Morning Comrades.
That this email will find most of you on a Monday morning, at work or on the way to work is actually not by design, as poignant as that would be, but rather by accident, if such things exist.
Work. Where to even begin on that subject? Work, in our modern times, dominates out lives and is one of the most contentious realities we experience, yet it is the one subject that the majority of us would rather not talk about, let alone aim at changing. Work feels like this massive elephant in the main room of a burning house that most of us have resigned to ignore. Yet, when one takes a moment to think about the concept of work, how soul-destroying the majority of it is in our context, how utterly authoritarian and undemocratic it is structured and what can be done differently, one starts to realize how large of a subject it is- and truly, to discuss work, what it is, why we do it, what is wrong with how it is structured and rewarded, by whom- feels so daunting that we, generally, focus on other subjects. Mostly because the social role of waged work has been so utterly naturalized as to seem necessary and inevitable, something that might be tinkered with but never changed, let alone escaped.
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
Marx, 1844: Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property
I have now worked for 27 years, in uncountable industries & roles and the majority of them have not only been unsatisfactory, but I down-right resented the work, the majority of people and so on. More so, I still down-right resent the fact that if I do not work I will not have a home, let alone food nor warmth for my family and me. Work has for the majority of my life felt forced, unwanted, stressful and in addition left me feeling alienated not only from the actual work, but myself and the people around me. I will not even get into the mental stress of having to work in structures that are run like petite-fascist dictatorships as the absolute majority of work places I have experienced are run just like it - and to tip it off, promote not talent & efficiency, but small-minded, bureaucratic, violent dictators. We all know this reality and I am not saying anything new here.
Nevertheless, “work”, as Aristotle understood and that understanding forms a core reality for philosophers such as Marx & Engles, not only holds the potential to be something creative and fulfilling, but furthermore states that “the end of labour is to gain pleasure” and importantly, they consequently reject the view of work as a necessary evil, denying that the negative character of work is part of our fate, a universal fact about the human condition that no amount of social change could remedy.
Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
As we all know, there is so much work to do, that is inherently gratifying and important, it is however the fact that in our current capitalist shaped reality, this work is not rewarded, financially, nor socially - and that is a hugely important part of this discussion, as work is and has a social function - and thus, not done.
In general, it is not the police or the threat of violence that force us to work, but rather a social system that ensures that working is the only way that most of us can meet our basic needs. In this way, as Moishe Postone notes in his book Time, Labor, and Social Domination the specific mechanism by which goods and services are distributed in a capitalist society appears to be grounded not in social convention and political power but in human need. Thus Marx seeks both to clarify the economic, social, and political functions of work under capitalism and to problematize the specific ways in which such world-building practices are corralled into industrial forms and capitalist relations of work.
This effort to make work at once public and political is, then, one way to counter the forces that would naturalize, privatize, individualize, ontologize, and also, thereby, depoliticize it. Work is, thus, not just an economic practice. Indeed, that every individual is required to work, that most are expected to work for wages or be supported by someone who does, is a social convention and disciplinary apparatus rather than an economic necessity.
Indeed, productive activity, on Marx’s account, is a central element in what it is to be a human being, and self-realisation through work is a vital component of human flourishing. That he thinks that work—in a different form of society—could be creative and fulfilling, perhaps explains the intensity and scale of Marx’s condemnation of contemporary economic arrangements and their transformation of workers into deformed and “dehumanised” beings.
Essentially, and according to Marx, work is transformed into a means of exploitation and domination. Hardly surprising, I know.
Marx correctly argued that in capitalist society, workers are forced to sell their labor to capitalists in exchange for wages. The value of labor power is determined by the cost of the goods and services needed to sustain the worker, and capitalists seek to extract the maximum possible surplus value from the labor of workers.
In this context, work becomes a means of domination, as workers are forced to submit to the authority of capitalists and accept the conditions of their employment in order to survive. Work under capitalism is also alienating, as workers are separated from the products of their labor and lack control over the direction and purpose of their work.
Marx argued that the only way to overcome these problems was to abolish the capitalist system of production and replace it with a system based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In this system, workers would have greater control over their working conditions and the direction of their work, and would be able to exercise their creativity and express themselves more fully in their work.
So we are back to revolution. Fun. For those that read this piece:
You will know that we are most certainly to going to have, participate in or witness the romanticized version of a revolution here in the NATO West in our lifetime. Granted, I have been wrong in the past but for the time being that’s the point from which I am arguing here. Acknowledging the facts that work, as it is exists for most of us is pure, unnecessary hell, and that it can be changed, Wednesday’s dispatch is going to focus on alternatives, ways and means of creating a reality in which work can be a central part of our communal fulfilment. As so often, we come back to the understanding that the world we suffer in, is man-made and simply because of this fact, can be changed, for each according to their ability for each according to their needs.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living
Yours, already at work,
V.