Defining 'job', 'labour', 'work': what then is labour, how is it distinct from 'job' and 'work'?
part two: the place and meaning of labour, in Arendt, and in contemporary life
What then is labour, and how is it different to those forms of ‘paid labour’ we call our ((bull)shit) jobs covered in the previous post?
Here, we can start with a few block quotes from Arendt, as Gorz is drawing on and riffing off Human Condition at several key points in Critique of Economic Reason (CER).
First Arendt block quote:
“[l]abor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body[1], whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself (7)
Labour, then, resides in the body’s (own) work; labour is (eigen)life[2].
I’m happy with this definition for heuristic purposes, although it leaves out what we ordinarily mean when we talk about labour as in ‘the labour movement’ and ‘the Australian Labor Party’.
It would also never satisfy any Marxist: provided one acknowledges the dialectic of capital and labour and then uses Arendt’s definition above as a critical counterfactual, this might actually be productive.
…what follows, then, is the problems that Arendt gets me into when she ‘keeps going’, as she tends to.
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At the same time, Arendt’s definition loads labour with a negative moral judgment. Labour, for Arendt, is that ‘oldest and most natural burden’ (italics mine), aligned with necessity. This is important because, in several places, she talks about societal attempts where privileged life has oriented itself around the attempt to unburden or dis-burden itself of necessity: in practice, this usually plays out through hierarchy, gender, citizenship[3].
This second Arendt block quote you’re about to read captures what she views as the societal danger of what, in my phrasing, could be called the denuding of labour by technological-workplace automation.
And again, there’s some slippage or tension here:
is labour just what-we-do-in-feeding-who-we-are (is labour inherent in life);
is labour the burden of necessity we wish to rid ourselves of (is labour inherent in history and cultural-particular divisions of labour); or
is labour a problem of/in modernity that has become a danger at the moment of its loss in a society where it has been accorded primacy as a group identity (is labour inherent in those groups who defined themselves positively as labourers in a modern capitalist economy)?
“Closer at hand and perhaps equally decisive is another no less threatening event. This is the advent of automation, which in a few decades probably will empty the factories and liberate mankind from its oldest and most natural burden[4], the burden of laboring and the bondage to necessity. Here, too, a fundamental aspect of the human condition is at stake, but the rebellion against it, the wish to be liberated from labor’s ‘toil and trouble’, is not modern but as old as recorded history. Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize (4)”.
Automation, then, would strip the human condition of the necessity of necessity.
Hannah: necessity… was this not that bad thing called tedium we wished to be rid of?
Or was it a good thing that labourers did?
Or: was it the thing that we must do as we reproduce ourselves?
I go round and round with Arendt’s circularity: is labour simply the activity-process that life is-and-must involve itself with (as she says); if so, what’s wrong with that, what’s bad about it? As I read it, it’s the negative judgment that really interests her in the first part of the paragraph: burden, bondage, toil, trouble. And yet: those who forgo the labour of feeding and bathing ourselves and our infants are typically deemed pathological or suffering from some kind of disquiet or disorder. If parenting is the essence of labour, what’s wrong with parenting?
Then she shifts again:
“However, this (achievement of the dream of being free from necessity) is so only in appearance. The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society[5]. The fulfilment of the wish, therefore, like the fulfilment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating[6]. It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won[7]. Within this society, which is egalitarian because this is labor’s way of making men live together, there is no class left, no aristocracy of either a political or spiritual nature from which a restoration of the other capacities of man could start anew. Even presidents, kings, and prime ministers think of their offices in terms of a job necessary for the life of society, and among the intellectuals, only solitary individuals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living[8]. What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse[9]” (4-5).
As often, if I read her patiently and generally and give credence to what she might be getting at, Arendt’s work contains the glint of an insight that helps us glimpse a bigger problem of her political present (in which we are [and are not] still enmeshed): Weber’s nullity, Durkheim’s anomie. As I see it, Arendt is driving at an existential social problem, that we have to ‘be for ourselves’ (Fromm in ‘47) in societal conditions in which that it’s almost impossible (Marcuse’s grumpy response to Fromm in ‘55).
However, I strenuously disagree with Arendt’s own complication of her also interesting definition of labour: both for her rhetorical tactic of danger and exaggeration, and for the substantive social fact (following her own damned definition!): insofar as labour consists in the autopoietic production of life itself by itself, we will always continue to labour – and that’s okay? If we follow Arendt’s definition of labour as life’s eigen-activity, the rest of her riffing in the above block quotes just a displaced critical sociology of modernity under capitalism (which she has not yet earned and, as a philosopher, is never quite interested in), and a set of highly debatable value judgments about what ‘labourers these days’ are doing with their leisure time (which she gives no evidence or argument for).
So: the problem is not a society of laborers without labor, both because labor continues (we just hit 8 billion people) because Arendt misdirects her readers away from how the economic rationalisation of drudgery, usually under the aegis of efficiency and calculability – in the context of a competitive capitalist market – has produced nullity and anomie:
without doing away with labour (as eigen-activity [which is ineradicable and fundamentally okay] and as tedium and drudgery [which we can reduce and should and this is ideally what technology and compound interest is good for]),
without doing away with jobs (paid labour),
without doing away with work (next post; the salient category in my triplet, I argue).
On the contrary, we are working more than ever; many people are doing 80 hours a week in bullshit jobs, and hard labour continues in shit (3K+2P) jobs.
‘We’ (in the OECD) are not ‘a society of labourers without labour’: in Australia (a modern society of labourers if ever there was one), we are society of labourers with jet skis and high spec 4WDs who outsourced most of the most 3K+2P labour to China and the developing world.
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So, in drilling down to a working definition of labour to keep working with CER, the problem, rather, is twofold.
Firstly, the problem – which Gorz glimpses in responding to Stoléru – is the pervasion of servile servicing and the highly unequal distribution of pay and conditions (see earlier posts). I think Gorz might be right, broadly.
Having lived through a time in which my own work was precarious (because I didn’t have a proper job, because my job was 2P) and my partner was going into labour, I can tell you: that is a fucking stressful life.
To me, the danger is not a society of labourers without labour, for the labourers, if they’re privileged, can just outsource the labour to China, and enjoy their jetskis.
The danger of labour now inheres in:
the problem of the meaninglessness of work in a society of technical plenty, for the privileged (Marcuse’s problem [I’ll return to this])
the terms and working conditions under which we are induced, coerced, forced to ‘do our jobs’ (if we’re lucky enough to have one) or ‘perform our services’ (if we’re part of the precarious majority).
a global division of labour in which all the tedium, chores, drudgery, all the 3K and 2P have been outsourced and offshored to people with less choice and power
the global birth lottery that places people in positions of good or bad fortune based on where they were born (and traps them there)
the ecological consequences of this global society doing its dirty work and tedious chores in jurisdictions – which people cannot move from – in which, due to corruption and an absence of effective regulation, there are massive emissions and these are all externalities absorbed by the soil, rivers, oceans and atmosphere.
Meanwhile, in responding to the second block quote from Arendt, Gorz comments that, for us, the problem is that (in a global division of labour marked by the kind of actual dangers. I’ve dotpointed above), we still have no free time and are buzzing around delivering Monkey Tennis – it is *this* that destroys our ability to have and enjoy free time. It’s not that we have become a society of labourers without labour, it’s that we are a society of servile servicers without free time or (in the majority case) without purchasing power to cushion this life with the purchase of real estate and niche services (which the privileged minority and its seasick dogs has access to).
Gorz, responding to Arendt:
“To postulate, as is generally done, that the total amount of free time created by current rationalization and technicization can be re-employed ‘elsewhere in the economy’, as a result of the infinite expansion of the economic sphere, amounts to saying that there is no limit to the number of activities that can be transformed into paid services which generate employment[10]; or, in other words, that in the end everyone, or nearly everyone, will have to sell a specialized service to others and buy from them everything they do not sell themselves[11]; that the market exchange of time (without the creation of value) can absorb with impunity all areas of life, without destroying the meaning of the free, spontaneous activities and relations whose essential characteristic is to serve no purpose… Except, perhaps, disguising private activities and leisure activities themselves as work and jobs. This state of affairs, to which I will return later, is not such a distant possibility (7-8).
I synthesise from the above the following dystopian horizon we can use to critically orient our thinking:
the market exchange of time (without the creation of value) has continued to absorb all areas of life with impunity: this world of bullshit jobs and servile servicing is destroying the meaning of the free, spontaneous activities and relations whose essential characteristic is to serve no purpose. Labour has to continue, somehow, in this world. When it does, we end up with a society something like George Saunders’ Semplica-Girls Diary.
[1] This makes sense: consider the phrase ‘a woman in labour’ and the different resonances of ‘a woman in work’, ‘women’s work’, ‘no job for a lady’ &c &c. This also beckons a new mission for the English Labour Party or Australian Labor Party: making *labour*, in the senses Arendt captures, the centre of a politics of justice as equa-fairness and responsibility ‘for all’. One could radicalise this by adding – *regardless* of their placement in the global birth lottery. An intersectional political ecology worthy of the name could make ‘global labour relations’ the centre of its politics. Ellen Key for all mankind, sans frontiers?
[2] Presumably Arendt would include autonomic functions like heartbeat, blood pressure, breathing, peristalsis? Or is this already ‘the automation of labour’, if we follow her definition? We can certainly speak of ‘laboured breathing’. Connecting to a distinct epistemological lineage of thinking about life and knowledge, it’s worth noticing that Arendt’s definition is circular – perhaps even in the cybernetic sense, though it’s unclear to me if she (writing in ‘58) was reading Weiner (published ‘48) or was following the Macy Conferences (‘41-‘60). She could not yet have been reading the Whole Earth Catalog (‘68-’72), Bateson (Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind came out in ‘72), or Maturana and Varela’s later epistemological use of these concepts (Tree of Knowledge came out in ‘87), but she doesn’t really seem the type.
[3] I think there is a general trouble with always returning to ancient Athens as any kind of model or exemplar here – I’ll address this trouble when we look at the chapter where Gorz follows Arendt back to antiquity in tracing the modern invention of work. Tracing things back to the Greeks, to me, tends to raise at least as many issues as it addresses. I’m not the first to notice that this is a very strong tic of Western philosophy and a huge problem with any Germanophone and Anglophone philosophy-based social theory, especially to the extent to which we ‘yada yada’ over the intervening 2,500 years of socio-cultural history in Europe, while never really quiet acknowledging the Eurocentrism of our perspective.
[4] So… by ’98, no more factories nor manufacturing jobs? Why is this *perennially * predicted and *always* (so far!) wrong? This deserves its own investigation or post (and see Peter Frase’s Four Futures for his Marxian discussion on this), but another short valid answer is in Jan Lucassen: work is not (only/really) an economic category, it is always also about dignity, identity and meaning, and therefore, people still want to do it (people without jobs still routinely work and must still labour), and will often do lots of it gladly, even (especially) in many instances where it is no longer a job. In fact, a lot of the caring institutional professions (and informal/ community/ service / grandparenting roles) are exploitable precisely to the extent that ‘they’ know ‘we’ love what we do, and would probably do it anyway, both ‘cos we love it, ‘cos we don’t know (or wish to know) another way to be, and ‘cos it very meaningfully passes the time, soaks people up, gives them something good to do.
[5] Gorz picks up the ball of this statement and runs with it in the first substantive section of CER.
[6] Why ‘only’? I’m picking on this a lot ‘cos this is what Agamben “always” does: it’s a tic he picked up from her, I think, and it shits me.
[7] I mean: evidence? This amounts to saying that people no longer (but: since when?) have hobbies or know what to do with their free time (where once upon a time they did???). In Australia, tradies love jet skis and 4WDing and online gambling while binge drinking and watching sport on huge screens… this appears fun and meaningful to those involved; they do not know they don’t know what to do with themselves. I do not personally enjoy these extremely popular pursuits, and I do judge them snobbily, but like: who are we to judge? One could look at Adorno’s essay ‘Free Time’ in Critical Models as another thinking on this topic, or think in great empirical detail about how most people tend to live beyond necessity. Putnam’s Bowling Alone, Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, and DFW’s writing on porn and television are interesting explanations here. We could also follow Elias and look at the global pervasion of sport.
[8] This is one of those moments where you can see clearly Arendt’s self regard and the tenured academics she is positioning herself in relation to. Such an interesting loner.
[9] Arendt: always with the exaggeration flourish by way of rhetorical question intimating a superlative (the terrible tic that Agamben might have picked up from her I note in note 6).
[10] So, following the definitions from the first section, we could go for the barbarous neologism jobisation, or for a more 2010s disruption flavour, taskrabbitisation, referring to the “online and mobile marketplace that matches freelance labor with local demand, allowing consumers to find help with everyday tasks, including furniture assembly, moving, delivery, and handyperson work”. Interestingly, taskrabbit’s website loads this with resonances of anxiety, loneliness and deskilling: our collective helplessness before our Trello boards and IKEA flatpacks: “When life gets busy, you don’t have to tackle it alone. Get time back for what you love without breaking the bank”.
[11] Superadding OnlyFansisation of everything how jobisation led to taskrabbitisation (PS I am now selling cushions of my barbarous neologisims on my Etsy page, and please check my Patreon to support this work).