I: Does work work?
James Livingston, historian and author of No More Work, August 2017
What matter the colour of the collar around a man’s neck, if the chains linked to them were identical?
Steven Erikson, House of Chains
I first came across James Livingston when I read his 2016 essay at Aeon, titled Fuck Work. It challenged the assumptions we make about work: the necessity of work or how it shapes our character. When I started doing research for Does Work Work in the summer of last year, I came back to that piece and moved on from there. It was my square one.
James Livingston describes himself as an old-fashioned socialist and advocates against the idea of full employment — a proposition that would terrify the political left and right alike. The core of the argument, however, stems not from a political statement but from a sobering observation of the labor market. Most developed countries have all but eliminated unemployment from their economies and… accomplished nothing in the fight against the growing inequality. James Livingston argues that our belief in the value of work failed. We’re all employed but so many people can’t make ends meet regardless of how hard they work. I reached out to him to ask how we put ourselves in this position and what we can do to dig ourselves out. We discussed the point of work itself. And as much as I’d like to tell you we arrived at an uplifting conclusion, that would be a lie.
The present of work is bleak. The future, I’m afraid, is uncertain.
Wojtek Borowicz: Work is so important to us. We judge people based on their jobs. We’re told to go to college not out of intellectual curiosity, but to be more employable. Our daily lives are built around the office schedule. How did work become so fundamental?
James Livingston: Historically, work was not a pleasure. It was an imposition. If you worked, it meant you were a slave or a serf. You belonged to your master. But then in the 16th and 17th century, with the Reformation, work became the means to salvation and liberation. People could think of their working lives not as deduction from their real life but as realization of self.
So the role of work in modern society is an extension of the Protestant ethic?
Absolutely. We live with it even if we’re not Protestants or even religious. We still think that work is the means by which we become ourselves and we realize our desires. But we are at the point where we have to say: enough. This doesn’t work as a way of realizing ourselves, so let’s find another way.
Is this part of your argument against full employment?
Work is at an end because it doesn’t serve its purpose anymore. If the labor market cannot provide jobs on one hand and cannot provide a justifiable distribution of income on the other, then work becomes a problem, not a solution. Why put people to pointless work — just because it leads to an income which in the end doesn’t meet their needs anyway? Why does anybody want a job — all the jobs are shitty! Do you really believe full employment is the solution?
Politicians seem to believe that. Left or right, they always promise job creation. Is this a lie? Should we expect them to offer an alternative to work instead?
Look at the employment figures. Who wants to restore employment? Come on, unemployment is below 5%! Full employment is here but nobody can make a living. Everybody is employed but nobody can make a fucking living. We’re all working our asses off but we can’t get by. Now what? But nobody is asking that question and nobody will have an answer when it is asked. This is what I’m talking about with the breakdown of the labor market.
I think politics are moot for the time being. Politicians are so removed from our world that it just seems to me pointless to approach them.
What makes you think we cannot keep adding those shitty jobs indefinitely? We’ve been doing that for decades, both with blue and white collar work.
I think we can. I don’t see an impediment to adding silly jobs indefinitely, of course we can do that. The question I’m trying to ask is: is that what we want to do? We are at the point of our civilization and of our intellectual development that we can ask this question. Do we want to work ourselves to death? And while we work ourselves to death, do we want to destroy the planet? Because this work ethic is a component of the drive to grow, which I think means planetary extinction.
In your essay for Aeon, you called work a social scaffolding. In Poland, where I come from, we have sayings like work makes you noble and no work is shameful. With work regarded as the core of human character, where do you even start taking this scaffolding down?
Oh man, what a problem. It’s unanswerable. How do you say: work defines your life, you want it to define your life, but it can’t in the future and it won’t. But what are we gonna do if we don’t have work? That’s the real question and I don’t have the answer. In my book I asked if we’re gonna just sit around at Starbucks all day with our laptops open. I don’t have answers, I just have questions.
But work is still an element of identity to many people. Where do they turn if there is no more work?
Look, you’re at a party and somebody asks you what you do. I don’t know about you, but I’m offended. It doesn’t matter what you do. It’s how you behave, how you act, where you are. I know It’s really hard to free ourselves from the idea that our occupations define us but that’s where we are. We just can’t identify ourselves in terms of occupation anymore. In part because these occupations are disappearing and in part because we’re so mobile between them. That’s a historical opportunity, that’s a social possibility, and that’s a political opening. And all of those are good things. Let’s stop defining ourselves in terms of occupations, let’s think of ourselves in other ways.
Surely many people are happy with the ways things are. Global corporations keep turning more profit. CEOs make billions. There’s still demand and high pay for developers, bankers, lawyers. Why would they want to change things?
They won’t want to, so… fine, fuck them. Who cares what they think? Are they gonna be on board? I don’t know. Some of them, maybe. It doesn’t matter. There’s no correlation between effort and reward anymore and that’s just true, there’s no arguing about that. What we have to do is fulfill the agenda that Occupy Wall Street articulated in 2011. Let’s take this to its logical conclusion. If the executives and CEOs say oh gee, you can’t do that because it’s bad… well, okay, we can put up with that.
Everybody is employed but nobody can make a fucking living. We’re all working our asses off but we can’t get by.
You mention the lack of correlation between effort and reward. But that’s not a new thing. Has it gotten worse over the last decades?
If you study the late 19th century, that correlation was very different. There was actually a convergence of income between labor and capital. That’s one thing. Has it worsened in our time? Yes it has. Now, the question is why. My guess is that the breakdown of the labor market, the disappearance of work is to blame. The labor market has broken down completely and I think that’s how to explain the extraordinary increase in income inequality.
What’s your take on gig economy, the Ubers and TaskRabbits of the world, giving people tools to take gigs rather than offering full employment?
It’s part of the breakdown of the labor market that I’m talking about. Think about it this way. The basic commodity in our post-industrial society is information and I believe all of us would agree on that. And yet look at it: it’s free. You just get it. The decommodification of information — that includes music, movies, and all sorts of things — means we have reached a stage at the development of capitalism that means the end of capitalism. Because if you de-commodify labor, if labor has no value, then… what does that mean about where we are in the development of capitalism? I think it means we’re at the end. I know that I sound utopian when I say it, but I think this decommodification of the most basic items, the most basic necessities of the post-industrial society is crucial and we have to think about it. We have to say that maybe we’re in the same kind of transition that people experienced in the 16th, 17th, and 18th century — the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Where are we going? What are we headed for? Nobody says socialism anymore because it’s embarrassing and old-fashioned but that’s the question I want to explore.
So if we’re at the end of capitalism, what do you hope comes next?
Well, shoot, I’d say I’m an old-fashioned socialist. A very, very old-fashioned socialist. I think that liberty requires equality and therefore we have to forge a society in which equality is a condition of liberty. And as Marx made it clear in the Communist Manifesto, the condition of the liberation of each is the condition of the liberation of all. We’re already a pseudo-socialist society. 20% of household income in this country is already derived from transfers from the government. We know what’s it like to be on the dole. The real question is: can you imagine getting something for nothing? That’s the problem we have. This psychological condition is going to determine how we navigate the future. We’re not yet equipped to say: of course, why not. Most of us think that no, you’ve got to work hard because otherwise what you get is illegitimate. Maybe someday we’ll get over it and then maybe someday we can move on.
You’re speaking from the perspective of the American labor market. But is the crisis of work confined to the United States or is it a global phenomenon?
I would say two things. First, the United States is always the harbinger of the future. Where we are now is where every other place is going to be in a generation, or in ten years, or in five. We’re not the exception. We’re the canary in the mineshaft. That’s one thing. The other is that it’s simply not true that the displacement of labor and all that follows is confined or specific to the United States. If you look at the labor in China or in Latin America, what you will find is just that: socially necessary labor is being displaced from the production of goods. In the labor market and in policymaking, China is the perfect example. The Chinese manufacturers are installing labor-saving machinery at such a rate that the demand for labor has tapered off there. Now what? What do you do with that?
If jobs can’t take up our time, then what? It’s not a question that is specific to the United States. It’s the question that China is asking, that India is asking, and that we’re all asking.
