ROUTINES MATTER. MY GRANDFATHER could roll and light a cigarette one-handed, without spilling any of the tobacco from his pouch. My own morning routine involves dismantling and refilling a stovetop coffee maker, which I’ve discovered I prefer even to someone else making me a coffee at a shop, in a much better machine. I think my grandfather and I—apart from respective addictions to habit-forming substances—share a taste for ordinary rituals of making and busy-work. Disassembling, washing, refilling and heating the machine does a wonderful job of occupying time and activity while I wake up, and it’s not the same if I just hand over $3 for the same drink in a paper cup. I can well understand the dilemma of the quitting smoker, who asks herself or himself, hanging desperately out for a denied cigarette, never mind the actual drug, what am I supposed to do with my hands?
Do you have a job? Do you like having a job?
Thus begins this remarkably futurist Techcrunch article, which has for the last day or two bounced around the social networks to which I subscribe. It’s channelling the spirit of the old-school ‘progressive’ mode of thought which—contrary to popular belief—is not just about happy, if-Dr-Pangloss-were-a-Fabian hope for gradual beneficient reform. The progressive aesthetic is quite happy to take in gradual apocalypses as well, and this Techcrunch piece is part of that venerable tradition of meeting social change with a weary shrug, fatalism, and kind pats to ‘smooth the pillow’ of whichever dying race or class is in question.
Technological change is abolishing areas of work. Economic violence, so gleefully admired by Schumpeterians (and others who should know better) isn’t producing creative destruction, so much as destructive destruction. Productivity gains aren’t leading to more freedom, just to more productivity. So the Techcrunch question is; well, what’s this new society of after-work going to look like? Aldous Huxley with a facebook account?
Post-work utopias, socialist and otherwise, are nothing new, of course. John Maynard Keynes wondered aloud whether technological change might abolish work altogether, and produce the new problem of dealing with surplus leisure time. The grumpy German imagined in his German Ideology a post-revolution of jobsharing and broken ‘spheres of activity’, doing away with the division of labour entirely. The whole historical, and economic, question is dealt with comprehensively by John Quiggin, who (as could be expected) comes down firmly on the utopian side:
It seems clear enough that technological progress can generate the necessary productivity gains, so what is needed most is a change in attitudes to work that would make a guaranteed minimum income socially sustainable. The first is that the production of market goods and services needs to become pleasant enough that those doing it don’t mind supporting others who choose not to. The second is that the option of receiving a guaranteed minimum income does not become a trap, leading into the kind of idleness that produces despair.
There are two parts to this problem: the Citizen’s Basic Income (CBI), and the consequences for those in and out of work. The Prime Minister made a much-derided speech a few years ago about labour and getting up early which I rated not nearly as bad as it looked. Her own fruitily-expressed view of working and aspiration involved this paragraph:
…To work hard, to set your alarm clocks early, to ensure your children are in school. We are the party of work not welfare, that’s why we respect the efforts of the brickie and look with a jaundiced eye at the lifestyle of the socialite…
The labour relationship is a social one of class and status, first and foremost. Well, duh. The equality of Australian imaginations has always been about, sameness, opinions about one’s neighbours and very definitely not minding one’s own business, as Elaine Thompson wrote about in 1994. The Citizen’s Basic Income, that curious policy agreement of glibertarians and the Scandinavian-inspired left, has a very difficult problem to overcome if it’s ever to fly in Australia. Before we can solve the wonkish problems of productivity gains, marginal taxes and base rates, get lower into the lizard brain and think of the problem as the Daily Telegraph or A Current Affair would. It’s naïve to think that post-work will involve a retreat from class.
Part of the mourning that journalists themselves are currently engaging in with respect to the change in their industry isn’t about pay or conditions, it’s pure identity loss: if buzzfeed, huffpost and other such shameless content aggregators do the same job as a journalist, what’s left to be proud of? Baby boomers still left in the industry retain a fantasy of journalists uncovering truths, which is much more important to them than rates of pay or precaritisation.
It’s not as if identity loss in social change is a new concept. From a more Marxist point of view, a CBI is just the replacement of all of the networks of social obligation and engagement that come with workplaces, training, career and workforce participation, with a callous cash payment. Most post-work utopias are significantly silent on what happens to these identities, that are bound up with the way we describe ourselves as adults participating in a political economy, once we rid ourselves of alienated labour.
Michael Douglas’s character D-FENS asked himself the same question on his unemployed walk through Los Angeles in Falling Down. Once capitalism has chewed you up, you have to face the terrifying prospect of making an identity for yourself outside the labour relationship. It’s easy to sneer at concepts like ‘profession’, ‘career’, and ‘vocation’, but they’re what we have, and they’re important. What identities are likely to emerge from a post-work, leisure-consumption society?
Once we give up the nasty bits of capitalism, the nicotine of getting up early to do alienated work, just what do we do with our hands?
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Jason Wilson · 3 June 2013, 14:26 · #
This is a really interesting post, and I completely agree that the habits and habitus of work is where our argument needs to be had. But I wonder why you never took up rolling your own cigarettes? That is to say that habits, identities and the matrices within which subjectivities take shape can change quite quickly. Indeed I would argue that our labouring selves have only been shoehorned into their current shape with some effort.
You will recall that medieval peasants weren’t materially rich, but they didn’t work long hours either. Their hours seem leisurely to us. But compared to hunter-gatherers , they were workaholics.
A lot of what we call modernity has been about squeezing more work out of people by forcibly reshaping their habits. As part of the process of primitive accumulation, women’s and men’s work was forcibly and brutally partitioned . Notwithstanding the enclosures, the flight of peasants to the cities, and the fact that people were basically given no choice, it took a very long time to make the whole notion of modern wage labour stick – indeed it has never been quite made to stick. Thousands of people were hanged in eighteenth century Britain as property crimes were redefined, and in order to provide a example to others about the parameters of the new labour relations, and you will remember that the effort to change the habits of work through mechanisation was determinedly resisted by skilled artisans and others. And then of course there’s the issue of the entire history of capitalist development being premised on forms of forced labour, and slavery, which the church had managed to largely stamp out as an economic factor in the high middle ages.
I won’t teach you to suck eggs by bringing up the development and slow trickle-down of the protestant work ethic, the long, bloody battles over working hours in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the consolidation and then the decline of the labour movement.
But here’s the thing: habit, and the habits of work, should not be seen as a given. Work habits, and the way these shape our lives are the terrain upon which the conflicts that everyone on the broad left is (or ought to be) invested in take place. The relationship between work habits and our broader lived experience are precisely what is at stake. Everything that makes the lives of working people better or worse depends on changing the practices and ethic of work. Historical change is almost defined by this kind of change.
It is still the case that the vast majority of work, even in rich, western countries, is boring, poorly-paid, heavily-surveilled and not at all autonomous. To the extent that people are able to do forms of work that are preferable to this in our economy, it is in a context where this kind of work is systemically prevalent. New technologies have largely been used to simply get rid of workers, or to further discipline and surveil them: it still takes a lot of institutional effort to discipline people to the extent that employers would like.
I’ll go with Marxists and indeed the non-Marxist anarchist left at least this far: the apparent scarcity which is used to discipline waged labour is largely imposed. Our work habits are inevitably bound up with this imposed scarcity. In a sense, it will be hard to tell when
I concede that imagining a situation where resources are distributed so as to end this scarcity is to imagine a wholly other society, culture, and economy. But if scacrity disappears, so does every moralising alibi for inequality.
On journalists, I think most of the problem is that many can’t imagine a way of doing the work they like outside their current context while surviving economically. What if they could? Wht if their sense of that work was not intimately bound up with an industry? What if all the tinkering and creativity that happens now in the context of precarity instead took place in circumstances of security? What if the archive we have assembled on networks was able to become a playground for exploration and scholarship?
Would it really be so hard to imagine a world where, after scarcity, our habits, education, child-rearing and other practices are different, and geared to these possibilities? Do we really need to project the current notion of “unemployment” onto that state of affairs? I don’t think we should.
Fyodor · 3 June 2013, 18:25 · #
First: Haiku Hoges, you are a gentleman of discerning taste and judgement. However, I suspect that you are – like most – one Nespresso machine away from abandoning the cafettiere.
Second: hand-wringing over an excess of leisure is a particularly high-quality problem for us to ponder. It also seems to recur whenever advanced economies experience cyclical downturns causing lots of people to have an excess of unwanted leisure, so to speak.
There’s a reason why widespread boredom and vocationalienation were not registered amongst the ranks of newly unemployed farriers and chimneysweeps.
Liam · 4 June 2013, 12:24 · #
Fyodor, I’ve had a few cups of coffee from one of those machines and they’re pretty good, I agree. But I think it’s the actual disassembly, washing and reassembly that I associate with waking up. Like Private Pyle cleaning and oiling his M14, only I don’t talk to it with quite so much innuendo.
Jason and Fyodor: the thing about ours being a very advanced and immensely complex (political) economy is really what I was trying to get at. And I think it’s important to differentiate post-work from post-scarcity: as Fyodor says, there’s a potential for lots of scarcity to coexist with post-work. I agree that it’s artificially imposed by our distribution of wealth, but inequality is a historical feature of our society.
The problem I’m concerned with is that in our advanced economy we have our identities utterly bound up, now, with employment and unemploment. We try to teach our children to aim high, and rightly so. So that’s our starting point. Imagination exercises that try to conjure up a post-work-without-labour seem to me always to be like trying to imagine advanced post-industrial networked capitalism as it works in Australia, where everybody has high-speed internet and cheap telephones, but where for some reason there aren’t any banks or landlords. It’s precisely the act of imagination that’s the problem: call me faithless but I can’t quite suspend belief that far.
This seems to me like the relentless old problem of redistribution. If there are going to be large minority of people permanently excluded from the workforce—and the argument being made in that techcrunch article is persuasive that there will, if in a simplistic way—what will we all do? It seems to me that a lot of the tinkering and creativity that you’ve mentioned is done out of necessity, for money. Well this is also going to be a problem in any kind of citizen’s basic income system, which does tend to (thinking of Olin Wright here) divide people into volunteers in, and abstentioners from, capitalism. If we think our current class system brings crises and artificial divisions, I can’t think of the social conflicts one that looked like that would entail.
The best model is that we all sit around painting watercolours and studying Arts degrees. A more realistic model is widespread sit-down money and alcohol-fuelled anomie. Worst (terrifying) case is an advanced form of what’s going on in Spain and Greece.
I’m entirely on-board with grounding our current habitus of work and training historically (obviously). Even within my lifetime lots of the important features of the industrial workplace have been revolutionised utterly—the place and status of women in it, thinking of the most obvious, but also casualisation, the shift to service and tertiary industries in Australia, and so on. We’re all heirs of the Protestant ethic and that pseudoscientist Frederick Taylor. What we do with the inheritance is our problem, but we can hardly get away from it.
I’m keen to hear about post-work utopias for human superfluity that don’t involve conceptual unemployment, but I haven’t heard a convincing one yet.
Fyodor · 7 June 2013, 02:18 · #
This seems to me like the relentless old problem of redistribution. If there are going to be large minority of people permanently excluded from the workforce—and the argument being made in that techcrunch article is persuasive that there will, if in a simplistic way—what will we all do? It seems to me that a lot of the tinkering and creativity that you’ve mentioned is done out of necessity, for money. Well this is also going to be a problem in any kind of citizen’s basic income system, which does tend to (thinking of Olin Wright here) divide people into volunteers in, and abstentioners from, capitalism. If we think our current class system brings crises and artificial divisions, I can’t think of the social conflicts one that looked like that would entail.
I think you’re reaching towards the inevitable – in my view, at least – conclusion about these post-employment utopias: they can’t exist. We’ve seen what a life of post-employment leisure looks like, and it’s a Merchant Ivory moofy, based on, for example, an EM Forster or Edith Wharton novel chronicling the lives of the rentier class, supported by the mass of much poorer people.
Although there’s much (reasonable) hand-wringing over mass-unemployment at the moment, such experiences are rare and unsustained if we look at economic history. The problems in Greece and Spain, for example, are highly unusual and have a lot to do with the self-inflicted wound of the euro currency union. It’s evidence of sloppy marxist economic illiteracy to associate temporary distortions in labour markets with post-employment dys/utopianism.
The core of communist utopianism is that class is an escapable aspect of the human condition, however all evidence points to the contrary. Today’s workers live much more comfortable lives, but there’s no escape from relative power, income and wealth disparities and there’s no sensible economic theory to support the possibility of an alternative.
Liam · 7 June 2013, 10:22 · #
Sorry? I could name you five just between 1840 and 1940. It was the post-war boom ending with the Oil Crisis (and ending for good with the end of the Cold War) that was the real outlier. Full employment was a genuinely realised goal for ~25 years, tops, in a few countries (I don’t count the Eastern bloc ones amongst them).
You don’t have to be a bearded paper-selling Leninist to be of the view that our system tends towards financial, labour, and technological development crises. What you call ‘temporary distortions’ in the labour market are much more accurately described as necessary conditions of profit.
And I obviously disagree with the fatalist TINA argument of your last para. But then I would, wouldn’t I.
Feckin' Fourieriste Fyodor · 8 June 2013, 20:23 · #
“Sorry? I could name you five just between 1840 and 1940. It was the post-war boom ending with the Oil Crisis (and ending for good with the end of the Cold War) that was the real outlier. Full employment was a genuinely realised goal for ~25 years, tops, in a few countries (I don’t count the Eastern bloc ones amongst them).”
Only five? I can name a multiple of that in economic cycles, but you’re merely proving my point. There is nothing extraordinary about the waxing and waning of economies, thus employment. The conclusion is thus that the current experience is consistent with economic history and far from a dystopian unemployalypse.
“You don’t have to be a bearded paper-selling Leninist to be of the view that our system tends towards financial, labour, and technological development crises.”
Yes, you do, as these “crises”, so-called, are no more than temporary disruptions in an unprecedented and spectacularly successful advancement of all aspects of human existence. I invite you to demonstrate a real-life economic system that lacks these features.
“What you call ‘temporary distortions’ in the labour market are much more accurately described as necessary conditions of profit.”
If you mean that the freedom to speculate, to over-invest, to over-borrow and in other ways miscalculate economically – which are the root causes of economic cycles – are necessary conditions for a market-based economy, then you are correct. So what?
And I obviously disagree with the fatalist TINA argument of your last para. But then I would, wouldn’t I.”
Well, of course. It’s telling that you think it’s a “fatalist” position. If there is an alternative, it has yet to be found. I can imagine pink unicorns, too, but that doesn’t mean I can prove they exist.
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