Shorter Hours, Free Time & the Dogma of Work (page 2 of 2)
Excerpt from `The Jobless Future'
By Stanley Aronowitz & William DiFazio

An End to Endless Work

At a basic level, our proposals involve much more than an effective legislatives struggle. They also require a significant effort to pose alternatives to the values that have propelled American cultural ideals since the end of World War I. The persistence of the old values, many of them crucially tied to the period of American economic expansion and world dominance, has constituted one of the most significant tools in the arsenal of insurgent conservatism. The conservatives have been able to mobilize working-class and professional constituencies with a populism that is based on resisting the implications of change.

Like many who have come before us, we believe that among the crucial tools of domination is the practice of "work without end," which chains workers to machines and especially to the authority of those who own and control them -- capital and its managerial retainers. To be sure, labor did not enter these relations of domination without thereby gaining some benefit. In the Fordist era, as Hunnicut has brilliantly shown, organized labor exchanged work for consumption and abandoned its historical claim of the right to be lazy, as Paul Lafargue put it.2 Here, within limits, we affirm that right but confess another: the freedom of people emancipated from labor to become social agents.

Needless to say, we reject the idea that liberal democratic states have already conferred citizenship and that apathy is the crucial barrier preventing many from participating in decision-making. Such optimism, unfortunately promulgated by many intellectuals of the left as well as the right, blithely ignores the social conditions that produce "apathy," especially the structural determinants of disempowerment, among them endless work. Nor are we prepared to designate the economic sphere, including the shop-floor "rational-purposive" activity that on the whole has been effectively depoliticized and functions only in terms of the perimeters of instrumental technical rationality.

Management's control over the workplace is an activity of politics. There are winners and losers in the labor process. To render the workplace rational entails a transformation of what we mean by rationality in production, including our conception of skill and its implied "other," unskill transformation of what we mean by mental as opposed to physical labor and our judgment of who has the capacity to make decisions under regimes of advanced technologies.

Politics as rational discourse -- as opposed to a naked struggle for power -- awaits social and economic emancipation. Among the constitutive elements of freedom is self-managed time. Our argument in this book is that there are for the first time in human history the material preconditions for the emergence of the individual and, potentially, for a popular politics. The core material precondition is that labor need no longer occupy a central place in our collective lives, nor in our imagination. We do not advocate the emancipation from labor as a purely negative freedom. Its positive content is that, unlike the regime of work without end, it stages the objective possibility of citizenship.

Under these circumstances, we envision civil society as the privileged site for the development of individuals who really are free to participate in a public sphere of their own making. In such a civil society, politics consists not so much in the ritual act of selection, through voting, of one elite over another, but in popular assemblies that could, given sufficient space and time, be both the legislative and the administrative organs. The scope of popular governance would extend from the workplace to the neighborhood. For as Ernest Mandel has argued, there is no possibility of worker self-management, much less the self-management of society, without ample time for decision-making. Thus, in order to realize a program of democratization, me must create a new civil society in which freedom consists in the first place (but only in the first place) in the liberation of time from the external constraints imposed by nature and other persons on the individual.

The development of the individual -- not economic growth, cost cutting, or profits -- must be the fundamental goal for scientific and technological innovation. The crucial obstacle to the achievement of this democratic objective is the persistence of the dogma of work, which increasingly appears, in its religious-ethical and instrumental-rational modalities, as an obvious instrument of domination.

Footnotes:

1. William DiFazio, Longshoremen (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1985)

2. Paul LaFargue, The Right to Be Lazy (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1907)
This book is available as a $17.95 trade paperback from University
of Minnesota Press, 1994.