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CounterPunch
October
9, 2002
The Work Ethic
and Its Discontents
by TOM WALKER
Anis Shivani extols Charles Bukowski's Factotum
as offering "the only answer that makes sense" to "the
sham that is modern work" ("The
Life of a Bum: Against the Work Ethic,". Henri Chinaski,
Bukowski's alter ego in that novel, "shows utter disrespect
for the work ethic."
"The problem with liberal critics
of capitalism," Shivani argues, "is that they don't
want to mess with the foundations of the system." His answer
to this faintheartedness? "Refusal of work means that you
have given up the deceptive fight to ameliorate its conditions."
Of course, not all anti-work dissidents
have the perserverence to drink, fuck, goof-off and get fired
like Henri Chinaski, let alone write like Charles Bukowski. A
handful of Bukowski acolytes may write a novel or two. A few
more pick up a degree in literature. Most probably end in something
more dependable like advertising or journalism.
Robert Frost wrote that he "never
dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative
when old." That's a fear worth attending to.
This is not to disparage Bukowski, only
the notion of Bukowski as a beacon of revolt against the work
ethic. The catch is that a little youthful rebellion never brought
down a regime. Nearly forty years ago, Timothy Leary invited
youth to "turn on, tune in and drop out." Somehow the
work ethic has weathered both Henri Chinowski's picaresque contempt
and Leary's pixelated pied-pipering.
Shivani is right that today's work ethic
is an abomination. Modern work is a sham -- not all work, mind
you, but all too much of it. It is highly improbable that a bit
of tinkering can set things right. So where does that leave us?
Can't live with it, can't live without it and can't reform it?
Can't get over it, can't get under it and can't get around it?
Not quite. The work ethic and the refusal
to work are the two poles of an axis. Amelioration of working
conditions also lies on that axis, located somewhere between
the two poles. But there is another dimension at stake that forms
its own axis, an axis that intersects the work ethic one.
That other dimension is time. Unless
the word "time" brings to mind such names as Marcel
Proust, Henri Bergson or Walter Benjamin, it may not be what
you think it is.
In his preface to Time
and Free Will, Bergson asked, "whether the insurmountable
difficulties presented by certain philosophical problems do not
arise from our placing side by side in space phenomena [namely
the experience of time] which do not occupy space..." It
may be worth asking if the insurmountable difficulties presented
by work and the work ethic do not arise from our acquiescence
to an illegitimate quantification of time and to the incoherent
practical and moral consequences that flow from it. It is, after
all, discontent with such practical and moral incoherence that
motivates such an inquiry.
It does seem reasonable to wonder, as
Freud did, whether people would perform necessary work without
coercion. It's another matter when a political and economic elite
insists on coercion for fundamentally aesthetic reasons -- because
it pleases them to see an increase in measured output without
regard to whether that output contributes to public welfare or
detracts from it. How does one distinguish between reasonable
doubts about the relationship between work and coercion and unreasonable
certainties?
Shivani's glorification of the Factotum
lifestyle trivializes the Freudian doubts, as did beat sensibility
and 1960s counter-culture. Liberal proposals for workplace reform
enshrine those reasonable doubts to an extent that paves the
way for a return of the unreasonable certainties. It remains
to be shown that we are throwing virgins into the volcano, not
because we believe it will appease the volcano god and not only
because we have been doing it so long that it has become a habit
but, most disturbingly, simply because we can't think of anything
else to do.
Not thinking of something else to do
is a moral lapse that makes Henri Chinaski's ennui positively
heroic by comparison. But only by comparison. The anti-hero's
heroism is parasitic in that it depends on the complacency of
the squares. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
But when everybody tries to be a bum, goofing-off loses its cachet.
Ultimately, the work ethic returns stronger than ever as an indignant
reaction to the beat ethic -- no longer a true positive but a
double negative. They're the worst kind.
Work ethic? We don't got no work ethic.
This ungrammatical, double negative work
ethic doesn't even have to stand on its own two feet. It can
lean against its own shadow. Its adherents believe it is sufficient
to proclaim "there is no alternative" to overrule any
objection. For crying out loud, there is an alternative. Those
who deny it are liars, cheats and embezzlers. The alternative
is an affirmation of work that is unequivocally subordinated
to an affirmation of life and dignity. The alternative makes
distinctions.
The alternative is neither a work ethic
nor its polar opposite. It is definitely not the spectral refusal-of-a-refusal
that passes for a post-ethical work ethic - the topsy-turvy work
and spend ethic. It is a time ethic.
If one accepts, with Max Weber, that
Benjamin Franklin's counsel, "time is money," represented
the epitome of the capitalist spirit, then it should seem peculiar
that custom and law in the most capitalist of all lands, the
United States, should blythely sanction the routine and wholesale
confiscation of this purest form of private property, a person's
time. The traditional employers' position with respect to working
time is founded on the hypocritical proposition that liberty
of contract is realized by the unrestricted right to offer one's
time for sale but not by a corresponding right to retain it.
In effect, the first abstract right is
nullified by the absence of the second concrete one. After all,
the right to not work and to starve as a consequence is no bargain.
It may well reflect the situation in the state of nature, but
in that state of nature the politicians, central bankers and
self-appointed moralists who point with satisfaction to the lash
of necessity would be unceremoneously clubbed to pulp for their
supercilious arrogance. A.J. Liebling said, "freedom of
the press is guaranteed only to those who owned one." Conversely,
the unrestrained right to work could only be enjoyed by those
who can afford not to work.
Instead of such a meaningless and abstract
right, what if we were to turn the tables and legislate a definite
limit on the number of hours a day and week that anyone could
be employed by a single employer? Many people might assume there
is already such legislation in effect. There isn't in the U.S.
or Canada. There are overtime laws but no absolute limits. Theoretically,
an employer could compel an employee to work 168 hours a week,
provided the employer paid the given premium for overtime hours.
As a thought experiment, say we propose
an absolute limit of 16 hours a day and 96 hours a week after
which no employee may be required or permitted to work? This
means that everyone would be guaranteed 8 hours off each day
and -- and a full day off after working the 16 hour maximum for
six days in a week. Positively Dickensian.
Some exemptions could apply, for example,
where there was clear and immediate danger to life or limb or,
as in the case of hospital interns, where round-the-clock hours
served an explicit pedagogical or scientific purpose. What employer
could possibly object on practical grounds to such a generous
standard?
Now that we've established the principle
of an absolute limit to the workday and week, thin edge of the
wedge wise, the next step is to initiate a public dialogue on
the practical scope of the limitation.
If establishing a principle and initiating
a public dialogue sounds like yet another pallid prescription
rather than an answer that makes sense, my excuse is that the
goal is persuasion, not protest. As with any persuasion, the
primary audience is one's self -- if you can't get excited about
your own spiel, who will?
It comes down to zeal. It's easy to be
cynical about the work ethic but it's hard to be zealous about
cynicism. Those who are enchanted by their illusions have the
advantage over those who are merely disenchanted. Presumably
what motivated Shivani's impatience with the pallid prescriptions
of the liberal critics was that they weren't inspirational. A
heroic gesture of refusal may be more inspiring in the short
term, but it is not sustainable. Hangovers, venereal disease
and a glut in the small press book market get in the way. A time
ethic, such as I am suggesting here, is sustainable in that it
offers a seemless program for self-understanding and for social
intervention.
Dreaming up legislative principles and
topics for public dialogue doesn't exhaust the potential of a
time ethic. Recall that such an ethic derives from questioning
whether philosophical problems arise from symbolically "placing
side by side in space phenomena which do not occupy space."
Economics, especially mathematical economics, relies heavily
on just such a procedure. By examining successive, artificially
frozen states of the economy side by side, it excludes from the
analysis precisely what constitutes economic "becoming".
Think of what fun it could be to tumbril
the self-proclaimed queen of the social sciences off for a haircut
at Madame Guillotine's! "Just a little off the top, please."
On second thought, maybe that's getting a bit over-zealous. Good
economists have always been very much interested in the becoming.
John Maynard Keynes even talked about "animal spirits".
And that sounds suspiciously like Bergson's *elan vital* to me.
In his discussion of the work ethic,
Max Weber lamented that care for the accumulation of worldly
goods had become an "iron cage" from which the formative
spirit of religious ascetism had escaped. Four decades later,
the words *arbeit macht frei* -- work liberates -- were wrought
in iron above the gates of the Nazi death camps. Asceticism had
escaped but the modern individual couldn't. That's the dark side
of the problem of free will and determinism.
In Time and Free Will, Henri Bergson
sought to show that the problem of free will and determinism
was a false problem. He concluded:
"The problem of freedom has thus
sprung from a misunderstanding: it has been to the moderns what
the paradoxes of the Eleatics were to the ancients, and, like
these paradoxes, it has its origin in the illusion through which
we confuse succession and simultaneity, duration and extensity,
quality and quantity."
Tom Walker
is a social policy analyst with TimeWork
Web,can be reached at:
timework@vcn.bc.ca
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