Work

Marx looked to the future, embracing the development of work under capitalism as the necessary stage before communism. Other critics looked backward, drawing on (sometimes quite unrealistic) visions of medieval craft guilds or the mutualistic cooperation of the village community. Utopian socialists in the early nineteenth century, such as Charles Fourier (1772–1837) and the Scottish industrialist-turned-radical Robert Owen (1771–1858), sought the productivity of capitalism without alienation and inequality through communal mass production and the equal exchange of products between specialized craftspeople. The late-nineteenth-century artist, designer, and philosopher William Morris put forth an ideal of craft mastery against the division of labor and of creativity rooted in knowledge of the past. The gadfly economist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) explored related ideals about productive creativity and disciplined work, but instead of archaic crafts guilds, he envisioned as social carriers the combined figures of industrial engineers and workers. He turned a critical gaze against financiers, the accumulators and manipulators of money, who he regarded as the parasites (the "leisure class") of otherwise productive capitalism.

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), a French sociologist-anthropologist who worked at the beginning of the twentieth century, offered perhaps the most perceptive defense of work under capitalism in The Division of Labor in Society. In traditional societies, people did pretty much the same work, so they bonded with each other from their sameness ("mechanical solidarity"). But with the advance of the detailed division of labor, people no longer do the same work. Instead, their mutual interdependence creates a new, "organic" solidarity—unity from difference. This denied Marx's postulate of ultimately polarized classes. Durkheim's work is especially important in that he recognizes and confronts some of capitalism's most troubling developments, such as division and inequality (he was, we should note, a vigorous reformer who favored socialism). But his solution represents a mystical hope. Why should the division of labor result in solidarity and not worsening alienation and increasing fractionation of work?

The troubling qualities of contemporary, alienating work sparked two important mid-to late-twentieth-century statements affirming its underlying value. Catholic social teaching, as expressed in Pope John Paul II's Laborem exercens (On Human Work), views work as a distinguishing feature of humankind. Through work, people come to understand their role in and obligation to a society, and to humanity as a whole. Likewise, work is a crucial source of self-respect and identity. This both establishes ideals of what work can be and provides a basis for critical evaluation of work in capitalism and socialism, where people become the objects rather than the subjects of work. Laborem exercens values labor over capital, though it accepts a subordinated role for capitalism. Hannah Arendt also sees work as crucial to the human condition, but she distinguishes between labor and work in an interesting fashion. Labor is the instrumental use of the body to make things that will be consumed and will not last long; work is the use of the mind and the hands to create things that will endure, the world of art and artifacts that surround and enrich human lives. She criticizes contemporary economics for blurring these two categories, for sacrificing the enduring monuments of work in favor of impermanent, mass-produced consumer goods. Insightful as this temporal perspective is, it seems biased toward artists and intellectuals and dismisses the creativity and necessity of daily chores, particularly those associated with women.

In 1974 Harry Braverman refocused the debate over work around the perspective of Marx. He argued that capitalists do not just buy labor power but seek to control the performance of work itself. Work may be considered to have two components, mental and physical (often called manual). To capture control over work is to take its mental side, the skills, knowledge, and initiative, away from the worker and put it in the hands of the employer. This is done through observation and redesign of physical motions (time-motion engineering), by building work skills into technologies and production layouts, and by bureaucratically controlled reward systems. Debate has raged over his reading of work history; for example, some technologies remove existing skills but introduce new skills. Nor are workers ever completely deskilled; even highly controlled and designed workplaces require subtle tricks and informal group cooperation. But after Braverman, we can no longer view new technology or management reform as simply neutral, as always means of greater efficiency and saving of effort; the forces behind such changes bear critical scrutiny.

In summary, writers of the last two centuries have viewed capitalist work with great ambivalence. From Smith, through Marx, to Arendt and Braverman, there is a sense that capitalism provides us a bounty of goods, but at the cost of controlled, subdivided, unchallenging, and unimaginative labors that do not tap the richness of human creative capacity. Ethnographers of workplaces generally agree with these views, but note that workers often find a sense of play and accomplishment in their jobs. Some bit of humanity peeks through.