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Three Resources for a Critique of Contemporary Labour Relations

This introductory chapter addresses the question of how the modern idea of free, dignified labour should be understood if it is to be used as the guiding principle of a critique of contemporary labour relations. This is no simple task. Various competing conceptions of what counts as a normatively ‘good’ or appropriate organization of social labour have been around for quite some time. There are many diverse perspectives from which work can be considered as a good for the individual or society – as something that transcends the mere satisfaction of needs and the provision of sustenance – and there are just as many traditions that advocate ways of improving, transforming and even revolutionizing working conditions. I therefore start by distinguishing and evaluating three modern schools of thought that offer critiques of capitalist working conditions but on the basis of very different ideas about the good or correct organization of social labour. In Chapter 2, I then take a closer look at the most promising and plausible of the three, the one that looks at labour as a social good and considers the impact of working conditions on democratic practice and participation. This approach once was taken for granted by some social theorists but unfortunately has since been almost completely forgotten. Chapter 3 is a systematic attempt at justifying the normative perspective from which the remainder of the book discusses the contemporary and future condition of social labour. I hope that, by the end of that discussion, it will have become clear why my argument focuses on the complementary relationship between a fair division of labour and political democracy.

Before the great transitions that took place between 1750 and 1850, there were few theories of how best to arrange labour relations. Premodern works contain only scant remarks about possible marginal improvements to the quality of daily activities in the crafts, the household or agriculture. The reason for this lack of utopian imagination is that, as I have already mentioned, work was held in such low regard: from antiquity to the early modern period, any activity that counted as work was so strongly associated with pure necessity, humiliating drudgery and low social status that criticizing it seemed as superfluous as thinking about how to improve it. According to the historian Moses Finley, ‘neither in Greek nor in Latin was there a word with which to express the general notion of “labour” or the concept of labour “as a general social function”’.1 But this contemptuous attitude began to change in the wake of the Protestant work ethic, bourgeois emancipation and the legal assertion of ‘free work’,2 and it gave way to the idea, articulated by Hegel, that labour is a means of securing individual independence, social status and honour.3 In the nascent capitalist countries, there soon emerged, alongside the critique of existing labour relations, ideas of a completely different world of work. It was only at this point, after work had become ‘free’ in the sense that it was no longer tied to personal tutelage and membership of a particular estate,4 that the idea of work was also ‘free’ to become associated with hopes for something better, more agreeable, more just or more in tune with human nature – in short, with normative ideas of a ‘liberated’ form of labour. Such visions for the future of social labour were fuelled either by historically specific ideals of certain ‘free’ and ‘self-determined’ kinds of activity or by the discrepancy between actual working conditions and the promise of democratic liberty. Some believed that all work could be as cooperative and fulfilling as the work of craftsmen or artists; others believed that the ideals and principles of democratic participation should also govern labour relations. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, employees became ever more conscious of the misery created by the new capitalist working conditions, and this period therefore saw the increasing dissemination of ideas of liberated and humanely organized forms of labour. Workers and craftsmen formed associations in France, the British Isles, the German states and North America, and these groups began to combine their criticisms of working conditions with proposals for improvement. If we are to determine what normative framework governed this complex mixture of social outrage, moral critique and utopianism, we need first to ask what, in each case, these critics saw as wrong, reprehensible or immoral. Doing so will allow us to explicate the normative bases of the various demands for a reorganization of social labour. Proceeding in this way, we can identify three movements that were critical of capitalist labour relations. The object of each movement’s critique – what exactly was considered wrong, immoral or ethically suspect – will allow us to determine, indirectly, the movement’s arguments in favour of another, better, more just organization of the sphere of labour. This historical reconstruction enables us, in turn, to identify three normative paradigms that, as I see it, may be employed in a critique of labour relations today.

(a) Estrangement5

The first of our three movements emerged just two decades after the French Revolution, and thus at the same time that Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right first appeared. At the time, some early socialists were criticizing working conditions in the privately owned factories. Their point was not just that workers were exploited to the point of complete exhaustion, that they were not given any security or that they were subject to the harshest forms of discipline; their main accusation was that the new regime of work deprived workers of the ability to experience their activity as a part of themselves – as an externalization of their own personality.6 The theme was picked up by the early Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts; combining it with Hegelian ideas, Marx created one of his most enduring theoretical motifs, that of estranged labour.7 According to this idea, what is truly scandalous about capitalist relations of production is that they dissect communal work into quantifiable pieces that can then be assigned to individuals and traded as commodities on the market. Marx is convinced that if labour becomes such a commodity, it loses all those properties that make it valuable to us; we are no longer able to experience labour as a productive use of our specific powers and skills as species-beings for the benefit of the social community. As it appears in Marx’s early writings, the idea of estranged labour rests on questionable assumptions and contains a number of inconsistencies, and the early writings therefore demand significant interpretive effort. It is not clear, for instance, whether Marx wants to claim that in its original, uncorrupted form labour necessarily involves the translation of one’s intentions and capacities into a tangible product. Such a claim would imply a highly problematic exclusive focus on material products, and it may well rest on untenable idealist premises. It is also unclear whether work that involves the productive – even pleasurable – exertion of the powers that we possess qua species-beings is possible only collectively or whether it can also be performed by a single subject. We would therefore be justified in interpreting non-estranged labour as just as much an ideal of individual self-realization as an ideal of un-coerced cooperation.8 Despite the concept’s inherent difficulties, the core of Marx’s idea – that labour under capitalist conditions is estranged because it can no longer be experienced as the exertion of the capacities we possess qua species-beings – quickly became popular in the emerging labour movement. And not only there: the British Arts and Crafts movement and other reform movements also soon picked up on the idea that, for work to again become a cooperative or individual exercise of specifically human capacities, as it still was in the arts and crafts, it was necessary to battle against the prevailing conditions of production.9

With this popularization, the philosophical elements of Marx’s thesis gradually receded into the background, but the idea’s intuitively plausible core – that the capitalist economy ‘estranges’ labour and turns it into something separate from the labourer, something ‘thing-like’ – nevertheless became one of the most influential paradigms in the critique of labour relations.10 The chief accusation is that capitalist working conditions do not allow the labourer to identify with his activities as an expression or exertion of his specifically human abilities – a fact that Marx, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, describes in Hegelian terms as the ‘worker’ no longer being ‘at home’ in his work, which is now traded as a commodity.11 The worker therefore cannot see work as an end in itself, as a productive ‘objectification’ done for its own sake, but only as a ‘means of physical subsistence’.12 Marx’s insight is still alive today, even if it is not necessarily expressed in his terms – terms that derive from the world of Hegelian thought. Today, work is described as...