Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other existential, phenomenological, mythological, ontological, and socio-political questions regarding Work (Life and Death). I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey.
Episode 2: To fear, or not to fear, the Reaper? What is labor-time, what the hell does turning towards death mean? These are the questions. Part 1.
I’m a big fan of the epigraph. I began almost every term paper and serious research or position paper with a quote – typically from an author I was already leaning on in the research – to set the mood of the paper. It’s also a great way to get the creative juices flowing, as opposed to staring at a blank page for hours hoping for the revelation of the first sentence. That said, I’m going to start here with the same two quotes that I kicked off “Towards Meaningful Work...”
The serious humanity of growth becomes civilized, more gentle, but it tends to confuse gentleness with the value of life, and life’s tranquil duration with its poetic dynamism. Under these conditions the clear knowledge it generally has of things cannot become a full self-knowledge. It is misled by what it takes for full humanity, that is, humanity at work, living in order to work without ever enjoying the fruits of its labor.
– Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share
For man becomes truly free only insofar as he belongs to the realm of destining and so becomes one who listens and hears, and not one who is simply constrained to obey.
– Martin Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology
Let’s start with an absurd fact: life has no meaning. Not in and of itself anyway. Second absurd fact: the only certainty of life is death. Between birth and death, if there’s to be any meaning to our lives, we must make it ourselves. Many, if not most of us, try to make that meaning through work. However, due to the existing conditions in which work takes place, capitalism, for most of the planet at this point, this is a flawed project. How can one find meaning in work when work itself is an alienated and alienating experience?
In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx said a great deal about “Estranged Labor” and the worker’s experience but left open the question as to whether or not work, in and of itself, is actually worth doing. “Work itself,” he claimed, “becomes an object which [the worker] can only obtain through an enormous effort and with spasmodic interruptions.” Now, It may be implied here that work is, in fact, worth doing; if the worker ought to desire to achieve the object of work, and thus go through such tremendous effort to achieve it.
6: Now, my paper was pretty narrowly focused due to the nature of the program I was seeking a degree in – Ethics and Applied Philosophy. I needed a target to shift my argument from theory and critique to praxis – to practical application. After several heated arguments with friends and colleagues during the development of that paper– more than a few were, with good reason, outright offended at my insinuation that work (i.e. their projects that they had committed so much of their lives to; starting small businesses, building dedicated teams within larger corporate environments, providing for their families, trying to perfect their craft, etc.) – was not only a worthless waste of time, but that they were somehow deluded by an oppressive system into thinking what they had done mattered at all because it wasn’t, well, either art or caring for others – I had placed artists (visual arts, music, literature, poetry – anything that monumentalizes “affect” – here’s an idea I’m looking forward to getting back and digging into some Deleuze and Nietzsche) and caregivers (teachers, nurses, and doctors) pretty much at the top of the list of kinds of work that actually do real good and therefore actually matter, and, admittedly, it was a little shortsighted and both too narrowly defined (for example, not including artisanal work) and too broadly accepting (example, those who get into the medical profession not to actually care for people, but for the money).
So, as far as praxis, my argument was that lacking a radical cultural or technological change (such as a Marxist, proletarian revolution or international commitment to a universal guaranteed income; or, regarding the latter, the elimination of scarcity, and not artificial or man-made conditions of scarcity, but rather its elimination in the ‘Star Trek Socialist Utopia’ sense of the means of production being freely and readily available to all) it should be presumed that capitalism would retain its resilience as the predominant mode of production and thus remain the primary ground upon which work takes place. Now, if that is the case, then, as opposed to arguments of “post-work” or “anti-work,” the more productive tack may be to address the question how do we make Work (both working and work itself) meaningful?
I should note that to the extent that I refer to Marx here, I was primarily using the Manuscripts as I was more concerned with the facticity of work’s alienation under capitalism and getting the worker to consider meaningless work as unethical, than the wage relations of the worker to their work and their employer. I hope to make the latter part clearer as I approach what meaningful work might look like, as it neither necessitates nor precludes waged compensation. The issue of money is a tremendous topic in its own right, best saved for another time.
Alright, vocabulary lesson time. I need to take a moment here to clear up some terms and phrases that are going to become common themes since, first and foremost, I do not want to alienate any potential listeners who haven’t read these authors. It’s just not my goal to speak either into the void, or into a leftist echo chamber, or only to people with an advanced philosophy background. We’re talking about work, life, and death here people, we need to be approachable! Another potential problem is that some of the authors, and I myself, apply some of these terms differently or use terms as shorthand, where authors writing in a “anti-capitalist” or, at least, capitalist-agnostic, genre, are expecting the reader to be pretty well versed in economic history and philosophy.
The first, and most glaring, is the term economic itself. When I’m referring to economics, I’m not talking about fiscal and monetary policy, or a college major, or Keynes v. Hayak v. Marx, etc., I mean, in it’s original form, the broadest conception and study of the organization of resources.
As I refer to Capitalism, Communism, and so on, I’m referring to them in the economic sense. I do not mean America and the (former) Soviet Union or the Chinese Communist Party, or any version of governmental organization. Likewise, as I reference liberal economies or liberal governments, I do not mean “leftist” or liberal in the sense its bandied about on, say, fox news. I mean open systems, i.e., free market economies and participatory democracies.
I should also be clear as to what I mean by work (which I contrast to labor and toil). I take ‘work’ to refer to any intentional productive activity, engaged in cooperation or isolation, of human effort over time. This is not to say that work cannot be the product of some happy accident or discovery, only that it requires, at minimum, some combination of consciousness and action that creates something, be it goods, services, things, or growth (which can take various forms, including, but not limited to, physical benefit, knowledge, or child rearing). Work is both means and ends driven, whereas toil I take to be strictly means driven; and though toil is, likewise, the engagement of human activity over time, as opposed to work, toil, ultimately, serves no creative or productive purpose. The toiling person may receive some recompense for their time in the form of wages, but they are in the end no better – their capacity for thriving has not increased – for having engaged in such action; nor is the task of that action ever accomplished (the toil, whatever it is, somehow always ‘needs’ doing). In each instance of toil, on at least one side of the equation laborer/product, at least one party will be ultimately meaningless and/or replaceable.
Labor, I propose, is the broadest potentiality of these three terms; taken to mean any expenditure, both meaningful and meaningless, of effort (living energy) as well as the biological, lexical parallel of giving birth.
Where I speak of Marxism, I’m referring to what Marx actually wrote and the writings of those authors that follow in that theoretical tradition; i.e., social change being driven by conflict, conflict stemming from class struggle, and, most importantly, that no economist before Marx (or since, in my opinion) has been able to explain, as accurately, the “creation” of wealth under capitalism – as Marx put it, the conversion of Money to Money Prime (more on that later, it’s definitely worth it’s own unpacking).
One sticking point of terms between me and some of the authors I was writing both with and against, is the use of the phrase “labor time,” a phrase borrowed directly from Marx, particularly, how I use Labor-Time, with a hyphen, in contrast to socially necessary labor time. Labor-time, as I conceive it, is the time of one’s life spent, or consumed rather, in laboring. Central to conceiving labor-time in this way is a regarding of time as the measure of the duration of each individual life. Thus, as a potential resource, time is not something that anyone can claim ownership of. This makes one’s own labor-time a scarce resource, such that it is exhaustible and irreplaceable. By conceiving labor-time as centered on an individual’s life rather than on the production of a commodity, we can instead focus on the relationship between work and the actual life expended by the worker in the production of the product of work and exploited by capital. Labor-time is unique from the rest of the general time of an individual’s life. This is because, under capitalism, the worker’s labor-time gets estranged from their general time. Friends and family, while one has them, are an always, namely, one has them whether one is spending their time in labor or in leisure – one can become estranged from them, or estrange them, often because of a job, but unlike ‘family-time’ labor-time is estranged from the worker as a function of the current system. Whereas estrangement of ‘family-time’ – for lack of a better phrase – is a product of particular conditions. It is the measurement of the total duration of time spent laboring and should not be confused with the time an individual spends laboring at a particular job, regardless of meaning or product, or engaging in a particular activity. (Side note, I was writing this in 2018, before Covid forced many large and small employers to send their workers, and their work, home, blurring some of these long lasting and estranging lines between work time and family time, and it’s something I intend to get into at some later date)
Now, I draw another distinction between Marx’ conception of socially productive activity and my usage of labor-time in labor-time’s explicit connection to work; rather than labor or activity, which are far broader. Specifically, Marx notes how estranged labor is alienating to and of the worker in that it collapses his (gender intended) species-life, his being-with-others, into his individual life, turning both into mere means for continued existence. However, this tie to continued existence is problematic in that it additionally collapses productive activity with reproductive labor (namely, all of the time we spend on ourselves to reproduce our labor; eating, drinking, sleeping, commuting, exercising, training; having, raising, and educating children to take their place in the labor market after we’re gone, the list goes on).
The difficulty in reconciling Labor-Time is in determining the scarcity of the resource. If time is taken to be a measurement of a duration, and labor-time taken to specifically represent the duration of time spent laboring by a particular life, then it follows that a determination of scarcity is only possible after the life of the particular individual has ended.
The present, let’s call it job market, seeks to overcome this complication by establishing the fundamental replaceability of the worker, generally accomplished by division of labor and de-skilling of workers. Yes, de-skilling. The Fordist worker-as-cog-in-the-machine is alive and well and has proliferated far beyond the assembly line.
Now, we could get into Marx’ analysis here on these topics, but, I want to keep this relevant to the conditions of work today and he was talking about the factory system of the industrial revolution, and, despite this proliferation of replaceability, it doesn’t overlay neatly anymore. So, here’s my two cents.
You may come fresh out of a top notch vocational or professional program prepared to work in a range of industry standard environments, but your employer has spent the past decade cementing their position in the market by insuring their systems are fully proprietary and that they own as much as possible of their processes as intellectual property that you cannot take with you (noncompete agreements, NDAs, etc.). Even if you do become a skilled professional in your field, your experience may be locked into a proprietary system that doesn’t translate to systems elsewhere. You’re now too experienced and too well paid to be brought on at another other firm, since they need to train you from scratch, and are looking to pay you as such. Oh, and during that time with firm one, it was likely a key part of your position was to document your processes, just in case, they need to replace your 3-5 years’ experience with a temp or new hire at a fraction of the wages.
But what about the job market’s demands for skilled workers? Okay, this is serious can of worms, especially now with AI on the ascent, and it has been an issue since the dawn of the industrial revolution and the omnipresent threat of automation. Take a look at some job listings. What do you see? Entry level, barely above poverty wages, potentially a requirement to undergo a partially paid, free, or even charged to the employee training period, while also requiring a college degree and 3-5 years experience. It’s nonsensical. That’s because the desired candidate is not a skilled worker, the desired candidate is a desperate human being facing precarity, crushing debt, conditions that will ultimately make them manipulable, exploitable, and governed by a sense of indebtedness and gratitude to the employer that’s keeping them afloat, but just precarious enough to be unable to take the time to explore other options. But, this is taking us down a bit of a tangent. Back to time.
In a late-capital consumer society, like the US, especially considering the scale of the service sector as a portion of the economy, while division of labor and deskilling are still relevant issues, the greater issue of fundamental worker replaceability takes on more various forms; e.g. short-term, temporary (gig and contract) jobs, and jobs designed around high turnover positions. Many of these jobs require little to no skill, and provide compensation based on that rather than on whatever skills a particular worker may themselves be able to provide. Essentially, while the ‘industrial reserve army’ that Marx identifies in Capital has grown, it’s no longer generally visible as a mass of workers waiting outside the factory to work. This raises ethical concerns as well, as these jobs function under the premise that regardless of how temporarily the job itself may be necessary, the workers themselves who fill these positions are ultimately interchangeable with any other individual (a leveling of the playing field by reducing workers to the lowest common denominator). The time, and therefore the life, of the particular worker is rendered anonymous, interchangeable; meaningless (with the caveat that we’re putting aside, for the moment, the incessant problem of workplace discrimination). It is the job, independent of the worker, that is attributed a meaning through its utility to the employer, and remunerated through wages determined reasonable, read profitable, by the employer.
Quick aside, at this point in the paper, I went into a vulgarly brief survey of some of the ideas that were informing my argument, specifically, four texts by Kathi Weeks, James Livingston, David Graeber, and Georges Bataille. Given the constrained space of the paper and the open format we have here, I think it does a disservice to these texts to try to squeeze them into a paragraph each and give you everything I think is important in their work, not to mention where I agree and/or differ from them. So, my plan is to unpack them in greater detail, probably an episode a piece, for now, with room to revisit them later where merited. So, in a bit of teasing what’s to come, eventually we’ll be discussing Week’s The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, Livingston’s No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea, Graeber’s BULLSHIT JOBS – which, I should also note, at the time, I was leaning on the 2013 essay Graeber wrote for STRIKE! Magazine and interviews he’d given available on YouTube. In 2018 though, prior to his death, he published a full book on the subject of Bullshit Jobs, and that’s what I’ll largely be referring to in the content to come – and Battaile’s the Accursed Share.
Now, as I was saying… the fact of the preponderance of meaningless wage labor and the resilience of the capitalist mode of production over alternative, capitalist critique projects like post-work and anti-work, remains; which, on its face, seems a natural defense for retaining mere wages as the primary ends of one’s labor. The question now though, I believe, ought to be why would people work meaningless jobs? Namely, the Bullshit Jobs, which make up 40% of the modern, late-capitalist work force (and it’s likely far more, especially if you include the portion of jobs that are in some way useful, but have up to 50% of their day taken up by bullshit make-work or endless, endless meetings, and this doesn’t include the problem that this “bullshitization” was a rampantly growing problem a decade ago when Graeber’s essay was written, and worse when his book was published in 2018, and that was all before Covid and ‘the Great Resignation’).
These jobs, as identified by Graeber, these are the “duct-tapers” that fill their days fixing mistakes caused by faulty systems or processes instead of their employers fixing the systems (personal note, this was a key function of my permalancer ITAM gig), the “flunkies,” the jobs that exist solely or primarily to “make someone else look or feel important,” the “goons,” whose positions generally entail some kind of aggression or enforcement, but, critically, the workers themselves self-report a feeling that their work is “essentially manipulative or aggressive” and ultimately hold no social value; the “box-tickers,” that do work that enables their employer to claim they’re doing something they’re not actually doing (i.e., filling out forms that indicate something’s being done, but the task of getting those things done is the responsibility of a different position that could be understaffed, underfunded, or outright doesn’t exist), the arcane administrative specialists that exist only because some other problem was optioned (or court mandated) to be managed, rather than solved), note, many of these jobs fall into both the goon and flunkie categories as well, and finally the “taskmasters,” these fall into one of two categories: first, the supervisor whose only task is assigning work to others (who, generally speaking, are entirely capable of doing their work without that supervisor) effectively, the opposite of the flunkies, these are pointless supervisors instead of pointless subordinates; and the second, these are the middle managers that do actual harm, those whose job is to supervise and or create bullshit work for others. One key component Graeber points out in his book, is that those that work bullshit jobs, are generally fully aware their jobs are meaningless. So, even with possible full knowledge of the worker that their work is ultimately meaningless, why do they do these jobs? Are these jobs just a quasi-ethical alternative version of distraction and solace, (it may be pointless, but at least I’m working) part of our contemporary bread and circuses? Work as “opium of the people”.
This leads me to something Weeks and Livingston both address, but, I believe, don’t quite overcome; the work ethic - our faith in both work and the capitalist conditions of work. “At the heart of the Protestant work ethic,” this is Weeks, “is the command to approach work as if it were a calling.” Max Weber states that the origin of the (Protestant) work ethic – and the lack of energy expended by workers in seeking relief from their exploitation – is directly linked to religious sentiment and belief. “For the damned,” Weber notes, whose plight can be compared to that of workers, “to complain of their lot in the world would be much the same as for animals to bemoan the fact that they were not born as men.” In this post-Calvinist Protestant work-ethic, it is the ruling capitalist class that is perceived as God’s ‘elect’, that their wealth is nothing more than that which was entitled to them by holy decree. Toil, thus, is the only ethical activity man can engage in, whether wealthy or poor, as his fate is predetermined. “This makes labor in the service of impersonal social usefulness appear to promote the glory of God and hence to be willed by Him.”
This conceptualization of labor transformed over the years, internalized by the working class as an ethic, sublimated, to go a bit Freudian, gaining a religious reverence to the object of work as though for its own sake and with faith lying not in religious salvation through work, but faith in capitalism itself. If I work hard enough, the work ethic tells us, I will find salvation (in the form of joining the wealthy, i.e. capitalist class). Conversely, and arguably perversely, it includes the belief that the poor are poor because they lack a proper work ethic. In addition to being one of the greatest hits of conservative political rhetoric, this is also an idea at the heart of the so-called prosperity gospel.
Now, one possible alternative to this is expunge the desire for redemption altogether. Albert Camus notes in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, that the gods “… had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.” He establishes in this essay that meaningless labor is not the tragedy, but rather that knowledge that one’s labor is meaningless is tragic; and concludes that “[one] must imagine Sisyphus happy.” The metaphor of Sisyphus, though it overcomes the lack-of-redemption narrative, only serves to highlight the fact that work is a necessary-though-insufficient condition of thriving. Of course it is important to imagine Sisyphus happy, but where the worker finds such happiness is just as important, as it can all too easily be misplaced, appropriated, or fetishized. And so, the question returns to how does the worker find a way to expend his energies, i.e. spend his labor-time, on projects that are generative of thriving?
(Hint, the answer is neither simply wages, nor work-life balance – if you need to find a balance between work and life, it’s because there’s an underlying contradiction here, namely, one part of this equation is actually diminishing your capacity for thriving. I argue that seeking balance here is itself a contradiction to thriving, as the aim is not growth, but homeostasis)
This gets to the basis of my project, is it possible to overcome or disrupt the influence of the work-ethic in order to begin to move towards meaningful work? To be clear, this is not an attempt to redeem or save work under capitalism, but rather a putting forward of an alternative to post-work politics and anti-work imaginaries, and one which places an existential, counter-ethical demand on work’s meaningfulness. To this end, I’m going to raise the parallel strategies of making work strange and turning towards death. By making work an alien thing, referring to work as the potential product of labor-time, rather than as a commodity, fetish, or ethic, we may begin to see labor, toil, and work for what they are. And by turning towards death, by coming face to face with the anxiety of our own mortality, specifically the anxiety that ought to arise at the prospect of squandering one’s own life in futile labor, we may find a disruption strong enough to overcome the present (religious) faith in capitalism and the internalized work-ethic.
I hope you’ll join me next week as we get into the real nuts and bolts of this argument. But, fair warning, shit’s about to get weird.
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