This essay was originally published on 10 March 2021 for subscribers to our newsletter.

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For most of known history, the great majority of society worked the land, a small minority were artisans in the towns, and an even smaller minority were the wealthy who owned large tracts of land (generally dependent on noble status and the king’s favour). Artisans included artists, sculptors, and architects because until the end of the Middle Ages these trades were defined as “manual arts” (as opposed to “liberal arts”). So that great majority was subject to backbreaking work – or were they?

Certainly, they were subject people, but they had a degree of autonomy in their work, because the concept of “productivity” did not exist. There would have been obligations – including military ones. However, there was seasonality (something abhorred by the modern economy) and so over the year they had a variety of tasks with differing skills. They needed an intimate knowledge of the land and its possibilities, in spite of Marx’s claim that capitalism “had thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.” On the other hand, Engels had already recorded the deplorable state of working-class life in mid nineteenth-century Britain, and later in the Manifesto they stated, “Owing to the extensive use of machinery and the division of labour, the work of proletarians has lost all individual character and consequently all charm for the workman. He has become an appendage of the machine…” We have come to the subject of this month’s newsletter (perhaps a little too weighty but we’ll have a go).

Marx conceded that capitalism is incredibly inventive but lacked any moral dimension to its decision-making. He could have added that inventiveness was often not rewarded (Cartwright gained nothing from his power loom, but it impoverished skilled weavers who were reduced to working in factories). His writings on the increasing concentration of capital in fewer hands and alienation are well known and fundamental.

Almost half a century ago, I read a translation of a work written by a Polish Marxist in the thirties in which he argued against Marx’s emphasis on the economy, because this perception deprived humanity of its sense of agency (if I find the book – long out of print – I will provide the information in another newsletter). This may have been a little hard on Marx, but undoubtedly Marxism as it came to be understood suggested the idea of historical determinism. Even in the business of creating the future, the individual ended up with little agency. What interests us here is the paradox of the age of democracy coinciding with a powerful sense of individuals being unable to develop their own creativity or even contribute meaningfully to the way society develops. Real existing socialism also treated its citizens as a resource to be used in accordance with its will, albeit in a different manner. The individual’s ability to create their own essence (to use Sartre’s definition in Existentialism Is a Humanism) was everywhere dismissed as impractical; people were expected to adapt to rigid templates. Sartre, being a free spirit, considered this to be relatively easy and encouraged everyone to do it, but of course it is not so easy for most people. And yet all people are born with creativity, which can with the right education develop into a state of mind. And here we have an older concept, the Enlightenment idea that education liberates. We have a period of time on earth, and if our work can produce sufficient not only for our sustenance but also for some leisure, we need education to satisfy our restless brains.

Reducing our argument to our current globalised world with a roughly similar economic system everywhere, we are faced with a job market that is once more shrinking in terms of variety as well as availability of work. Many interesting skills are now redundant, and small businesses are being destroyed by corporations (a trend that is gathering pace during the pandemic). Young people are being forced out of the workplace, and our citizens are either working long hours or not at all. The economic system not only abhors seasonality but also day and night. Jonathan Crary’s 24/7. Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep (Verso, 2014) provides an excellent analysis of this (though I always have my doubts about the term “late capitalism” which seems to have been hanging around for most of my adult life, without there being any signs of capitalism’s imminent demise; the destruction of the planet does mean that extreme free-market economies cannot go on indefinitely, but none of us knows exactly how long that will be or have any idea of what is to follow). Put simply, individuals are now required to live in a manner that doesn’t conform to their own needs in terms of creativity and good health, but rather to the weird strictures of productivity. This takes us back to Frederick Taylor, the man who turned people into cogs; enriching some people, but pauperising most – not just economically but also in terms of suppressed creativity. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The more intelligent neoliberal thinkers are aware of the problem (not in the Sartrean sense, but at least in terms of their own self-interest). Increased deskilling (through IT) and robotisation of factories create a primary problem of overproduction and a secondary one of “unemployed intellectuals” (an Italian term often used in the seventies), who have always constituted an unstable element that threatens to break free of the dominant narrative. The spread of agencies to carry out work previously managed by the state may be costly and inefficient, but it has created many fairly soul-destroying jobs, while depressing the income of the workers who have now been shifted to the private sector. The costs of this intentional inefficiency which creates “middle-class” jobs (armies of managers and accountants) financially outweighs the savings on workers’ wages (their impoverishment and humiliation don’t even come into the equation), but it creates a space for vested interests and debilitates trade unions. David Graeber’s Bullshipt Jobs. The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do about It (Penguin, 2019) promises to say some interesting things about this (I confess that I haven’t read it yet, but I look forward to it). Work is where we spend most of our adult life or at least its waking hours, and it is what makes us who we are. We may be the only animal whose existence precedes our essence, but we are not necessarily the agent that creates that essence. There is also the proletarianization of middle-class jobs (doctors, teachers and other professions may be relatively well-paid, but they don’t have anything like the autonomy they had forty or fifty years ago and are required to work in accordance with current “best practice”, which can become something of a straitjacket). Inspectors, not necessarily a bad idea when it comes to removing bad practices, have become too invasive and fixated on ticking boxes that prevent innovation from below (this is an aspect of modernity common to both capitalism and real existing socialism).

The only solution can be a fairer distribution of work and leisure, not in the sense of consumer entertainment through the endless iteration of the same cultural products with ever increasing production values and ever decreasing substance, but rather a space in which individuals can exert their own individual creative drives (not just in the arts and literature, but in the widest range of human activities). This of course means a reduction in the working week. It also presupposes an effective, open, and liberal education (not one based purely on the vocational, as Thatcher’s government wanted; it justified religious education on the frankly quite illogical grounds that it was good for nurses! – one of the inevitable idiocies of a utilitarian concept of learning).

Here we could divide the world in two: into the Third World and the West (though there are also the “emerging economies”, which are now amongst the strongest, but we don’t have the space here). I think that the current situation cannot be better explained than by Jeremy Harding’s LRB review of Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums (Verso, 2006), which I quoted in In Praise of the Garrulous: “This constant production of numbers – and a seamless access between continents – offers us the world as a single, intelligible place defined by universal laws of accumulation and deprivation. Any sense that slum cultures and slum cities might have a specific character, beyond the common lot of misery, is tenuous. No book will give readers the impression of covering greater distances, even if they will feel by the end as though they’d been cooped up in a narrow, featureless room. Homogeneity, Davis would argue, is what late capitalism does: already a billion people live in roughly the same extraordinary way in roughly similar environments. Vast, contiguous slums are the habitat of the future for ever larger numbers, yet the future looks more and more like it did the day before yesterday.” The ecology of human culture is being destroyed on a global scale, but while this process in the Third World is wasteful, brutal, and ultimately lethal, in the West it is wasteful, managed and soporific.

Leisure time still exists in the West but is increasingly under threat. It is a space that is also exploited through mass tourism and a universal culture of mediocrity. Music, films, and books that have to enjoy the economies of scale are almost always reduced to a lowest common denominator, which has to exclude what may be less accessible beyond the borders of a particular culture. It is not only a problem of “consumption”; it is also a problem of production. Once people produced their culture locally, but now cultural production has gone beyond the national to something global and with a dominance of Anglo-American culture (principally American).

Part of the argument in the last chapter of my book on language, In Praise of the Garrulous, is of relevance here: “The cultural destruction, like the ecological one, will be partly irreversible. I do not, therefore, attempt to persuade everyone to switch off their tellies and start reading, writing and chattering with maniacal zeal, as this would have as much chance of success as attempting to convince humanity to forego violence and live together in brotherly love. This is not an age for slogans and certainties (although peacefulness and garrulousness are undoubtedly virtues). This is an age for attempting to salvage as much as possible from the storm of greed, wastefulness and compulsive subservience to fashion (particularly when it comes to thinking). I can say, however, that whoever does switch off the television (or even better, throws it in the dustbin) will start to engage with idleness and chatter and perhaps the odd book. These thoroughly human activities will often be psychologically beneficial. I am certainly not advocating universal bookishness, but books as an extension of our dialogues and an enrichment of our intellectual interaction can also be helpful as long as they are not accompanied by fanaticism, … I do not mean, let it be clear, that man is perfectible, nor do I believe, like Marx, that one day the state can wither away. Power will remain the principal necessary evil, and some human beings will always be driven by its corrupting force, which even in the best society the state can only partially bring under control. There will never be an end to conflict in society, but rules can be devised to keep it within certain limits. My argument here is this: the soothing effects of language and education will allow more people to gain some control over the self and its insatiable wants, thus lessening the pressures within society. This is almost an Enlightenment idea, although it would not have been expressed in exactly those terms, and it is certainly a classical one. However, I also see the merits of the counter arguments: the men of 1789 were arrogant in their belief that they could create a Year Zero and rebuild society from scratch, with little understanding of what worked as well as of what patently did not work. They were not wrong in the injustices they wished to put right, but they were foolish in believing that reason can take into account all factors concerning change, and in failing to understand that we, as a species, and therefore they, as a group of overconfident young men, were and are not very good at rationalism. This failure could be called the irrationalism of rationalism. Part of the problem is human language, which has a wonderfully ungainly structure, consists of a multitude of tongues which do everything in such different fashions, and provides us with the sheer pleasure of its inefficiency. Would we want it any other way? Language, as I have said, is a gift from the past, and we should always keep our ears attuned to its subtle wisdoms.”

In short, if we ever achieve a thirty-hour or even twenty-five-hour week, literature could be one of the factors leading towards a better society, whose creation is never an easy task and it takes great effort to maintain it as well. The requisites are equality or at least greater equality, tolerance, transparency, education and an understanding of the complexities of life (a proper scepticism or awareness of our limited knowledge). Surely fiction with its openness and examination of the variety of human natures and how they interact can instruct us on how to feel about other people and society at large through a process so complex most of us are not even aware of it. I have said on other occasions that the reader is at least as creative as the novelist; we perform the books creatively in our heads and we are our own audience, but we never feel alone in that empty theatre of our minds.

Allan Cameron, Glasgow, March 2021

Header image: The Library of Thorvald Boeck by Harriet Backer, 1902, oil on canvas.