A World of Work #7

The role of theory is to enable the story of the hidden to be told.

One of the most problematic and powerful principles of Marx is his capacity to show that there are plural stories of the same world. When he describes the relationship between profit and suplus value, for example, he describes a situation of essence and appearance. Profit is the appearance of the essential reality of surplus value, extracted from the worker through the labour power that is purchased. Marx tells a plural story, with a capitalist version and a proletarian version. The capitalist story of profit hides and displaces the proletarian story - or, for Marx, reality - of surplus value.

The sad legacy of Hegel is the condition for this use of a distinction of essence versus appearance, deployed almost as though it were a fixed and obvious common sense. The concept of an essence, so easily reduced to something like a ‘natural fact’, has been so radically re-organised in a post-phenomenological world that it is difficult for it to operate as it did for Hegel, at least within philosophy. Outside, in a wider world of conceptual usage, there has been some pushback against what came to be called essentialism (the name for the reduction of an essence to a natural fact) but the basic disinction between a layer of truth - essence - and a layer of something else - appearance - is widely retained.

The problematic aspect of this distinction is the hidden value structures that too often accompany claims to reach an essence of things. The power of the principle, however, lies in its’ capacity to reveal plurality, to reveal that there are stories of things both as they appear and as they hide. For now let’s replace or shift the distinction between essences and appearances away from a simple model of truth (essence) and error (appearance) towards a sense of a distinction between hiding and appearing. In this sense the story of labour power in Capital is a plural story of that which appears (profit) and that which is hidden (surplus value). The role of theory is to enable the story of the hidden to be told.

In point of fact, profit is the form of appearance of surplus-value, and the latter can be sifted out from the former only by analysis. - Marx, Capital Vol 3, Chapter 2.

When it comes to work, which is after all the location of this labour-power-in-action that produces the profit / surplus value nexus, a similar need to sift out the various elements needs something like theory or analysis. Yet we might ask why? The need for an analysis or theory of work is only called into existence if we already suspect work of hiding something. This experience, of something not being right, of something not quite fitting, it’s this that must be presupposed before there is even a problem of work¹. The problem, after all, must first be felt as a problem, only after which can any attempt to think it begin, however falteringly.

In Kathi Weeks book The problem with work they attempt to think about the value of work, not just its practice. It’s this interest in the value of the thing that motivates her critical engagement with both marxism and (socialist) feminism. She draws on both of those traditions of thought but each of them has some limits, mainly in the way they too quickly assume a kind of natural fact of the matter when it comes to work. It just is assumed to be the way it is, and arguments mainly turn around how it is organised, controlled, paid and protected. The assumption that we know what work is or what value it has, however, goes unchallenged.

Weeks draws on concepts that arise out of autonomist marxism in order to think beyond the limits of traditional accounts of work. One concept is of the refusal of work.

The refusal of work is at once a model of resistance, both to the modes of work that are currently imposed on us and to their ethical defense, and a struggle for a different relationship to work born from the collective autonomy that a postwork ethics and more nonwork time could help us to secure. - Weeks, p.26

The reason for this is primarily based on the claim that work is not simply an economic activity. Rather it is a primary mode of domination. It is perhaps the central motor by which the capitalist system captures the individual, even those who oppose the system. We are placed into a relationship that we live intimately and everyday and which has direct material effects. It’s very hard to live this relationship ‘in the negative’ as it were.

It’s important to maintain a focus on the productive role of work, not least because it reveals the creative capacity of human society as well as its destructive side. At the same time the complications of work and its role in our lives is central to any attempt to analyse it. The tools to do so must be able to cope with the lived experience and subtle subversion of our subjectivity that takes place as we live our working lives.

Take the idea of ‘getting your perfect job’. It’s impossible to simply dismiss this desire and dream by responding sarcastically that there is no such thing. The truth is that there is something like a ‘perfect job’ for people, something they would find themselves wanting to do not just for money, or perhaps wanting to do because of the money. These desires, these wants - like all desires - often find some sadness in satisfaction, as the reality of some dream comes home. Yet even then this desire is not only powerful and real but, sometimes, appears to be fulfilled. People can and do get pleasure and purpose from their job, and sometimes quite reasonably so. Some work is useful, or beautiful. Here though we get to at least one of the lingering feelings many will have with regard their job, the work they do.

The COVID lockdown revealed something that many people seem intent on repressing, which is that a large amount of work that people do is utterly useless, perhaps destructive. Being forced to stop work and then seeing that it didn’t matter is a little like being told that your life doesn’t matter, which is often not far from the truth within our current system of work. There is much talk about a surplus population of unemployed, unemployable and underemployed, yet the truth is that we probably have far more useless employed than we care to realise. Work in capitalism is often futile. Bullshit jobs as David Graeber called them².

Yet despite these bullshit jobs many individuals, many subjectivities, are organised around this idea of getting something like a perfect job, or a better job. How many times have you ever thought you’d like a better job? What is it that’s involved in this desire? The complicated process of trying to disentangle the positive, freedom affirming elements of those desires from the capitulatory acceptance of status quo and ‘the way things really are’ is one of the key targets of any analysis of work, over and above it’s role in extracting surplus value³.

One analogy might be worth making here. There is much that is wrong in our contemporary moment with University education in the UK. As someone who has worked in that space and spent the last decade resisting it in my work with the Free University Brighton, I’m never quite sure how to answer the question of whether someone should go to University. If the question is ‘should I study’ then my answer is always yes, without a doubt, study - and group study in particular - is a powerful tool for self-transformation, or what we prefer to call ‘learning’. However when it comes to the University, the debt, the crappy teaching and the ethos of the modern University, it’s a much more complicated answer. If you want money and a good career, for example, you’re better of by far going on the trade, becoming a gas fitter, scaffolder, plumber and such like. Well paid and consistent work that offers a degree of self control you won’t find in the cube farm office space the graduate is likely to end up in. As for those who study and love the joy of learning, they too often find themselves sucked into wanting to become an acadamic, a dream that once achieved produces little other than disappointment, stress and humiliation.

Despite all this there is an experience of validation, insight and joy that many encounter at University.

So the advice is complicated. The positive experience of learning in a validating community can be life-changing, particularly for working class people who have had poor experiences of education. It can feel liberating to exit the world of the ‘uneducated’. The problem comes when considering which world one enters once you have exited the previous one. It’s not likely to be the world you thought it was.

1. This applies, in my case at least, to any reading of Marx I make. There is a clear sense in which the problem motivating Capital is something like profit and an analysis of what it is, an analysis that arises perhaps as a result of the study of labour power. Whilst Althusser and his account of a scientific break between Capital and the earlier work of Marx has always sat a bit uneasily in my head, at the same time it’s not easy to connect the Marx who writes of labour and alienation in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and the one who writes of labour power and socially necessary labour time in Capital. If we didn’t already know they were written by the same author and were to find them, as it were, as though they were ancient texts, I can easily imagine them being ascribed to completely different authors.

2. If you’ve not heard of this or read the book, take a quick primer from the Wiki page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

3. To be clear here, I take the theory of surplus value to be on a par with the theory of gravity. It’s not a speculation, but a theory that explains how profit originates and whilst other theories of profit exist, their status as knowledge is no more solid than a religious explanation. The difficulty, perhaps, is that the theory of surplus value is far more difficult to put to work than the theory of gravity.

---