On work and jobs

Austin Michaels
Jul 21, 2017 · 4 min read

A Twitter thread by economist and Bloomberg writer Noah Smith seems to have touched off a small but spirited debate about the value of work among the policy literati of the broader Twitter left. In his thread, Smith argues, among other things, that the contemporary American left as expressed in the tendency of democratic socialism has lost its love for work.

Smith juxtaposes what he sees as the central argument of democratic socialism (“Tax the rich, give to the poor”) with the central premise of New Deal liberalism (“Work and good pay for those that are able”). In the course of his argument, Smith comes to conclude that the shift away from the centrality of work to a focus on concerns of distribution is indicative of an elite, formally educated conception of work itself. He argues that the comparatively well-off, educated professionals that make up a rather large part of the social democratic/democratic socialist left have lost a respect for the intrinsic value of work due to being overqualified or otherwise feeling that their jobs do not make use of their talents or impart meaning to their lives.

Smith concludes that the tax-the-rich-give-to-the-poor premise of democratic socialism, when advocated by richer-than-average formally educated professionals, ultimately condescends to the working poor, who would rather earn their living than take handouts.

Fellow believer of economics Matthew Stoller furthered Smith’s argument and asserted that work is an essential component of American culture, and that ditching the primacy of work amounts to an attack on American culture itself.

Neither Smith nor Stoller are wrong on the limited historical and cultural claims of their arguments. The New Deal really was focused on providing work, not only as a means to stimulate the economy and provide income to the poor, but also as a moral good in and of itself. Americans really do hold work in uniquely high regard, and it really would be a massive change to American culture to disentangle the bare idea of work from its moral and ethical connotations.

But to argue that moving away from a focus on work represents a blindspot for the socialist left betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the theory and political project of anti-capitalism.

Marx makes a clear distinction in his writing that is nearly as foundational to Marxist theory as the notion of class society. This distinction is between, though Marx doesn’t put it exactly this way, work and jobs. For Marx, work is the defining activity of humankind as a species. Humans are unique among animals in being able to shape the world around them and the circumstances of their life, and to Marx this represented something essential about human nature and existence.

Marx contrasts this essentially human activity with wage labor, which he argues actually removes people from their own sense of humanity. Understanding wage labor, i.e. jobs, as a transaction between two people (the owner, who purchases labor-power, and the worker, who sells it) is absolutely essential to Marxist thought. It is by transforming the essential species-activity of work into a mere market transaction that people are alienated from their own humanity.

Not only is a worker removed from the fruits of their labor (the product and profits), but the worker is estranged from the work itself. In being compelled to sell their labor in order to survive, the worker is forced to spend 8 or 10 or 12 or 14 hours a day to ensure their survival until the next day. Even though these hours may be spent creating something — whether it be a wooden chair or a website — the worker is working with the purpose of getting paid.

Thus, wages are both and ends and a means. They are the goal towards which the worker is working and they are the means by which the worker can survive to come back to work the next day.

So, when Smith and Stoller argue that democratic socialists make a mistake in de-prioritizing work, they make the critical error of conflating work and jobs. Probably no one would argue that work, i.e. the actual act of doing something productive (in the loosest sense), is not worthwhile. In fact, it’s quite common for socialists to ponder what we would do with our time if pursuing the financial means of survival didn’t take up so much of it.

What socialists are saying is that there is no inherent value in jobs. Sure, providing jobs for people is a great short-term measure to alleviate the pressures of capitalist society, but so long as work is only carried out in the fulfillment of a market transaction, it is wrong to say that it carries intrinsic moral value.

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founder and editor-in-chief of medium.com/@austinjmichaels

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