Summary of Chapter 5: The Decline and Fall of Work
V’s summary:
The obligation to produce alienates the passion for creation. Productive labour is part and parcel of the technology of law and order. The working day grows shorter as the empire of conditioning expands.
“In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.” (52) The two opposed terms through this chapter will be productivity, forced upon us from above, and creativity, freely chosen from below. In the current capitalist system, forced labor maintains order and the status quo by confusing and exhausting people.
The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanised slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, taking to the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry. Already the front against forced labour is forming; its gestures of refusal are moulding the consciousness of the future.
V traces the etymologies of travail and labor from torture and suffering, respectively. While in the feudal order, the elite eschewed labor as demeaning, the bourgeoisie embrace it:
The bourgeoisie does not dominate, it exploits. It does not need to be master, it prefers to use. Why has nobody seen that the principle of productivity simply replaced the principle of feudal authority? Why has nobody wanted to understand this? (53)
Is it because work ameliorates the human condition and saves the poor, at least in illusion, from eternal damnation? Undoubtedly, but today it seems that the carrot of happier tomorrows has smoothly replaced the carrot of salvation in the next world. In both cases the present is always under the heel of oppression.
The point of productivity (as opposed to creativity) is not the transformation of nature, and not self-realization, because Taylorism destroyed the craft spirit of work.
Nowadays ambition and the love of a job done are the indelible mark of defeat and of the most mindless submission. Which is why, wherever submission is demanded, the stale fart of ideology makes headway, from the Arbeit Macht Frei of the concentration camps to the homilies of Henry Ford and Mao Tse-tung. (54)
The aristocracy ruled on the basis of a “unitary myth;” the bourgeois order cannot recreate this, so relies on the fractious reign of competing ideologies, unified by the ideal of productivity.
So what is the function of forced labour? The myth of power exercised jointly by the master and God drew its coercive force from the unity of the feudal system. Destroying the unitary myth, the fragmented power of the bourgeoisie inaugurated, under the flag of crisis, the reign of ideologies, which can never attain, separately or together, a fraction of the efficacy of myth. The dictatorship of productive work stepped into the breach. Its mission is to weaken the majority of people physically, to castrate and stupefy them collectively and so make them receptive to the feeblest, least virile, most senile ideologies in the entire history of falsehood.
V discusses the role of consumerism and the “leisure explosion” in prompting people to work harder to be able to have leisure. He critiques Maoist China as just “another example of the perfected form of capitalism called socialism.” (55)
Has anyone bothered to study the approaches to work of primitive peoples, the importance of play and creativity, the incredible yield obtained by methods which the application of modern technology would make a hundred times more efficient? Obviously not.
[This is an interesting observation in 1967, as Marshall Sahlins would have recently articulated the concept of the “original affluent society,” and Vaneigem might well have heard of this; Richard Lee had finished his dissertation, and Pierre Clastres was conducting fieldwork in South America. On the liberatory potential of modern technology, several of Bookchin’s essays that would later be collected as Post-Scarcity Anarchism would have been coming out in New York during this period, as well. So, despite V’s “obviously not” shrug, such questions were definitely in the air.]
To the extent that automation and cybernetics foreshadow the massive replacement of workers by mechanical slaves, forced labour is revealed as belonging purely to the barbaric practices needed to maintain order. Power manufactures the dose of fatigue necessary for the passive assimilation of its televised diktats.
And yet:
One day, perhaps, we shall see strikers, demanding automation and a ten-hour week, choosing, instead of picketing, to make love in the factories, the offices and the culture centres. Only the planners, the managers, the union bosses and the sociologists would be surprised and worried. (56)
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