Usually -- and this is even more true in "Communist" than capitalist
countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone
is an employee -- work is employment, i. e., wage-labor, which
means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of
Americans who work, work for somebody (or some thing) else. In
the USSR or Cuba or Yugoslavia or any other alternative model
which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches
100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions -- Mexico,
India, Brazil, Turkey -- temporarily shelter significant concentrations
of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most
laborers in the last several millenia, the payment of taxes (=
ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being
otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All
industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of
surveillance which ensures servility.
But modern work has worse implications. People don't just work,
they have "jobs." One person does one productive task all the time
on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic
interest (as increasingly many jobs don't) the monotony of its
obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A "job" that might
engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time,
for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty
hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of
owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no
opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those
who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of
bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination,
of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates
who -- by any rational-technical criteria -- should be calling the
shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational
maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of
organizational control.
The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the
sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as
"discipline." Foucalt has complexified this phenomenon but it is
simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian
controls at the workplace -- surveillance, rotework, imposed work
tempos, production quotas, punching -in and -out, etc. Discipline is
what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison
and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically
original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic
dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible.
For all their bad intentions they just didn't have the machinery to
control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do.
Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is
an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest
opportunity.
Such is "work." Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary.
What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced. This is
axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the "suspension of
consequences." This is unacceptable if it implies that play is
inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences.
This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any,
are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the
behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the
play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The
player gets something out of playing; that's why he plays. But the
core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is).
Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga
Homo Ludens), define it as game-playing or following rules. I
respect Huizinga's erudition but emphatically reject his constraints.
There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge)
which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than
game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel -- these practices
aren't rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules
can be played with at least as readily as anything else.
Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all
have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't
free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey
orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them
under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the
smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around
are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way,
dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to
the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern
workplace. The liberals and conservatives and libertarians who
lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more
freedom in any moderately deStalinized dictatorship than there is in
the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of
hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison
or monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons
and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators
consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A
worker is a par-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when
to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much
work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating
extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how
often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you
for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and
supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking
back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty
child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for
unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for
them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school
receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their
supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and
teachers who work?