Explanation of Work!

Further to posts on work...

In my mind work is associated with effort. To do more work is to require more effort.

An economic myth is that money repays work. This would mean that money repays effort. Yet we know perfectly well that the builder actually carrying the bricks is paid less than the foreman who just walsk around giving orders.

My father used to say that the extra pay was because of "responsibility". I'm sure I've argued already in this blog my doubts about this concept. Apparently the people who actually did the killing of the Nazi regime were not responsible for that killing - they were only following orders. What a dangerous concept!

Actually - morally at least - we are all absolutely responsible for everything we think or say or do. There is no escape from this. So what is "responsibility" if we are all always responsible by nature of morality? And, what is the extra money for?

We have also seen that the most responsible people are also the least responsible like with the state of the financial system at the moment. Wages are not linked to anything other than supply, demand and dishonesty.

So having eliminated wages from the concept of work, we return to work.

Looking at the increasing numbers of joggers on the streets in the UK these days the issue of work becomes rather poignant. There is more effort in these 10k runs than in a whole day pushing keys on a key board - yet we expect pay for one and nothing for the other!

Playing in a football team we expend vast amounts of energy and effort - yet we don't lament in the changing room after the game the amount of work we have just done.

Yet get asked to do half and hour of unpaid overtime and it becomes a burden.

Once again it looks like a case of relativity.

Working in a busy production line everyone is happy because the team works together. I once worked on a telephone mending line. There was a great work ethic in that company. We had a Jew, 4 English saxons, and a Carribean fellow. The Jew was the hardest working, the saxons came in next and the Carribean sitting next to his reggae music did about half the work of the saxons. Often the foreman set us targets after which we could go home. What was good was the he set those targets according to ability so while the Jew was give 100 phones to fix and the saxons 80 the Carribean was given only 40. Yet the group worked together enjoyed each others company and were a sound team. The "work" was not done by individuals but by the team, and it was a social organism that was created by the work. The only person who did nothing in fact (as usual) was the foreman who was also not part of the team! He spent his time talking to the staff because he was bored. Isn't this an essential experience for the "manager" that to oversee the work they cannot be a part of the work and are relegated to an antisocial position outside the group. Maybe this is what the money compensates. This is also another example of the SRH. If there was any work created it would have been by comparing the effort of the manager with the effort of the staff - this is where the concept of work seems to arise!

So before (in this blog) I have seen Work as an unpleasant part of Life, the effort to keep the ball of creation and decay rolling. The Sysyphine tragedy that is mortal existence. But this is to give is some ontological presumed status - to say that "work" actually exists. In this new view (like with everything) it depends upon a dialectic between effort and non-effort. The class system did not export the unwanted tasks to the slaves (and then "liberated" working class) as though those tasks were in there essence unwanted. Rather two groups of people emerged those whose "society" was generated around working structures and those whose society was generated around "capital". We call the "working" class working class only because there is a "capital" class. On some island with shared ownership there is neither the concept of "capital" nor the concept of "work". Work is Life, Work is Living, Work is Family, Work is Society. They are all one and the same, there is no concept of work. There is no concept of ownership.

I am reminded of a Nepali friend telling me that pre-development the communities in the hills used to each meet up at sunrise and head off to the fields for the days work. It was a great social event that everyone looked forward to. There was much talking and laughing and in the fields the people sang all day enjoying and celebrating what they were doing. There is much more work to this than any penpusher in an office on 10000 times the equivalent wage but while the penpusher sees his experience as work, for the field labourers it is just life and society.

In Do Botton's talk he touches on exactly this (still to read the book). That work can be an enriching part of life. Yet I would argue it actually is Life, except that it has been distorted through the lens of property, and now Life is fragmented in an economics that breaks everything up and disintegrates what once was a more fluid and less distinct society. What we call free-time is clearly no different from what we call work-time - but the labels have arisen because the capitalists "own" our actions in work-time while we "own" our actions in free-time. We experience this notion of self in a dialectic with capitalist. This is where the concept of working class comes from. When we are on holiday and we feel "free" this feeling exists only in dialectic with capitalist. Private and Public likewise. None of these things actual "exist" they are created because opposing things (with no existence) are brought together (and made to exist) in a dialectic.

I'm seeing again that it truly can be said that all existence is relative-existence.

So my previous rejection of "work" has some sense to it. I am not averse to work - I enjoy helping my mother (or friends) in the garden, I enjoy jogging and cycling and walking, I enjoy writing this blog and trying to make sense of a world that I refuse to be bullied into thinking makes any sense (and I refuse to be cynically resigned to the belief that it can't make sense), I enjoy cooking, I enjoy my GCSE tuition etc etc. I enjoy these things because they are Life not work. What I do not enjoy is "work", that is providing effort for capitalists. And now I understand why! Because it is vis-a-vis capitalists that our efforts get the meaning and feeling of work! And if free effort is actual Life then effort brought to bear by capital is Death! Rather shocking result but isn't that the killing feeling of spending ones life in the slavery of capital ownership? Isn't that what we all complain about and get drunk at weekends, and take long holidays and try to get rich to get away from?