Here’s Part III of my ongoing inquiry into work. Most of this part is new, recently added to the talk I’ve given over the last few years in venues from coast to coast. It’s where I take up three issues—”bullshit jobs,” “essential workers,” the “Great Resignation”—made urgent by the collapse of a labor market that’s supposed to adjust the supply of and demand for workers. Made urgent, in other words, by the obvious fact that the price of labor-power has no intelligible or justifiable relation to the real cost of reproducing it. The preface to my discussion of these issues is another bet, this one on the end of capitalism. And so you don’t have to backtrack, I’ve put the last few paragraphs of Part II up front.
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[End of Part II]
Even the best, most hopeful books and essays on the subject [of a Universal Basic Income] warn us, in good Puritan fashion, of the dangers that exemption from necessary labor will probably bring. For example, Robert and Edward Skidelsky’s wonderful book of 2014, called How Much is Enough? They sketch in fine detail the rudiments of the good life, and explain how a UBI could serve its purposes, but they conclude by worrying that indolence and idleness could contaminate the leisure time afforded by a basic income.
Well, of course they could. But we already know that they didn’t, so not to worry. How’s that? Like I said, we’ve got some evidence. Between 1968 and 1981, federal, state, and local officials conducted four experiments that included eight cities and two rural counties in the US, about 6,000 families altogether. A fifth experiment was conducted in Dauphin, Manitoba, by the provincial government there, between 1974 and 1979. The results were the same in every instance—supplements to family income that raised the participants above the poverty line had no significant effect on anyone’s work ethic.
The pioneer study was the New Jersey Graduated Work Incentive Experiment, run out of Nixon’s Office of Economic Opportunity between 1968 and 1971. 1,357 male-headed households in Passaic, Paterson, Trenton, Jersey City, and Scranton, Pennsylvania—who knew that New Jersey had such imperial ambitions?—received an income subsidy with this question in mind: what will happen to the work habits of the parents? Pretty much nothing. The fathers reduced their work hours by one a week, the mothers by slightly more, but they spent the remainder with their kids doing homework and getting them to the doctor as needed. I would remind you that these results were duplicated in all the other experiments.
The original results in New Jersey plus Scranton were encouraging enough for the OEO to commission a Preliminary Report that, in April, 1970, convinced a substantial majority of the House to pass Nixon’s Family Assistance Program, which was designed to replace welfare with the kind of income supplement or subsidy the Jersey experiment delivered.
The OEO was then directed by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
What were they thinking???
III
The more important question just now is, what are we thinking??? Us academic and intellectual and humanistic types still want to talk about “meaningful work” in the Arendtian or Heideggerian mood, as if artisanal activity, craftsmanship, DYI , poeisis in short, is the standard—it’s just us and the raw materials—as if that situation, that hard, isolate, lonely relation between us and the material world, is the only one that can sustain our souls. With Arendt and Heidegger, we’re stuck on Aristotle. Why can’t we get over this ancient delusion?
Because, as in dreams, where we steer the gods and monsters toward a happy ending, sometimes by just waking up, we can’t get over our origins as infantile pilots of our infinite, immeasurable, unquenchable desires for omnipotence, for mastery of the material world—“freedom,” we call it when we grow up. We can’t relinquish these desires, which are now and always served by the “compulsion to work,” as Freud named it. But the decline of socially necessary labor since the 1920s has finally freed us from this psychological command, this “compulsion to work.”
Now, therefore, we can rethink socially beneficial labor, what used to be called “women’s work”—health care, education, service—and perhaps treat it as our basic industry, with all that entails when it comes to wage differentials and what we mean by equality. We can but we don’t.
Why not? My guess is that we don’t yet know enough about the end of capitalism, the apocalypse that already approaches because it already happened. How could we? Who knew that antiquity would give way to Hellenistic culture, republics to empires, feudalism to capitalism? Those gret bourgeois revolutionaries of the 17th and 18th centuries didn’t know they were creating the possibility of capitalism—they didn’t even know what it was. But I’m willing to place a bet on the future, and hedge it, too. I think I know when the end of capitalism happened.
Before I do so, let me remind us of Marx’s uncanny, unstinting admiration for capitalism, which is most happily on display in the Grundrisse (ca. 1857, trans. 1973), those famous notebooks where he turned the base verbal dross of political economy into a kind of lyric poetry—especially when praising the corrosive effects of a money economy on tribalism and patriarchy (yes, he was a 19th-century liberal in his own way). In the 4th planned volume of Capital, which was published in English as Theories of Surplus Value (3 vols., 1963-71), Marx defined the “historic function of capital” as its unprecedented capacity to increase and improve the productivity of social labor, first by means of the “so-called primitive accumulation,” which turned everything—even land and labor—into a commodity, and then by the rationalization of the labor process, a.k.a. factory discipline regulated by clock time.
The creation and constant reconstruction of the labor market were the means to capital’s end, that “historic function.” Not that workers were mere bystanders in the process, forced into the satanic mills by the sheer market power of capital. The point is that the labor market is where workers learned to buy the right not to die by increasing and improving their productivity (and this would include their creativity). Parts 7-8 in Volume 1 of Capital are a concrete illustration of this process, where “the historical and moral element” of the wage—later known as “the human element”—becomes pivotal, central, crucial.
Our question now becomes, What happens when the labor market can’t teach that lesson any more? When the “historic function of capital” has been accomplished—completed—to the point where labor is so productive that its value approaches zero? When the “historical and moral element” in the determination of the wage bill has gone missing?
All right, then, here’s the other bet. The epitome of market society, capitalism in the USA, has finally failed because it succeeded. It has succeeded because by driving the cost of labor toward zero, information, the most basic necessity and public good in a post-industrial society, is now close to free. It has failed because by driving the cost of labor toward zero, information—call it knowledge if you like—is now close to free. The commodity form no longer regulates the distribution of words, sounds, or images, because the labor market no longer compels the increase and improvement of productivity, and is no longer needed for that purpose.**
If I’m right, we’re already experiencing the eschaton, that apocalypse—the end of capitalism. It’s upon us, and it feels like the end of days, but if we think about the possibilities residing in this event, we could have some fun.
Speaking of fun, I can now add a postscript to these remarks about the meaning of work, even as it disappears. Here I want to address three recent phenomena that have become household words—the kind of phrases that somehow summarize a historical moment, giving us a common knowledge of our time. These are (1) “bullshit jobs,” a designation invented by the late, great anthropologist David Graeber; (2) “essential workers,” a category generated by the public health response to Covid-19; and (3) the “Great Resignation,” an event that sounds like a direct reply to the Great Recession (which was itself a parody of the Great Depression—notice that the two older nominatives no longer require quotation marks: they’re now “real events” because there’s general agreement on their importance and the documentation required to demonstrate it).***
Graeber’s 2014 essay and follow-up book were emphatic in defining and excoriating bullshit jobs—they’re pointless and/or destructive, to be sure, but the key criterion is that the people who hold them know perfectly well that they’re pointless and/or destructive. The worst of these are corporate lawyers, Graeber says, whose disappearance wouldn’t make a bit of difference in the grand scheme of things. He’s wrong about this, of course—corporations are uniquely creatures of the law, without which they, too, would disappear—but you get the point. In keeping with deeply held bourgeois beliefs, Graeber is suggesting that lawyers, bankers, merchants, middlemen in general, deduct their incomes from the sum of value created elsewhere, by productive labor: they don’t make anything real, they just push paper around.
Put it another way. Bullshit jobs are meaningless because they don’t benefit anybody except their holder, or anything except the bottom line. They exploit everybody they can and they extract wealth from everywhere they are and everything they own. They do not replenish the earth, they diminish it. In this sense, the experience and effects of “worldlessness,” which Arendt and Heidegger (et al.) associate with the “standing reserve” of mere mindless labor, actually applies only to bullshit jobs. But they are by far the better-paying jobs.
According to Graeber, the authentic, valuable, indispensable jobs are held by teachers, cops, construction workers (a.k.a. the building trades), garbage collectors, and health-care providers. They create and convey knowledge, they keep us safe—he was writing before BLM, before the use of first-person plural pronouns sounded parochial or privileged—they build or repair useful things, they clean up after us, and they help us get better. But let us notice two fundamental facts about these occupations. They enlist more of our sympathies than our ambitions because they pay for shit, or because they can be quite hazardous.
Still, the people who happened to find themselves in these occupations were the heroes of the pandemic, to the point where they became known as “essential workers.” Which raises an obvious question—essential to what and whom, exactly? Nobody gathered to applaud or hoot and holler at the end of restaurant shifts in Manhattan, nor when the school day was over. I didn’t notice anybody clapping for dirty-joke-a-day Jay, the UPS driver in my neighborhood, nor for the Fresh Direct, Amazon, and Fed Ex guys who stood in for the cashiers and salespeople in the retail stores we couldn’t go to. Nobody cheered for the USPS mail carriers, either, and they were the people who delivered the real goods, those checks from the Trump and Biden administrations that kept furloughed workers afloat in 2020 and 2021.
Think about it: “essential workers” are by definition those who perform socially necessary labor, who produce both the material things and the intangible goods (a.k.a. “social capital,” “social commons,” “public goods,” “information”) that keep a civilization intact and able to imagine its future. But in a post-industrial society like ours, the production and maintenance of the material things require an ever-decreasing share of the available labor-time, while the production and maintenance of the intangibles require, or allow for, an ever-increasing share. So the essential workers of our time are those who provide services like education, public health and safety, and yes, “hospitality” (dining, travel, entertainment, etc.). Socially beneficial labor—attending to, caring for others (“women’s work”)—is become socially necessary labor. Willy-nilly, like it or not, we are now our brothers’ keepers.
We celebrate or sentimentalize such work because it demands sacrifice, and we often call it selfless because it is: no matter how heroic, it still pays for shit. But why is that, especially now, when the pandemic has so forcefully reminded us of how necessary this socially beneficial labor has become? Two reasons, one residual yet real, the other evident yet unknown. First, and again, it’s “women’s work,” which has always been undervalued and underpaid—or unpaid—because, well, because it’s women’s work. Male nurses and elementary school teachers are no longer the butts of bad jokes, but they’re still the exception that proves this rule.
As the province of affect and attachment, “women’s work” has been, by definition, a quasi-familial adjunct to the labor market, where male workers and child laborers are provisioned—fortified, really—with the emotional energy required to leave home and go to work the next day. In this sense, “women’s work” has been that “historical and moral element” in the determination of wages, the element that has armed working people against their reduction to the thing-like status of strictly economic functions or “factors of production,” whose value can be calculated as if they are mute objects, interchangeable parts moving along an assembly line.
Second, and more important for the near future, is the absence, or the erosion, of this very “historical and moral element” in the determination of the socially beneficial wage bill. I don’t mean that “women’s work” is now done, contra the proverb. I mean that the hallowed bourgeois family lies in ruins precisely because neoliberal capitalism has been so successful in hollowing it out, draining it first of its economic purposes, then rearranging its internal articulation according to market criteria.
I’ll quote Joseph Schumpeter to drive home the point: “Capitalist evolution not only upsets social structures which protected the capitalist interests . . . but also undermines the attitudes, motivations, and beliefs of the capitalist stratum itself . . . [for example] the loosening of the family tie—a typical feature of the culture of capitalism—removes or weakens what, no doubt, was the center of the motivation of the businessman of old.” Daniel Bell and Michael Novak, both of them ambivalent admirers of capitalism (like Schumpeter), make the same point, although Novak does so inadvertently. For that matter, so does George Gilder, the idiot son of Say’s Law, who claimed that women’s participation in the labor force on equal terms with men was the harbinger of “sexual suicide,” that is, the end of the bourgeois family.****(
The labor movement has of course been another ingredient in that “historical and moral element.” In all their permutations over the last two centuries, trade and industrial unions have asserted their interests at the workplace by insisting that they represent more than the roles their members must play on the job (the obvious exceptions being the Industrial Workers of the World, the syndicalist unions or councils of France and Italy, and, at another remove, the soviets cultivated by the Bolsheviks in 1917).
The wage has always been a means to ends that can be realized only outside or after work—in the space of “free time,” where a worker becomes something else, a husband or a father, a wife or a daughter, a reader, a dandy, a citizen, a consumer, a multi-dimensional individual, a pliable subjectivity capable of inhabiting many identities. Without a labor movement which insists that workers are greater than the sum of their occupational skills—something more or other than workers—wage earners can be, and clearly have been, reduced to an accountant’s abstraction and treated accordingly.
The cultural climate (a.k.a. “ideological contours,” “structures of feeling”) will also, and perhaps most significantly, shape the reach and weight of “the historical and moral element” in the determination of incomes derived from socially necessary labor. Public opinion and local politics are the key constituents of this climate. In the late-nineteenth century, for example, a moment of extraordinary class conflict, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics found that workers won the majority of strikes and lockouts, even though only 10% of the labor force was unionized. How? Because local middle-class populations stood with striking workers as against the railroads and the other “foreign bodies,” the large industrial corporations, that were reshaping local labor markets. Why? Because most Americans feared (and fought) the concentration of wealth these new leviathans represented, on the assumption that political standing derived from market power: capitalists were still construed as parasitic but consequential growths on the body politic.
In our time, the cultural climate produces strange weather indeed—a paradoxical, almost schizophrenic mix of attitudes and beliefs. On the right it combines an utter contempt for the 1% with an illiberal devotion to individual rights, and on the left it combines a radical critique of capitalism with an illiberal urge to dismantle individual rights.
The result is not so much the “polarization” of public opinion as an odd consensus that acknowledges the failure of capitalism and the exhaustion of liberalism. From both sides, distant, unaccountable elites appear as the impediment to needed change, and so Main Street becomes the antidote to Wall Street and K Street. Either way, market solutions and state/local politics become the default settings of mainstream political discourse. On the liberal left, for example, this setting means more vigorous enforcement of anti-trust law—the restoration of inter-firm competition—while on the conservative right it means, as ever, “deregulation” and privatization of public goods, particularly schools at every level of education.
In this climate, socially beneficial labor will be priced according to the market criteria of cost accounting. The historic stigma of “women’s work” remains, because it is not productive labor in the sense that it produces real, valuable, material things that others can purchase. What do teachers and professors do except push paper around? Do nurses and hospital staff produce anything new, tangible, or measurable? And what are trade and industrial unions for except raising prices by increasing the costs of labor-time—by insisting, against the clear logic of the labor market, that “the historical and moral element” in the maintenance of human life after and outside of work must be included in the costs of the wage bill? Labor unions embody inherited social norms, which insist on the dignity of work and human life, but they thwart economic efficiency. So “essential workers,” those who do the socially necessary (now beneficial) labor, are no less subject to the demands of the profit motive, or rather imperative, than what we used to call “tertiary workers,” and no less vulnerable to the cost-cutting measures that have driven the value of labor-time in general toward zero.
Consider the plight of teachers and truckers, “essential workers” who are coded as female and male, respectively, and who are now in short supply because their pay is so shitty—and because their surveillance by the bosses, whether school boards and state legislatures or trucking companies, is so extreme. Everyone knows that teachers at the elementary and secondary levels of education are paid a pittance, that they spend their own money for school supplies, that they work long, overtime, uncompensated hours grading exams, preparing lesson plans, and/or coaching athletes—and that they burn out quickly. Everyone also knows that teachers at these levels are now the objects of close political scrutiny, to the point where the content of course curricula is subject to approval of and cancellation by parents, school boards, and state legislators.
Everyone knows as well that over the last 30 years, 2/3 of all new hires in higher education have been adjunct, contingent, part-time instructors who get paid 3 to 5K per course, with no benefits attached. For the most part, these are people with advanced degrees, with publications in peer-reviewed venues, with experience in the college classroom—and they do most of the teaching on college campuses. But their labor-time is practically worthless: they can barely support themselves, let alone a spouse or a family. Their workload is impossible to sustain, and they have no job security whatsoever unless they’re represented in bargaining agreements made by regular faculty unions such as AFT or AAUP. In that event, however, adjuncts are the herald of the university’s ruin, because their permanence means the end of tenure.
(Meanwhile, college tuition has risen much faster than the cost of living over the same 30 years. Why is that? Because the urge to cut labor costs never applies to management, in this case the increasing numbers of deans and HR bureaucrats who supervise faculty, and because state legislatures have mercilessly slashed the budgets of public universities, in accordance with the stupid notion that increased enrollments will close the funding gap—they don’t—and, let’s face it, with the equally stupid idea that higher education produces nothing of value except M.B.A.s, patents, and professional athletes.)
Not everyone knows that long-haul truckers, “essential workers” because they deliver 71% of the freight shipped within the US, toil under similarly straitened conditions. Since the industry was deregulated in 1980 under Democratic Party auspices, the Teamsters’ representation of drivers has fallen from 40 to 4%, and their wages have declined by roughly 50% when adjusted for inflation. They’re now paid by the mile, not for hours on the job or by the route the company owns. So they typically work well over 60 hours a week, and drive more than 300 days of the year. Their cabins—which double as their living quarters—are festooned with cameras and sensors that record their every move, even eye movements: they can be fired for looking at their phones instead of the road. The turnover rate among truckers is now 91%. The so-called Freedom Convoys were pathetic declarations of independence from the only authorities these beleaguered men can see and address without fear of losing their jobs. Unlike their unionized forerunners, they don’t strike because they can’t.
In these terms, the ”Great Resignation”—69 million people quit their jobs in 2021, most of them without the promise of a better one—is the reassertion of the missing “historical and moral element” in the determination of the wage bill. Every poll, survey, and informal canvass (Gallup, Harvard Business Review, Pew Research, Fortune, Business Insider, Adobe, The Atlantic) shows pretty much the same result: people quit their jobs mainly because the pay was insufficient to support the lives they wanted to live.
64% of job seekers polled by Gallup, for example, said they quit in search of higher wages, better salaries. But 61% said they quit to find “better personal well-being” in a job that offered a different work/life balance. That is why the longtime chief of research at Gallup, Jim Harter, summarized his survey this way: “Pay is important and it must be fair, but two-thirds of the reasons people left jobs in 2021 were due to issues related to their engagement [with bosses and colleagues at work, but also with the substance of their work] and their overall well-being.” He went on to say that organizations of all kinds should be more mindful of “the role employers must play in supporting the whole person, not just the worker.” (my italics: in its own way, this too reasserts “the historical and moral element”).
Millennials and Generation Z led the exodus. Employees between 30 and 45, people in mid-career, quit at rates ten times the increased average rate for the labor force as a whole, most of them with no new jobs on offer. Younger and older workers, those in their early twenties or late sixties, did the opposite—they stuck it out, actually reducing their quit rates from 2019 and 2020. Resignations were highest in health care, where 20% of the labor force left their jobs between March 2020 and November 2021. No surprise there.
What is happening here? It’s reasonable, I think, to characterize this unprecedented mass resignation as a general strike, but not of the kind that convulsed Seattle in 1919 and Minneapolis in 1934 (San Francisco’s “general strike” of 1934 is a separate case, a brief moment in the longshoremen’s 83-day walkout). In those instances, trade unions and allied organizations planned, incited, and directed the insurgencies along explicit ideological lines, for political purposes. The Great Resignation has no such ideological mastermind, nor a discernible political purpose—unless we follow W.E.B. Du Bois’s example and treat it the way he treated the flight of 500,000 enslaved people to Union lines during the Civil War, as the General Strike that crushed the Confederacy’s ability to fight and win its war for slavery.
The people who fled the farms and plantations didn’t write up programs and pamphlets to explain or justify their itinerary; no great fanfare accompanied them on their way to, or greeted them on arrival at, Union lines. But their urgent demand for freedom from bondage was no less evident or strident than speeches and exhortations could have made it. In that sense, their General Strike was explicitly though wordlessly ideological, and had momentous political implications and consequences (of the half million who fled to Union lines, 200,000 returned to the South as Union soldiers).
In the same sense, I would argue, the Great Resignation has ideological and political connotations, even though we don’t yet have the words to spell them out. In my view, it’s a new stage in the transformation of mainstream political discourse which began with Occupy Wall Street, and was then amplified by Bernie, #MeToo, and #Black Lives Matter. It certainly puts employers and politicians alike on notice that the labor market is broken and can’t be fixed without reasserting “the historical and moral [i.e., human] element” in the determination of wages.
The market as such, as it now operates, can’t accommodate what substantial majorities of the American people say they want—decent jobs with flexible work schedules which pay a living wage, fundamental changes in the definition and delivery of health care, much higher taxation on the wealthy and the corporations (which have increased their share of national income during the pandemic), government negotiation of prescription drug prices, plausible but large-scale programs to address climate change, and so on. Recent jeremiads from “centrist” Democratic consultants and pollsters agree that the party can win back “the working class” by meeting these needs. It can win hands down across the sociological board by meeting them.
Because the Great Resignation—workers’ continuing abstention from the labor market now magnifies its scale and scope—proves that most Americans want freedom from bondage to gainful employment as it is presently organized and compensated. They want that “historical and moral element” restored to its rightful place in the computation of their wages, or they want out of the job market altogether.
Are they saying “Fuck Work”? In a manner of speaking, the kind that we might hear as “common sense” . . . Yes.
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** Jeremy Rifkin calls this process the advent of “the zero marginal cost society” in a book with that title of 2014. Since 2012, I’ve called it primitive disaccumulation, as in the reversal of what Marx termed “primitive accumulation,” whereby everything, even land and labor, became a fungible commodity, ca. 1400-1800.
*** My conversation with Matt Seybold and Corey McCall kindled my renewed interest in these issues (see the bibliography attached to the podcast posted March 18, 2022: http://marktwainstudies.com/FuckWork/?) So did discussions with Denise Dutton and her students, March 7, 2022, at the University of Tulsa, and with Mark Teich of Popular Science, March 10, 2022. Thanks to the people who invited me to give the original talk at their workplaces: Nelson Lichtenstein, Jonathan Levy, James Bruggeman, Jeff Sklansky, Barbarba Cutter, Brian Roberts, Billy Knoblauch. And thanks, finally, to Laura Kipnis and Bruce Robbins, whose strong readings of this mostly new Part III made me revise and reconstruct it.
**** Schumpeter, Business Cycles (1939), vol 2; Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976); Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982) as discussed in Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out (2009); Gilder, Sexual Suicide (1973).