In The Mythology of Work, Peter Fleming examines how neoliberal society uses the ritual of work—and the threat of its denial—to maintain the late capitalist class order. Work becomes a universal reference point, devoid of any moral or political worth, transforming our society into a factory that never sleeps. Blending critical theory with recent accounts of job-related suicides, office-induced paranoia, fear of relaxation, managerial sadism, and cynical corporate social responsibility campaigns, Fleming paints a bleak picture of a society in which economic and emotional disasters greatly outweigh any professed benefits.
In The Mythology of Work, Peter Fleming examines how neoliberal society uses the ritual of work—and the threat of its denial—to maintain the late capitalist class order. Work becomes a universal reference point, devoid of any moral or political worth, transforming our society into a factory that never sleeps. Blending critical theory with recent accounts of job-related suicides, office-induced paranoia, fear of relaxation, managerial sadism, and cynical corporate social responsibility campaigns, Fleming paints a bleak picture of a society in which economic and emotional disasters greatly outweigh any professed benefits.
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Overview
In The Mythology of Work, Peter Fleming examines how neoliberal society uses the ritual of work—and the threat of its denial—to maintain the late capitalist class order. Work becomes a universal reference point, devoid of any moral or political worth, transforming our society into a factory that never sleeps. Blending critical theory with recent accounts of job-related suicides, office-induced paranoia, fear of relaxation, managerial sadism, and cynical corporate social responsibility campaigns, Fleming paints a bleak picture of a society in which economic and emotional disasters greatly outweigh any professed benefits.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745334868 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2015 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Factory That Never Sleeps
We now know that nearly everybody works far more than is economically necessary under neoliberal capitalism. Even the unemployed bear the emotional and existential weight of full-time employment. In this sense, the social is no longer really part of the economic. Economic necessity and income are almost completely disconnected from all the work we do. Our labour-obsession is perhaps best understood as a social pattern prompted by simulated conditions of 'survival'. They hunted; we work. There is little difference. However, it is becoming very clear that the outward symbolic gesture of labour has entirely overtaken the content of the productive act. And the late-capitalist situation repeats this simulacrum over and over for reasons that are not entirely clear. For me, this is the first warning that the question before us is not really about work at all. In its form another agenda is being pursued. But what?
To answer this question, let us take another tack. Many critics of paid employment approvingly recall John Maynard Keynes's weird 1930 essay 'Economic Prospects of Our Grandchildren'. Observing the immense increase of capitalist wealth and its technological triumphs, he predicted that work itself would probably soon be obsolete. Good riddance to bad business. The coming generations would be the first in history to enjoy the authentic emancipation from toil, necessity and most importantly, work. Keynes's essay is often read as evidence of a certain betrayal at the heart of neoliberal capitalism since we are now, of course, working more than ever. The faith that all this technological progress and inordinate wealth might relieve us from the burden of labour has been systematically derailed. Material abundance and Wi-Fi are now used to extend the working day, with debilitating penalties. The dialectic of modern capitalism is plain to observe in this respect. The ritual of labour has undoubtedly been existentially entrenched and generalized as the key standard by which we are judged. But this occurs precisely at the same moment that its redundancy is obvious to all – especially to the millions who have been deprived of work as neoliberalism gained global supremacy over the last 20 years.
However, a closer analysis of Keynes's argument reveals an important subtext that is prophetic. The ruling class's fear of a work-free world is certainly the red thread that holds the text together. That raises an important question. Is this 1930s paper behind the insistence that we continue to follow an antiquated way of life as we do in neoliberal societies today? Perhaps. But it is interesting that the present cataclysmic economic crisis has not disqualified the notion of work, but has made it more invidious. While capitalist wealth creation and technological innovation would undoubtedly guarantee more leisure and relaxation, Keynes sounds a note of cautious reserve about this prospect. The tone is one of plaintive restraint, almost warning the authorities that a world bereft of work might not be such a good thing after all. For what will the masses do with all that free time on their hands?
Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard – those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me – those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties – to solve the problem
which has been set them. (Keynes, 1930/2009: 198-199) What looks like a gesture of class sympathy is really nothing of the sort. Instead we can detect a deeply reactionary and not so 'gentle' nihilism in Keynes's liberalist argument. He levels his antipathy against the parasitical rentier class for a particular reason: to justify an infrastructure that retains the most basic contours of capitalist class relations and its ideological preoccupation with work. Additionally, I suggest that his message concerning the 'dread' of leisure apropos the commoner (i.e. us) was taken very seriously by the capitalist ruling classes – and perhaps still is. Read deeper and he seems to be stating the following: We cannot allow the working multitude to enjoy the independence that progress could so easily bestow upon them, because then they would act like us (i.e. profligate idlers with a penchant for sadistic risk-taking, the elite's primary method for making an otherwise boring life more interesting). But more importantly, the working people would begin to rethink the very foundations of class society once its basis in economic necessity is discredited.
It is said that we live in post-Keynesian times, but Keynes' counsel to the ruling class has been bequeathed to us today in concrete governance practices and the whip of market discipline. While most work is now needless, neoliberal society has made good use of work's ontological connotations to keep a lid on a fundamental antagonism that defines modern life. Hence the socially manufactured scarcity that even Dallas, the beggar cum drug dealer residing outside my East London flat, understands well enough. The most interesting trait of the workforce today is the sheer amount of labour exerted that not only goes unpaid (discretionary work, unrecognized overtime, etc.) but is also functionally unessential to the firm, even by the firm's own standards of profit maximization. This is work done for its own sake, which may look from the outside to be meaningless, but is driven by extant concrete forces not greatly different from ancient rites of superfluous sacrifice. And as we shall note in the forthcoming chapters, this does not undermine the process of hyper-rationalization mentioned in the Introduction, but is ITL∫ITL to it.
Most working people recognize that capitalism fanatically underlines the importance of surplus labour in order to maintain its logic of expropriation, so that the rich can enjoy the idleness they are so afraid we might come to think is our entitlement as well. During the early years of industrialism, a major cultural impediment to economic (over) production was the long-standing custom of working just enough to meet the community's needs. As Max Weber (1905/1930) discovered in his analysis regarding the 'spirit of capitalism', workers who were paid a wage simply stopped half way through the day, since why would anyone continue to toil once they had met their basic needs in a satisfactory manner? Anthropological studies of other societies have noted this strange tension too. As Clastres observes in Society Against the State (1989), so-called primitive societies acted very differently to the capitalist norms imposed on them when presented with new technology:
The advantage of a metal axe over a stone axe is too obvious to require much discussion: one can do perhaps ten times as much work with the first in the same amount of time as with the second; or else complete the same amount of work in one-tenth the time. And when the Indians discovered the productive superiority of the white men's axes, they wanted them not in order to produce more in the same amount of time, but to produce as much in a period of time ten times shorter. (Clastres, 1989 194)
From a capitalist point of view, something clearly had to be done. What fit the bill was an ideological overcoding of work with moral and religious significance. For a time this compelled people to labour more than they really had to. Rather than being presented as a finite social activity, work needed to be approached as an endless way of life pregnant with ethical connotations. Work will save you. Thus we witness a veritable Copernican revolution in the way the relatively simple act of labour is approached, one that has intensified under the neoliberal paradigm, but with some curious and rather depressing permutations. If what we might now call the ritual or ideology of work has become thoroughly decoupled from economic necessity, then work is also paradoxically no longer idolized as the highest social virtue (as it was at the apex of modernity, by capitalists and communists alike). The attempt to persuade us that a life of work is obliged by both basilar necessity and moral rectitude has long been abandoned. Everybody knows that we work now to keep the authorities at bay (the landlord, the tax man, the credit-card company, the multinational retailer, and so forth). But we also realize work's impudent needlessness. And this perception of senselessness has to be closely managed, something which neoliberal society only partially achieves. Since it is blindingly evident that there is not enough work to go around, the corporatized state apparatus fears both the employed and the unemployed. Moreover, those of us 'lucky' enough to have a job are so disgruntled by what it has done to us that a whole industry has arisen to deal with work's pathologies. We work, not because we want to or like it, but because it has become a way of life with little alternative or way out. This ideological universalization is a key governance strategy that neoliberal institutions use to keep the frantic pace of useless toil cranking along at breakneck pace. Work has become a virtual portmanteau that weighs upon our shoulders, its negative energy swallowing everything around us like some perfidious black hole. And, as I explore in more depth in Chapter 2, this demented generalization of the will-to-produce that has captured the social imaginary of late capitalism represents first and foremost a class offensive. As Keynes anxiously admitted, what would we do with all that free time?
What is striking about the cultural idiom of our workers' society is the compulsive obsessiveness that it inspires. If its justification has long been emptied of pious assurance, that void has been stopgapped by a certain social sickness: a liturgy of inwardness that is exaggerated by an 'all or nothing' attitude towards the empty grammar of labour. Many readers will recognize these extreme cases: interns who work themselves to death; bankers who see little alternative than to end their own lives when something goes wrong at the office; IT employees who work in their sleep; governmental functionaries who never see their families. While these are certainly marginal cases (and we analyse them in depth in the following chapters), it would be a mistake to consider them as unexpected aberrations from the norm. They are better approached as indicative of an underlying social tendency taken to its limits – the norm perfectly fulfilled. When fully realized, the 'ideal worker' celebrated by neoliberal capitalism is frequently a dead one. For sure, most of us pull back from the black hole before things get too ugly. But the same ideological template is still lurking behind much of what we do. As with any obsession – especially fixating ones such as cigarettes – the compulsion to repeat implies a certain degree of somatic dependency or addiction.
Most addictions function through a singularity that requires persistent displacement in order to perpetuate its own untenable premises. A multiplicity of life elements are contracted to the object of desire, THE ONE, thus relocating to the dark territory of existential blindness anything else that cannot be sublimated. Of course, this means that the object can never really be obtained or enjoyed. In describing this ongoing constitution of the unattainable and the functional disarticulation with fulfilment that work implies today, we are merely repeating Aristotle's famous meditation on accumulation in his Politics (especially Book 1, Chapter 9). The good life is defined by the skilful placement of desire so that the wish-object can be achieved and then left behind. A passion's ability to be terminated by accomplishment or fulfilment is a key definition of enjoyment or the good life. Money-lust, according to this formula, is a classic example of the bad life. Once enmeshed within this peculiar desire-matrix we can never have enough (even when drowning in the stuff) – we never arrive at the terminus of satisfaction. The same might be said of economic growth, another capitalist fetish, and now of work itself. The wheel that always returns goes nowhere or, as Aristotle puts it, we find ourselves in a world where there is no conclusion or end – none, that is, except for the 'big end', or death. Besides that, the obsessive subject position of idealized labour is nothing but a psychic curve folding back on itself indefinitely, much like the parameter-less totality I will discuss in the next chapter. No wonder the prison metaphor of 'escape' is so popular in radical politics today.
If the otherwise weird social construction of 'work' drives an addiction complex that is difficult to quit, then we might do well to compare it to other dangerous habits, such as the one I mentioned above: cigarette smoking. As anyone who has been addicted to cigarettes will attest, the first smoke in the morning is exhilarating. But smoking progressively become less enjoyable as the day goes on, even as we relentlessly light up. This self-harm becomes the source of an underlying anxiety that is a poignant facet of the obsession structure. We try to give up but cannot, even when the initial pleasure has turned into coercive non-enjoyment. At this stage it is understandable that we begin to hate ourselves and narcissistically project that judgement onto others, suspecting them of feelings of which they are actually innocent. Now we not only hate ourselves but believe that others might too, adding a touch of paranoia to the mix. Interestingly, this self-hate component of paranoia can most easily be observed in the contemporary post-industrial office. This may be due to the rampant consumption of 'smart drugs' currently being gobbled up in epic proportions by workers determined to stay alert and energetic over a 12-hour day (a topic we shall discuss in Chapter 2). Unfortunately, the prime pitfall of synthetic speed is paranoia. But notwithstanding this chemically induced chariness, work-for-its-own-sake cultures automatically make paranoia the default attitude in the office. For example, in her Financial Times article entitled 'Paranoia at Work is Out to Get You', Naomi Shragai (2014) explores the pandemic of paranoia in British organizations. The excessive prevalence of paranoia in this setting might be explained by competitive individualism, ambitious employees vying for the boss's favour, and run-of-the-mill Machiavellian office politics. But Shragai's report also notes how it stems from a fixated relationship with work. A young woman employed by a public relations firm tells us about the source of her paranoia following a major burnout. Clearly she is transferring her dislike of authority (managerial capitalism) onto her mother (a prototypical authority figure) as she recounts her slow but steady demise in the office:
The feeling I recall is of being actively disliked [by my mother], and in reaction to that I felt that I needed to try extremely hard – too hard – at work ... I had such a desperate need for people to say: 'Gosh you work so hard and aren't you brilliant'. At work you don't necessarily get that ... You're the target of envy too, because you're out to prove you're the best ... I thought hard work rather than relationships were the answer to progress at work. (Shragai, 2014: 12)
Shragai explains what happen next:
In a series of jobs she repeated a pattern of overworking to diffuse her imagined fears that people thought badly of her ... She quickly burnt out, was left feeling angry with every employer and as a result kept moving on to another job ... Her fear of being sacked drove her to work harder, but this often left her being exploited. (Shragai, 2014: 12)
Given the relatively conservative nature of the Financial Times, it is not surprising that this case of extreme paranoia is presented as being an exception to the rule, emanating from the personal qualities of dysfunctional individuals. However, I want to present another reading. Do we not have a fairly accurate depiction of what social life becomes when extreme neoliberalism is fully embodied? For most workers, the fear of being fired is a very real and rational response. The catchword of late-capitalist ideology is 'abandonment' ... you are always expendable. Moreover, the young woman's suspicion that she was not respected or liked by her employer is also probably accurate. The level of cynicism and sadistic enjoyment in pointless labour driving the present employment pointless labour driving the present employment regime is easily observable. Her smoker-like addiction to work closely intersects with the social structures she thought would provide her security. But security has nothing to do with employment today, especially following the systematic demolition of labour unions, pension schemes and protective legislation that followed in the wake of Thatcher and Reagan like effluent carelessly discarded from a long departed super-yacht in the Mediterranean.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Mythology of Work"
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Copyright © 2015 Peter Fleming.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Once Upon a Time, Man Invented Work ….1: The Factory That Never Sleeps
2: Planet of Work
3: What is Managerialism?
4: Viral Capitalism in the Bedroom
5: Corporate Ideology as False Truth Telling
6: Critique of Dialogical Reason
Conclusion: Inoperative Critique and the End of Work
References
Index