Work

Getting beyond the articulate voices of intellectuals is especially a problem for understanding civilizations before the era of widespread printing and literacy. However, cross-cultural comparison allows us to highlight similarities and differences. This article compares concepts of work from three widely separated world regions: the Inca empire of the Andes before the Spanish conquest, the Indian subcontinent (South Asia) before British colonialism, and the Greek and Roman world before the Christian era. In the Andes, archaeological evidence from the epoch before the Incas shows that large public works (walls, temples, canals) were constructed by multiple communities each working on its own small, essentially equivalent segment. There was no division of labor by task, but rather by community. Similarly, in the Inca period, people paid the principal taxes to the state not in the form of money or goods but as collective labor service, as communities or segments of communities (e.g., all young men of an area would serve as imperial message runners). Conceptually, this labor service took the form of reciprocity between unequal social ranks, from village to regional lord to emperor; for example, harvesting the lands of the emperor and his official religion, the cult of the sun, was reciprocated by extensive gifts of cloth and corn beer. In the late empire, however, what had started as a system of independent agricultural communities giving tribute to the state was radically transformed with new forms of labor that were disarticulated from the local community, and turned into permanent labor forces at the service of the Inca aristocracy.

In South Asia, we see a similar pattern of unequal reciprocity. Under the jajmani system, local caste groups owed a variety of work services and products to each other, from tanning to weaving to conducting rituals. Indeed, it is plausibly speculated that castes originated as hereditary occupations. At the level of ideas, work was not thought of as a unitary subject performed by a free (if socially grounded) individual; instead, group productive roles existed, marked by highly unequal but also reciprocal qualities of ritual purity, such as the work of tanners—conceived as polluting—which inter-locked with the putatively pure work of Brahmin priests. Clearly, this was an ideology that explains and endorses inequality, though it also allowed space for change (as local castes maneuvered for changed work roles with improved ritual rank) and resistance (as groups dropped out of the system by conversion to egalitarian religions like Buddhism or Islam).

We notice a pattern in these precapitalist class societies in which the idea of work was differentiated into concrete products or tasks associated with specific collective groups, in turn synthesized into a functioning economy through unequal exchanges, mystified as mutual and reciprocal in nature. Though group membership was envisioned in various ways, cultural, linguistic, religious, and so forth, it was often the case that groups consisted of or were identified with a specific kind of work, and that such work carried denigrating or exalting qualities.

With this in mind, we can better situate Greek and Roman ideas about work, which constitute in part the roots of the Western intellectual tradition. The early Greek oral traditions of Homer and Hesiod idealize the work of the farmer, as do early Roman stories about Cincinnatus, the patriotic farmer-general. These "farmers," however, were owners of large estates and masters of extensive households in which women, slaves, and other subordinates labored, so these ideals highlight not hard work in general but the hands-on management of rural production. By contrast, classical Greek thought turned against work, especially for others (self-sufficient farming was still esteemed). The ideal in Plato (c. 428–348 or 347B.C.E.) and Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) was the man free of necessity, with leisure to engage in politics and contemplation. There was particular disdain for merchants, who made money by trade rather than production from the land, and for artisans, who crafted goods with their hands. The productive and reproductive work of women was largely ignored. The classic Roman authors, such as Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.), held roughly the same views. This constitutes a characteristic inversion of the social reality surrounding such authors: they lived in commercially vibrant cities whose wealth came from extensive long-distance trade in farm and handcraft products. The idle rich, with time for political and natural theory, drew income from this economy, while distinguishing themselves by denigrating its key actors: slaves, foreigners, and craftsmen.

Unlike the Inca and South Asian examples cited above, in the Greco-Roman case there seems to be no specific mandate to reciprocity (however unequal) between direct laborers and intellectual elites. Perhaps this difference is the result of the greater division of labor and differentiation of roles in the rich commercial Mediterranean, creating more conceptual separation between urban authors and direct producers. The brief glimpses we have of the idea-worlds of artisans differ significantly from the famous classical writers; numerous inscriptions on pottery express pride and status in well-made handcrafts. Also, there were in Rome collegia, large clubs of craftsmen, with a rich mythological and ceremonial life. Though inarticulate in the sense of bequeathing to us extended texts, these represent alternative views of work from the famous disdain of Plato or Aristotle.