Work

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, new theories of work under capitalism emerged.

Smith and Ricardo.

In 1776 the United States declared independence and Adam Smith (1723–1790) published The Wealth of Nations. Within the history of ideas, this is the year best suited to mark the full birth of capitalism, though as we saw above, the change had been long coming; and it was still to be a few decades before artificially powered factories began to diffuse outward from northern England and Scotland. Smith's view of work must be understood within his wider understanding of markets, since he saw markets as leading to the division of labor in detail, breaking production into a series of discrete operations, performed repetitively and with a focused perfection by different kinds and grades of workers. This concept, which was to become pervasive in capitalist practice, is exactly the opposite of the medieval notion of the unity of all stages of work in a craft. Smith was ambivalent about his vision of the trajectory of work, however, since he feared that this division of labor would dull the mind of the worker. (This worry is characteristic of Smith, who both forecast the power of markets and capitalism and explored moral sentiments that bind otherwise materialistic and competitive people.)

Smith accepted the labor theory of value, but it was propounded most emphatically by David Ricardo (1772–1823) around 1810. In the mid-nineteenth century, it was adopted by Karl Marx (1818–1883) and has been a mainstay of orthodox Marxism since then. The labor theory of value holds that as people make and reshape the raw materials of nature and transform them into objects of use ("use value"), their market values ("exchange value") come from the physical and mental effort in that work. It is, in part, a theory of price, but more widely it is a theory of the commonality in the values that each individual idiosyncratically attributes to objects. Clearly, a labor theory of value exalts work as a fundamental theme of human life. In Ricardo's hand, it highlighted the producing classes, capital and labor together, against the dead hand of rent-collecting landlords—in other words, it announced the birth of capitalism out of feudalism. In Marx's subsequent version, however, it valued workers against capitalists, the direct producers against the surplus-collecting owners of tools and resources ("means of production"), which are the congealed results of labors past. To Marx, this announced the future birth of communism out of capitalism. Neoclassical economists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries avoided the question of intersubjective value and transfer of value between classes altogether, narrowing their concern to how prices are set in particular markets. Other radical perspectives have looked to nonlabor theories of value, especially energy and other ecological-physical value sources. Flawed as it may be, however, the labor theory of value captures something of the relationship of past work (capital) to present work (laborers), which is both an existential necessity and the basis for unequal and exploitative power relations.

Karl Marx.

Marx offered a comprehensive, radical theory of work. In his labor-based worldview, human activity is central to making and transforming all aspects of life, including the concepts we use to understand it. It is important that we recognize that this is not a purely economic perspective, which is often assumed about Marx, but a much wider emphasis on the practice of life rather than the play of unworldly ideas. Likewise, his view of labor is wider than physical effort in factories, though Marx himself focused on this (then new) feature of capitalism. Rather, the term labor captures the full range of human capacities, as much mental and creative as physical and forceful.

This understood, we turn to alienation, Marx's central concern about work. At times we labor for ourselves, and though the product may be outside our bodies (e.g., my cleaned desk), we are not highly alienated from it. It is part of our being. At other times, we labor directly for others (e.g., a garden I plant for my wife), rendering a product that someone else will possess, use, and enjoy. But though the product is separated from us, it becomes part of a social bond, a nonalienated relation to another human being. However, under the condition of commodity production (making a good for anonymous sale), and even more importantly in wage labor under capitalism (working on a good that is owned by someone else, in a manner controlled by someone else), the result of our labors has no connection or relation to us. It is alienated. To take, for example, the division of labor in a bank, we will see that one worker will collect data, another sum it up, and a third give it a credit score, based on research by a fourth, fifth, and so on. No one worker has an organic relationship to the owner of the labor (the bank), the final product of labor (the mortgage), or the person who receives the product (the potential homeowner). Alienation is, in Marx, a matter of objective relationships, but it has subjective, felt implications—a sense that the product or the customer or the firm does not matter, that the individual has no control or commitment to work, that the whole goal of labor is vague or even unimaginable.

Within this broad framework, Marx launched a critical analysis of work under capitalism. If capitalists want to profit, labor has to render enough value to cover two funds. One is to pay workers enough to live, that is, to "reproduce" labor power. The other is for capitalists to hold the "surplus value." Marx thus saw unequal reward for work at the heart of capitalism; assuming the labor theory of value, work activity produces all the value, but the workers receive only part of it. The rest is captured by the owners of past labor, the means of production. If total value can be conceptually divided into the necessary payment to workers and surplus value, then capitalists who seek constantly to add to their invested capital (to "accumulate capital") have two basic strategies. One is to increase the total length of the working day, so that workers are paid for ten hours, say, enough to survive, but have to work for two hours beyond that. Marx called this absolute surplus value. The other is to make the workers' efforts during a given period of time more productive. More could be paid to workers, possibly, but the total product would increase even more quickly, rendering yet more surplus value. Obtaining this "relative surplus value" is, according to Marx, the main logic governing work under capitalism: not that work becomes more and more brutal, though sometimes it does, but that it becomes more and more dominated by the efficiency of production, especially via technology, the dead labor of the past used to speed up the live labor of the present.

Marx thus foresaw the ultimate polarization of capital and labor, leading to a revolution by the workers. Capital would accumulate more and more means of production, pushing relative surplus value ever more extremely, and workers would have more and more in common, as each would experience the same alienated and fractured labor. Both classes would become clearer in self-definition and self-understanding, and more openly in struggle between them, until a fundamental historical transformation (a "revolution") would usher in a new state of communism. Marx failed to think clearly about this future, being always focused on the immediate task of criticism and hostile to utopias, but he hints at a life of holistic, undivided labor, producing goods that were directly shared or exchanged in webs of immediate social relations. This recital indicates two major flaws in Marx's thought. Neither workers nor capitalists have become clearly defined and self-recognized classes across national or ethnic lines, though capitalists have come closer than Marx's preferred workers. And actual communism formed a series of dystopias, dedicated to the mass production of commodities in alienating factories with worker's labor unions and other self-expressions (e.g., religion) severely controlled or repressed by domineering political-economic masters: the worst of capitalism without the leavening of democracy and civil liberties. However, no worker, student, or activist in the modern world can ignore Marx's analysis of work, whether one seeks to defend or to transform capitalism.