Undoing Work, Rethinking Community

A Critique of the Social Function of Work

James A. Chamberlain

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501714870
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This revolutionary book presents a new conception of community and the struggle against capitalism. In Undoing Work, Rethinking Community, James A. Chamberlain argues that paid work and the civic duty to perform it substantially undermines freedom and justice. Chamberlain believes that to seize back our time and transform our society, we must abandon the deep-seated view that community is constructed by work, whether paid or not.

Chamberlain focuses on the regimes of flexibility and the unconditional basic income, arguing that while both offer prospects for greater freedom and justice, they also incur the risk of shoring up the work society rather than challenging it. To transform the work society, he shows that we must also reconfigure the place of paid work in our lives and rethink the meaning of community at a deeper level. Throughout, he speaks to a broad readership, and his focus on freedom and social justice will interest scholars and activists alike. Chamberlain offers a range of strategies that will allow us to uncouple our deepest human values from the notion that worth is generated only through labor.

1

The Ends of Work

Despite the polarized and rancorous nature of the US presidential election in 2016, candidates from across the political spectrum found common ground on the need to get more Americans working. At his first press conference after winning the election, President Donald Trump repeated earlier boasts that he would be “the greatest jobs producer that God ever created.”1 Trump’s campaign rhetoric also included the empirically false claim that immigrants reduce job opportunities for native-born Americans, thus calling for more restrictive immigration policies, while he struck another nationalist chord by promising to return offshored jobs to the United States. Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders ran on a platform committed to establishing full employment in the United States. Sanders explained that “work is part of what being human is about,” while he also acknowledged “the horrors of unemployment” and the effects of “not having a job, not being part of the community, being isolated, feeling worthless.”2

These examples express a commitment to the value of work that goes beyond the United States and its recent presidential election. For example, in August 2011, riots involving up to fifteen thousand people convulsed British society. As the media broadcast scintillating images of looted shops and burning vehicles, the public’s attention inevitably turned to the causes of the unrest and how to prevent future inflammations. The fact that the rioters failed to articulate a coherent set of demands arguably exacerbated the sense of collective anxiety and left politicians and commentators grasping at familiar themes of criminality, moral degradation, and social exclusion to account for their disturbing behavior. Despite predictable disagreement over the relative weight of structural factors and individual agency, though, a consensus emerged across the political spectrum that employment—or more accurately, the lack thereof—had played a key role in the outbreak of social unrest. The then prime minister David Cameron summed up these views when he claimed in the aftermath of the riots that “work is at the heart of a responsible society. So getting more of our young people into jobs- or up and running in their own businesses is a critical part of how we strengthen responsibility in our society.”3

As all three examples show, the value of employment in contemporary society far exceeds its function of distributing material rewards and enabling us to satisfy various needs and wants. In addition, they suggest that full inclusion in the political community requires earning an income and that employment lays the foundation of a just, stable, and harmonious community. This book argues that, in the contemporary work society, good citizenship does indeed entail gainful employment but that this requirement substantially undermines freedom, equality, and justice. Given this, I examine the openings and limitations for freedom offered by the regime of flexibility as well as by the possible introduction of an unconditional basic income. While these measures offer some prospects for greater freedom and equality, I argue that they do not suffice to break fully with the work society. Rather, it is also necessary to reconfigure the value and place of paid work in our lives. We need to rethink the meaning of community at a deeper level and, in particular, abandon the view that community is constructed by work, whether paid or not. As will become clear, this task raises significant political and theoretical challenges, as work is deeply embedded in the way we tend to think about society, community, and even civilization. Moreover, capitalism stands in fundamental tension with the view of community that I propose, such that undoing the pernicious effects of work requires both a rethinking of community and the struggle against capitalism.

In developing these arguments it will become clear that two thinkers in particular—André Gorz and Kathi Weeks—have served as important sources of inspiration and intellectual support for this project. They and I are concerned with understanding, criticizing, and ultimately moving beyond the work society. All three of us share a broadly Marxist orientation that informs our critiques as well as our visions and hopes for the future. And all three of us recognize the emancipatory potential of the unconditional basic income (although this is true of Gorz only in his later works) alongside the need to reduce the hold of paid work on our lives to make room for activities that better match our needs, desires, and values. Yet despite my debt to and agreement with these pioneering thinkers, this book diverges from their analyses most markedly in its focus on community.

Weeks provides a comprehensive account of the work ethic but offers relatively little to help us understand the construction of the work society as a social order. Similarly, she shies away from offering a vision of the postwork society, preferring to present two “utopian demands”—for the reduction of work without loss of income and for an unconditional basic income. Meanwhile, although Gorz helpfully explains how paid work integrates individuals into society, his post-wage-based society carries forward important features of the existing work society, thus undermining its ability to address all the injustices that flow from the present connection between work and citizenship. In sum, while my project is broadly complementary to theirs, it moves beyond them by foregrounding the question of community and showing how we need a new conception of community to put the work society behind us.

To clear the way for the analysis of the next chapter, this chapter disentangles three prominent threads that run through popular and scholarly discourses on the meaning and value of work: the work ethic, independence, and citizenship. As will become apparent, these familiar themes intertwine and support one another in lending a positive valence to paid work. Yet existing analyses of these narratives do not supply an exhaustive account of the political dimensions and normative force of paid work in contemporary society. In particular, in chapter 2, I will show how work not only constructs individual subjects; it also structures the social order as a whole, making up the work society.

The Work Ethic, Independence, Citizenship

No discussion of the work ethic would be complete without reference to the seminal work of Max Weber. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber famously analyzed the reversal in attitudes to work that occurred when the Protestant Reformation helped unseat the “traditional” culture of work and replace it with the “modern” work ethic. Whereas the traditional culture saw work as a necessary evil and something to avoid whenever possible, Weber shows how the Protestant ethic sanctified work, framed it as a religious duty, and encouraged people to see successes derived from it as a sign of God’s grace. In Weber’s account, the orientation to work promoted by the Protestant ethic long outlived strict religious observance and was in fact bound up with a set of processes that undermined the appeal and hold of religion itself. This in turn brought alarming consequences for human freedom because, whereas the “Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so.”4 In many ways this book shares the critical thrust of Weber’s conclusion, but I will take a more overtly political approach by identifying work as a mechanism that helps fabricate a social order from and by individuals who are presumed to exist prior to it.

The impact of the Reformation on the American work ethic appears both in the nineteenth-century doctrine of usefulness and in the belief that regular work would consume sexual passions, dispel violence, doubts, and despair, distract from radicalism, and reform convicts. But in addition to the utilitarian and disciplining functions of work, employment became seen as a pathway to success and as a creative act.5 Furthermore, unlike in Europe, where work was viewed as an end in itself, in the United States labor promised an eventual release from the “repulsive necessity to work for others” and thus provided a pathway to greater independence.6 Abraham Lincoln, for example, publicly proclaimed that through hard work, a white wage laborer could one day become an independent citizen who owned his own land.7

It is important to note that the valorization of work does not appeal only to religion for its ethical support. As Weeks puts it, “Once the world is made hostile to the religious basis of the Protestant ethic, new rationales emerge for what remains a fundamentally similar prescription.” Thus, in the industrial era the work ethic framed work as a conduit to social mobility and “achievement in this life,” while the postindustrial ethic that developed in the last decades of the twentieth century treats work “as a path to individual self-expression, self-development and creativity.”8 As Weeks understands it, the postindustrial work ethic arose in part out of the movements of the 1960s and early 1970s that opposed the “disciplinary subjectivity of the Fordist period and the problem of worker alienation that they helped to publicize.”9 In this regard, as I will show in chapter 3, the postindustrial work ethic has close ties with the discourse and practices of flexibility, which emerged around the same time and, at least in part, respond to similar dissatisfaction with the Fordist organization of work. Like flexibility, all three versions of the work ethic also amount to “an individualizing discourse” in that each presents achievement and success as a reflection of the individual’s character. As Weeks points out, this means that every individual, rather than the community as a whole, bears the moral obligation to work.10 These observations will also provide support for my argument that the work society is based on an individualist social ontology, meaning that society appears as an association of individuals who are integrated into it by means of work.

The sanctification of paid work as a means to personal advancement within the work ethic overlaps with the idea that paid work can ensure independence. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the American preoccupation with independence as a core republican value called into question the status of the increasing numbers of those who were dependent on wage labor for their livelihoods. If the American citizen was neither a slave nor an aristocrat, it was necessary to distinguish between wage and slave labor for the nonslave workforce to credibly claim citizenship.11 Thus, although in the 1840s white workers invoked white slavery and wage slavery to protest their loss of freedom and independence at the hands of increasingly overbearing and profit-driven masters, it was ultimately free labor that won out as a description of wage labor by the 1860s.12

Whereas slaves, paupers, colonial natives, and housewives, with all their connotations of dependency, were antithetical to a notion of citizenship premised on independence, the white male breadwinner who supported his family through hard work eventually embodied the ideal citizen of the Fordist-Keynesian regime.13 Despite being excluded from full citizenship, the figure of the housewife represented a “good” form of dependency during the industrial era; but as Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon point out, in contemporary postindustrial society all forms of dependency have now become “suspect.” From the pervasive but usually subtle liberal denunciation of middle-class women who refuse a career in favor of full-time parenting to the more explicit demonization of the so-called “underclass” (including single mothers who receive welfare and the often racialized long-term unemployed), it is clear that the “independence” that paid work affords has helped make the figure of the worker the norm to which all must conform on pain of social marginalization.

By the modern industrial period in the United States and Britain, employment had thus become a core attribute of citizenship.14 Indeed, in 1945 the British sociologist T. H. Marshall pronounced that “today all workers are citizens” and that “we have come to expect that all citizens should be workers.”15 As the state subjected workplaces to greater legal regulation, as workers gained rights to collective bargaining, and as welfare rights were largely addressed to workers, participation in the labor market came to undergird much of the substance of modern legal citizenship. Despite the neoliberal remaking of state and society—a process that could not leave untouched the organization and experience of work, as I will show in chapter 3—the tie between work and citizenship remains alive and well. In fact, the crumbling of the welfare state and the transformation of the social citizen have only intensified the economic imperative of paid work, while at the level of ideology, employment still constitutes a paramount civic duty.

Children, seniors, and people with disabilities are to some extent exempt from the civic duty of paid work, but members of these groups rarely enjoy comparable social status to most full-time workers. In addition, their exemption is temporary and often conditional on an assessed incapacity to work. Thus, although it is no longer considered acceptable in the United States or Britain for children to work full time, it is expected that they participate in some form of full-time education, in no small part designed and increasingly justified on economic grounds as preparation for a subsequent life of paid work.16 Even though retirees are “free from” paid work, they are only legitimately so if they have “paid their dues” by participating in a lifetime of paid work. The very wealthy often are at pains either to point out that they earned their income through hard work or that their wealth helps create jobs for others. People who cannot work due to mental or physical incapacity are exempted from the civic duty of paid work, but only after government agencies have made every effort to ensure that they are not faking it, and not without experiencing loss of privacy and social esteem. Ultimately, these exceptions from the civic duty of paid work prove its rule.

The connection between employment and citizenship is especially apparent when the latter is thought of not as a legal category but in terms of social recognition. As Judith Shklar points out, when one says that people must engage in paid work to become “full-blown citizens,” this means that employment earns them not only wages but “social standing.” That paid work confers social standing on those who engage in it is most obvious when one looks to those who do not work, for their fellow citizens scorn them, and they “feel dishonored, not just … poor.”17 According to Shklar, this is because earning is not simply a means of making money but, alongside voting, one of two key attributes of American citizenship. While this argument helps one understand the psychological burden of unemployment in a nation that so highly values paid work, it remains unclear why work is considered to be an attribute of citizenship.

In her discussion of the work ethic, Weeks considers the relationship between work and citizenship, observing that the obligation to work “is fundamental to the basic social contract; indeed, working is part of what is supposed to transform subjects into the independent individuals of the liberal imaginary, and for that reason, is treated as a basic obligation of citizenship.” She also asserts that “work is the primary means by which individuals are integrated not only into the economic system, but also into social, political and familial modes of cooperation.”18 Finally, in her analysis, this “glorification of work as … the key both to social belonging and individual achievement, constitutes the fundamental ideological foundation of contemporary capitalism.”19

Although I agree with all three of these claims—that work counts as a fundamental social obligation in contemporary s...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Ends of Work
• 2. The Work Society
• 3. Flexibility
• 4. Unconditional Basic Income
• 5. Community beyond Work
• 6. The Postwork Community
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index