Alienated Labor Revisited
By Peter Goodchild
15 November, 2010
Countercurrents.org
In Capital, Marx says that the worker’s “labor . . . has . . . been alienated from himself by the sale of his labor-power” (1906, p. 624). But why is that the case? How did the worker and the work come to be so separate that the larger part of the day is something that one tries to ignore?
There are curious distant origins of the words for “work” in various languages -- “work,” “labor,” “travail,” “toil” in English, Arbeit in German (cf. the related earfothe, “hardship,” in Old English), ergon in Greek, and so on. The ancient meaning usually includes the concept of “grief, suffering, trouble,” that sort of thing; people long ago didn’t believe in what later became the Protestant work ethic. As recently as a hundred years ago, for a member of the upper class to indulge in “trade” was considered demeaning. Yet today people talk about “the right to work,” oblivious to the fact that the phrase was coined by a murderer named Stalin (Constitution of the U.S.S.R, Article 118).
When the enslaved plowman in Aelfric’s eleventh-century Colloquium describes his many duties, he is told, “That is a great deal of toil.” “Yes, it is a great deal of toil,” he answers, “because I am not free.” There is more to his answer than one might imagine. The slave is miserable, not so much because of the physical effort, and not so much because he does not own the land or the harvest. His main sorrow comes from the lack of fulfillment of what Maslow calls “esteem needs,” particularly those for independence, freedom, strength, competence, confidence, recognition, and dignity.
In modern times, the main problem with “work” is that so many people have sunk into that life of alienated labor: the gap between “what people do” and “what people need” has become unbridgeable. Human beings are no longer in touch with Mother Nature or even with human nature. It is not surprising that they feel that the locus of power is no longer within them.
All human beings need to refrain from “working” for a living. “Work,” as it is generally known, is a complete denial of the liberal education that people struggle for in their youth. The modern corporation has no room for liberal thinking; on the contrary, to work for a living means either to be a slave, stuck in an entry‑level position forever, or to climb the corporate ladder and be a sycophant, a hypocrite, and a robot, losing all touch with one’s soul, constantly trying to please a boss. The boss is in turn dehumanized by those on the next‑higher level of authority. What a contradiction most people endure: they pay lip service to democracy on a political level, yet they spend eight hours a day in an economic environment that is totally undemocratic!
Marx thought religion was a product of capitalism, whereas Max Weber thought capitalism was a product of religion. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, a small book written at the dawn of the twentieth century, Weber (1988) described the Protestant ethic by saying that if God is omniscient and omnipotent, then he must know whether a person is destined to go to Heaven or Hell after death. In fact, since he created the universe he must have created each person’s posthumous destiny. If that is the case, then there is nothing that anyone can do about the matter. But that realization in turn leads to a great anxiety: How is one to know one’s fate? The answer is to look in the mirror: if one is prosperous and blessed in a material sense, then such a fact may be seen as a sign of God’s favor. It follows logically that those who work hard, avoid wasteful luxuries, and stick to the ascetic path will be most likely to achieve that state of material blessedness that is the sign of spiritual blessedness. Economic success, therefore, is not a vice; on the contrary, it is (according to Protestant theory) the very proof that one has been chosen by God. One’s job is not just a job; it is a calling -- one has been called by God to fulfill a certain destiny. And to ensure that material prosperity does not lead to sinfulness, one must never accumulate wealth solely for the purpose of living a life of idleness or of sensual pleasure. Hard work and economic prosperity are virtues, but the catch is that those virtues must never be renounced.
One of the most famous champions of that ethic was Benjamin Franklin, with his proverb, “Time is money” (Weber, 1988). What Franklin meant, unfortunately, is that time -- one’s life -- must never cease to be anything but the pursuit of money. Money must always be pursued, never merely enjoyed.
It might also be said that the middle class is more prudish, more concerned with propriety, and more obsessed with money and “success,” than either the lower class or the upper class (Weber, 1988). Upper‑class people don’t care about what their underlings think, and they don’t worry about money because they already have it. At the bottom of the social scale, the lower class is (again, according to this theory) too degenerate to improve its lot. The lower class and the upper class are static, unchanging, whereas the middle class is always trying to get up one notch. (Vance Packard [1959] notes the same phenomenon in the tenth chapter of The Status Seekers.)
The person who can best provide an understanding of the nature of work is not really Marx, and not really Thoreau, but Darwin -- although I am talking about cultural, not genetic evolution. It is the intense struggle for survival, the intense struggle by each human against other humans, that leaves people cursed with having to work and work, until everything before their eyes is just a gray blur. No child can imagine the situation, no child can imagine that for ten thousand mornings an alarm clock will drive him or her out of a warm bed and out into the cold predawn streets. But that is exactly what happens to almost all human beings, until the Angel of Death has mercy upon them.
A Darwinian struggle for survival, an eternal competition against our neighbors, is the first and greatest commandment. This planet is only eight thousand miles wide, but we are convinced that everything we see or touch must be made bigger, faster, and more powerful. If the television commercials allow a flickering image of lounge chairs, cool drinks, and palm-sheltered beaches, our minds are in no danger of corruption, and for civilized man a vacation is no more than a financial bloodletting. Certainly no one who wears a necktie can feel anything but vaguely cheated by the two weeks of a holiday. After the first few days of trying to enjoy a vacation, I can see why Thoreau said (in the second chapter of Walden), “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. . . .”
In The Overworked American (1991), Juliet Schor makes the point that overload can cheat the human mind of its ability to enjoy leisure even when the actual hours are available: instead of the planned “leisure activity,” there is only enough energy for the numbness of television. One can long await an evening of listening to music, only to find that Beethoven has been translated into the jangling of tin cans.
It is sad to see people who have no income at all, but it is perhaps sadder to see young people grabbing at “high tech” jobs, thinking that in that way they can protect themselves from the storm of laissez-faire capitalism. No matter how many hours one spends in front of a mirror, perfecting one’s hairstyle and one’s buzzwords, it is just not possible to turn oneself into an adequate piece of machinery, not when the machine is really designed to make money for people who sit in the back seats of limousines with tinted windows. Even if one could become that ideal piece of machinery, one would not be happy. When I see such “ambitious” young people, I wonder whatever happened to the notions of dignity, honor, and self-respect.
It is misleading to talk about the “daily grind” when the grind is not “daily” but eternal. In fact, the grind is almost everything: one’s daily job takes up more time that any other part of the twenty-four hour cycle, and certainly more time than any other phase of one’s life. I suspect that well-paid industrial psychologists have looked into the question of making the grind even more pervasive. (For those who have jobs, of course -- for a large number of people, ironically, there is the vast emptiness of unemployment.) If the research and development of sleep were ever left to large corporations, they would do their best to reduce human slumber to zero. After all, sleep is a big waste of time, a third of a human life, and that time could be devoted to increasing production of goods and services, increasing the Gross Domestic Product, increasing corporate profits.
When newspapers tell us that “the past year has been a good one,” or when they tell us that “good times have returned,” the “goodness” being referred to is not happiness, except perhaps in some tangential way. Nor does the goodness consist of beauty or wisdom. Nor does it consist of physical or mental health. A “good year” is not one in which a forest or a river has been saved from destruction. The goodness to which the newspapers refer is only one thing: economic production (Galbraith, 1984). A good year is one in which the GDP has inched higher on the charts. The equation is so firmly fixed in the reader’s mind that it generally needs no explanation, and anyone who questioned it would be looked upon as some sort of benighted extraterrestrial. If it were (but it isn’t) the function of newspapers to provide us with real information, those papers would be telling us that there is something abnormal in assuming that a “good year” must be one that makes corporations richer.
The only answer to the global economy is the local economy. The unasked-for global community should be balanced by the local community, the tribe. Every time I produce my own goods and services, I am striking three blows against corporate feudalism: I am not increasing the income of a CEO in New York, I am no longer alienated from my own labor, and I cannot be laid off as redundant. Of course, I won’t want to reduce myself to an utterly Paleolithic style of life, so I should trade my goods and services with other people in that local community: turnips for blankets, pottery for furniture.
To live sanely, I must get out of the city. I let myself become caught in a sort of hamster wheel, a cycle of spend-work-spend-work: I have to spend money, so I work at a long hard job in the city, so I have to spend money, so I work at a long hard job in the city. Around and around and around. And while all of that is happening, I pray that I won’t be laid off.
I need the kind of work that does not require me to sacrifice my dignity or my self-esteem. I do not need a master, because I can be my own master. I do not need to be a slave, and I do not have to possess the mentality of a slave, thinking always of somewhere to hide, thinking always that sleep is the ultimate goal. I need to give up “work” in that sense, and begin “work” in a positive sense. I need to live on my own land, to work my own land, to watch the wind-stirred grain turning to gold under the summer sun.
REFERENCES:
Galbraith, J. K. (1984). The affluent society. 4th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Marx, K. (1906). Capital: A critique of political economy. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Ed. Friedrich Engels. New York: Modern Library.
Maslow, A. (1987). Motivation and personality. 3rd ed. New York: Harper & Row.
Packard, V. (1959). The status seekers. David McKay.
Schor, J. B. (1991). The overworked American: The unexpected decline of leisure. New York: HarperCollins.
Weber, Max. (1988). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith.
Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is odonatus {at} live.com
