“You could be earning $22.38 an hour”: the disintegration of the free time of industrial society, and the rise of the servile class of those who service those who gain without labour
riffing on the introduction of Gorz' Critique of Economic Reason, part two of three
In the last post, I followed Gorz’ contention that the utopia of industrial modernity, having its ‘bicentennial’ in the same year as Australia in ‘88, was disintegrating. In the intervening 34 years in Australia, I sketched how this utopia of labour[1], phrased as ‘wealth for toil’, had been replaced by an economy in which both political parties – led by transformations induced by the Labor Party in the 80s – fully aligned with the primacy, interests and agendas of capital, broadly and inclusively defined[2].
This coaxed into existence a society that thinks of itself as ‘competitive’, and that replaced the ‘uncompetitive’ society of the Keynesian 70s. Yet this neoliberal ideology – the story of competitive individuals acting in their own self-understood interest toward their need and want satisfactions, in total conditions of market scarcity – masks a set of rackets that, in Australia at least, are less about ‘get rich or die tryin’ (the US), and really about one’s inherited privilege and possessive entitlement: to capital, to property, to real estate, to rents, to gain above all. Contempoary Australia is a society whose utopia is that of gain *without* labouring[3].
The utopia of postindustrial Australia is: gain without labour.
In the pursuit of its postindustrial utopia via capitalism, contemporary Australia seeks to transform land appropriation (the work of the previous two centuries) into the world of compound interest, and as Keynes wrote in 1930, “the power of compound interest over two hundred years is such as to stagger the imagination”.
In a society of compound interest, where ‘gain from ownership’ replaced ‘wealth for toil’, what becomes of work and the distribution of its rewards? Back to Gorz…
As I touched on in the previous post, Gorz perceptively notices that, the end of the rainbow of industrial society, we find neither leprechauns nor our Commonwealth. Instead, we find a strikingly uneven distribution of free time and reward – a new[4] division of society within society, a divvying between a substantial minority with materially amazing jobs-houses-returns, and the bare majority, excluded from the possibility of attaining them. Where technical progress was supposed to emancipate everyone from drudgery and ‘dirty, dangerous and difficult’ work, in effect, automation and computing has not only done away with a lot of these kinds of labour-based jobs, it’s also-actually expelled large numbers of people from meaningful work, leaving a minority, the professional elite, with the kind of job where you work 80 hours a week for >1-500k/year, and the rest with whatever they can grab. As Gorz phrases it,
“an increasingly large section of the population will continue to be expelled, or else marginalized, from the sphere of economic activities, whilst another section will continue to work as much as, or even more than, it does at present, commanding, as a result of its performances or aptitudes, ever-increasing incomes and economic powers. Unwilling to give up part of their work and the prerogatives and powers that go with their jobs, the members of this professional elite will only be able to increase their leisure time by getting third parties to procure their free time for them[5]. Therefore they will ask these third parties to do in their place all the things everyone is capable of doing, particularly all labour referred to as ‘reproduction’. And they will purchase services and appliances which will allow them to save time even when producing these services and appliances takes more time than the average person will save by using them. They will thus foster the development, across the whole of society, of activities which have no economic rationality – since the people performing them have to spend more time in doing them than the people benefiting from them actually save – and which only serve the private interests of the members of this professional elite, who are able to purchase time more cheaply than they can sell it personally. These are activities performed by servants, whatever the status of the people who do them or method of payment used.
The division of society into classes involved in intense economic activity on the one hand, and a mass of people who are marginalized or excluded from the economic sphere on the other, will allow a sub-system to develop, in which the economic elite will buy leisure time by getting their own personal tasks done for them, at low cost, by other people. The work done by personal servants and enterprises providing personal services makes more time available for this elite and improves their quality of life; the leisure time of this economic elite provides jobs, which are in most cases insecure and underpaid, for a section of the masses excluded from the economic sphere” (5, italics in original underlined above).
Gorz claims that the division of contemporary society co-produces a “mass of people who are marginalized or excluded from the economic sphere”, and this is basically true in 2022 Australia: one might nuance the claim by echoing the sociological literature on ‘relative deprivation’ and talk about ‘relative exclusion’. These are differentials, not categories with binary-final in/out outcomes. By this I mean: ‘anyone’ can access education, and so potential inclusion in the economic sphere, but only by indebting oneself in exchange for the best university credential one’s bank balance and grade point average/ENTER score affords. Yet, how accessible-costly ‘getting to that’ is, in turn, was co-generated by one’s formative experiences and opportunities, whose determinants are all socioeconomic. That is: if your parents were rich and you went to one of the elite schools, this is apt to be pretty smooth. The poorer and darker your parents are and the further you live from the urban centres, the more fraught this becomes.
Alternatively, one might eschew the wealth transfer racket that contemporary university has become and try to use skills and nous to hustle into a position where we can get a toehold on an asset or instrument – that earns compound interest. Learn a trade; start a business. Then there are the ‘if you can’ hustles: sell your body in a highly specialised and lucrative way unique to your birth lottery; become a star athlete; get a million followers; start up a successful start up; sell drugs very well without getting caught. If one falls and fails, then there is welfare, which is 565-850/fortnight; if you are single and independent and can’t work, a disability pension is 450-936/fortnight.
In the meantime, what is this large group of differentially precarious people usually doing for money, and how and where are they living, and what can they save and hope for?
In Gorz’ rendition, the world beyond the rainbow of industrial utopia leads to “a situation in which one section of the population is able to buy extra spare time from the other and the latter is reduced to serving the former” (6). This is the key point, with the pervasive consequence that nearly no one has any free-time and almost everyone is overburdened. The difference that makes a difference in this differential is that the professional elite has so much purchasing power, and the marginalised mass needs money to make rent and dinner, that a deal is struck, and a service set and setup are born.
Much of work in Gorz’ theorisation of disintegrated-industrial-modern society is essentially servile: the precarious mass provides ad hoc services for the established minority, precisely because the latter can afford the variegated, niche ‘neighbourhood market services’ on offer: from rub-n-tugs and nail salons right up to spoodle blow waves and laser anal bleaching (piu piu). What Amis noticed in the rich bits of LA in ’84 in Money tends to become a diffuse truth of world’s gentrified urban areas: “You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hour, but can you get lunch?”
For Gorz, this produces a social stratification marked by a co-dependency different to that of a society based on class as we might understand it in a traditional Marxian sense, for “it does not reflect the laws immanent in the functioning of an economic system whose impersonal demands are made… …for those who provide personal services, this type of social stratification amounts to subordination to and personal dependence upon the people they serve. A ‘servile’ class, which had been abolished by the industrialization of the post-war period, is again emerging” (6, italics mine).
At the horizon of this society (can it be a utopia; whose?), in which the majority of the population are comprised of a servile class whose services tend to be in some essential way personal, the young also tend to serve the old, and the young who “deliver their hot croissants, newspapers and pizzas” are also deprived of chances of economic and social integration (again: but for the personal circumstances of [eg] the Boomer Handshake).
Where does this leave us?
On Gorz’ telling, we end up with “a mass of operatives, on the one hand, and a class of irreplaceable and over-worked decisionmakers and technicians who need a host of helpers to serve them personally in order to do their jobs” (7, italics mine).
This is quite interesting to me as it super-adds to Weber’s shattering conclusion to the Protestant Ethic, a century earlier. As Weber memorably put it,
“Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”
Yet if we add Gorz to this, then the dirty secret of working from home also shows that ‘this nullity’ is also dependent on the home delivery of a spectrum of basic and niche services in order to retain its level of civilisation.
For what it’s worth, although I find flaws in the detail and nuance of Gorz’ account, in broad brush I find itto be an astonishingly prescient analysis of where most of the ‘winner’ countries in the OECD had drifted by the end of the 2010s, after the decade of disruption, of Uber, Air BnB, Amazon Prime. The lockdown years in Melbourne in 2020-1 were ones in which one need only know whether one was delivering oneself or having stuff delivered to oneself to know who you were and what your fundamental relation was to the last two hundred years of industrial modernity and its rationalisation.
If you were capable of sitting in a house that had a nice view of the utopia of gain without labour, and you owned that house or could afford the mortage, then you were the winner.
And yet: so many, so lonely, so alienated…
~
So then:
Do you get serviced; do you have delivery delivered?
Or
Do you ‘deliver’ for your client, or;
Do you service; do you deliver delivery?
You could be earning $22.38 an hour… would you…. must you… or are you close enough to the horizon of gain without labour that you would never dream of doing so?
On the basis of your response to these questions, we an already surmise (with a huge degree of imprecision, to be sure) what your income and work conditions are likely to be, and (thus) what your probable relation to capital, property, and the future is.
~
In the next post, I want to finish up thinking through some of Gorz’ theorisations by focusing more on technical innovation, wages, and their relation to urban rent and real estate prices.
Gorz aside, if you want to go much deeper on this topic, and with much greater finesse than this blog, and think about ‘all of the above’ in relation to the US, read Fulfilment.
[1] I’m *think* I’m preferring to use ‘labour’ to talk about work in the sense of work as arbeit, or ‘I’m late for work’; I want to retain it both as the ordinary English term for ‘the task(s) we perform when we’re at work’, as well as for the Marxian resonance (dialectic of labour and capital) and the fact that, in Australia, it’s called the Labor Party, precisely as an effect of its constitutive history in the labour movement. Labour would be, thus, ‘what the workers do’, when they work. This bears a footnote as Gorz is an attentive reader of Arendt, and is using her and Beck and Habermas as a ‘way into the open’ or out of, or across Marxian categories (that he felt stuck in or at the limit of by the end of the 70s. And I think there are ways and means ‘out’ here; I think Gorz was onto something. As for Arendt, as you may know, she performs one of her ‘strikingly counterintuitive yet analytically fruitful’ moves of inverting work/labour’s meanings, so that, for her, “[l]abor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, 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.
Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not embedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an ‘artificial’ world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness” (Arendt, Human Condition [1858/1988], 7).
For me, work has persisted, even and especially as it has been shorn of labour. This is a different way of defining what a bullshit job is.
[2] …including economic concepts like human capital and sociological concepts like cultural and symbolic capital
[3] …whose cultural paragons are all about ‘pretence without excellence. I’ve purloined this great phrase the tagline of the late 90s ‘culture jam’ replacement of Unimelb’s still actual motto: postera crescam laude (I will grow in the esteem of future generations), itself purloined from Horace.
[4] In other theorisations this could also be neu-feudal or neo-Victorian, but for careful reasons in how Gorz substantiates his argument, neither of these fits his overall argument and its many reasonings and evidence.
[5] A friend of mine directly experienced this: when hired as a research assistant by a very senior and busy professor, they were asked to read Bourdieu’s major works in order that said professor did not have to: for a book that the latter was writing, and that would later appear with their name on it.