lifework

How people work, and how employment as we know it doesn’t

Introduction

Lifework df
Whatever we have to do, or choose to do for ourselves, each other and the world. As distinct from employment: other-directed work for money, boss or institution (public services mostly adopt top-down model of capitalist companies).

Why I write: no special qualification, but experience, conviction and faith that others are more like me than not. I cant ignore the elephant in the room: wage-slavery’s alive and well. Our ‘social democracy’ fails to include the main productive business of our lives; we routinely drop all claim to self-determination and mutual accountability as we enter employers’ premises. At the core of our organised ‘social’ activity we resign ourselves to powers and purposes outside our control..

What turned me against employment? Maybe it seemed a bit too like school: at home my parents made most of the decisions, but they’d ask me what I wanted, let me choose. I knew they loved me and could, mostly, answer back; none of which applied at school. After school, before university and instead of military service I spent a couple of years in voluntary work-camps: no pay, often badly run, but friendly, doing the best we could, mostly manual work in what seemed like a good cause. Unlike a string of ‘proper’ jobs where, even in a ‘public services’ it was often impossible to do a good job well: that didn’t seem to be the main aim, and we workers had little say in what we did or how: that went for an NHS hospital, Reuters, the Victoria Line tunnel, schools and colleges, adult education and community work.

Public service? Private industry? In neither are workers and managers primarily concerned with what they’re doing for its own sake, for community, society or the wider world, Not even what they’re doing for themselves – apart from money and promotion (nothing to do with the job in hand, any more than marks or coming top of the class at school) In private enterprise, under capitalist company law, the reason is obvious: doing good is not the name of the game at all; the goal is not the welfare of workers, society or a better world; the goal is no more or less than profit for owners and shareholders. In public services, although broad goals are set by more or less elected authorities, the working structure closely parallels that of private enterprise, with power at the top and decisions imposed on those below.

Wage slavery’s alive and well: official!
Although we have a choice of employers, once in the rules of the game are broadly the same: do what you’re told or else. If we’re sacked, we don’t have five acres and a mule – the space and resources to fend for ourselves. And government benefits, ‘social security’ is made conditional on our efforts to get back on the treadmill: democratic authorities funnelling us back into undemocratic employment.


Freedom TO work, freedom AT work
We need work, for a living and as a living. We need the income, our part in making and doing the things we need, and our share in the product. We need the company and recognition of others who know us, not just by appearances or titles, but in action, by what we do. Work is also self-expression. We need a say in what we do, how we do it and to what purpose. If democracy means anything, it’s about how we organise ourselves: who does what, and how, for whom, and who gets what? We should all have a say in how the process and product are allocated, shared. To make sense of what we do, commit ourselves and understand each other, we need a common purpose we can believe in. ‘Do what you’re told’ and/or ‘whatever makes most money for the boss’ is just not good enough.
With no credible personal or shared commitment – if human wellbeing and a better world are not on the agenda for our daily work - how on earth do we expect to live happily, build a community or save the world?

Work is too important to leave to Employers
We don’t just sell our labour, we sell a part of ourselves, the only lives we’ve got, time and energy we might have spent differently. We learn, and unlearn, by doing: not just picking up skills, but shaped in ourselves, transformed, or deformed. It’s easy just to focus on what we’re doing, the immediate object, or – if that gets too monotonous – on what we hope to get for it, the money and what we might spend it on. All work, every action, has both motives and consequences.

Human work, human purpose, is as good as human consciousness:
In human work, we like to know what we’re doing and why. Our motives will be more or less recognised, by ourselves and others; our purposes will include at least some of the consequences - if not the goods or service we produce, than the wage we hope to get for it. Some of our own motives, as well as other people’s, remain obscure. And for every intended consequence, there will be others unintended: collateral damage or lucky break.
People used to say ‘what’s your game’ when asking about someone’s job. If we’re lucky we may actually enjoy what we do for a living. In a game, or hobby or art, the process may become an end in itself – the joy is in the music or the game as it’s played, not just the final score, applause etc. Human work at best is both vocation and game, our main purpose and joy in life. Everything in play, and to play for.

High and low, rare and commonplace
Mechanical work, evolution, plant and animal life, these all come into what we do. Not beneath us, but part of us. As we move and move things in the world, making and breaking, meeting and mating, so we are moved: we feel what we do, inside and outside ourselves; we are touched by what we touch. What goes on in our heads, and socalled ‘hearts’ is part and parcel of the world it reflects, and serves to change.
The images and affections of our inner life are as real and effective as the process and pattern of the world around. The world goes through us as we go through it. The human ‘spirit’ is no more separate from our bodies in the world than matter and energy are separate in physics and chemistry.


Genius of capitalist employment:
- Uses us against ourselves and each-other, subordinating co-operation and common interest to competition and greed (note: we need all sides of our nature – aggression and appropriation are also essential – but not to exploit one side at expense of others.)
- Sets dead labour – capital and finished product - over living labour, past over present. Capital a millstone round the neck of vital time and energy.
- Substitutes wants it can satisfy for the needs it cant: turns old needs into new wants, to keep us producing the things it can supply, distract us from the things it cant – freedom, love etc
- Addicts us to more of the same and jumps the points at which priorities change: survival once secured, what matters most is not what we can get or how much we have but what we do with our lives, what we make of ourselves, each other and the world..
- Entrenches inequality, in its own power-relations and in its distribution of earnings and profits . Depends on hierarchy, differentials, setting one over and against another. In society, as in work, we’re classed, divided and ruled.
- Capitalist employment substitutes goods for good, images of wealth and success for the experience and process of human happiness; blots out our vision of the world, and the damage we do to it, with…Disneyland.

The alternatives?
- People work better, live better when they co-operate, by choice, in a common cause, when they know what they’re doing, who with and who for.
- We enjoy working for ourselves and each other, the self-satisfaction and mutual respect that comes with doing something useful in the world.
- We already manage a lot for ourselves - at home, in childcare (who teaches our children to walk, talk and feed themselves?)’ at leisure and in emergencies.
- Even at work, a lot of the management is left to us (which is why working-to-rule has sometimes been an effective weapon in industrial disputes); and why employers’ requirement of subservience is balanced, or contradicted, by demand for teamwork and initiative.
- A bit more ambition, a will to connect: to take back our own lives, reach out to each other and into ourselves, come to grips with the world as it is, make the most of what we find, reclaim the only time we’ve got..

Capital and Commonwealth.
Of course we NEED capital, all our capita, fairly and functionally shared
- Commonwealth could mean what it says: resources – land and plant as well as cash – to be owned by those who work, enjoy and depend on them..
- capital is our personal and social inheritance, the lasting product of our own and our forbears’ work, what we save and build on, pass to our children
- what matters is who produces and commands that capital, how it’s shared, and the purposes to which it’s put: as it stands we get the pay, but not the product, profit or plant.
- working companies in need of outside capital must pay for it, with interest or product share, but NOT at the price of power. Voting shares for active stakeholders, those who pay with their lives. If I have savings to invest, that is money I can live without, though I want it safe and welcome a return on it.
- In capitalist employment, the product, profit and power of decision belong not to those who produce, nor to those who gain or suffer most directly from the
- process. Who pays the piper calls the tune: the players, the dancers and the neighbours do as they’re told, take what they get.
- Decision is divorced from experience, thinking from doing and suffering, word from deed, orders from reality. As workers we have no say in what most concerns us: what we do and how our time is spent; those who give the orders cant know what they’re talking about.
- Company law gives ownership and decision-making to shareholders, those with disposable cash, not those who invest their lives. (In a social democracy we can all vote for local councils and parliament, but in employment, where so much of our daily life and energy is spent, a property-owners democracy still prevails: absentee investors may vote, but workers don’t.).
- Within companies, the higher you get, the nearer to the owners and their way of life, the more your status and condition resembles theirs; crossovers are common, mutual consultation and respect built in – a semblance of democracy, equality. The further down the ladder, the more clear-cut the difference and subordination rung to rung.
- Public services, though accountable to government and electorate, have adopted the capitalist model of employment in their internal functioning: with the exception of senior executives and professionals, employees are hired to do as they’re told and fired if they don’t.
- Unions mostly confine themselves to wages and conditions: a bigger slice of the cake for workers, rather than a say in what sort of cake or how its baked. They accept the employer’s right to buy our lives, to haggle on the price.
- Markets and money, nothing wrong with them in principle; as with capital, the problem lies in ownership and control. A free market, and a free currency, is one that is shared on more or less equal terms by all its users.


Time for a change
- To extend social democracy into the economic sphere, company law and employment - the theatre of working life
- To commit companies, collective enterprise, to social as well as economic goals, to democratic management, accountable to workers, customers and community
- To re-root conventional representative democracy in working life, a direct democracy of people deciding and acting for themselves on the job.
- effective human interaction, mutual responsibility and self-determination, people living and working together face to face.
- To transform the vertical structure - pyramid of ladders, heads only meeting at the top - into an open network, enabling contact and movement in all directions

Competition?
We are competitive by nature, but also co-operative, inclined to share. Life is a survival of the fittest BUT fitness has as much to do with fitting in, working together, as it has to do with domination, let alone extermination
- We need structures that allow for competition as part of a broader co-operation, not vice versa as in conventional employment.
- Love thy neighbour as thyself and do as you would be done by are also part of human nature, empathy, companionship and mutual care built in.
- Our economic arrangements should reflect this balance, structuring in the range of qualities we need.

Human work – lifework – too important to be left to employers
Not just what we do FOR a living but what we do AS a living, central to what we are, what we make of ourselves as well as what’s made out of us. A subject in its own right, and worth a closer look. That’s what I want to do now, with your help perhaps. I’ll draw on my own experience – as jack of many trades and master of none – and welcome help from you and yours. How it will all fit together I don’t yet know: if I did, if I knew the answers in advance it wouldn’t be worth going on.. I’d be bored and so would you.

In my next section, I’ll give some headings, to prompt recall and reflection, some fields to put our stories in.


P.S. Of course not everything is work
Not all or only work, and that goes for this writing – and reading. The joy of work includes the moment when you stop, don’t have to any more. Times when or things just happen, get given you, by others or by chance. Work can become a game, and play sometimes turns out to have been useful. When Archimedes got into his bath, he wasn’t thinking weights-and-measures, just wanting to relax and float.