In my incredible hectic lifestyle I had the task today of clearing up my cousins garage for a tenant. I did a good job I think shrinking the whole garage down to a third and creating a lot of neat space, well delineated for the tenant. I even swept the floor.
This I did without any payment at all and yet it never crossed my mind to get a reward for the job. The point was that the tenant needs some space to store bikes and so I have made some space to store bikes. Really jobs are no more complex than this. So why do they get so complex?
The standard argument is "cheats". I may end up doing a lot of work and some people may do no work and just enjoy the fruits of my labour. In a way does this really matter? It may matter if I did a lot of work and saw none of the fruits - this might even jeopardise my life. But apart from extremes it doesn't really matter. I think the real complexities lie elsewhere.
The garage is in Richmond, which is where I am staying at the moment. A job like clearing out a garage I felt is rather "beneath" me in a place like this. My cousin has a house cleaner and a gardener; this is more their type of activity - I am related to the capitalist class. Now the cleaner and gardener get a good rate of pay so in one sense I am even lower than them in that I don't get a reward. But in my way of thinking, working in exchange for things lacks any grace and amounts to being bought. Only the free individual works without pay because they haven't been bought by the capitalists. They work entirely for the sake of the job they do and nothing more or less. If the job isn't worth doing, then no amount of money can buy that job. This is my own take on freedom and higher class, but maybe that is just me.
I have seen this idea of "that job is beneath" me in the work place. The normal argument is that a skilled worker wastes his time doing a menial task that could be done by anyone and removes him from the task that only he can perform. This is entirely true, but few jobs are so time consuming that there is no time to shoulder menial tasks and the real point is that there is an enormous difference in not doing a menial task because you don't have time to do it, and not doing it because it is "beneath" you. It is this latter sense which makes work much more complex.
Working in the garage today was what I call work. It feels natural and makes one happy to do it. There is a direct and simple relationship between the worker and the task. I was given my instructions by my cousin, I understood what was required and have done what was required as best I understood it so that after the work the situation is better suited to peoples' needs than before. This is the true and proper nature of work. There is simply no concept of reward in the proper understanding of labour. There is only the state of people before and after.
It may be that because it is my cousin who I have always known that there is a secure reward. But I know there isn't. I have helped by cousin before and reward is never an issue. I certainly don't know the tenant or get any of the rent. This argument doesn't work. Working for a complete stranger shouldn't be any different. The reason for the work is simply that things will be better after it is done. What more reason to do something than that it will make things better? Isn't money a bastard version of this because with money we think we can make our life better - but really it was the work that we (and others) did that made things better - the money doesn't actually "do" anything. This would be yet another of my criticisms of capitalism that the quality of work will always decline because people work for money not the goods, and goods are created for profit not for their own value. It is a form of inflation as what we can buy with our money becomes progressively less valuable. In medieval times we could buy highly skilled carpentry, now we spend our money down Ikea.
So in a very simple way today I felt what labour really is and allowing myself to do this really shows up what is wrong with the system of labour that we have adopted. It goes so deep into the mess of economic thinking that we have that to see the truth really does requiring throwing away everything that has been thought on the subject in 3 or 4 centuries if not more.
Just adding some more. The proper mode of labour is actually "giving". When we work we give something. How may people who have negotiated a good salary consider what they are doing as giving? If we didn't give something how is there anything to buy! When we buy something we are accepting what someone else has made for us. This is the supply led economy and it is something that we have forgotten about in this Keynesian climate of demand led - the climate that has informed the massive government stimulus' of late which have sort to encourage people to spend and therefore hopefully encourage people to work. In actual fact (in this analysis here) this is exactly the wrong way around. It is human giving which drives the economy: this is the nature of work. The economists Veblen even goes so far as to say that capitalist economics is designed to limit the amount of giving the proletariat can do so that Capitalists can control the flow of goods and so maintain power. I didn't accept this when I first read it but now think it is a better examination of Capitalism than the view that Capitalism stimulates productivity. Humans give - that is what we do.
Now this is not new the very same thing exists in much, much older texts. Both the Bible and Bhagavad Gita remind us that we did not make ourselves and so we can't own what we do. In the terms of these books God owns what we do and what we do we do for God. What we do is a gift already because it never came from us in the first place! This is why when we work we give and anything else doesn't make sense. Another important thing in ancient books is the error of usury and lending at interest. As I understand it this is the single biggest cause of poverty in the world and also the biggest break on the economic development of people and countries in debt. A far cry from the dogma that lending leads to economic growth!
Thinking further this comes as no suprise. The vast amount of work done on this planet is actually done as "gift" already. Economy has only managed to suck up into the trade system a tiny amount of very specialised work. Parents for example who provide one of the most important services do so without reward. It is true that people used to have children to look after them in old age - but only after they themselves had already looked after their own parents, whether this is a reward or a basic necessity of getting old is open to debate. Then there are all the social interactions from giving a mate a car lift, to lending a friend some money. It is only mass produced traded goods that show up in GDP which is only a special type of "work" and one that I am saying has been divorced from its true nature.
===CONTRADICTION
1.0 I make the point that the modern economic system creates a situation where people work for things that are made by machines ... in other words they labouring for something that is made automatically, or which is surplus through efficiency.
2.0 Yet here I make the point that labour in its pure nature operates without reflection on reward... the labour and what it creates is the purpose of that labour.
3.0 OK not a contradiction... the point then is that true labour does not claim the fruit for itself. It does of course pay especial attention to the fruit of the labour to ensure it is the right fruit and a good fruit for purpose, but that purpose is a general interconnected one that may include the self but does not seek exclusive detached rights over the labour. It is this thinking of cutting the world into isolated organs and units, hours of work and individual rewards which misses the point of labour, people and the world.
A search for happiness in poverty. Happiness with personal loss, and a challenge to the wisdom of economic growth and environmental exploitation.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
"The Jewish Fallacy" OR "The Inauthenticity of the West"
I initially thought to start up a discussion to formalise what I was going to name the "Jewish Fallacy" and I'm sure there is ...
-
The classic antimony is between : (1) action that is chosen freely and (2) action that comes about through physical causation. To date no ...
-
Well that was quite interesting ChatGPT can't really "think" of anything to detract from the argument that Jews have no clai...
-
There are few people in England I meet these days who do not think we are being ruled by an non-democratic elite. The question is just who t...
No comments:
Post a Comment