The Right to Useful Unemployment (1978)

"In this postscript to Tools for Creativitiy, Illich calls for the right to useful unemployment: a positive, constructive, and even optimistic concept dealing with that activity by which people are useful to themselves and others outside the production of commodities for the market. Unfettered by managing professionals, unmeasured and unmeasureable by economists, these activities truly generate satisfaction, creativity, and freedom."

In terms of its Ludosophic significance, the book provides a fertile ground for reflecting on empowering 'functions' of games, and of free play in particular. So it seems another good starting point to think what playing could mean as emancipatory praxis in view of modernization of poverty in an age of capitalistic relations. These relations, as İllich explains, claim to be the sole decisive factor in assessing usefuleness and productivity of our activity, which, bitteronically enough, boils down to a market driven solely for the sake of exchange value.