible as possible.
Therefore, we can imagine a social anarchist society being based on two basic arrangements — firstly, an agreed minimum working week of, say, 20 hours, in a syndicate of your choice, plus any amount of hours doing "work" which you feel like doing — for example, art, experimentation, DIY, playing music, composing, gardening and so on. The aim of technological progress would be to reduce the basic working week more and more until the very concept of necessary "work" and free time enjoyments is abolished. In addition, in work considered dangerous or unwanted, then volunteers could trade doing a few hours of such activity for more free time (see section I.4.13 for more on this).
It can be said that this sort of agreement is a restriction of liberty because it is "man-made" (as opposed to the "natural law" of "supply and demand"). This is a common defence of the free market by individualist anarchists against anarcho-communism, for example. However, while in theory individualist-anarchists can claim that in their vision of society, they don't care when, where, or how a person earns a living, as long as they are not invasive about it the fact is that any economy is based on interactions between individuals. The law of "supply and demand" easily, and often, makes a mockery of the ideas that individuals can work as long as they like - usually they end up working as long as required by market forces (i.e. the actions of other individuals, but turned into a force outwith their control, see section I.1.3). This means that individuals do not work as long as they like, but as long as they have to in order to survive. Knowing that "market forces" is the cause of long hours of work hardly makes them any nicer.
And it seems strange to the communist-anarchist that certain free agreements made between equals can be considered authoritarian while others are not. The individualist-anarchist argument that social co-operation to reduce labour is "authoritarian" while agreements between individuals on the market are not seems illogical to social anarchists. They cannot see how it is better for individuals to be pressured into working longer than they desire by "invisible hands" than to come to an arrangement with others to manage their own affairs to maximise their free time.
Therefore, free agreement between free and equal individuals is considered the key to abolishing work, based upon decentralisation of power and the use of appropriate technology.