A World of Work #6

Work is first a flow of force

It’s taken a little time to get back to work on this set of notes, mainly because of the Xmas break and also because of moving past the reading of Communists Like Us towards some other writings on work (Kathi Weeks, The problem with work will crop up in the next few weeks for example). I’ve also been watching Landman and thinking about the role of these kinds of TV shows / films (Deepwater Horizon being one of the films I watched over Xmas and that caught my interest).

Taking seriously the idea that material realities make the real difference often feels difficult because we don’t know how to change them. Part of the nature of a material reality is that it seems natural or immutable or just how things are. This is unsurprising because from our limited perspectives we are unable to get an adequate impression of the dynamics of change and if we can’t see the dynamics we damn sure can’t make out any inflection points and possible causes. How can we change something that to all intents and purposes presents as unchangeable?

The suggestion (in the last post) was that we need something like the scientific method because it can cope with the difference in scale between the individual human perception capabilities and the scale of the social phenomena those individuals are made in, live in and work in. This is more than a sense of not being able to see the woods for the trees. Rather it’s to do with the fact that some objects don’t exist, perceptually, outside the means with which to see them. In particular this applies to processes and dynamics, to trends and flows and movement.

How can we see what’s happening when what’s happening is only brought in front of our eyes when we look at it from a vantage point that is beyond the human. If the so-called scientific method is anything it is in the capacity it has for being able to bring into our vision something we cannot see just as a single human. The curious thing is that this process can involve a form of story-telling. History, for example, enables a kind of scientific method if such a method is considered to be this capacity to step out of our situation and bring into vision dynamical processes. A theory, too, offers a kind of story, a kind of diagram of the world that has a surrounding story of the way the theory enables something. So both a history of work as well as a theory of work could offer forms of understanding that enable this step beyond our limited horizons.

In terms of history, for example, E.P.Thomson’s famous essay on the factory and clock time expresses a key dynamic of social re-organisation that is curious¹ . Is it an ideological shift or an organisational one? The advent of the measured day is a vital underpinning to a Marxist conception of abstract labour, enabling a quantitative time that can become an object of exchange value, the wage. Outside this transformation the time of production is quite different, more connected to the time taken to make something rather than the inverse, the time in which something is made.

So Thompson essay tracks what exactly? A transformation, for sure, but also a new kind of object (clock-time) that is only important in so far as it reorganises social life. If the clock had not become part of the factory system it may have remained a curio, a quaint object of interest. For the new form of time governed by the clock to come into existence, however, the clock had to be put to work within a particular flow and set of structures. Is Thompson’s work a history rather than a theory?

Tracking a materialist analysis of anything, from work to time to motorcycles to microscopes, should not involve a focus on some object or need, nor is it totally accurate to simply talk about production. Rather it should be focused on the things that are forces and how something - some object perhaps, or some function or process - finds itself put to work in the service of those forces. Nothing stands still, so there’s little interest in the physical object in itself, rather, as in archaeology, the object is an artifact of a process and embodies a moment in time of the flow of forces. So with work.

Work is first a flow of force. Flows are channeled and directed, either consciously or through their interaction with other forces. The flow of a river or a canal are similiar not in themselves but in so far as they became the space of the flow of goods and people. A road or settlement is best understood by looking to the flows of forces that brought it into being, and so, for example, the history of the Turnpike system in Britain can offer insight into the state of interconnection of an economic community. With the advent or large scale capital we also see specific reorganisations of flows, from the flows of time to the flows of community.

The delicate and careful stories we should be telling involve questions such as why this, why then - why that, why now? What was needed for some object or process - such as the Turnpike roads, or enclosures, or the steam engine, or coalfields - to become connected to some other process? In particular, when thinking about capitalism - and work within capitalism - only some things are able to be brought into view as work, even though they might still be an activity. Things need to somehow be connected to the circuits of capital and that’s not an obvious process. In addition we need to pay attention to how capital - particularly large scale capital, often connected to the state - is able to make something work for it.

The arguments around social reproduction theory, for example, have their greatest strength in reminding marxists, in particular, that capital’s circuits don’t just run through the factory floors of direct surplus value extraction². They remind the theorist that there is a system at work, a machinery of capital, a set of means and relations of production that go to make up a mode of production, and that the appearance or form of the capitalist mode of production is, for Marx, one that inherently hides its own operation.

1. Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism: E. P. Thompson Source: Past & Present, No. 38 (Dec., 1967), pp. 56-97: Oxford University Press: http://www.jstor.org/stable/649749. Accessed: 06/01/2014 10:10

2. I say marxists ‘in particular’ because in some sense I feel like they should know better and their failure to foreground social reproduction for so long speaks to the limited theoretical capacity of most marxists, who are too often caught in a kind of strange mimicry of science with little if any actual critical thinking. No doubt this is partly because marxist theory has been over-determined by its political role, quieting the quest for questions.

But the point needs to be acknowledged far beyond marxist circles. “Once trained to see social reproduction, it becomes impossible to unsee it. Plights and fortunes in any fieldsite invoke analogous instances elsewhere, making sense with respect to a broader logic. This has, in the first instance, a sobering effect. As Tania Li (2008) describes of her experiences studying poverty-reduction programs of development agencies in Indonesia, it bars one from being taken in by technical solutions to immediate problems which, in their blindness to social reproduction, are helpless against the persistence of misery.” Weiss, Hadas. (2021) 2023. “Social reproduction”. In The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Felix Stein. Facsimile of the first edition in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Online: http://doi.org/10.29164/21socialrepro

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