Defining 'job', 'labour', 'work': the meaning of work (where we also derive meaning)
A job: some form of paid labour. Labour: a factor of production. Work: a function of capitalism.
So then, work. In this third (of three) preliminary posts opening groundwork on Critique of Economic Reason (CER), I want to follow up on the work (see what I did?) unpacking ‘job’ and ‘labour’. At stake (for the theory nerds) is the counterintuitive, insight-filled analysis Gorz has synthesised from Marx, Weber, Arendt and Habermas; at stake for most readers is an account that might do a better, less laboured job (see!) of explaining aspects of:
what happened to the (Australian) Dream
the fate of free time (in a society where technology should have solved drudgery and compound interest should have solved scarcity)
the creeping nonrelationality between wages and reward (who does what, who gets what)
the emergence of
disruptionthe servile service economy that the 2010s was, in the OECDthe spectre of automation (in a society of labourers without labour, who still work, but without proper jobs)
the disintegration of the lifeworld (in the context of the ever tighter societal integration of capital, administration, marketing and surveillance)
the search for meaning (in a world of ‘all of the above’).
I want to make the post on ‘work’ (PC!) short, ironically because it’s the most important and has the most in it – and also because it’s the trickiest to define. Gorz (where he follows Arendt[1]) doesn’t do a great job defining it, and the remainder of the posts I want to do analysing CER will in effect unpack work, bit by bit. But as for the groundwork of definition, actually, I’ll go further and say: Gorz fails to follow his own entailments and really define it clearly, and the book – the work, the œuvre that he has œuvraient (16) – still manages to become marvellous and successful in spite of this.
Sufficed to say, I managed to boil job down:
Job = ‘paid labour’. Simplest of the three (skip to bottom of post, or above in the subtitle, for final working definitions of all three, if that’s all you want from this semantic Rubik’s Cube).
~
Moving to labour, this second of our three terms proved more complicated for me. Gorz brings in Arendt’s definition of labour as (what I called) ‘eigenwork’, the manifold (re)productive activity of life in its own activity for its own purpose. Gorz then pulls this against Weber (focusing on the values-geist shift of the protestant ethic, the industrious revolution that attended and pre-dated the industrial revolution), and Marx… and ends up with something that flaps against itself like a an octopus in a tux trying to fix its bow tie.
Arendt’s definition of labour (as eigenwork) holds a strong counterfactual interest, especially as a critical note that scrambles Marxian categories – and this is part of her purpose in The Human Condition (read Aristotle against Marx, ancient Greece against 20C Germany and the postwar US). But as I’ve just intimated, in CER also really fucks with what I think Gorz is actually driving at, because as soon as he shifts to talking about Weber and Marx, Arendt’s definition not only occludes the rich, important to grasp senses of labour and work that those too venerable old dead Germans are on about (which they are, like, justly world famous for), it trips up his own definition[2].
In the substantive sections where Gorz is doing the conceptual-semantic genealogy, the ‘thing’ whose emergence he is after is the suffering we all live by, ‘that thing we call work now’ (or did, in ‘88).
Yet in order to ‘make mean work of work’ and ‘make work work’ and – so – to get us to work on time in a few short, dense chapters (in a book with nothing but short, dense chapters), Gorz’ actual procedure (how he goes about his work) involves two big moves:
showing the rise and fall of the thing called labour that came to be at the centre of the modern politics of the labour movement, socialism, and Marxism – and then,
the exploring the consequences of the emergence of this other thing called work, largely from the ashes or ruins of the labour movement, or at labour’s expense, or as the putative replacement for labour, or as a way of saving labour, or extracting the labour out of any given job (in the way fat gets sucked out of a supine thigh during liposuction, or the way a liposuction vacuum cleaner could suck a small octopus out of a tuxedo underwater).
So then: to clarify what I think Gorz was getting at, how he went about getting there, I propose we avoid the Arendtian misdirection[3] he tarries with, and start by noticing and modifying the section and chapter titles.
As published, section one has the following heading and chapter titles; please run your eyes across them
PART I
METAMORPHOSES OF WORK
The Invention of Work
The Utopia of Work in Marx
Functional Integration or the Divorce between Working and Living
From Functional Integration to Social Disintegration
The End of Working-Class Humanism
The Ultimate Ideology of Work
The Latest Forms of Work Search for Meaning (1)
The Condition of Post-Marxist Man Search for Meaning (2)
I would propose the minor amendments to chapters one and two (crossed out and bolded below), after which I’ll conclude with one or two thoughts that follow the line I’m pursuing and get us to a ‘clear enough’ and ‘cleared’ up tripartite distinction of job, labour, work.
The Invention of
WorkLabourThe Utopia of
WorkLabour in MarxFunctional Integration as the Divorce between Working and Living, or; the emergence of work as function
From Functional Integration to Social Disintegration
The End of Working-Class Humanism
The Ultimate Ideology of Work
The Latest Forms of Work Search for Meaning (1)
The Condition of Post-Marxist Man Search for Meaning (2)
Okay then….
Firstly, job: a job is some form of paid labour.
Then, labour: modern labour is a factor of capitalist production that tends toward exploitation, the exhaustion of the body, and barely making ends meet. Labour is a factor of production[4].
And finally, work: work is a function of capitalism that involves varying degrees of labour and is conventionally structured as jobs (paid labour). Work is a function of capitalism.
A job: some form of paid labour.
Labour: a factor of production.
Work: a function of capitalism.
(…interestingly, I caught myself about to type ‘my job here is done’, then hesitated, and this hesitation cause me to reflect my unpaid labour here, yet which is effectively covered by the flexibility-privilege I have in terms of the patterns of labour I do – within the work I do, as part of my strange job.)
[1] I have to say, Arendt… she has these brilliant, brillian passages of 3-7 pages in all her books (the prefaces in Origins of Totalitarianism, the final paragraphs in her long intro on Benjamin in Illuminations), and occasional phrasal flashes ‘the right to have rights’, or analyses that can boil down into semi-autonomous/portable phrasal synecdoches ‘banality of evil’. However, like Fromm and Durkheim (and Foucault), she is so much about her own synthetic project that she often does not directly engage with and reference her intellectual contemporaries (who, you get the sense, she was both reading attentively and keeping her distance from). And, again like Fromm and Durkheim, she has these massive ‘fades’ – usually with bowdlerised histories of concepts and phenomena that give latter historians the screaming meemies – that can go for like seventy pages (in all their respective books). You should still read The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, The Sane Society, and The Human Condition, but be prepared to have to be generous, keep doling out the credence, and get annoyed with the idiosyncratic wobble of their thought in its path.
[2] In its French version, first section of CER is called Métamorphoses du travail; this has been translated as ‘transformations of work’. I don’t speak French, and this seems fine as far as I know, as far as it goes: yet it’s interesting that French retained travail from Latin, and that the word passes through a common point where it gathered the resonances of labourious effort by also picking up the Latin trepalium (instrument of torture). Gorz – who as the final possible AustroHungarian who adopted French and was ‘married’ in English – plays around with the semantics on page 16 and elsewhere.
[3] Re-reading Gorz carefully as we move into the next few chapters, the Arendt inclusion (which is at the start of chapter one) quickly becomes a red herring whose only real purpose is to set up the slave-owning patriarchy of ancient Athens as a counterfactual to modern modes of existence (and as I posted previously: is Ancient Athens ever really that helpful or actually a valid comparison?). Gorz’ real move here is the more typical (and more helpful) one of critical theory since its protean days in 1910s Lukacs: bring in Weber (and, just quietly, Simmel) to complicate and fix up some of the fucking brilliant things in Marx’ thought in the 1840s-50s, yet in contexts and categories that don’t quite get at what’s happened since the mid 19C (which was, like, a lot…).
[4] We cannot talk about it meaningfully without considering the industrial revolution, the factory system and enclosures, urbanisation, imperialism, the labour movement, and the Labo(u)r Party: I want to send Arendt copies of EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm.