Work As Alienation

Most often, the people I meet do not see themselves as laborers.

Even more rarely have I met a person who produces the satisfaction of his own needs and desires.

In contrast, most of the folks I meet identify themselves as consumers. They treat their work as the (sometimes intolerable) access key to a paycheck, which they can then use as a means of getting stuff, some of it necessary. They may not use the phrase "I, as a consumer..." but their attitude towards human effort depends upon treating their own labor as a wrong they must endure so that they can get scheduled permission to acquire goods.

Not a new or unique observation, I understand.

And I cannot even find this commonplace attitude all that objectionable. In everyday usage and everyday language, capitalism works like that. A person might fill bins at a feed lot, or chop up chickens for piecework payment, or turn over a fried chicken sandwich in a taylorized grilling regime, or mop restaurant floors, or pick up the trash and waste food for disposal, or work the incinerator at the land fill.

None of this work, of itself and on its own terms, promises to satisfy the need of the person doing it. A person might do it well, and even come to enjoy some aspect of employment, but the worker (in my experience) rarely labors at the task for the immediacy of her own needs and desires.

In the creative fields, in science, in medicine, in politics and law enforcement (well, sadists have bills too y'know...), in sport - I suspect that an observer can discern a difference. The work itself satisfies, or has at least the promise of satisfaction.

Not for nothing do these fields tend to belong to middle, upper middle and upper class participants - or to people who enter the upper class soon after mastering them. Performing those tasks provides the potential for enjoyment and acquisition, for the satisfaction of need and desire, in the immediate moments of labor.

This labor produces an outcome which they laborer can enjoy in the very doing of it. It has, if you will, the quality of play, because the person turning food into effort can enjoy her "act of creation," can transform the raw material of existence into both the expression of desire, and its fulfillment.

I don't mean to suggest that a farm worker, for example, cannot enjoy the harvesting of produce, or the tending of animals; within the economic environment which currently exists, this experience of satisfaction has no chance for expression, because the workers themselves cannot both enjoy the fruits of their own labor and serve the needs of those who own that labor, and exchange for it a scheduled permission slip to consume some small amount of necessity, entertainment, sanitation and shelter.

Further, even those who identify emotionally or symbolically with "the working class" tend to do so in reference not to the working satisfaction of their needs, or even as unstructured cooperative play. They don't, in my experience, identify themselves as "working class" because they enjoy their own labor, but as a dual marker, one of status, the other as cultural membership.

By identifying himself as working class, today, a person establishes that he possesses a certain level of average consumption. By that identification, she compares her self as caught between those who sustain higher levels of consumption, and those who cannot. Understood this way, "working class" has come to mean "able to buy more than the really poor, but no where near as much as the comfortable." Secondly, the "working class" marker provides a cultural label. A person who sees himself as "working class" often does so as an assumption of membership and participation in a group of people united by what social access they do not have, and therefore by what forms of entertainment, worship, association and fun they can take compared to those who can and will do more. Used thus, it becomes a way of accepting that the wealthy can do more while still rejecting how they use their leisure.

I think this method of identification has become so widespread precisely because class divisions set real boundaries to enjoyment, to play, and to how a person feels his own labor, in the doing of it.

When your work amounts to doing what someone else tells you to do so that you can keep your permission to buy a small number of cheap goods used to ease your boredom, wash your skin, feed your hunger, cover your rest and dumb your pain, it probably follows that you stop treating your effort as meaningful on its own, and learn to see it as a barely tolerable burden which one part of you performs so that the rest of you can get to tomorrow, later...

Or, I just wasted forty five minutes type-scribbling a few paragraphs of unvarnished error...