It was once said, by some prohibitionist, that drink
is the curse of the working classes; somone else replied that work is the curse
of the drinking classes. According to Mark Twain, "Work consists of whatever
a body is obliged to do . . . Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged
to do." It's a cliché to be depressed on Monday morning and happy to
see the weekend arrive. Most people assume that work is to be avoided whenever
possible, even though everyone knows that work is what keeps life going. The
aversion to work produces the social contradiction that we would all like to
be free of work ourselves while knowing that the work will still get done --
by others. Or, more precisely, we would like people like us to have dominion
over the labor of people unlike us.
That work is a curse, a burden, something to
shift on to the backs of others, strikes us as so natural as to be
self-evident. But let's think about the reason for this
attitude.
Marx made the distinction between
necessary labor -- the activity required to maintain the life
of society, and free labor: activities, like music or cooking,
that we pursue with care and self-discipline either because we love
the results or because we love the activity, or both. This way of
putting it suggests that if we loved our society, we could love what
we do to keep it going, and there would be less distance between work
and play.
When American workers think seriously about
what they don't like about their jobs, they tend to think the problem
lies in having to work for someone else, and that their
alternative is to work for themselves by starting their own business.
Now it is certainly true that working for someone else is a problem,
but let's consider why it's a problem. Of course, it means that your
employer tells you what to do and how to do it. By itself this is not
so bad: receiving directions is part of learning, and we all have to
go through it when we take up something new. And conversely, on some
jobs, skilled or managerial jobs, you are expected to figure out for
yourself, in consultation with co-workers, what needs doing and how
best to go about it. So there is no necessary correlation between
having a job and losing your freedom to think for
yourself.
Being told what to do makes sense when you
and your supervisor share a common goal and interest. If I am
teaching you to read, or to repair a bicycle, we are both interested
in your developing this skill and in the value of the activity. But
when an employer tells a worker what to do, the employer has designed
the activity with something else in mind: the financial return to the
business, whether the business is a small gift shop or the Nike
Corporation. The needs of the worker and of the consumer are
secondary to the requirements of minimizing the costs of labor and
materials, and maximizing the quantity of sales and the price paid
for the product. The worker and the consumer are manipulated to serve
the end of profit. This is one way to understand the pain of labor:
when you go to work, you spend your energy advancing interests that
are not your own, interests that stand opposed to you. When you make
Nike or Intel or GE richer by doing their work, you make yourself and
others like you poorer. When you make PGE or Time-Warner powerful and
influential, you make yourself weak and insignificant. This is what
is wrong with work today: not just that we work for others, but that
we work for others who diminish us, and thus we actively disable
ourselves.
The alternative, then, to working for
someone else, is not to work for oneself, but to work together, for
and with each other. Not only do we need to continue building
cooperative, worker and community owned businesses and services; we
also need to find ways to transform today's giant corporations into
democratically governed public institutions. These massive
concentrations of productive wealth today serve the financial needs
of the richest 1 percent of Americans who own 40 percent of all U.S.
assets. This wealth was created by workers, and it continues to grow
and to be productive through the activities of all of us. It is we,
therefore, who should govern and make use of it.
However, we can no longer believe, as many
of us once did, that a revolutionary movement is going to sweep
capitalism aside and set the stage for a new and just form of life.
But if we are to do more than merely resist the domination of our
lives by corporate capital, we need to stop taking its existence for
granted. And one of the central assumptions that keeps it going is
that necessary labor means wage labor and its discontents. We need to
learn how to transform common sense, so that instead of bemoaning
work itself, we complain every day about working for capital, for the
wealth of the few, when we could be working together for our
families, friends, and communities. Let us learn and teach that wage
labor is the labor of making the rich and powerful richer and more
powerful. So wage labor is crazy! We don't have to do it anymore. The
individual, of course, is not free to make that decision; but
collectively, we are. The knowledge that wage labor is crazy has to
be built. Let's learn how to talk with each other in a way that
builds that knowledge.
