This past Labor Day I got to thinking about work. What is this thing we do most of the hours of our days, this activity that takes up more time than sleep, sex, eating, reading, or, for that matter, living? Thoreau thought it an infinite peonage, a pin in the balloon of the ideal that let fly the soul's best and only breath. I think I would have to agree with him. While some work can be pleasant, some of it liberating and creative, by and large the work that most of us have to do is simply cultivating another man's vineyard. This is at best an agreeable annoyance, at worst an unvalved siphon draining our best parts out for occasional profit.
Some distinctions, though. What I mean by "work" is wage employment, the category most of us find ourselves in. I draw a line between "work" in this sense and "labor," which I see in the way Marx saw it, as a generative transforming activity, turning the stuff of the earth into comforts and sustenance. Humans have always had to labor, but it's our particular capitalist-era legacy to have the privilege of working to make money for others. True, the "wage" is supposedly our profit, our share of the pie we bake for the owner. But somehow the slices of pie most of us bring home have little filling and don't stretch between too many mouths. So we have to go bake some more so we can bring home less which forces us back out to bake some more so that we can bring home less, and so on like fleas upon fleas' backs. This is not labor but work, a kind of slavery, as Marx saw it, and a slavery in which we are supposed to ground our dignity and by which we are supposed to measure our success. But slaves don't have dignity and slaves are never successful.
Are there different kinds of work than the ones we have to bear, different ways of distributing the benefits of labor? Of course there are. But such "re-workings" (pardon the pun) often fail because the protracted catechism we all absorb in school and home tells us we should obey the ethic of wages and perpetual indenture. And we do obey it, tailoring much of our self- congratulation and depth of purpose to how much our jobs allow us to be who we think we are. Service to this ethic freezes our sense of perspective, and we literally can't get out of our own way.
We all have hints of how minimizing and noose-like work is, and we want to break free of it. But we don't know how. Perhaps next Labor Day we should talk less about the "dignity" of work and more about how this "work" locks most of us down, keeping us too unsure to buck the tide and too tired to be well-informed. Now, to my mind, that would be work worth doing, labor-intensive, with clarity as profit and a wage of understanding.
Children As Aliens
Autumnal