The Importance of Work Work, we can’t really avoid it. Human civilisation has been built on work, the labouring of many billions of people throughout history has created the cities, farms, industries, armies and infrastructure which have marked our time on the planet. Even before human civilisation emerged, the role of labour and the development of different kinds of tools has been central to our evolution from the more primitive primates. If work is so important, and has got us so far, why is it so terribly shitty most of the time? In Britain today, the use of sick notes has reached record levels. More and more people are taking time off work with a wide variety of mental health issues: stress, depression and anxiety predominant amongst them. Morale in most workplaces – regardless of the economic climate – is often low. Our working lives are increasingly dogged by bureaucracy, targets, tick-boxes, key performance indicators and meetings about meetings. We are commanded to revel in the faux-hyper-excitement of the sales team who made another successful pitch. This is the pathology of our times. Work is necessary, but it is also alienating. It is this way because our natural human endeavours to strive, to create, to design and build have been captured by the ruling elites; bastardised and turned in on themselves. We are confronted with our creativity but it has been deformed and rendered monstrous by the desires of capital – the relentless push for profit. We dream of a fulfilling life but instead we end up selling car insurance. A genuine revolution against the current conditions of our cruel social relations will always confront the question of how we work and who we wish to work for. Revolutions which begin in city squares against a police line, will often see the fruits of their struggle develop in workplace occupations and the various attempts by workers to self-manage and regulate their own time and labour. These attempts have not always been successful, but they point to an urgent desire shared by workers, for collective control over their work. As such, any revolution that seeks to change our social relations will have to confront and dissolve the divisions of labour that have emerged under capitalism, primarily between men and women, between “ethnic” labour and the culturally privileged sections of the class, and between physical and affective labour. In a number of industries, bosses cynically attempt to co-opt our desire to reconfigure work. They dissolve the distinction between work and leisure time, implementing policies which include higher levels of working from home, flexible hours and the proliferation of life/work spaces. Just visualise the Google HQ with its relaxation cubicles and ‘free thinking’ space with billiards tables. The goal is to create the desire for employees to linger in their workplace, hopefully not noticing the longer working hours that might result from it. Of course, for most of us, the regimented system of control and discipline which is the modern workplace – ‘Why are you two minutes late to sign into your workstation?!’ - remains as it ever was: a terrible reinforcement of factory discipline in a country where most of us don’t work in factories any more. Reconceptualising what work is, and how we can do it, is a key project of the utopian struggle for communism. We do want to abolish the life/work distinction but not on the terms of the bosses. We want to increase leisure time dramatically whilst maintaining the same standard of living. We demand meaningful jobs – not jobs which cause us to spend our Sundays in a state of misery, dreading the return to work the next day. Such an existence is not only possible, it is an absolutely necessary basis from which to establish any kind of harmonious society. The problem is that the capitalist class can’t really organise their system any other way. Occasionally, within some anarchist circles, people are quite scornful of work. They fight for ‘the right not to work’ i.e. the right to not have to work under the tyrannical labour conditions of modern capitalism. Naturally, there is a lot to be said for the strength of this argument. But, we also have to put forward the positive case for work, that if we really want to develop civilisation and improve the living conditions for humanity as a whole then it will require more labour power to be expended. The Marxist critique of work is more hopeful than the ideas of some post-modernists. Derrida believed that all work was automatically alienating, despite the social conditions in which it happened. From a socialist perspective, our work doesn’t have to be alienating; it can be transformed and brought back into alignment with our humanity. It can emerge as an organic and natural component of who we are, a complement to our other natural desire – to relax and enjoy our leisure. Revolutionaries today should be cautious of “post-work” talk, or unwittingly regurgitating the capitalist propaganda that ‘there is no working class now’. We have to fight to acknowledge the importance of work in the development of our civilisation, to overcome the contradictions and pathologies of modern working life and re-establish a non-alienating work-relationship in society. An example is to use new technology, not to impoverish workers through unemployment but to augment our labour in a democratic way that improves working conditions and does not render human labour “obsolete”. But again this points to collective, democratic control over technology and machinery, not its ownership by a ruling capitalist elite that deploy it in their interests and not in ours.
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 11:38:46 +0000
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