Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other philosophical and socio-political questions regarding Work, Life, and Death. I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey.
Episode 21: The Work Ethic, Archeology and Genealogy
The Problem of Work part 2.
Okay, it feels a little strange to be getting here over 20 episodes in, but let’s talk about the work ethic. Now, I know I said this episode was going to be about my reading of Weeks and what I propose is this movement from subject to victim of work, but, surprise, we’re not there yet. As I got into writing this one, I realized there was a lot more to say about the background of the argument and this was getting really long. I’ll also note I have another happy hour queued up, so that will be arriving soon – we haven’t had the chance to sit and talk yet, so, there’s no spoilers I can tease there – Weeks part 3 will be on this ‘subject to victim’ movement and the refusal Weeks lays out through chapter 2. Today we’re looking at the background theory and the move from the traditionalist to Protestant work ethic.
I mentioned last episode that we need to perform a genealogy of the work ethic if we’re to understand the problem and have any hopes of overcoming it. To keep to the text though, Weeks notes that Weber’s analysis provides an “archeology” of the ethic. So, I guess the first question is, is this just a semantic difference? Well, no. It connects to specific methodological and critical traditions. On the one hand, with a genealogical method, we’re talking about critical theory of becoming in the tradition of Nietzsche, Bloch, and Deleuze, whereas with Archeology we’re talking about a positivist, materialist approach – think geology and the principle of superposition; as you dig deeper, the layers explain what came first. That which is on top is the most recent, and everything below it came beforehand, and this applies to every layer – so we’re talking authors like Weber and Marx. Without getting into all of those specifics now (I mean, that’s kinda going to be the whole point of the next arc), we can simplify the difference by looking at the theoretical bridge between the two methods; Michel Foucault. Foucault, in The Order of Things lays out his methodology for analyzing the history of ideas archaeologically. And by the time his work evolves to focus on power (he’ll also later argue his work was always about power) his method moves to genealogical.
In writing on Foucault’s methodological shift from archeology to genealogy, notes Dr. Muzaffar Karim, Assistant Professor in English, University of Kashmir, in an article for the Journal of Research in Humanities and Social Science, “genealogy is the aim of the analysis and the archaeology is the material and methodological framework.”
Weber provides us with the archeology, the material history of the work ethic; what Weeks is doing, and what we need to do, is genealogical. Weeks clarifies in this regard, “In keeping with this line of interpretation, I will treat Weber’s famous argument about the historical relationship between capitalist development and religious belief less as a strictly historical claim than as a genealogical device.” If we’re to have any chance at overcoming the work ethic (and the political imagination problems Fisher speaks of in Capitalist Realism) imagining the postwork something-yet-to-come requires a genealogical understanding of the ethic. Where it came from, how it came to be, how we’ve come to be so attached to it, as well as the role it plays in subject formation and where it appears to be leading us. We need to be able to think both backwards and forwards. And, of course, the Foucauldian question of power, who benefits from workers believing in and adhering to the work ethic?
I was in a Publix the other day and while debating the cost of by the pound vs by the bag potatoes – as a good Irish-American, I opted for potatoes in bulk – I overheard a couple of guys, possibly supervisors or department leads based on their attire, complaining about their employees’ or coworkers’ work ethic, or lack thereof. What I noticed though, in what I caught of their conversation, was mostly complaint over a perceived lack of teamwork (and the inescapable ‘this generation just doesn’t want to work’, ironic in this case as neither of these guys could have possibly been over 30). I found this surprising given Publix has a reputation of having a labor market edge on their competitors in terms of profit sharing at all levels. Further though, I don’t think either of these guys were actually familiar with what the work ethic is. Their problem seemed to be a perception of unfairness, a personal slight against them by their coworkers, and not a lack of commitment to salvation through work; which, I’ll note, they both themselves displayed in casually putting up produce while complaining about work.
I noted briefly in the last episode that Weeks notes that it takes more than force, state violence (police violence to breakup protests and strikes and threats of imprisonment, for example) to commit workers to willingly spending their lifetimes at work. She reiterates here that it requires a “blend of coercion and choice, necessity and desire, habit and intention.” The vast majority of us have no choice but to work to earn wages with which to afford the basic necessities of survival, and so, at best, hope to find work that we enjoy, or at least tolerate, and wages that secure some level of comfort and prosperity, or some sliding scale between the two (work-life balance). But, why do we tolerate compulsory work without the constant and explicit threat of force? Putting aside for the moment social issues of wealth and poverty, ‘haves and have-nots,’ we, especially in the US, live in a society of abundance; abundance of wealth, abundance of things, abundance of cultivatable and habitable land – they say in the south you can’t throw a rock without hitting a church, but, in Charlotte, on the off chance you miss the church, you’ll likely hit a parking lot or a golf course. It does have an abundance of trees, that part’s nice – except for the living hell of early spring pollen spread, affectionately referred to as the micro-season, ‘the pollening’ which blankets everything in yellow and sends folks like me, with allergies, stockpiling kitchen staples and sheltering in place til the rains come.
Notes Weeks, “One of the forces that manufactures such consent is the official morality – that complex of shifting claims, ideas, and values – known as the work ethic.”
Now, on it’s face, this seems like a week claim in a pluralistic, heterogenous society. Where are the counter claims of moral relativism? The debates over virtue ethics, consequentialism, religious dogma, etc? Ethics, as such, has been a matter of debate, in the West, at least since Socrates. Why is the work ethic somehow privileged and nigh immune to criticism, in the general public? Going back to Livingston, no one on either the Right or Left sides of the aisle in Congress are debating the validity of work itself. How did Work become some kind of ethical First Principle?
Writes weeks, quote
I want to advance three general claims… first, we cannot take on the structures of work without also challenging the ethics on which their legitimacy depends; second, despite its longevity, the ethical discourse of work is nonetheless vulnerable to such a challenge; and third… because of its particular significance to post-Taylorist processes, [the claim that] our “insubordination to the work ethic” [here she’s citing Berardi’s essay “Anatomy of Autonomy”] is now more potentially subversive than ever before.
We’ll get to Weber and the archeology of the work ethic in a just a second, but I want to linger on this passage from Berardi that Weeks is referencing, as I think just dropping ‘insubordination’ in passing, for someone that hasn’t read Berardi or other Autonomists, is potentially a little weak. Berardi is referring to political action on a scale far greater than simply not following your boss’ instructions.
I recently discovered a site hosted by Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, that holds a collection of “debates on the centrality of work” called For Work /Against Work at onwork.edu.au (I’ll link to it in the show-notes). One, or several, of the arguments cites the following passage from “Anatomy of Autonomy” as the “key passage” of the text – or at least the key passage the debate referenced (the citation doesn’t back-link to the specific debate, just the collection in general), “Autonomy involves liberation from work, and suppression of the general formal conditions of capitalist domination.” The central problem here isn’t work or wages per se, it’s the work society, the de facto requirement to work in order to simply survive, let alone thrive, wherein the only alternative to work (unless you’re one of the fortunate few to have been born ‘independently wealthy’ and freed from work by the virtue of happenstance) is death or destitution.
Sidenote, if you’re citing a document you found online – I’m looking at the Macquarie University entry author – please check your pagination. You confuse people if you drop the wrong page. I’m guessing we were looking at the same document scan I found online, republished by e-flux. It’s not the greatest scan, it’s a little cockeyed. The page above the quoted passage shows “68,” but it’s actually 168. And to whomever reduplicated the same article for libcom.org, without sources, good on you for at least identifying the translators, but come on, I get it, screw the man and the capitalist pay to play, but cite your friggin sources. Others may come along who actually want to read the book you’re copying essays from. Help them help everyone else. We’re all supposed to be in this together, right? Books do more than provide isolated essays for you to fill your online libraries. Sure, sometimes it’s for the money, but authors and publishers, especially publishers like semiotext(e) that provide a platform for leftist thinkers and activists, typically print anthologies and collect essays together because of the work they perform taken together. [sigh] I’ll get off my soapbox now.
I think, to hammer home the political extent to which Berardi is invoking insubordination, we need to turn to Berardi, so, I’m going to cite, in full, the passage Weeks is referring to. In his conclusion to “Anatomy of Autonomy,” Berardi, writing then under the alias “Bifo” (B-I-F-O) – this was a time in Italy without free speech and progressive and leftist activists, like the Autonomists, were being imprisoned for subversion and other treasonous crimes, Berardi notes, quote
…the forms and the politics involved in this process [the production of Knowledge] are still entirely unknown to us. That is to say, we have not elaborated any theory of “transition” (to use that horrible and imprecise word). The only theory of power and transition that we possess, the theory to which we must constantly refer— perhaps in order to deviate from it, though always remaining in some ways entrapped within it— is the Leninist one. Essentially, the Leninist theory can be formulated as follows: the proletariat must take possession of the State, bolster the machinery of the State and the domination of the State's will over society in order to abolish capitalism (only afterward will the extinction of the State be possible). We have had the dream of realizing this program on our minds for fifty years now, from the time of “war communism”, from the time of the NEP [the New Economic Policy of the Soviet Union, under Lenin, 1921-28], through the period of Stalinism, up to the Chinese experience, up to the awful reality of present-day socialism. Capitalism has been neither abolished nor transformed, but rather has become ossified, inasmuch as the State, which ought to incarnate the will to supersede, has instead been nothing more than the reification of those relationships of production inherited from capitalism. In other words, the State has represented a terrorist-style forced recapitulation of the existing modes of production, a throttling of every possible move toward autonomy in the social system.
Thus the time now seems ripe to formulate an hypothesis concerning the “transition”. The hypothesis which we advance as the premise for further theoretical work is an exact reversal of Lenin’s theory. That is, we seek to reify an “ignor-action” toward the State” (“ignoraction”: adapted from the German ignoraktion — an action which ignores, does not recognize those formal boundaries which the State imposes), to reify an abolition of the mechanism of State control and to reify a political formalization of the alliance between mobile strata of the labor force and dynamic capitalism, between capitalistic, post-industrial, electronic development and proletarian insubordination to the work ethic.
Personally, I find it both interesting and troubling that Berardi’s comments in 1977, at the dawn of political neoliberalism epitomized by Thatcher and Reagan, are just as relevant today. I previously noted that I found it difficult to peg Trump economically. Well, the past couple of weeks have highlighted that his administration, and especially Elon Musk’s influence, are simply neoliberalism on meth. They’re implementing at break-neck speed what Thatcher and Reagan sought to accomplish; the complete dismantling of the federal government in order to privatize the services the government once provided. Abdicating the role of the government to provide for the general welfare of the people in all areas; health, education, transportation, infrastructure, emergency services, veterans’ affairs, even defense and military preparedness. Trump is enacting this same Leninist agenda in regards to the State, but on behalf of the wealthy capitalist class; taking possession of the State, bolstering the machinery of the State and the domination of the State's will over society in order to abolish plurality and dissent, and through which seeking the extinction of the State, and transfer of power to the rich.
We’ll be coming back to Berardi, and this particular essay, closer to the end of the year (maybe next year) for a discussion of Knowledge and Power. I think the way Berardi sets up the bourgeois/capitalist production of Knowledge (“to modify the epistemological”) and the role of knowledge in both the revolution and status quo, pairs particularly well with Mckenzie Wark’s analysis of the information economy in Capital is Dead. Is This Something Worse?
Getting back to the text at hand, what Weeks is keen to point out though, and why we’re about to dig into Weber, is that the requirement of the work society, the coercion of work in the face of death or destitution, is insufficient, by itself, to explain why we’re not openly revolting against work en masse right now. I am also concerned that reactionary sentiment against Trump will play into deepening commitment to the work society. While the far right is now co-opting the methods of Revolutionary Leninism in order to consolidate power, it’s also, unfortunately, highly likely quote-Moderate Democrats will swing further to the traditional grounds of Conservative Republicans. Already they’ve demonstrated their counterargument to Trump relies on the policies of Ronald Reagan; and some of his greatest hits including massive tax cuts for the wealthy, in part paid for by redefining student loans as taxable “income,” a legacy of intensified air and water pollution as a direct result of the Reagan/Gorsuch EPA’s intentional failure to both administer Congressionally passed laws and enact Court ordered remediations while deregulating environmental protections and defunding EPA programs (and a quick honorable mention to the “mishandling” of the then $1.6 Billion Superfund, intended to fund massive scale disaster recovery projects resulting from things like industrial pollution and strip mining, in order to protect the interests of the responsible businesses and sway political campaigns in Reagan’s backyard of California, done such that was so blatant and egregious that Anne Gorsuch (Justice Neil Gorsuch’s mom) was forced to resign in disgrace), and lets not forget the arming and combat training of future dictators and terrorists, including one Osama Bin Laden, as expendable pawns in anti-Communist proxy wars. [sigh] But, we’re maybe getting a little off track.
Okay, Weber’s archeology of the ethic in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and as Weeks refers to this process, the primitive construction of subjectivities.
The work ethic, Weeks notes, is, per Weber, an “unintended consequence of the Reformation,” the treatment of work ‘as if it were a calling.’ “This new Ethic,” says Weeks, “entailed an important shift in expectations about what work is or should be, and a distinctive conception of what it means to be a worker. What characterized the Protestant ethos in particular was an ethical sanction for and the psychological impetus to work; ascetic Protestantism preached the moral import of constant and methodical productive effort on the part of self-disciplined individual subjects. … The infraction of its rules,” this is Weeks citing Weber now, “‘is treated not as foolishness, but as forgetfulness of duty.’ … One should set oneself to a lifetime of ‘organized worldly labor’ as if (and not, as we will see, precisely because) one were called to it by God.”
Asceticism, because some may not be familiar with it and this idea is going to keep coming up, especially when we get to Nietzsche (who has a deeply antagonistic, but problematic relationship, with it), is a praxis, typically religious, that The Reward (enlightenment, nirvana, unity with God, heaven, inner peace, what have you…) is achieved through rigorous to extreme self-denial, the denial of all things sensual, pleasurable, taste, comfort, joy, sexual pleasure, intoxicants, even something as simple as exercise, if that exercise is done for any purpose or form outside of the particular religious dogma’s precepts, and potentially including self-flagellation, starvation, isolation… It’s like stoicism, but on steroids. A key figure here being Arthur Schopenhauer.
And, since we’re talking archeology of ideas, here’s a brief survey.
Take Seneca, Roman stoic philosopher, (the Ancients all wind up getting grouped together as “ancient,” but we’re about 400 years after Socrates now), and not the ‘founder’ of stoicism, but writing in that tradition, and his approach is more of a praxis of stoicism. He’s not doing epistemology, but ethics, and advocating ‘the good life’ via stoicism, in terms of coming to know one’s own irrationality (emotions) and replacing them with rational responses. There’s no such thing as moderation here, emotions must be replaced by reason. Notes Katja Vogt, writing for the SEP (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), “As Seneca puts it, will the ideal agent not be angry if he sees his father murdered and his mother raped? Yes, he argues, we should react, but not with emotions and emotional action (revenge), no matter how curbed they might be through reflection. The idea of “moderate emotions,” says Seneca, is about as absurd as the idea of “moderate insanity.” Emotions are irrational; there is no taming of the irrational, precisely because it is irrational. Emotions thus cannot be moderated—they must be replaced with rational responses.” (Sidenote, if Seneca’s thoughts here piss you off, I mean, even Spock eventually came to realize this level of anti-emotionality was itself illogical, and I suspect Seneca could have benefitted from speaking to a therapist, had any existed then, I highly recommend checking out Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion, if you’re interested in looking at how emotions shape individual and collective bodies, both critically and, potentially, positively.)
The ascetics take this even further, from aiming to subjugate one’s emotions to one’s reason, to denying all affective responses, good and ill.
Now with Schopenhauer we get a specifically Christian asceticism, with arguably Buddhist roots – granted, arguably, Christianity itself has Buddhist roots. Given the time and place of Jesus’ life, it’s unlikely he wouldn’t have come across people familiar with Buddhist teachings that thus likely informed his own. For Schopenhauer, much like Buddhism, suffering is caused by desire, and so the answer to the problem of suffering is the elimination of desire, specifically the Denial of the Will to Life.
Now, Schopenhauer isn’t advocating literal suicide, his paradoxical argument places the individual will-to-live in conflict with a transcendent humanity. Essentially, Schopenhauer’s goal is to un-eat the apple and go back to Eden, transcendent humanity liberated from the evils of individuality, knowledge, and desire. Referring to the SEP again, “When the ascetic transcends human nature, the ascetic resolves the problem of evil: by removing the individuated and individuating human consciousness from the scene, the entire spatio-temporal situation within which daily violence occurs is removed.” Personally, I think Schopenhauer is more dystopian than utopian, but he is arguing for a utopian society in which there is no violence as violence is caused by want. Rather than addressing desire (lack) economically, as Marx would, or psychologically, as Lacan would, or politically, as Rawls would, Schopenhauer’s hope is to eliminate desire itself from the human psyche.
Nietzsche we’re not going to get into just yet, suffice to say he’s opposed to Schopenhauer’s negative Will to Life, diagnosing Schopenhauer’s asceticism as a disease of humanity and advocating instead for desire and a Will to Power to overcome suffering and resistance; one of his great villains being the ascetic priest the derives power and profit from convincing their subjects both of their inherent weakness and sinfulness as well as laying them solely to blame for their inescapable weakness and thus trapping them in their guilt.
I’ll also cite the following brief poem from Nietzsche, since it’s about Seneca and stoicism. This is 34, from “Jest, Ruse, and Revenge” from the beginning of Der fröhliche Wissenschaft, (The Gay Science, or the ‘joyful’ science, depending on your translation and/or DEI censorship), and, um, please forgive my Latin pronunciation, or mispronunciation, however this goes. I have never claimed to be proficient at Latin or poetry.
Seneca et hoc Genus omne (Seneca and this whole genre)
They write and write (quite maddening me)
Their “sapient” twaddle airy
As if ‘twere primum scribere,
Deinde philosophari
In English, ‘write first, then philosophize.’ Nietzsche here criticizing stoicism not unfamiliar to my own criticisms of analytic philosophy as, well, mental masturbation.
Weber’s target is this ascetic Protestant ethic, that, it is only in becoming a worker, in one’s very being, the ascetic denial of self and dogmatic commitment to work through which one has any chance of being moral and achieving salvation – we’ll get to salvation sometime later when we get to Weber’s text itself, he does go into detail regarding different Protestant practices, Lutheranism, Calvinism, Methodism, etc., in which there are different versions of how to achieve salvation, and, specifically, Calvinist predestination and work as remediating anxiety as regards uncertainty of whether you’re one of God’s elect or not (thus, to act ‘as if’).
I know we’ve taken some detours, but I like to think of this as more of a companion piece to whatever texts we’re discussing rather than a summary or book report. Let me know your thoughts, comment on whatever platform you’re listening on. And while on the topic, shameless plug, please like, follow, rate, etc. I hate to sound conspiratorial, but, and while I’ve yet to see any hard data confirming it, I know I’m not alone in voicing concern that left-leaning content creators have been getting pushed down in the algorithms as of late. While I’m glad to be reaching a broader audience, I’m also a bit concerned that I’m now seeing higher traffic and downloads in Europe than in the US. Hopefully this is organic, but I’ll just say, I’m concerned.
So, let’s get back to Weeks, on Weber.
“As we will see,” states Weeks, quote
Posing the historical claim about the unholy melding of religion and capitalism in terms of a neat causal argument – with its sharp and definitive contrasts between a “before” to the Protestant ethic that Weber casts as “traditionalism” and an “after” that he assumes to be secular – serves to highlight, clarify, and dramatize this capitalist ethos, to train our attention on and school our responses to the phenomenon. Each of these transitions – first from the traditionalist to the Protestant orientation to work, and then from that religiously informed ethos to a secular one – offers an opportunity to defamiliarize what was already in Weber’s day, and certainly is today, an all too familiar formulation of the nature and value of work.
Okay, so, how does this happen? What was the traditionalist form? And, note, we’re going to start getting into three of those aforementioned antinomies now that “the ethic’s prescriptions… mandate…” namely, rational and irrational behaviors, productivist and consumerist values, and individual independence and social dependence.
In the traditional (pre-capitalist) form, one of the major obstacles Capitalism needed to overcome was a general opposition, both of the working public and within the work ethic to working more. The aim of work was “the concrete and finite ends” of work. Work was meant to produce things, and once things were produced, the work was done. Move on. Use your leisure time – now, it’s critical to recall from the ancients up to late pre-capitalism, leisure was the domain of citizens and inaccessible to slaves and serfs; who had, at most, some access to what Aristotle would have called ‘amusement.’ To be a citizen, one must possess themselves and they must possess their own means of production (which I’m not going to go into detail here, this is more Marx’ domain than Weber’s). How to best use one’s leisure was a central ethics question going back to the Ancient Greeks (in the West, at least).
The Protestant work ethic, that capitalism was and remains fully reliant upon, would have been nigh antithetical to someone with a ‘strong work ethic’ in the traditionalist sense. “From a traditionalist perspective,” notes Weeks, “the new Protestant ethic of work – the willingness to dedicate oneself to work as an end in itself, living to work instead of working to live – makes little sense.” However, upon replacement of traditionalist forms, under the new Protestant ethic, Weeks, citing Weber now, reports, “economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naïve point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence.” The Protestant ethic “confounds” means and ends as regards to work, quote, citing Weber again, “where a man exists for the sake of his business, instead of the reverse.” Once we begin to understand this, we can begin to see how irrational this is as an ethic. It requires an ascetic denial of self, a replacement of the Will to Life with a Will to Work; following Weber again, “so irrational from the standpoint of eudaemonistic self-interest.” Weber, here, falling back on Aristotelian ethics.
Thinking back to the Publix staff, or anyone complaining today about their co-workers’ or employees’ lack of work ethic, taken traditionally, it can easily be argued that anyone that works and values their time, that does their work and moves on to enjoy their time (ideally in a noble-leisure kind of way; building relationships, thinking philosophically, taking political action, doing art or poetry, etc.) does, in fact, have a strong, rational work ethic.
We’ll get into the development of the Protestant ethic when we get to Weber, for now, the takeaway is the intertwining of the Protestant ethic and the development of capitalism and waged labor. Weeks is keen to point out that increased wages – and, keep in mind, this is at a time of distinct, real barriers between the wealth class and the working class, this is still a time of slaves and serfs in much of the Christian world (and American capitalist conservatives today still exploit the racial divides among the working class, fomenting discord that originated with the Civil War amendments, freeing the slaves and guaranteeing birthright citizenship to all, that had blurred the distinction between slaves and free workers dedicated to the Protestant ethic. For many, this move was too much of a wakeup call to the irrationality of the ethic, as they were forced to cope with the possibility that they were, at work, no different from slaves, and so transferred that emotional and psychological charge into race and racism).
Backing up, Weeks is keen to point out that increased wages was insufficient to convince the working populace to adopt longer working hours, more strenuous working conditions, etc., that were required by employers aiming to maximize both productivity and profit. This, Weber shows, is where the transition from the traditional to the Protestant ethic comes in.
Now, I will interrupt here to caveat that one could make the argument that where increased wages, the carrot, is insufficient, a society could employ the stick, state violence, to make up the difference, and certainly states have done precisely this to compel its citizens to work. But this has two critical flaws; first, it’s never sustainable. This has, so far, across human history inevitably resulted in revolution and/or collapse and/or conquering. Internal strife invites external threat (see collapse of the Roman Empire, and basically every empire since), and vice versa (see the American and French Revolutions and the Russian revolutions from 1905 through 1917). And, second, it’s just too expensive in the long run. It’s far cheaper and more efficient to convince the people to police themselves, to discipline them, have them internalize the behaviors you want them to demonstrate. See Constantine and the adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire.
“Material need, Weber suggests,” says Weeks, “is not the only, or even necessarily the most effective, inducement to work. She continues,
Not only does the idea of work as an end in itself render the satisfaction of concrete needs less relevant, but it also makes the specific qualities of the work less germane. The Protestant ethic is in this sense a democratizing force: neither the quality nor the status of work is important; what matters is that it is approached with methodical dedication, or, in Weber’s formulation, “as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling.” The ethic is thus well-suited to an economic system predicated on labor abstracted from the specificity of the working person and the particular task; it helps to render both the qualities of work and the satisfaction of concrete needs irrelevant to the logic of now limitless production. To the extent that the quantity of worker’s effort is now more significant than the quality of the work, the ethic is well attuned to a new cycle of capital, production not for finite consumption but for continuous accumulation.
Under the regime of the Protestant ethic, Bullshit Jobs have no qualitative difference from Meaningful Jobs; there is no difference between teaching, policing, IT Support, street sweeping, retail clerking, data entry, emergency surgery, hospice care, administration of corporate law, flipping burgers, etc., all jobs are of equal qualitative value. One’s own ethical value is only measurable quantitatively in the terms of how many hours one works, and qualitatively to the extent they fully dedicate themselves to work itself.
How this benefits capitalism, is in enabling the transformation of the ends of work from the production of concrete things (we’re isolating here, for the moment, art, discourse, politics, and ideas, along Arendt’s and Aristotle’s terms to leisure and praxis as distinct from work) to the production of the means of limitless accumulation.
This is a potentially dangerous aim, and requires societal commitment to work itself over and above any interest in what or how well something is produced, as the inevitable end result, as regards concrete things, is a surplus. Basic supply/demand logics demand that a glut of produced things result in a reduction in price of those things. If prices degrade enough, it reduces the wages and/or number of jobs employers can provide, which runs risk of destabilizing the market. Recall, productivist and consumerist ideals. It’s a delicate dance to balance endless production with limited consumption, and so producers must be constantly seeking new markets to unload products; but, going back to Ford, those new markets need consumers that can afford your products. You can probably see how this can escalate into global capitalism and, eventually, the willingness of neoliberalists like Bush, Cheyney, and Rumsfeld to apply the military to open markets by force of arms; or Xi Jinping and China’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiative to develop parts of the ‘third world.’ China has a massive surplus labor force. To achieve anything resembling ‘full employment’ (and, of course, this explicitly excludes China’s rural/agricultural sector from being ‘workers’ – under Maoism, there’s no such thing as the Marxist, Communist ‘proletariat,’ there is only ‘the masses.’ The Chinese, urban ‘working class’ has for decades now been marching headlong into capitalist exploitation with no conception of what is happening, in Marxist terms, despite the ruling party being nominally Communist).
Okay, so, in part three, we’ll get into the transition from the Protestant ethic to the contemporary ‘secular’ work ethic; three formations of the ethic - Work, Family, and Laborist, the first two pointing to individual independence and social dependence, and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, and last of which, particularly, bringing into focus the antinomy of tools of subordination and insubordination. And, finally, we get into some Feminist ethics, this move from subject to victim; and the Refusal, the antiwork political project.
‘til next time.
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Episode 21: The Work Ethic, Archeology and Genealogy
The Problem of Work part 2.
Okay, it feels a little strange to be getting here over 20 episodes in, but let’s talk about the work ethic. Now, I know I said this episode was going to be about my reading of Weeks and what I propose is this movement from subject to victim of work, but, surprise, we’re not there yet. As I got into writing this one, I realized there was a lot more to say about the background of the argument and this was getting really long. I’ll also note I have another happy hour queued up, so that will be arriving soon – we haven’t had the chance to sit and talk yet, so, there’s no spoilers I can tease there – Weeks part 3 will be on this ‘subject to victim’ movement and the refusal Weeks lays out through chapter 2. Today we’re looking at the background theory and the move from the traditionalist to Protestant work ethic.
I mentioned last episode that we need to perform a genealogy of the work ethic if we’re to understand the problem and have any hopes of overcoming it. To keep to the text though, Weeks notes that Weber’s analysis provides an “archeology” of the ethic. So, I guess the first question is, is this just a semantic difference? Well, no. It connects to specific methodological and critical traditions. On the one hand, with a genealogical method, we’re talking about critical theory of becoming in the tradition of Nietzsche, Bloch, and Deleuze, whereas with Archeology we’re talking about a positivist, materialist approach – think geology and the principle of superposition; as you dig deeper, the layers explain what came first. That which is on top is the most recent, and everything below it came beforehand, and this applies to every layer – so we’re talking authors like Weber and Marx. Without getting into all of those specifics now (I mean, that’s kinda going to be the whole point of the next arc), we can simplify the difference by looking at the theoretical bridge between the two methods; Michel Foucault. Foucault, in The Order of Things lays out his methodology for analyzing the history of ideas archaeologically. And by the time his work evolves to focus on power (he’ll also later argue his work was always about power) his method moves to genealogical.
In writing on Foucault’s methodological shift from archeology to genealogy, notes Dr. Muzaffar Karim, Assistant Professor in English, University of Kashmir, in an article for the Journal of Research in Humanities and Social Science, “genealogy is the aim of the analysis and the archaeology is the material and methodological framework.”
Weber provides us with the archeology, the material history of the work ethic; what Weeks is doing, and what we need to do, is genealogical. Weeks clarifies in this regard, “In keeping with this line of interpretation, I will treat Weber’s famous argument about the historical relationship between capitalist development and religious belief less as a strictly historical claim than as a genealogical device.” If we’re to have any chance at overcoming the work ethic (and the political imagination problems Fisher speaks of in Capitalist Realism) imagining the postwork something-yet-to-come requires a genealogical understanding of the ethic. Where it came from, how it came to be, how we’ve come to be so attached to it, as well as the role it plays in subject formation and where it appears to be leading us. We need to be able to think both backwards and forwards. And, of course, the Foucauldian question of power, who benefits from workers believing in and adhering to the work ethic?
I was in a Publix the other day and while debating the cost of by the pound vs by the bag potatoes – as a good Irish-American, I opted for potatoes in bulk – I overheard a couple of guys, possibly supervisors or department leads based on their attire, complaining about their employees’ or coworkers’ work ethic, or lack thereof. What I noticed though, in what I caught of their conversation, was mostly complaint over a perceived lack of teamwork (and the inescapable ‘this generation just doesn’t want to work’, ironic in this case as neither of these guys could have possibly been over 30). I found this surprising given Publix has a reputation of having a labor market edge on their competitors in terms of profit sharing at all levels. Further though, I don’t think either of these guys were actually familiar with what the work ethic is. Their problem seemed to be a perception of unfairness, a personal slight against them by their coworkers, and not a lack of commitment to salvation through work; which, I’ll note, they both themselves displayed in casually putting up produce while complaining about work.
I noted briefly in the last episode that Weeks notes that it takes more than force, state violence (police violence to breakup protests and strikes and threats of imprisonment, for example) to commit workers to willingly spending their lifetimes at work. She reiterates here that it requires a “blend of coercion and choice, necessity and desire, habit and intention.” The vast majority of us have no choice but to work to earn wages with which to afford the basic necessities of survival, and so, at best, hope to find work that we enjoy, or at least tolerate, and wages that secure some level of comfort and prosperity, or some sliding scale between the two (work-life balance). But, why do we tolerate compulsory work without the constant and explicit threat of force? Putting aside for the moment social issues of wealth and poverty, ‘haves and have-nots,’ we, especially in the US, live in a society of abundance; abundance of wealth, abundance of things, abundance of cultivatable and habitable land – they say in the south you can’t throw a rock without hitting a church, but, in Charlotte, on the off chance you miss the church, you’ll likely hit a parking lot or a golf course. It does have an abundance of trees, that part’s nice – except for the living hell of early spring pollen spread, affectionately referred to as the micro-season, ‘the pollening’ which blankets everything in yellow and sends folks like me, with allergies, stockpiling kitchen staples and sheltering in place til the rains come.
Notes Weeks, “One of the forces that manufactures such consent is the official morality – that complex of shifting claims, ideas, and values – known as the work ethic.”
Now, on it’s face, this seems like a week claim in a pluralistic, heterogenous society. Where are the counter claims of moral relativism? The debates over virtue ethics, consequentialism, religious dogma, etc? Ethics, as such, has been a matter of debate, in the West, at least since Socrates. Why is the work ethic somehow privileged and nigh immune to criticism, in the general public? Going back to Livingston, no one on either the Right or Left sides of the aisle in Congress are debating the validity of work itself. How did Work become some kind of ethical First Principle?
Writes weeks, quote
I want to advance three general claims… first, we cannot take on the structures of work without also challenging the ethics on which their legitimacy depends; second, despite its longevity, the ethical discourse of work is nonetheless vulnerable to such a challenge; and third… because of its particular significance to post-Taylorist processes, [the claim that] our “insubordination to the work ethic” [here she’s citing Berardi’s essay “Anatomy of Autonomy”] is now more potentially subversive than ever before.
We’ll get to Weber and the archeology of the work ethic in a just a second, but I want to linger on this passage from Berardi that Weeks is referencing, as I think just dropping ‘insubordination’ in passing, for someone that hasn’t read Berardi or other Autonomists, is potentially a little weak. Berardi is referring to political action on a scale far greater than simply not following your boss’ instructions.
I recently discovered a site hosted by Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, that holds a collection of “debates on the centrality of work” called For Work /Against Work at onwork.edu.au (I’ll link to it in the show-notes). One, or several, of the arguments cites the following passage from “Anatomy of Autonomy” as the “key passage” of the text – or at least the key passage the debate referenced (the citation doesn’t back-link to the specific debate, just the collection in general), “Autonomy involves liberation from work, and suppression of the general formal conditions of capitalist domination.” The central problem here isn’t work or wages per se, it’s the work society, the de facto requirement to work in order to simply survive, let alone thrive, wherein the only alternative to work (unless you’re one of the fortunate few to have been born ‘independently wealthy’ and freed from work by the virtue of happenstance) is death or destitution.
Sidenote, if you’re citing a document you found online – I’m looking at the Macquarie University entry author – please check your pagination. You confuse people if you drop the wrong page. I’m guessing we were looking at the same document scan I found online, republished by e-flux. It’s not the greatest scan, it’s a little cockeyed. The page above the quoted passage shows “68,” but it’s actually 168. And to whomever reduplicated the same article for libcom.org, without sources, good on you for at least identifying the translators, but come on, I get it, screw the man and the capitalist pay to play, but cite your friggin sources. Others may come along who actually want to read the book you’re copying essays from. Help them help everyone else. We’re all supposed to be in this together, right? Books do more than provide isolated essays for you to fill your online libraries. Sure, sometimes it’s for the money, but authors and publishers, especially publishers like semiotext(e) that provide a platform for leftist thinkers and activists, typically print anthologies and collect essays together because of the work they perform taken together. [sigh] I’ll get off my soapbox now.
I think, to hammer home the political extent to which Berardi is invoking insubordination, we need to turn to Berardi, so, I’m going to cite, in full, the passage Weeks is referring to. In his conclusion to “Anatomy of Autonomy,” Berardi, writing then under the alias “Bifo” (B-I-F-O) – this was a time in Italy without free speech and progressive and leftist activists, like the Autonomists, were being imprisoned for subversion and other treasonous crimes, Berardi notes, quote
…the forms and the politics involved in this process [the production of Knowledge] are still entirely unknown to us. That is to say, we have not elaborated any theory of “transition” (to use that horrible and imprecise word). The only theory of power and transition that we possess, the theory to which we must constantly refer— perhaps in order to deviate from it, though always remaining in some ways entrapped within it— is the Leninist one. Essentially, the Leninist theory can be formulated as follows: the proletariat must take possession of the State, bolster the machinery of the State and the domination of the State's will over society in order to abolish capitalism (only afterward will the extinction of the State be possible). We have had the dream of realizing this program on our minds for fifty years now, from the time of “war communism”, from the time of the NEP [the New Economic Policy of the Soviet Union, under Lenin, 1921-28], through the period of Stalinism, up to the Chinese experience, up to the awful reality of present-day socialism. Capitalism has been neither abolished nor transformed, but rather has become ossified, inasmuch as the State, which ought to incarnate the will to supersede, has instead been nothing more than the reification of those relationships of production inherited from capitalism. In other words, the State has represented a terrorist-style forced recapitulation of the existing modes of production, a throttling of every possible move toward autonomy in the social system.
Thus the time now seems ripe to formulate an hypothesis concerning the “transition”. The hypothesis which we advance as the premise for further theoretical work is an exact reversal of Lenin’s theory. That is, we seek to reify an “ignor-action” toward the State” (“ignoraction”: adapted from the German ignoraktion — an action which ignores, does not recognize those formal boundaries which the State imposes), to reify an abolition of the mechanism of State control and to reify a political formalization of the alliance between mobile strata of the labor force and dynamic capitalism, between capitalistic, post-industrial, electronic development and proletarian insubordination to the work ethic.
Personally, I find it both interesting and troubling that Berardi’s comments in 1977, at the dawn of political neoliberalism epitomized by Thatcher and Reagan, are just as relevant today. I previously noted that I found it difficult to peg Trump economically. Well, the past couple of weeks have highlighted that his administration, and especially Elon Musk’s influence, are simply neoliberalism on meth. They’re implementing at break-neck speed what Thatcher and Reagan sought to accomplish; the complete dismantling of the federal government in order to privatize the services the government once provided. Abdicating the role of the government to provide for the general welfare of the people in all areas; health, education, transportation, infrastructure, emergency services, veterans’ affairs, even defense and military preparedness. Trump is enacting this same Leninist agenda in regards to the State, but on behalf of the wealthy capitalist class; taking possession of the State, bolstering the machinery of the State and the domination of the State's will over society in order to abolish plurality and dissent, and through which seeking the extinction of the State, and transfer of power to the rich.
We’ll be coming back to Berardi, and this particular essay, closer to the end of the year (maybe next year) for a discussion of Knowledge and Power. I think the way Berardi sets up the bourgeois/capitalist production of Knowledge (“to modify the epistemological”) and the role of knowledge in both the revolution and status quo, pairs particularly well with Mckenzie Wark’s analysis of the information economy in Capital is Dead. Is This Something Worse?
Getting back to the text at hand, what Weeks is keen to point out though, and why we’re about to dig into Weber, is that the requirement of the work society, the coercion of work in the face of death or destitution, is insufficient, by itself, to explain why we’re not openly revolting against work en masse right now. I am also concerned that reactionary sentiment against Trump will play into deepening commitment to the work society. While the far right is now co-opting the methods of Revolutionary Leninism in order to consolidate power, it’s also, unfortunately, highly likely quote-Moderate Democrats will swing further to the traditional grounds of Conservative Republicans. Already they’ve demonstrated their counterargument to Trump relies on the policies of Ronald Reagan; and some of his greatest hits including massive tax cuts for the wealthy, in part paid for by redefining student loans as taxable “income,” a legacy of intensified air and water pollution as a direct result of the Reagan/Gorsuch EPA’s intentional failure to both administer Congressionally passed laws and enact Court ordered remediations while deregulating environmental protections and defunding EPA programs (and a quick honorable mention to the “mishandling” of the then $1.6 Billion Superfund, intended to fund massive scale disaster recovery projects resulting from things like industrial pollution and strip mining, in order to protect the interests of the responsible businesses and sway political campaigns in Reagan’s backyard of California, done such that was so blatant and egregious that Anne Gorsuch (Justice Neil Gorsuch’s mom) was forced to resign in disgrace), and lets not forget the arming and combat training of future dictators and terrorists, including one Osama Bin Laden, as expendable pawns in anti-Communist proxy wars. [sigh] But, we’re maybe getting a little off track.
Okay, Weber’s archeology of the ethic in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and as Weeks refers to this process, the primitive construction of subjectivities.
The work ethic, Weeks notes, is, per Weber, an “unintended consequence of the Reformation,” the treatment of work ‘as if it were a calling.’ “This new Ethic,” says Weeks, “entailed an important shift in expectations about what work is or should be, and a distinctive conception of what it means to be a worker. What characterized the Protestant ethos in particular was an ethical sanction for and the psychological impetus to work; ascetic Protestantism preached the moral import of constant and methodical productive effort on the part of self-disciplined individual subjects. … The infraction of its rules,” this is Weeks citing Weber now, “‘is treated not as foolishness, but as forgetfulness of duty.’ … One should set oneself to a lifetime of ‘organized worldly labor’ as if (and not, as we will see, precisely because) one were called to it by God.”
Asceticism, because some may not be familiar with it and this idea is going to keep coming up, especially when we get to Nietzsche (who has a deeply antagonistic, but problematic relationship, with it), is a praxis, typically religious, that The Reward (enlightenment, nirvana, unity with God, heaven, inner peace, what have you…) is achieved through rigorous to extreme self-denial, the denial of all things sensual, pleasurable, taste, comfort, joy, sexual pleasure, intoxicants, even something as simple as exercise, if that exercise is done for any purpose or form outside of the particular religious dogma’s precepts, and potentially including self-flagellation, starvation, isolation… It’s like stoicism, but on steroids. A key figure here being Arthur Schopenhauer.
And, since we’re talking archeology of ideas, here’s a brief survey.
Take Seneca, Roman stoic philosopher, (the Ancients all wind up getting grouped together as “ancient,” but we’re about 400 years after Socrates now), and not the ‘founder’ of stoicism, but writing in that tradition, and his approach is more of a praxis of stoicism. He’s not doing epistemology, but ethics, and advocating ‘the good life’ via stoicism, in terms of coming to know one’s own irrationality (emotions) and replacing them with rational responses. There’s no such thing as moderation here, emotions must be replaced by reason. Notes Katja Vogt, writing for the SEP (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), “As Seneca puts it, will the ideal agent not be angry if he sees his father murdered and his mother raped? Yes, he argues, we should react, but not with emotions and emotional action (revenge), no matter how curbed they might be through reflection. The idea of “moderate emotions,” says Seneca, is about as absurd as the idea of “moderate insanity.” Emotions are irrational; there is no taming of the irrational, precisely because it is irrational. Emotions thus cannot be moderated—they must be replaced with rational responses.” (Sidenote, if Seneca’s thoughts here piss you off, I mean, even Spock eventually came to realize this level of anti-emotionality was itself illogical, and I suspect Seneca could have benefitted from speaking to a therapist, had any existed then, I highly recommend checking out Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion, if you’re interested in looking at how emotions shape individual and collective bodies, both critically and, potentially, positively.)
The ascetics take this even further, from aiming to subjugate one’s emotions to one’s reason, to denying all affective responses, good and ill.
Now with Schopenhauer we get a specifically Christian asceticism, with arguably Buddhist roots – granted, arguably, Christianity itself has Buddhist roots. Given the time and place of Jesus’ life, it’s unlikely he wouldn’t have come across people familiar with Buddhist teachings that thus likely informed his own. For Schopenhauer, much like Buddhism, suffering is caused by desire, and so the answer to the problem of suffering is the elimination of desire, specifically the Denial of the Will to Life.
Now, Schopenhauer isn’t advocating literal suicide, his paradoxical argument places the individual will-to-live in conflict with a transcendent humanity. Essentially, Schopenhauer’s goal is to un-eat the apple and go back to Eden, transcendent humanity liberated from the evils of individuality, knowledge, and desire. Referring to the SEP again, “When the ascetic transcends human nature, the ascetic resolves the problem of evil: by removing the individuated and individuating human consciousness from the scene, the entire spatio-temporal situation within which daily violence occurs is removed.” Personally, I think Schopenhauer is more dystopian than utopian, but he is arguing for a utopian society in which there is no violence as violence is caused by want. Rather than addressing desire (lack) economically, as Marx would, or psychologically, as Lacan would, or politically, as Rawls would, Schopenhauer’s hope is to eliminate desire itself from the human psyche.
Nietzsche we’re not going to get into just yet, suffice to say he’s opposed to Schopenhauer’s negative Will to Life, diagnosing Schopenhauer’s asceticism as a disease of humanity and advocating instead for desire and a Will to Power to overcome suffering and resistance; one of his great villains being the ascetic priest the derives power and profit from convincing their subjects both of their inherent weakness and sinfulness as well as laying them solely to blame for their inescapable weakness and thus trapping them in their guilt.
I’ll also cite the following brief poem from Nietzsche, since it’s about Seneca and stoicism. This is 34, from “Jest, Ruse, and Revenge” from the beginning of Der fröhliche Wissenschaft, (The Gay Science, or the ‘joyful’ science, depending on your translation and/or DEI censorship), and, um, please forgive my Latin pronunciation, or mispronunciation, however this goes. I have never claimed to be proficient at Latin or poetry.
Seneca et hoc Genus omne (Seneca and this whole genre)
They write and write (quite maddening me)
Their “sapient” twaddle airy
As if ‘twere primum scribere,
Deinde philosophari
In English, ‘write first, then philosophize.’ Nietzsche here criticizing stoicism not unfamiliar to my own criticisms of analytic philosophy as, well, mental masturbation.
Weber’s target is this ascetic Protestant ethic, that, it is only in becoming a worker, in one’s very being, the ascetic denial of self and dogmatic commitment to work through which one has any chance of being moral and achieving salvation – we’ll get to salvation sometime later when we get to Weber’s text itself, he does go into detail regarding different Protestant practices, Lutheranism, Calvinism, Methodism, etc., in which there are different versions of how to achieve salvation, and, specifically, Calvinist predestination and work as remediating anxiety as regards uncertainty of whether you’re one of God’s elect or not (thus, to act ‘as if’).
I know we’ve taken some detours, but I like to think of this as more of a companion piece to whatever texts we’re discussing rather than a summary or book report. Let me know your thoughts, comment on whatever platform you’re listening on. And while on the topic, shameless plug, please like, follow, rate, etc. I hate to sound conspiratorial, but, and while I’ve yet to see any hard data confirming it, I know I’m not alone in voicing concern that left-leaning content creators have been getting pushed down in the algorithms as of late. While I’m glad to be reaching a broader audience, I’m also a bit concerned that I’m now seeing higher traffic and downloads in Europe than in the US. Hopefully this is organic, but I’ll just say, I’m concerned.
So, let’s get back to Weeks, on Weber.
“As we will see,” states Weeks, quote
Posing the historical claim about the unholy melding of religion and capitalism in terms of a neat causal argument – with its sharp and definitive contrasts between a “before” to the Protestant ethic that Weber casts as “traditionalism” and an “after” that he assumes to be secular – serves to highlight, clarify, and dramatize this capitalist ethos, to train our attention on and school our responses to the phenomenon. Each of these transitions – first from the traditionalist to the Protestant orientation to work, and then from that religiously informed ethos to a secular one – offers an opportunity to defamiliarize what was already in Weber’s day, and certainly is today, an all too familiar formulation of the nature and value of work.
Okay, so, how does this happen? What was the traditionalist form? And, note, we’re going to start getting into three of those aforementioned antinomies now that “the ethic’s prescriptions… mandate…” namely, rational and irrational behaviors, productivist and consumerist values, and individual independence and social dependence.
In the traditional (pre-capitalist) form, one of the major obstacles Capitalism needed to overcome was a general opposition, both of the working public and within the work ethic to working more. The aim of work was “the concrete and finite ends” of work. Work was meant to produce things, and once things were produced, the work was done. Move on. Use your leisure time – now, it’s critical to recall from the ancients up to late pre-capitalism, leisure was the domain of citizens and inaccessible to slaves and serfs; who had, at most, some access to what Aristotle would have called ‘amusement.’ To be a citizen, one must possess themselves and they must possess their own means of production (which I’m not going to go into detail here, this is more Marx’ domain than Weber’s). How to best use one’s leisure was a central ethics question going back to the Ancient Greeks (in the West, at least).
The Protestant work ethic, that capitalism was and remains fully reliant upon, would have been nigh antithetical to someone with a ‘strong work ethic’ in the traditionalist sense. “From a traditionalist perspective,” notes Weeks, “the new Protestant ethic of work – the willingness to dedicate oneself to work as an end in itself, living to work instead of working to live – makes little sense.” However, upon replacement of traditionalist forms, under the new Protestant ethic, Weeks, citing Weber now, reports, “economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naïve point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence.” The Protestant ethic “confounds” means and ends as regards to work, quote, citing Weber again, “where a man exists for the sake of his business, instead of the reverse.” Once we begin to understand this, we can begin to see how irrational this is as an ethic. It requires an ascetic denial of self, a replacement of the Will to Life with a Will to Work; following Weber again, “so irrational from the standpoint of eudaemonistic self-interest.” Weber, here, falling back on Aristotelian ethics.
Thinking back to the Publix staff, or anyone complaining today about their co-workers’ or employees’ lack of work ethic, taken traditionally, it can easily be argued that anyone that works and values their time, that does their work and moves on to enjoy their time (ideally in a noble-leisure kind of way; building relationships, thinking philosophically, taking political action, doing art or poetry, etc.) does, in fact, have a strong, rational work ethic.
We’ll get into the development of the Protestant ethic when we get to Weber, for now, the takeaway is the intertwining of the Protestant ethic and the development of capitalism and waged labor. Weeks is keen to point out that increased wages – and, keep in mind, this is at a time of distinct, real barriers between the wealth class and the working class, this is still a time of slaves and serfs in much of the Christian world (and American capitalist conservatives today still exploit the racial divides among the working class, fomenting discord that originated with the Civil War amendments, freeing the slaves and guaranteeing birthright citizenship to all, that had blurred the distinction between slaves and free workers dedicated to the Protestant ethic. For many, this move was too much of a wakeup call to the irrationality of the ethic, as they were forced to cope with the possibility that they were, at work, no different from slaves, and so transferred that emotional and psychological charge into race and racism).
Backing up, Weeks is keen to point out that increased wages was insufficient to convince the working populace to adopt longer working hours, more strenuous working conditions, etc., that were required by employers aiming to maximize both productivity and profit. This, Weber shows, is where the transition from the traditional to the Protestant ethic comes in.
Now, I will interrupt here to caveat that one could make the argument that where increased wages, the carrot, is insufficient, a society could employ the stick, state violence, to make up the difference, and certainly states have done precisely this to compel its citizens to work. But this has two critical flaws; first, it’s never sustainable. This has, so far, across human history inevitably resulted in revolution and/or collapse and/or conquering. Internal strife invites external threat (see collapse of the Roman Empire, and basically every empire since), and vice versa (see the American and French Revolutions and the Russian revolutions from 1905 through 1917). And, second, it’s just too expensive in the long run. It’s far cheaper and more efficient to convince the people to police themselves, to discipline them, have them internalize the behaviors you want them to demonstrate. See Constantine and the adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire.
“Material need, Weber suggests,” says Weeks, “is not the only, or even necessarily the most effective, inducement to work. She continues,
Not only does the idea of work as an end in itself render the satisfaction of concrete needs less relevant, but it also makes the specific qualities of the work less germane. The Protestant ethic is in this sense a democratizing force: neither the quality nor the status of work is important; what matters is that it is approached with methodical dedication, or, in Weber’s formulation, “as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling.” The ethic is thus well-suited to an economic system predicated on labor abstracted from the specificity of the working person and the particular task; it helps to render both the qualities of work and the satisfaction of concrete needs irrelevant to the logic of now limitless production. To the extent that the quantity of worker’s effort is now more significant than the quality of the work, the ethic is well attuned to a new cycle of capital, production not for finite consumption but for continuous accumulation.
Under the regime of the Protestant ethic, Bullshit Jobs have no qualitative difference from Meaningful Jobs; there is no difference between teaching, policing, IT Support, street sweeping, retail clerking, data entry, emergency surgery, hospice care, administration of corporate law, flipping burgers, etc., all jobs are of equal qualitative value. One’s own ethical value is only measurable quantitatively in the terms of how many hours one works, and qualitatively to the extent they fully dedicate themselves to work itself.
How this benefits capitalism, is in enabling the transformation of the ends of work from the production of concrete things (we’re isolating here, for the moment, art, discourse, politics, and ideas, along Arendt’s and Aristotle’s terms to leisure and praxis as distinct from work) to the production of the means of limitless accumulation.
This is a potentially dangerous aim, and requires societal commitment to work itself over and above any interest in what or how well something is produced, as the inevitable end result, as regards concrete things, is a surplus. Basic supply/demand logics demand that a glut of produced things result in a reduction in price of those things. If prices degrade enough, it reduces the wages and/or number of jobs employers can provide, which runs risk of destabilizing the market. Recall, productivist and consumerist ideals. It’s a delicate dance to balance endless production with limited consumption, and so producers must be constantly seeking new markets to unload products; but, going back to Ford, those new markets need consumers that can afford your products. You can probably see how this can escalate into global capitalism and, eventually, the willingness of neoliberalists like Bush, Cheyney, and Rumsfeld to apply the military to open markets by force of arms; or Xi Jinping and China’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiative to develop parts of the ‘third world.’ China has a massive surplus labor force. To achieve anything resembling ‘full employment’ (and, of course, this explicitly excludes China’s rural/agricultural sector from being ‘workers’ – under Maoism, there’s no such thing as the Marxist, Communist ‘proletariat,’ there is only ‘the masses.’ The Chinese, urban ‘working class’ has for decades now been marching headlong into capitalist exploitation with no conception of what is happening, in Marxist terms, despite the ruling party being nominally Communist).
Okay, so, in part three, we’ll get into the transition from the Protestant ethic to the contemporary ‘secular’ work ethic; three formations of the ethic - Work, Family, and Laborist, the first two pointing to individual independence and social dependence, and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, and last of which, particularly, bringing into focus the antinomy of tools of subordination and insubordination. And, finally, we get into some Feminist ethics, this move from subject to victim; and the Refusal, the antiwork political project.
‘til next time.
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