Generation Bubble

Has the cunning of history masterminded not the elimination of drudgery and labor, but in fact their greater saturation of cultural milieu via the capillaries of online social-media networks?

Asking people why they work is sort of a dumb question. Capitalism promulgated the idea that work has little to do with personal development and instead presented it as an obstacle, a burden one would shoulder only because it is a means to secure the true vehicle of self-actualization — money. Work time is wasted time, a period of bondage to be slogged through to reach the golden shore of leisure. At that point one can test the very limits of freedom by using his purchasing power to get whatever — and thereby become whomever — he wants. If working for wages has so corrupted the meaning of work, should one look for alternatives? Is raising non-participation in the workforce to be celebrated as a good omen of things to come? After all, if employment in a capitalist system is basically wage slavery anyway, then doesn’t it follow that unemployment is emancipation?  Work could be severed from income and thereby have meaning restored to it beyond myopic money grubbing. Do away with unnecessary accumulation, pursue the steady-state economy, minimize exploited labor as a macroeconomic imperative, organize society so as to make the bulk of human effort non-compulsory and see what the fruits of liberty could really be — such is the essence of Herbert Marcuse’s utopian vision in Eros and Civilization.

Capitalism needs workers who believe they have no choice but to sell their labor power to survive. Yet the sort of work most are compelled to do is not a life or death matter; growth for its own sake has become the guiding imperative, but not from some transcendental necessity. Capital succeeds, however, not because it presents specific tasks as socially necessary, but because compulsory work itself is mystified. This translates as: “I don’t care what I do, as long as I am getting paid.” One works not because he produces useful stuff, but because he must be disciplined to conform to the existing order, or to “civilization,” as Freud would have it. Compulsory work and programmed leisure come to form a unified, inseparable whole; the pleasures of consumerism rely on the structure supplied by the pressure to work and the pliant, receptive passivity that carries over from workplace discipline to color one’s “free” time. Outside of this structure, what we enjoy now — our “repressive needs,” Marcuse calls them — may cease to satisfy us.

That prospect, not surprisingly, terrifies most people. No one wants to be obliged to invent new pleasures, even if that would make us more “authentic” or autonomous. As Marcuse explains:

The ideology of today lies in that production and consumption reproduce and justify domination. But their ideological character does not change the fact that their benefits are real. The repressiveness of the whole lies to a high degree in its efficacy: it enhances the scope of material culture, facilitates the procurement of the necessities of life, makes comfort and luxury cheaper, draws ever-larger areas into the orbit of industry — while at the same time sustaining toil and destruction. The individual pays by sacrificing his time, his consciousness, his dreams; civilization pays by sacrificing its own promises of liberty, justice and peace for all.

Sacrificing the joys of administered leisure seems unimaginable. Instead the logic of the work ethic snares all those who find themselves in its path. Unemployment becomes a crushing psychic burden, and is rightly reviled across the political spectrum. Refusing to sell one’s labor power is seen as somewhat inexplicable (if one isn’t already absolved by wealth, that is). Common sense dictates that if one had enough money (as if there were such a thing as “enough”), he wouldn’t bother to go to work and would instead bang on his drum all day. Such is the argument not only for the righteously idle rich, but also against a guaranteed minimum income or “social wage.” If you paid people to do nothing, then nothing is what they will do. Just ask Jim Bunning and his friends in the Republican party who think unemployment benefits encourage laziness.

The time-honored strategy for compelling work under capitalism is to leverage the reserve army of the unemployed — which has swelled to a mighty force in recent months. In Capital, Karl Marx argues such an army is useful for capitalists in keeping workers under their thumb:

The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active labor-army; during the periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check. Relative surplus-population is therefore the pivot upon which the law of demand and supply of labor works. It confines the field of action of this law within the limits absolutely convenient to the activity of exploitation and to the domination of capital.

But the reserve-army strategy works only insofar as labor is a commodity, with workers interchangeable, their skills transferable. The more specific the labor, the more likely the workers in that field will retain bargaining power, and not only that, some residual pride in what they do, an identification with their work that makes more of it than a disutility, a necessary evil. Thus it has been beneficial for capitalists to make work drudgery, that is, to make it more efficient through the hierarchical division of labor and technological deskilling innovations, so as to subsume labor under capital more thoroughly, and at the same time offer the end products of the production process as compensation for workers’ loss of meaning in their work. Work made to suck proffers only the pale fruit of a wage with which to buy the exciting crap that other drudges have made or have offered on the market.

In a chapter called  “Why Work?” from his 1992 book The Politics of Identity, sociologist Stanley Aronowitz argues that productivity enhancements have to some degree eliminated the possibility of worker autonomy within the work world, and the prevailing ideology of consumerism has helped to make leisure the more pressing and meaningful engagement in everyday life. As a result the workplace is where domination is established and reproduced — not a place where skills are learned, social ties are developed and human nature and will to mastery is expressed. Aronowitz elaborates how capitalist management techniques succeeded in making work into empty “unwork” in the modern era, while producing enough goods and “repressive needs” to make consumerism appear to compensate for the emptiness. But, he argues, people will only accept consumerism  — as they are encouraged to by mass media representations and by their inculcated insecurity about social belonging — if they are unnaturally isolated from their natural companions in society, those with whom they would once have had solidarity with in the workplace.

Indeed, millions still seek jobs, but only to earn a living. Few jobs still carry with them the idea of a vocation such as is usually associated with professions or genuine crafts (neither of which correspond to their contemporary practices). Even much industrial labor of the past — mining for example — was closely linked with work cultures that far overshadowed the semi-skilled character of the work itself. The sense of vocation experienced by workers in retail trades or civil trades (two of the most important service sectors) was long eclipsed by the advent of corporate selling.

Work once provided a culture and a sense of belonging, an identity derived not only from the skills required but from the social rituals enacted on the proverbial shop floor and the cooperation and collaboration that takes place there and after hours. These social bonds are the ultimate source of the “general intellect” from which social value ultimately springs.

Marx argues in Capital that “social contact begets in most industries an emulation and a stimulation of the animal spirits that heighten the efficiency of each individual workman.” He offers a ringing paean to the “social productive power of labor, or the productive power of social labor. This power is due to co-operation itself. When the laborer co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.” Aronowitz, for his part, claims that “Work is that human activity which expresses creative achievement and corresponds, therefore, to part of desire, our will to objectivate ourselves individually and collectively by creating objects or social relations.” At work in such an environment, we embrace a subjectivity that has joy in collaboration and reciprocity woven directly into its fabric along with a clear sense of purpose, a lived sense of a vocation rather than a vicarious one.

Workplace solidarity offered a potential source of resistance to administered consumerism — which itself is an appealing meme to consume: From the ideal of workplace cooperation stems the sentimental, nostalgic representations of lost working-class culture, as well as the tropes of contemporary workplace-based sitcoms, which offer a fantasia where the only work that takes place is the elaboration of each employee’s personality. In real life, Aronowitz cites the example of furloughed longshoremen in the late 20th century, whose experience in underemployment demonstrated

that the shift from production to consumption as the locus of everyday life is by no means automatic when “free” time dominates “necessary” labor time. When the workplace and the neighborhood are spatially contiguous and workers have succeeded in preserving an institutional equivalent of the shop floor to provide for the basis for their social interaction, consumerism is relegated to a subordinate place in their everyday experience.

But the production of identity, though it relies on an audience, is no longer a collaborative project undertaken at work. Suburbanization and commuting have all worked to destroy work-life integrity — often under the ironic banner of convenience. Here’s how Aronowitz describes the transformation, which was fairly complete in the United States by the end of the Reagan–Bush era:

The classic model of contemporary mass society is provided by the suburban or exurban location of industrial and commercial working spaces. The horizontal patterns of home construction produce low density living arrangements. Hence the nuclear family, the shopping center, the mass media constitute the nexus of social relationships that often effectively countervail the collective tasks performed at the workplace.

Aronowitz’s analysis sounds a lot like what I grew up with in a 1980s exurb. Work was regarded as a drag, identity hinged on what you could get at the mall (by far the most significant and most anticipated destination in everyday life), and the overriding problem was to find ways to connect meaningfully with peers and to escape the sense of being marooned with family in a detached, isolated house.

In a sense, such feelings of disconnected isolation manifest one of the vintage contradictions of capitalism: the tension between the need to commoditize labor yet still capitalize on labor cooperation in the workplace. By streamlining work processes in order to deskill them, workers themselves began to become superfluous, and work deadening. But capital needs to extract the surplus value workers produce when they collaborate. They can’t be demoralized to the point where they become unprofitable. This capitalistic dead-end loomed in the 20th century as “Fordist” industrialism no longer could cohere.

A delicate balance, then, must be struck between making work suck for workers (to keep it unfulfilling and alienating for them so they remain willing to sell off their labor power cheaply and seek life satisfaction in consumerism), but at the same time making being with one’s fellow workers seem fun (so we will inadvertently create value through our collaborative relations with them). And yet we mustn’t get so cozy with co-workers as to start figuring out we could be productive without bosses — especially since the “means of production” for postindustrial work can be no more expensive than a laptop and an internet connection.

Who's the boss?: social networks' new paradigm of "play-bor."

The advent of networked sociality offers a new way for capitalism to strike the balance. Enthusiasts for online culture often present it as though it offers a solution to the problems of atomization and the  “crisis in leisure” Aronowitz describes: “the effort of people to regain their sense of craft, and liberate themselves from their complete dependence on the wage relation for personal and social meaning.” And in a sense the crisis in leisure has done just that. People no longer have the sense that they live in a world in which “friendship and community-making have become as rare talents as good cabinet-making,” as Aronowitz writes. Instead we are increasingly connected in social networks and may thereby seem to have more community in our lives than in the days of suburban angst and dyadic withdrawal into the claustrophobic nuclear family. It has opened a whole new space in which people can construct identity, replacing what was lost as the workplace became deadening.

So it seems that the wage relation may no longer define people, and not only because fewer of them are drawing wages. It used to be that what compelled work was the threat of starvation. Now it is “compelled” as immaterial labor, by the promise of being someone and earning social recognition on terms favorable to the existing social order. The surplus generated by human cooperation can be harvested online without people even realizing they are working — that is, social life can become a covert job regardless of whether or not people think they are employed or getting a wage. They just need to be maintaining their friendships and their creativity online — escaping the alienation and isolation brought on by suburbia, by meaningless work, by anomie and loneliness.

These same ideas also emerged earlier, in the workplace, to complement the shift to a postindustrial service economy. The product manufactured, more often than not, is affect — emotions, pleasures, the other side of the coin of domination. Maurizio Lazzarato, in Towards an Inquiry into Immaterial Labor details this shift in broad terms. Immaterial labor — “audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, the production of software, photography, cultural activities, etc.” — makes apparent consumption into a form of production. It “gives form and materializes needs, images, the tastes of consumers, and these products become in their turn powerful producers of needs, of images and of tastes.” Work becomes a matter of creating an environment in which these things can flow.

To that end, management encourages communication and networking within the workplace, which would seem like a good thing if it weren’t merely a higher form of compulsion:

The management watchword “you are to be subjects of communication” risks becoming even more totalitarian than the rigid division between conception and execution, because the capitalist would seek to involve the very subjectivity and will of the worker within the production of value. He would want command to arise from the subject himself, and from the communicative process : the worker controls himself and makes himself responsible within his team without intervention by the foreman, whose role would be redefined as a role of an animator…. What this phase of transformation still succeeds in hiding is that the individual and collective interests of the workers and those of the company are not one and the same.

Web 2.0, likewise, is not a solution to the atomization problem but is instead its apotheosis, the social factory. Its space is preformatted, proscribing autonomous spontaneity. People can only express their being as media — as digitized, quantifiable expression. It makes life pursuits into odd jobs of consumerism — shaping a fashion trend here, hyping a band there, making connections between disparate products, orchestrating synergies. Online sociality materializes the notion that people are no more than a series of signifiers articulated serially, in prescribed, administered commercial spaces, that they are nothing more than their latest status update, and whatever response this managed to generate. Selfhood has become a broadcasting project, not the holistic, lived experience one might wish it to be.

Once, the struggle was to articulate a real, authentic-seeming identity within a work world dictated by the needs of capital. It was a matter of “not selling out” even though one sold his labor power in a way which perpetuated the system. Now, the problem is different. Before workers developed identity and a sustaining culture in opposition to management, subverting the workplace by ingraining within it a kind of resistance, a conspiracy against capital that played out as the preservation of one’s own personal aims. But in the new system of immaterial labor, social networking and the pseudo-employment of public self-fashioning, making one’s identity is part of the production process that is subsumed under capital. It proceeds within commercial spaces, to suit the mutual ends private citizens share with businesses. Their respective brands become co-extensive.

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