Critique of work

Critique of work or critique of labour is the critique of, or wish to abolish, work as such, and to critique what the critics of work deem wage slavery.^[1]^[2]^[3]

Critique of work can be existential, and focus on how labour can be and/or feel meaningless, and stands in the way for self-realisation.^[1]^[4]^[3] But the critique of work can also highlight how excessive work may cause harm to nature, the productivity of society, and/or society itself.^[5]^[6]^[7] The critique of work can also take on a more utilitarian character, in which work simply stands in the way for human happiness as well as health.^[8]^[2]^[1]^[9]

History

Many thinkers have critiqued and wished for the abolishment of labour as early as in Ancient Greece.^[1]^[10]^[11]^[12] An example of an opposing view is the anonymously published treatise titled Essay on Trade and Commerce published in 1770 which claimed that to break the spirit of idleness and independence of the English people, ideal "work-houses" should imprison the poor. These houses were to function as "houses of terror, where they should work fourteen hours a day in such fashion that when meal time was deducted there should remain twelve hours of work full and complete."^[11]

Views like these propagated for in the following decades by e.g. Malthus, which led up to the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834.^[11]

The battle of shortening the working hours to ten hours was ongoing between around the 1840s until about 1900.^[10] However, establishing the eight-hour working day went significantly faster, and these short-hour social movements aligned against labour, managed to get rid of two working hours between the mid-1880s to 1919.^[10] During this epoch, reformers argued that mechanization was not only supposed to provide material goods, but to free workers from "slavery" and introduce them to the "duty" to enjoy life.^[10]

While the productive capacity rose enormously with industrialization, people were made busier, while one might have expected the opposite to occur.^[10] This was at least the expectation among many intellectuals such as Paul Lafargue.^[10] The liberal John Stuart Mill also predicted that society would come to a stage where growth would end when mechanization would meet all real needs.^[10] Lafargue argued that the obsession society seemed to have with labour paradoxically harmed the productivity, which society had as one of its primary justifications for not working as little as possible.^[1]

Paul Lafargue

In Lafargue's book The Right to Be Lazy, he claims that "it is sheer madness, that people are fighting for the 'right' to an eight-hour working day. In other words, eight hours of servitude, exploitation and suffering, when it is leisure, joy and self-realisation that should be fought for – and as few hours of slavery as possible".^[1]

Automation, which had already come a long way in Lafargue's time, could easily have reduced working hours to three or four hours a day. This would have left a large part of the day for the things which he would claim that we really want to do – spend time with friends, relax, enjoy life, be lazy.

The machine is the saviour of humanity, Lafargue argues, but only if the working time it frees up becomes leisure time. It can be, it should be, but it rarely has been. The time that is freed up is according to Lafargue usually converted into more hours of work, which in his view is only more hours of toil and drudgery.^[1]

Bertrand Russell

Russell's book In Praise of Idleness is a collection of essays on the themes of sociology and philosophy. Russell argues that if the burden of work were shared equally among all, resulting in fewer hours of work, unemployment would disappear. As a result, human happiness would also increase as people would be able to enjoy their newfound free time, which would further increase the amount of science and art.^[2] Russell for example claimed that "Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish".^[13]

Contemporary era

David Graeber

The anthropologist David Graeber has written about bullshit jobs, which are jobs that are meaningless and do not contribute anything worthwhile, or even damage society.^[14] Graeber also claims that bullshit jobs are often not the worst paid ones.^[15]

The bullshit-jobs can include tasks like these:^[16]

Watching over an inbox which received emails merely to copy and paste them into another form.
To be hired to look busy.
Working with pushing buttons in an elevator.
Make others look or feel important.
Roles that exist merely because other institutions employ people in the same roles.
Employees that merely solve issues that could be fixed once and for all, or automated away.
People who are hired so that institutions can claim that they do something, which in reality they are not doing.
Jobs where the most important thing is to sit in the right place, like working in a reception, and forwarding emails to someone who is tasked with reading them.

Frédéric Lordon

In Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire,^[17] the French economist and philosopher Frédéric Lordon ponders why people accept deferring or even replacing their own desires and goals with those of an organization. "It is ultimately quite strange", he writes, "that people should so 'accept' to occupy themselves in the service of a desire that was not originally their own."^[17] Lordon argues that surrender of will occurs via the capture by organizations of workers' "basal desire" – the will to survive.

But this willingness of workers to become aligned with a company's goals is due not only to what can be called "managerialism" (the ways in which a company co-opts individuality via wages, rules, and perks), but to the psychology of the workers themselves, whose "psyches… perform at times staggering feats of compartmentalization."^[17] So consent to work itself becomes problematic and troubling; as captured in the title of Lordon's book, workers are "willing slaves."

Franco "Bifo" Berardi

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