“It has become an article of the creed of the modern morality that all labour is good in itself-a convenient belief to those who live on the wealth of others”. (William Morris, Useful work Vs. Useless Toil 1885).

LET’S FACE IT, work as we know and loathe it today, sucks. Anybody who has worked for a wage or salary will confirm that. Work, for the vast majority of us, is basically forced labour. And it feels like it too!

Whether you’re working on a casual or temporary basis and suffer all the insecurities that that entails or are “lucky” enough to have a permanent position where the job security tightens like a noose around your neck it’s pretty much the same. Work offers it all: physical and nervous exhaustion, illness and more often than not, mind numbing boredom. Not to mention the feeling of being shafted for the benefit of someone else’s profit.

Think about it. Work eats up our lives. And not just the time we’re physically engaged in it either. Apart from the hours we’re paid for, work dominates every facet of our existence. When we’re not at the job we’re travelling to or from it, preparing or recovering from it, trying to forget about it or attempting to escape from it in what is, laughably, called our leisure time!

Indeed work, a truly offensive four letter word, is almost too horrifying to contemplate. The fact that those of us ‘in work’ sacrifice the best part of our waking lives to work, in order to survive, in order to work.... (ad nauseum) week in week out, is so scary we generally just get on with and keep our eyes on the wage packet or, if we don’t work it, the weekend. Think about it too much and even the ‘cushiest’ of jobs becomes pretty unbearable.

But, apart from the simple realisation that we must work (that is, sell our labour power) in order to eat (or struggle by on state benefits where they exist), we wage slaves are dragooned into ‘gainful employ’ by ideological factors encouraging us to see the neccessity of ‘having a job’. This can be described as the ‘Ideology of Work’. What we need to ask is, where did this ideology come from and how did it manage to get such a hold upon us?

Slave

Ancient Greek civilization did not consider physical labour to have any intrinsic value other than its immediate benefit to the individual and community. That an ideology of work did not develop is down to the simple fact that in a classical slave holding society such an ideology was unneccessary as the captive labour force was conscripted and coerced at will. The abject powerlessness and dependency of slaves upon their masters meant that there was minimal need to convince them of their toil’s worth or value. If anything, physical labour was held in contempt by Greek civilization. We have little record of what the slaves thought of the situation, although Spartacus would give the Roman slave holders of a later period something to think about.

An identifiable ideology of work began to take shape with the decline of slavery and the emergence of Feudalism. The medieval Catholic church assisted the Feudal lords in encouraging a belief that work (ing for a master) was a noble thing, ordained by God. This was in part a response to the (comparative to chattel-slavery) ‘freeing-up’ of labour and the independent power of artisans organising into guilds. As the guilds themselves became important players in the merchantile economy they too contributed to a new notion of work. During this period the state began to attack ‘scroungers’ and draconian laws were passed to prevent vagrancy and vagabondage. Individuals who had not integrated into the economy were portrayed as lazy and ungodly outlaws and forced into what would eventually become the embryonic working class.

However, the ideology of work which is identified with modern or industrial capitalism has its basis in the 16th Century Protestant revolution, the Reformation. It’s from here that much used, seldom explained term, the ‘Protestant Work Ethic’, comes. It is this ‘ethic’ which transformed work from a simple means to an end to an end in itself. The exact relationship between the Protestant revolution and emergent capitalism has been debated for more than a century but that the Calvinist version of Protestantism furnished capitalism with an excellent motivating myth is beyond doubt.

Gabriel

Calvinist theology maintained that only a pre-selected few would see heaven, so the doing of good deeds had no bearing upon the believer’s chances of making it through the pearly gates. This was in direct opposition to Catholicism’s ‘good works’ benevolence and suited the ‘devil take the hindmost’ attitude of dog-eat-dog competition. But the aspect of Calvinism most important to capitalist development was that Calvinists, being unsure that they were amongst the ‘elect’ with seats booked on the ‘here-after express’, developed the the idea that God would reward ticket-holders whilst on earth by allowing them to enjoy commercial success. So Calvinists dedicated themselves to working hard and accumulating wealth, believing that success would make their destiny manifest, as it were. This single-minded, methodical and disciplined ideology was not confined to followers of Calvin, however, and as capitalism replaced feudalism so this dove-tailing ideology became the dominant one-effecting those of all religions and none. What happened is that Capitalism transformed serfs (bonded labourers) into freemen (wage labourers) and simultaneously transformed the meaning of work.

The Protestant work ethic was reinforced as industrial capitalism consolidated its grip on society. Capitalism’s entrenchment and prosperity meant that it could offer vast numbers of workers permanent jobs in industries with a high division of labour. Skilled and semi-skilled workers were required and their services were attracted by offers of job security. A ‘job for life’ became a commonly held aim and could be offered by a ‘healthy’ capitalism. Workers could, for example, join a company upon leaving school at 14 and be in the same job until retirement or premature death. The work ethic was reinforced by encouraging workers self-identification with their work. and the bringing in of the dubious notion of status to individual workers. People were identified by their occupation, the first question following an introduction became “what do you do for a living?”.

This job identification was reinforced by craft and, later, trade unionism, which encouraged ‘skilled’ workers to regard themselves as a special case, and a practice of mutual aid and solidarity that only extended to their own trade or even grade within that trade.

All of this was happening as wage labour was becoming generalised and assisted in its’ legitimisation in the eyes of the new working class and in society as a whole. Unemployment became a moral problem whilst those without work were seen as ‘victims’ by ‘progressive’ opinion and pariahs by everybody else. This ideology dominated despite the attempts of socialists of various types to put the blame for unemployment, and therefore poverty, on the capitalist system itself.

Large numbers of workers have continued to blame themselves for their lack of work and this has been consistently reinforced by the State.

There must be some way out of here!

But has this ideology (of work) begun to be challenged by recent changes in capitalism itself i.e. chronic mass or un- or under-employment, the phenomenon of temporary and casual work, short-term contracts etc? Increasingly the notion of a job for life, so popular in the ‘boom’ period of post-war capitalism, has become a thing of the past for most working people outside of the so-called professions. The apprenticeships which created skilled manual workers for manufacturing industries are almost non-existent. Increasingly work is transitory, fragmented and periods of unemployment regarded as a natural condition from time to time. Many young working class people have never experienced the ‘dignity’ which labour is supposed to bestow and those who have never known the ‘world of work’ feel little guilt in not being part of it.

It is obvious that work as a basis for capitalism’s desired smooth social integration of the working class is being undermined both by the economic crisis which is requiring some rapid and radical restructuring and by the new technologies which is increasingly making unsuitably skilled or unskilled workers superfluous.

So where does this leave libertarian revolutionaries and our vision of social change? Will our arguments for a society without ‘employment’, i.e.without bosses and without wage labour make more sense to working class people for whom work has already become a despicable means to an end and for whom work has little meaning. Is there the possibility that a weakening of workers identification with their ‘occupation’ will engender a weakening of their identification with the status quo? Or perhaps the atomisation of large sections of the working class caused by the recent changes in capitalism mentioned above will actually bring a further dissipation of class consciousness?