How does the guy who wrote a book called “Fuck Work” celebrate Labor Day? By taking the day off? That never happens, does it—as many of the comrades, colleagues, and friends have pointed out, I never stop writing something, anything, doggerel, movie notes, little essays, actual poems, song lyrics, screenplays, book chapters, op-eds, angry letters, memoir fragments . . . . and a lot of it sees the light of day if not the spiritual daylight of the present.
But is it work?
In answer, I recall a dark winter’s day in December 1990, when I was working feverishly on what would become Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution (1994). I remember that day because I was still smoking but only out of doors, in deference to the lungs of the 6 and 3-year-old kids inside (I quit on March 27, 1991). There I was on the back porch inhaling deeply and thinking hard, pondering my recent handiwork on Marx’s reproduction schemes in Volume 2 of Capital, wondering how to translate it into the legible prose of an argument on consumer culture, when my next-door neighbor Louise, a Rush Limbaugh Dittohead and a fellow smoker, walked over to her side of the fence between us and said, “What are you doing, Jim?”
Like my wife, she was suspicious of pointy-headed academic types, and she resented the fact that I seemed to be always around but never doing anything that looked to her like work (child care didn’t count). It was a leading question, but I offered no objection. I said, “I’m working, Mooeez”—that’s how my son had first learned to pronounce her name—knowing I’d piss her off, make her start ranting about the waste of her tax dollars on public education, especially higher education (I had just been granted tenure at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey). I’d heard it all before.
Sure enough, Louise started in, beginning with “You call this work. you’re standing there smoking, looks to me like you’re taking a break, like always, Jim, I mean, what do you do all day, anyway?” I could already hear the rasp of the cancer that would kill her by the time I moved up the street to a bigger house. Beyond that, I could hear the anger in the voice of someone who had worked her ass off as a shipping clerk for over thirty years and had nothing to show for it except a meager pension and a paid-off mortgage (her husband was dead; her live-in son and daughter-in-law paid the property taxes on her house out of their salaries).
“Yeah, I do call it work, I’m working, Louise, I’m thinking out here, see?” I pointed to my head with my free hand. “I get paid to do that, no matter where I am, or when I do it.”
“You get paid to think?”
“Yeah, and to write books, also read ‘em, and don’t forget the teaching, Louise, I teach over there across the river. And there’s meetings to go to, and committees and shit. C’mon, you know the drill.”
“That’s not working.”
“Sure it is, look, it’s killing me.” I squinted and pounded my forehead.
She lit up, literally and figuratively. “Oh for God’s sake, you don’t make anything, do you, what do you do, you use big words and you ‘corrupt innocent minds.’” She got that last phrase from Rush, of course. “You don’t produce anything!”
“What, knowledge isn’t something, a thing?”
“You produce knowledge? Ha! How does that happen?”
“By thinking, Louise,” I said, pointing to my head again, “by thinking.” I had to elaborate: “And research. And writing, too, you know, the writing is where the thinking really happens, it’s where you convey the knowledge to other people, it’s only when you do that, that’s when you know what you know, you see what I mean?”
“No,” Louise said. “And so what? What good does your knowledge do? Your students, what do they do with what you teach them? A big fat nothing, I bet.”
“Well, I don’t know what they do with it, Louise, and I don’t care, my job is to teach them how to think, not what to think. You see the difference?”
“No. It sounds like bullshit to me. That’s the thing, you’re bullshitting, and you get paid for it! That’s what gets me, my tax dollars pay your salary so you can go around bullshitting, and then you don’t even care what happens to the students who have to listen to you. Jesus. What a scam.”
“A sinecure,” I said, again the pedant. “Yeah, it sounds pretty cushy, but it ain’t easy. Seriously, Louise, it’s hard to get a job as a professor. But then you get tenure, and you gotta choose . . .” I trailed off, she had stopped listening, anyway. She waved her hand, turned away, tossed her cigarette butt, went inside.
I went back to work at my desk. Louise had got me thinking about the Marxist distinction between productive and unproductive labor, about how Marx himself had predicted the end of the labor theory of value’s utility, and, as I settled into my nicotine-induced high, about the future of the liberal arts, and with them, the fate of the university as such.
It’s thirty years, four books, and one pandemic later. I’m retired from teaching and the university is in ruins. Put it this way: there is little or no place for the kind of work I used to do, or I’m used to doing, on campus or off. The academic job market is a joke because tuition at public universities keeps going up even as the marginal cost of college-level instruction approaches zero—adjuncts get paid less than what it costs to (re)produce them—and that’s because state governments have in effect defunded higher education. Enrollments in liberal arts, especially in History, my discipline, and English, have fallen accordingly, by as much as 60% in the last twelve years, except at elite institutions where kids can afford to major in something outside of STEM, the strenuously utilitarian disciplines. Meanwhile men are deserting the university in numbers (and proportions) comparable to those that measure their falling labor force participation rate. And so on.
And work, more generally? How’s that going for you? Not so good, I hear. Real wages are still stagnant or declining, despite some municipal and state movement toward a living minimum wage, and, more promising, a new surge of unionizing efforts at the cutting edge of corporate cost-cutting innovation (Amazon and Starbuck’s). Inflation induced largely by supply-chain collapse and corporate, specifically fossil-fuel profiteering—don’t give me that wage-push crap peddled by the court poets of economic austerity—hasn’t helped. The job market stays in its pandemic daze, making no sense to anyone who would like to see some legible, rational, or justifiable relation between effort and reward, work and income, or between necessary social labor and real compensation. (Remember those “essential” workers, you know, the nurses, the teachers, the restaurant crews?) Instead we witness Wall Street bonuses rise as the rest of us wonder if we got enough saved to live out a few healthy years in retirement—or just enough to stay alive. [See my 3-part piece, “What Now, After Work?” here at Substack and Bernie Sanders at The Guardian for this Labor Day, 09/05/2022]
What I concluded in “Fuck Work” (a.k.a. No More Work [2016]) is still relevant today, even more so now than then. Either we redefine work, to begin with by detaching the receipt of income from the performance of labor time, thus disarming the principle of productivity—which holds that if you do not work, neither shall ye eat—or it will kill us and the planet by keeping us busy earning a living instead of taking it easy.
That first step means distancing ourselves from the Protestant/Hegelian/Marxist intellectual tradition—I say this as a Marxist who thinks the old carbuncled mole got just about everything right—that is, the tradition which assumes that human nature resides in our capacity to change the world and ourselves by working on them, and recovering from its corollaries, among them the idea that the unpaid labors of love with which females have long been associated (teaching, caregiving, etc.) are somehow “unproductive” or at least inferior to the manly trades (manufacturing!), where goods of real value get made.
Taking that step also means we learn how to embrace the moral universe residing in what the Left, no less than the Right, derides as “consumer culture,” you know, the place where useless plastic gadgets pile up because advertising agencies on the payroll of large corporations can create enough false consciousness to sell us anything. By my accounting (in Against Thrift [2011]), that universe more closely resembles Kant’s “kingdom of ends”—where all individuals have a “dignity” rather than a price, where, in other words, all of us can be treated as ends in ourselves rather than as means to ends we have no part in determining—than the boring dystopia depicted by its solemn critics, who are uniformly if unwittingly attached to the Protestant/Hegelian/Marxist intellectual tradition.
But hey, I got nothing against celebrating Labor Day. Especially if it means a day off work.
How's it going at work.
That is a great read James.
I'm a neophyte when it comes to economics/Marxism, however it seems patently obvious to me that the principle of productivity espoused by practitioners on Wall St, never applied to Wall St.
Since the financialisation of everything began in the 1970s, those in Wall St have concentrated mainly on becoming more adept at extracting profit with less effort, as evidenced by the boom in take overs and acquisitions, asset stripping and share buy back schemes.
I was a shipping clerk at a greeting card company for the five summers between high school and grad school. I boxed up the orders, to be shipped to Ben Franklin five-and-dimes, and transported them by conveyor belt to Cecil and Clyde, who filled out bills of lading, sealed the boxes, stacked them on a pallet lifter, and pushed it into a truck at the loading dock. Cecil and Clyde had had that job for fifteen years. Unbelievable. My pay was above average and covered all my college expenses. The sole proprietor management was stern but kindly, the facilities clean and well-lit, and my work hazard confined to paper cuts. After graduation the company offered to make me a management trainee. No.