Review of Elizabeth Anderson: "Hijacked: How neoliberalism turned the work ethic against workers, and how workers can take it back."
We live by the sweat of our brow, though work. At least that has been the story after we were thrown out of the garden of Eden, where we had previously foraged without effort. By the time of Puritans, work had been re-valued as being next to godliness, in what became known as the Puritan work ethic. Elizabeth Anderson takes this as her point of departure in a fascinating historical study of the winding (and mostly descending) road that attitudes toward work took down the centuries, in the perennial battle between workers and parasites who have found ways to avoid sweating, yet eat just the same ... or better.
Anderson trots through all the classical economists and philosophers, down to John Stuart Mill and Marx, showing two main threads of thought. First is the progressive thread, in which the Puritans can (curiously) be classed, as can Adam Smith. They value work as both a cultural and meaningful activity, not just a means of sustenance. They think everyone should work, and criticize anyone, high or low, who shirks this responsibility. Genteel landowners who spend their time hunting rather than improving their estates are just as culpable as drunkards and other able-bodied peasants who fail to do their share. Learning and innovation are highly valued, as not just ameliorating the lot of those making improvements, but at the same time raising the wealth of, and standard of living for, all.
In contrast is the conservative thread. Anderson herself describes it trenchantly:
"From the conservative perspective, however, poverty reflected an individual's failure to filfill the demands of the work ethic. Society is at fault solely in establishing institutions that violate natural law in promoting vice through provisions such as the Poor Law. Conservatives agreed that the Poor Law must therefore be abolished or radically reformed. If poverty is caused by the vice of the poor, the remedy for poverty must be to force the poor to practice virtue, to live up to the demands of the work ethic. Conservatives differed somewhat on which virtue was most necessary for the poor to practice. Priestly focused on frugality, Bentham on industry, Malthus on chastity, Paley on contentment (understood as the opposite of covetous envy of the rich). Thus, Priestly hoped to convert poor workers into virtuous bourgeios citizens through a legally mandated individual savings plan. Bentham favored a workfare system that turned the working poor into imprisoned debt peons of capitalist entrepreneurs. Malthus advocated leaving the poor to starvation, disease and destitution, but offered them the hope that they could rescue themselves by postponing marriage and children. Burke and Wately agreed with Malthus, but attempted to put a liberal-tory paternalist veneer on their view. ...
"The moral accounting that assigns responsibilities to individuals without regard- and even in inverse proportion- to the means they have to fulfill them remains a touchstone of conservative thought to the present day. ...
"The ideology of the conservative work ethic is distinguished by a harsh orientation toward ordinary workers and the poor, and an indulgent one toward the 'industrious' rich- those who occupy themselves with making money, either through work or investment of their assets, regardless of whether their activities actually contribute to social welfare. in practice, this orientation tends to slide into indulgence toward the rich, whether or not they are industrious even in this morally attenuated sense. ...
"Here lies a central contradiction of the conservative work ethic. All the conservatives claimed that the key to overcoming poverty was to make the poor bourgeois in attitude. All they needed to do was adopt the work ethic, or be forced to adopt it, along with the spirit of competitive emulation, the desire to better others in the race for riches and ensure that one's children not fall beneath the standard of living in which they were raised. Poverty was proof that they hadn't adopted bourgeois virtues and aspirations. This presupposed that the poor suffered from no deficit in opportunities. The path to prosperity was open; the poor were simply failing to take it. Yet we have seen that, Priestly partially excepted, conservative policies knowingly reduced the opportunities of the poor to acquire or retain property, work for themselves, or escape precarity."
My major critique of Anderson's analysis is that putting all this conflict and history into the frame of the work ethic is inappropriate and gives the work ethic far more weight than it merits. Firstly, everyone thinks of themselves as working. The most sedentary rentier doubtless thinks of his or her choosing among investments as of critical importance to the health and future of the nation. Even his or her shopping choices express taste and support a "better" sort of business, in that way performing work towards a better community. The English royals probably see themselves as doing essential cultural work, in their choice of hats and their preservation of cherished traditions. Parenting, community associations, and political agitation can all, to an expansive mind, be construed as "work". And indeed some of our greater artistic and other accomplisments come from the labors of wealthy people who were entirely self-directed rather than grubbily employed. All this implies that a work ethic can be accommodated in all sorts of ways if markets are not going to be the standard, as they hardly can be in any philosophical or moral system of a work ethic. This makes work ethics rather subjective and flexible, as Anderson implicitly demonstrates through the centuries.
However a more serious problem with Anderson's analysis is that it leaves out the ethic of power. Her presentation laments the sad misuse that the work ethic has been subjected to over the years, (by conservatives), without focusing on the reason why, which is that a whole other ethic was at work, in opposition to the work ethic. And that is the power ethic, which values domination of others and abhors work as commonly understood. Or, at best, it construes the organization of society for the benefit of a leisured upper crust as work of momentous, even civilizational, significance. Nietzsche had a field day calling us to recognize and embrace the power ethic, and not hide it under sweeter-smelling mores like the Christian or work ethics.
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Anderson does helpfully discuss in passing the feudal background to the Puritan work ethic, where the Norman grandees and their progeny parcelled out the land among themselves, spent their time warring against each other (in England or in France), and lived high off the labors of their serfs/peasants. No thought was given to improvement, efficiency, or better ways to organize the system. Conservatism meant that nothing (god-willing) would change, ever. Even so, the work of politics, of war, and of religious ideology was never done, and the wealthy could easily see themselves as crucial to the maintenance of a finely-balanced cultural and economic system.
Anderson also notes that the original rationale of the gentry, if one must put it in an economic frame, was that they were responsible for military support of the king and country, and thus needed to have large estates with enough surplus in people, livestock, horses, and food to field small armies. When this rationale disappeared with the ascendence of parliament and general (at least internal) peace, they became pure rentiers, and uncomfortably subject to the critique of the Puritan work ethic, which they naturally countered with one of their own devising. And that was essentially a restatement of the power ethic, that the rich can do as they please and the poor should be driven as sheep to work for the rich. And particularly that wealth is a signifier of virtue, implying application of the work ethic, (maybe among one's forebears, and perhaps more by plunder than sweat, but ... ), or transcending it via some other virtues of nobility or class.
But in Locke and Adam Smith's day, as today, the sharpest and most vexing point of the work ethic is not the role of the rich, but that of the poor. By this time, enclosure of lands was erasing the original version of the job guarantee- that is, access to common lands- and driving peasants to work for wages, either for landowners or industrialists. How to solve extreme poverty, which was an ever more severe corollary of capitalism and inequality? Is it acceptable to have homeless people sleeping on the streets? Should they be given work? money? social services? education? Do the poor need to be driven to work by desperation and starvation? Or is the lash of work not needed at all, and lack of wealth the only problem? Malthus was doggedly pessimistic, positing that population growth will always eat up any gains in efficiency or innovation. Thus it requires the predatory power of the gentry to enable society to accumulate anything in the way of capital or cultural goods, by squelching the poor in sufficient misery that they will not over-reproduce.
The progressive view of work and the poor took a much more sanguine view. And here one can note that much of this discussion revolves around "natural" laws. Is the population law of Malthus true? Or is the natural communitarian tendency of humans also a natural law, leading to mutual help, spontaneous community formation, and self-regulation? Are some people "naturally" superior to others? Is a hierarchical and domineering social system "natural" and necessary? Adam Smith, in Anderson's reading, took a consistently pro-worker attitude, inveighing against oppressive practices of employers, collusion of capital, and cruel goverment policies. Smith had faith that, given a fair deal and decent education, all workers would strive to the best of their abilities to better their own condition, work diligently, and thereby benefit the community as well as themselves.
For the story of Eden is fundamentally wrong. Humans have always worked, and indeed valued work. Looking outside the window at a squirrel trying to get into the bird feeder ... is to see someone working with enthusiasm and diligence. That is our natural state. The only problem was that, as human civilization progressed, power relations, and then even more- industrialization- generated work that was not only cruel and oppressive, but meaningless. The worker, forced to work for others instead of him- or herself, and routinized into a factory cog, became fully alienated from it. How to get workers to do it, nevertheless? Obviously, having a work ethic is not a full solution, unless it is of a particularly astringent and dogmatic (or tyrannical) sort. Thus the dilemma of capitalist economies. For all their trumpeting of the "natural laws" of competition and "freedom" for employers to exploit and workers to be fired, capitalism violates our true natures in fundamental ways.
So the question should be, as Anderson eventually alludes to, do we have a life ethic that includes work, rather than just a work ethic? She states plainly that the most important product of the whole economic system is ... people. Their reproduction, raising, education, and flourishing. It is not consumption products that should be the measure of economic policy, but human happiness. And a major form of human happiness is doing meaningful work, including the domestic work of the family. The world of Star Trek is even alluded to in Anderson's last chapter- one where no one works for subsistance, but rather, people work for fulfillment. And they do so with zeal.
Anderson sees great potential in the more progressive forms of the work ethic, and in the social democratic political systems that implemented them after World War 2. She argues that this is the true legacy of Marxism (and of Thomas Paine, interestingly enough) and expresses the most durable compromise between market and capital-driven corporate structures and a restored work ethic. Some amount of worker participation in corporate governance, for instance, is a fundamental reform that would, in the US, make corporations more responsive to their cultural stakeholders, and work more meaningful to workers. Tighter regulation is needed throughout the private economy to make work more humane for the very low-paid, giving workers better pay and more autonomy- real freedom. More public goods, such as free education to university levels, and better provision for the poor, especially in the form of a job guarantee, would make life bearable for many more people. For my part, inheritance seems a key area where the ethics of the dignified work and equal opportunity run up against completely unjust and artificial barriers. In America, no one should be born rich, and everyone should grow and express themselves by finding a place in the world of work.
