The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half
the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of
men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes
it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or
-- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism
and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is
lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid
monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and
monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping
cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing
mechanisms as television and education. People who are
regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and
bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the
end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their
aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is
among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience
training at work carries over into the families they start, thus
reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics,
culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people
at work, they'll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything.
They're used to it.
We are so close to the world of work that we can't see what it does
to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or
other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our
present position. There was a time in our own past when the "work
ethic" would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was
on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion,
Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago
would immediately and appropriately be labeled a cult. Be that as it
may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work
in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view
prevailed, the Calvinist cranks notwithstanding, until overthrown by
industrialism -- but not before receiving the endorsement of its
prophets.
Let's pretend for a moment that work doesn't turn people into
stultified submissives. Let's pretend, in defiance of any plausible
psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on
the formation of character. And let's pretend that work isn't as boring
and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work
would still make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic
aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. Socrates
said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens
because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship
and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we
do we keep looking at out watches. The only thing "free" about
so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free
time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work,
returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a
euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not
only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace
but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and
repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do
that. But workers do. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his
gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!"
Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share
with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the
worker as a citizen and a human being. Herodotus identified
contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the
zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero
said that "whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts
himself in the rank of slaves." His candor is now rare, but
contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down
upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western
anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil,
have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every
other day, the day of rest designed "to regain the lost power and
health." Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when
they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least
were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of
industrialization. Their religious devotion to "St. Monday" -- thus
establishing a de facto five-day week 150-200 years before its legal
consecration -- was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They
took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor
of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to
replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and
children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the
exploited peasants of the ancient regime wrested substantial time
back from their landlord's work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of
the French peasants' calendar was devoted to Sundays and
holidays, and Chayanov's figures from villages in Czarist Russia --
hardly a progressive society -- likewise show a fourth or fifth of
peasants' days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we
are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited
muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should
we.
To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the
earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when
we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was
then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a
desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged
against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky
or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for
existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse
of government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing
without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes'
compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society
which illustrated other ways of life -- in North America, particularly --
but already these were too remote from their experience to be
understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the
Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. Throughout
the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes
or, captured in war, refused to return. But the Indians no more
defected to white settlements than Germans climb the Berlin Wall
from the west.) The "survival of the fittest" version -- the Thomas
Huxley version -- of Darwinism was a better account of economic
conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as
the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book Mutual Aid, A Factor of
Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientist -- a geographer -- who'd had
ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he
knew what he was talking about.) Like most social and political
theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really
unacknowledged autobiography.
The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on
contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an
article entitled "The Original Affluent Society." They work a lot less
than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we
regard as play. Sahlins concluded that "hunters and gatherers work
less than we do; and rather than a continuous travail, the food quest
is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of
sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition
of society." They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming
they were "working" at all. Their "labor," as it appears to us, was
skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual
capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is
impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich
Schiller's definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes
his complete humanity by giving full "play" to both sides of his
twofold nature, thinking and feeling. As he put it: "The animal works
when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when
the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant
life is its own stimulus to activity." (A modern version -- dubiously
developmental -- is Abraham Maslow's counterposition of
"deficiency" and "growth" motivation.) Play and freedom are, as
regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his
good intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that "the
realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed
where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is
required." He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy
circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work -- it's rather
anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work -- but we can.