How we live and how we might live - Part 8 (2025)

From the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

‘[The claim] that every individual is required to work is a social convention and disciplinary apparatus rather than an economic necessity’ (Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work).

The post-capitalist society being argued for here is one where productive activity is taken up voluntarily by individuals, and access to the social product is open and free. Last month we showed how an objection often made that members of such a society would prefer to lie down and starve rather than do anything to meet their needs was unfounded. We can now look at the many immediate benefits that the structure of such a society would bring even before it developed more elaborate institutions. We have already seen how a system of free access would render ‘greedy’ behaviour pointless or counterproductive. We can now show that the same system of society would undermine the lazy-person argument.

The most immediate impact a free-access society is likely to have on its members would be a huge reduction in the amount of effort they would need to put in to sustain it. Capitalism is immensely inefficient in its use of human labour. Its system of corralling individuals, families and businesses into independent and competing property units, and then routing production through the profit motive, requires a gigantic social apparatus to sustain it. Not only does it force capitalism to maintain an elaborate monetary mechanism, it also requires a means of managing the resulting inefficiencies. Moreover, the competitive nature of the system creates much duplicated effort, and results in a great deal of labour being devoted to the production of useless and shoddy goods.

Wasted labour

In almost all capitalist states large numbers of jobs are dedicated to the management of a central banking system which, besides making valiant attempts at stabilising capitalism’s financial system, concerns itself with the production and issue of money. Upon this foundation whole industries have developed to finance business operations and to service the system’s property relationships. The pensions, insurance and brokerage industries are three of the largest of this kind. Out of a total UK working population of 43 million people well over one million are employed in this sector alone.

The property system also requires capitalist governments to employ armies of civil servants and local government officers to devise and administer welfare and unemployment payments to maintain the workforce through periods of unemployment, to provide for those unable to work, and to top-up the incomes of those whose wages are inadequate. Governments also employ workers to register ownership of land and property, assess and collect taxes, enforce weights and measures, etc. These systems require not only labour for direct planning and administration but also for the production and development of equipment such as computer hardware and software, buildings, stationery products, transport systems and sources of energy.

The bulk of capitalism’s legal systems, its judiciaries and police forces, is dedicated overwhelmingly to adjudicating property contracts, property disputes, and property transgressions, along with crimes against people motivated by monetary gain. Businesses based on gambling like casinos, amusement arcades, bookies, betting shops and stock exchanges flourish in the win-lose system that is central to capitalism. Capitalist states consume labour in the production of armaments and military hardware, for sale to others as well as for their own use. They maintain military personnel to further the interests of businesses within their territories in the international competition for markets, resources, trade routes, and the ability to project power and manoeuvre strategically to secure these essentials. In the aftermath of conflict labour is then deployed for rebuilding what has been destroyed.

Monetary tasks

In the world of business, firms of all kinds must dedicate labour resources to monetary tasks such as bookkeeping, accounting and debt collecting, while the demands of profit maximisation through competitive sale on the market forces them to devote huge labour resources to the advertising and marketing of brands and products. Companies work ceaselessly to bombard us with advertising online, in newspapers and magazines, on TV, at the cinema, on roadside hoardings, on the sides of lorries and buses, on bus shelters and railway platforms and on every available space. Capitalist companies employ labour to research and implement sophisticated psychological techniques for creating artificial wants in consumers. We are pressurised into buying by limited time offers, or into believing we are getting a bargain by supposed discounts, or into purchasing a lifestyle or an identity through branded items. In-store lighting, music, shelf placement and shelving layouts are designed to exploit our instincts and vulnerabilities. ‘Product placement’ on our favourite video channels keeps goods relevant to our interests in the forefront of our minds. Online ‘organic communities’ built around brands proliferate to keep us talking about a company’s products. PR consultants like the notorious Frank Luntz gleefully explain in their writings the techniques used to manipulate the public by a careful choice and placing of words and images.

And we submit to all of this because capitalism’s restless search for profit has uprooted or unsettled our communities. It has isolated us emotionally and economically. We buy stuff to fill up an emotional void. A halo of excitement surrounds each new product on the shelf or online platform and entices us to buy. At home, the excitement persists for a few days or weeks, but then fades and the exciting object becomes just one more thing we have. Our new possession morphs into junk or household clutter, or it falls apart or goes out of fashion. Still hungry, still unsatisfied, we dispose of it to make room for more. And more labour is then eaten up in transporting and disposing of the waste.

Planned obsolescence

Since the 1950s capitalism’s drive to maximise profit by ramping up sales has increasingly taken on various forms of planned obsolescence, so much so that it is now a regular sales strategy. Companies produce cheap products that soon fall apart and have to be quickly replaced. Parts or whole products are entombed in plastic or in spot-welded metal casings rendering them inaccessible and unrepairable. Companies use screws with proprietary heads that cannot be removed with an ordinary screwdriver. Spare parts are quickly withdrawn from sale, or they are sold at exorbitant prices that make it cheaper to replace the whole item. New components are designed to be incompatible with old ones. White goods that once were built to last 30+ years now break down in six or seven. Fashion houses rush out new fashions weekly or even daily. Smart phone manufacturers introduce new designs every year, simultaneously swamping public spaces with advertising, while about the same time punters begin to notice that their old phones are unaccountably starting to go slow.

A great deal of labour in capitalism’s competitive society is mopped up in the production of consumer goods that originate not in the spontaneous wants and demands of the population but in the requirements of profit making. In the mid-20th century, pundits predicted that rapidly advancing technology would result in a rise in the productivity of labour. As a result, they believed we would have to work fewer hours in the future. As early as 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes declared that by the millennium, when his generation’s grandchildren had grown to adulthood, no one would have to work more than 15 hours a week. Keynes was right about capitalism’s drive towards increased productivity. He was wrong, however, about the forces that drive capitalism. In a profit system capital takes on a life of its own. It becomes ravenous. It must constantly seek out new outlets for investment, new ways of creating ever more capital. Inevitably this means that new products, new services are constantly being puffed into existence. Instead of reducing the work needed by society, the profit motive keeps us at work generating ever more ephemeral stuff. So we get not just the kind of unproductive work that the late anthropologist David Graeber referred to as ‘bullshit jobs’, but jobs dedicated to producing bullshit products, and then to marketing them to the ‘consumer’.

Eliminating the profit system

By eliminating capitalism’s class system together with its profit motive, huge amounts of unnecessary labour and whole industries would cease to exist. In the same move, the direct connection between production and consumption would be restored. The quantity of social effort required to meet social need would plummet, and the population would gain a new level of social control over its labour time. It would be free at last to decide how much effort it wanted to expend on production and how it wanted to use it.

Eliminating the profit system would transform the whole nature of work. When society is founded on common ownership and free access, work ceases to be ‘work’: the sale and exercise of labour power on behalf of an employer, and becomes productive activity, a voluntary social act, undertaken by individuals for social purposes. The aim of production would no longer be maximisation of profit by competing firms, but the meeting of social needs. And social needs include those of the producer as well as the consumer. Under capitalist conditions, unpleasant, mindlessly repetitive work often conducted in unhealthy conditions, with unsociable hours and overseen by a harsh disciplinary regime, is the product of the individual capitalist firm’s need to minimise costs. With the profit system removed like a glitch in software, only one social purpose for productive activity remains: the meeting of social needs.

Social psychology has known for decades that extrinsic ‘rewards’ or ‘incentives’ like wages and salaries are poor motivators for action. And to say this is already to miss something important. To a large extent, wages and salaries in capitalism are not primarily rewards or incentives. For the majority of the population they are an imposed necessity. The motivation for doing a task – any task – comes principally from intrinsic rewards, that is, from the rewards which arise out of doing the task itself. Human beings are primarily motivated by three things: by the ability to control their own lives; by the desire to master skills; and by social belonging. These are incentives that capitalism is very bad at providing. As we argued earlier, it provides intrinsic incentives only occasionally and only in certain industries where profits are temporarily above average and where there are shortages in the labour market.

In a post-capitalist world of common ownership and free access where class conflicts of interest are eliminated, communities engaged in productive activities can organise their work to meet those human needs for control, for mastery and for community. They can provide themselves with conditions of work that maximise their own satisfaction, and not the profits of their employers. Under these conditions productive activity becomes not a sacrifice of time and effort for an extrinsic wage, but a collective activity carried on for collective ends and as a seamless part of a community’s social life.

The final article in this series next month will dive deeper into what motivates human beings and answer the question of who will do the dirty work.

(A representative list of tasks required by capitalism’s money system is given in Chapter 3 of the SPGB’s pamphlet: ‘From Capitalism to Socialism: How we Live and how we Could Live').

Hud.

Recipe for disaster? (2006)

Pamphlet Review from the May 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Work. Anarchist Federation. £1.00.

It might be thought that a pamphlet on work would begin by setting out what is going to be meant by the word. But this pamphlet does not do so. Instead, it uses the word in two different, even contradictory, senses. Work “must be destroyed before it destroys us”, proclaims the front cover. “Work is a disease” says an illustration. “Arguments against work” is one chapter heading.

But another chapter is headed “Work in a free society” though even this has the subtitle “freedom begins where work ends”. So, after all, work is not going to be destroyed? It is not a disease (or, if it is, it’s still going to exist in a “free society”?). So, in a free society, we are not going to be free when we work?

In physics work is the expenditure of energy. For humans, it is the exercise of a person’s physical and material energies to produce something that has some use, an unavoidable feature of human existence which has to take place in all societies and so cannot be abolished or destroyed. Under capitalism most work takes the form of employment, which is the things the pamphlets says: boring, meaningless, done for the benefit of an employer. It is employment – working for wages – , not work as such, that is a “disease” that can be abolished. What is required is the transformation of work, not its impossible abolition.

The authors of Work make some strong and valid criticisms of the human consequences of capitalist employment. For many workers it means physical and nervous exhaustion, illness, often anti-social laws, damaged family relationships, the intensification and lengthening of the working week, job insecurity, the switch from long-term employment to sub-contracting and self-employment, usually with worse pay and conditions. Even the unemployed, they say, are now engaged in the “work” of “looking for work”.

We agree that in “a society without ‘employment’, without bosses and wage labour”, the work of producing what society needs will be quite different: it will be “freely chosen”, “not measured at all” and an “expression of a person’s pleasure in what they are doing”.

Where we disagree is over how the Anarchist Federation envisage such a society coming into being – by a general refusal to work:

   “We will take our hands from the plough and the loom, rise up from our desks, cast off our boots and overalls, walk out of the hotels and restaurants, leave the factory and office, meeting with others to join in their refusal to work as they celebrate ours”.

This is a recipe for disaster. If (as this scenario assumes) people had reached the stage of wanting to abolish capitalism and its employment and wage labour, then a more sensible option would surely be to organise, not to stop working, i.e. to stop producing with all the consequences this would have on social life, but to keep production going under worker control while the transfer through political action of social control from the capitalist class to the community as a whole takes place.

Adam Buick

Editorial: Socialism and work (1986)

Editorial from the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Paul Lafargue wrote his well-known pamphlet The Right to be Lazy he chose this title to parody the demand, still current today, for "the right to work", In one sense he was right. The "right" to be employed by a capitalist is not something worth fighting for (quite apart from being unachievable). Given the demeaning and exploitative nature of employment it would indeed be better to demand the right not to work, the right to be lazy. In another sense, however, this title is misleading in that it suggests social life could continue without work, not in the sense of employment but in the sense of productive activity.

The sixties and seventies saw the growth and circulation of the idea of "the abolition of work", of a work-less society in which production would be fully automated leaving human beings free to engage in "play" or "leisure" or "creative activity" as it was variously put. This was reflected not only in the number of books, pamphlets and articles on this theme but also in the extraordinary popularity, mainly on the strength of its title, of Lafargue's pamphlet which went through edition after edition in nearly every West European language.

The spread of the idea of the abolition of work was positive in that it reflected the rejection, in practice also, of the capitalist "work ethic" by an increasing number of people. But it eventually became clear that the idea had not been fully worked out. Was it work as such — the expenditure of human physical and mental energy — that was being objected to, or was not the objection rather to work as employment, to work for an employer, to wage-labour? Was it not possible that the exercise of humans physical and mental faculties might even be a basic human need? Was, in any event, a fully-automated society a desirable objective? Would it be compatible with the need to conserve resources and to maintain a sustainable balance between human society and nature?

These reflections led some to conclude that the objection was indeed to wage-labour rather than to human productive activity as such and that the aim should not be to automate all productive activity but rather to achieve a society in which productive activity would become enjoyable and "creative". This was in fact the position taken up by Lafargue's contemporary, William Morris. And of course Fourier too had argued that work could and should be made attractive and that this was the answer to the questions, aimed at advocates of a free society, "what will be the incentive to work?" and "why would anybody want to work?".

Some of those who came to this conclusion then went to the opposite extreme and rejected not just the aim of full-scale automation but all modern technology, suggesting that the solution was to go back to a "simple life" based on handicraft production. But this is to make a fetish of "machines" and "technology", to attribute to them a consciousness and a will which, as inanimate objects, they don't have. Machines and technology don't and can't do anything on their own. The type of machines that are constructed and the use to which they are put depend on the social context. Machines in a society geared to maximising profits will be used differently (and will tend to be different) than in a society geared to serving human needs, including the need to engage in satisfying, creative activity.

Achieving the goal of turning the necessary task of production into creative, enjoyable activity does not have to involve rejecting all modern machinery and industrial techniques; it will be attained if production, both its aims and its methods, is brought under full human control. This can only be done through the abolition of property (private and state), production for sale and profit, and working for wages. In other words, through the establishment of socialist society, which wiIl not have to abandon industrial production, but adapt it to serving human needs.

A strong case can be made out for seeing satisfying, creative work not just as a desirable aim but as a vital human need. In any event some kind of activity, some physical and mental exercise, is necessary from a purely biological point of view since the chemical energy we acquire in the form of food must be used up in ways other than merely maintaining body temperature. So it is in the nature of humans to expend their physical and mental energies, to exercise their faculties, to work.

There is another reason why humans must expend physical and mental energy and that is to obtain from nature the food, clothing and shelter they need to survive. Since transforming nature to satisfy needs is the definition of production, this activity is productive activity and is a necessary human activity in any system of society, socialist as well as capitalist.

Etymologically, productive and creative should mean the same: the transformation of materials found in nature into something useful to human life. When something is produced by transforming nature something new, that didn't exist before, is created. Productive activity and creative activity should therefore be synonyms but it is a measure of the extent to which productive activity has come to be debased that we should be raising the demand that it be converted from the unsatisfying, externally-imposed burden that it is for the great majority of people into a satisfying, freely-chosen activity, that productive activity should once again become "creative".

The term "once again" is appropriate in this context since the evidence from the anthropologists is that in the original propertyless, classless - communist - condition of humanity productive activity was creative in the sense of being a satisfying, freely-chosen activity. It only became the unsatisfying, externally-imposed burden it has been for most people throughout history with the corning of propertied, class society where it became forced labour, an activity imposed by ruling classes to serve their needs.

In the sense that this original situation with regard to productive activity can be regarded as being the natural human condition then satisfying, freely-chosen productive activity ('creative activity'') can be regarded as being just as much a human need which human society ought to satisfy as food, clothing and shelter are - and the various class societies of history, including existing capitalist society, which denied this need must be regarded as being contrary to human nature and the kind of productive activity they have imposed (slave labour, serf labour, wage-labour) as unnatural, alienated labour.

This means that there cannot be any question of distinguishing in socialist society between a "realm of necessity" (of externally-imposed activity) and a "realm of freedom" (of freely-chosen activity), where the aim would be to reduce supposedly externally-imposed productive activity to a minimum in order to have a maximum of "free" time to engage in other activities. All time must be free, otherwise society will not have escaped from the tyranny of having to economise labour-time — which is precisely the economic logic of capitalism and what is meant by the term "externally-imposed". All productive activity, including the most routine, must become freely-chosen, work in a socialist society must be entirely voluntary.

In a society where humans are free to choose both the pace and the length of time they work, not only would the blind pressure to reduce to a minimum the labour-time needed to produce a product no longer exist, but it would become perfectly meaningless to measure the "value" or the "cost" of a product in terms of the labour-time socially necessary to make it. A society based on voluntary work would be free from such considerations. And if productive activity is enjoyable how can it be regarded as a cost?