People who have never studied Marx often misunderstand his attitude toward work. Marx thought that work was the most important part of people's lives, that working together was the natural state of human beings, and that under the right conditions people found work to be the most rewarding thing they did, even a source of joy. Work was seen by Marx as naturally a social and collaborative effort, in which people cooperated in meaningful labour for goals that were easy to understand and agreed upon: food, shelter, more liberation for everyone!
But this attitude toward one's work is exceptionally rare in the capitalist system that grew up with the Industrial Revolution. Instead, capitalism has made much work robotic and alienated, with the efficiency and profitability of the labour front and centre. The typical workers in the 19th and 20th centuries had only a small part in the creation of a product or any other work process; they couldn't take personal pride in their work. They weren't growing or making anything that they themselves would use. They weren't asked to be creative or original in their work but to function as much as possible like a machine. This still seems to be the fate of the majority of workers in the developing world, working on repetive manufacturing and processing tasks, often in sweatshops. But it is also true of much of the work we still do here in Canada - perhaps under more humane conditions most of the time.
By comparison even the more primitive feudal period of work during the Middle Ages actually had some things to recommend it. At least the worker was still in direct contact with the natural reality of the physical world, connected to the ultimate reason for their work (to eat, or provide shelter for oneself, etc) and aware of the upshot of the work they did. The workers were still working alongside other workers toward a clearly understood common goal; there was not much competition, because there was no real possibility of "getting ahead."
In the developed world we have become richer than most kings were in the world before industrialization. But curiously, the more you have, the more things lose value, a bitter human truth. A subsistence farmer in the Middle Ages could still understand the intrisic material value of things (not the value in our modern abstract dollar-sign sense). The chicken you raise and kill yourself, I've suggested, is arguably a much more satisfying or at least significant meal than the one you buy at McDonalds. I'm sure one appreciated it more.
Karl Marx wasn't the only one to romanticize work life as it had existed before the Industrial Revolution. Throughout the 1800s and 1900s a variety of cultural critics of all political persuasions and intellectual bents have regretted the mechanization of work. Lewis Mumford, the sociologist whose proto-environmentalist critique of mechanization is discussed in the recommended reading for this lesson, was one of the first and most original thinkers to study the effect of technology on human society. Like many critics, he emphasized how there may have been a kind of value in pre-industrial work that could not be measured in dollars. The medieval craftsperson or agricultural worker, for instance, seems to have enjoyed a vast array of church holidays, working in the cyclical and seasonal time of the church calendar, rather than the mechanized time of the factory timeclock. They were not divorced from nature. Work was not the meaning of that person's life, and at the same time their work life was inherently meaningful; people could see and understand the point of most of the work they were doing, and knew why.
The efficiency of the machine age involves a kind of impoverishment of the life of the worker at work, even as the worker's standard of living (in terms of consumer products, etc) improves. Before the Industrial Revolution, work was a part of life, and a meaningful part, but perhaps not the overriding focus of life, and an onerous one, as it is for many people today.
Certainly an economy that enjoyed a long series of holidays, free from work, only fifty-two of which were Sundays, cannot be called impoverished. The worst one can say about it is that in its concentration on its spiritual interests and social satisfactions, it might fail to guard its members sufficiently against a poor winter diet and occasional bouts of starvation. But such an economy had something that we now have almost forgotten the meaning of, leisure: not freedom from work, which is how our present culture interprets leisure, but freedom within work; and along with that, time to converse, to ruminate the meaning of life. (Mumford 1970, 138, quoted in Kovács 2009, 297)
However idealized Mumford's view here may sound, and even if he is too comfortable in the trivialization of "starvation" (a "slight drawback" to an economy based on subsistence farming that people in underdeveloped parts of the world still have to cope with on a daily basis), it does seem to be the case that mechanization changed work for Western humans forever in ways that have impoverished human life as well as enriching it. Not only did it make work easier in many ways, and increase the wealth of the worker overall, but it also made work more inflexible, made wealth a larger focus of anxiety, made work more competitive, and made the work that most people do less intrinsically meaningful, more alienated. "Time is money," as Benjamin Franklin famously formulated, and with the mechanization of time and work and the redefinition of work as an effort whose goal was money, it does seem like our work became alienated, unnatural, and abstract where before it had been immediately comprehensible and valuable.
Just as there are no minutes or hours in nature, so there are no dollars or cents there. What we call "materialism" today is actually a focus on artificial symbolic constructs and consumer ideals that we tend to think of as real, but whose detachment from the reality of our animal and social nature can sometimes make our lives feel empty and immaterial. We'll come back to the possible relationship between immediate material experience (in the old sense) and reality in the next lesson.
A person who builds a table and then uses it for meals with his family understands fully the meaning of the work he has done. Even a craftsperson who builds a table himself and then receives payment for it has a sense of the purpose and human meaning of the work he has done. He can take credit or responsibility for it, and sees the result. A person who works in a table factory, however, is disconnected from the origins of the process (the design of the table, the cutting of the wood, the customer's order for the table, etc) and from the final result (the family sitting down to eat on the thing thus created). Instead, the table factory worker toils all day on a series of identical table assemblies without any human meaning or any space where they might leave their personal mark on the product. Such a worker is working for money, not to create tables. If this doesn't sound strange to you, it is because this is how most of us work now - for money, only secondarily to produce something worthwhile for ourselves or others. This worker is unknown to the designer of the table and to the eventual owner of the table, and is often treated by their employer as a complicated and inefficient machine that sadly cannot be replaced by someone or something simpler and cheaper. The human value of the work done by the worker is ignored and lost in the faceless products and services thus produced.
The result, according to critics of work in the Industrial and post-industrial world, is a high standard of living (comparatively inexpensive consumer products), but at the same time a situation in which many humans spend the largest part of their waking life expending energy on work whose meaning and value is difficult for them to see or appreciate, and in which they can take little ownership. Too many of them have been torn out of the natural circumstances in which they could understand and feel emotionally invested in the work they do and have been forced into a small role in a giant process where there is not yet a suitable machine for the job. Ironically, the fact that we are not directly working to create food and shelter for ourselves like earlier humans had to do has made work less inherently meaningful for a lot of us. Yet still it is the biggest part of most of our lives. This is where more of the time of our lives goes than anywhere else: our jobs.
Given this continued mechanization and the outsourcing of a lot of our more "mechanical" manufacturing jobs to developing countries where labour is cheap and workers rights are generally less protected than in Canada, it should not be a surprise that the largest and only growing sector of employment in the fully "developed" world during this current "late capitalist" period is in the service industry: giving people the human things that machines still can't provide (customer service and support, medical care, food preparation and service, and - yes - education). In these professions we are paid to care, or at least to pretend to care, because that's something they haven't been able to create a machine for yet (though it certainly seems to be coming!). And too often, our "caring" can come off not as real, but precisely as "mechanical." ("Your call is very important to us.") Indeed, some - including me - would say this commodification of care is a gross diminishing of the meaning and value of human caring as well as human work.
Yet we shouldn't be surprised if we find ourselves turning caring into a meaningless and empty mechanical gesture. That's what they're paying us for: to be caring machines, as a small part of a process whose scale is sometimes too large, abstract, and commodified to have social and personal - human - meaning. Too large to really care about.
The influential historian and futurist Yuval Noah Harari, in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), speculates that with the rise of Artificial Intelligence and robots, the mass of workers are destined to go from exploited to irrelevant, without any intermediary period in which all 8 or 10 billion of us have interesting creative jobs. Maybe we should be happy that robots can't quite yet act as priests, psychoanalysts, nurses, teachers, or even all aspects of call centre staff. Once the machines can care better than we can, it's hard to see what labour any of us will be able to exchange for wages.
Thank heavens that for now we still have something we can be exploited for!
And now it's time for you to make your first discussion board post on Blackboard! Have fun!