Probably part of it (4.00 / 5)

Very interesting post.  I'm probably crazy to try and respond, but here are some semi-connected, semi-informed thoughts.

1. Relative to Europe, the U.S. not only had slavery, but also a very large class of free, independent (yeoman) farmers.  In the early nineteenth century, most people were either slaves or part of a yeoman farm family.  The North was dominated by yeomen.  There were relatively few wage workers.  In this environment, it's easy to see why people came to think that "workers" were lazy.  They were either despised slaves, or people who "weren't able" to acquire their own land, and "probably had something wrong with them."  Note that it's assumed that businesspeople (like the yeomen) want to work.  In Europe, there were some yeomen, but many peasants, depending on the country, were if not serfs, tenant farmers of some sort.  Their descendants are the current majorities, and different ways of thinking about work arose.  So maybe it's a mix of slavemaster mentality and work ethic after all.

2. It's not as widespread, but plenty of Europeans, especially in the upper classes, do think about work in the same way you describe.  The relatively pro-labor, welfare state policies have always been, and still are contested, even in the most "socialist" countries like Sweden.  Europe didn't have slavery, but it did have serfdom, which in some countries was pretty close and lasted pretty long, although less in Western Europe.  So they certainly have some slavemaster mentality too.

3. Most of the progressive policies date to after World War II, or in some cases the Depression.  The kind, gentle welfare states are relatively new.  It doesn't take much reading about life in any European country in the early 20th century to see how brutal and exploitative much of life and labor relations was.  There are differences between here and there, but we shouldn't be deterministic.  It's possible for any society, including ours, to change.

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by: dedelste @ Mon Jul 27, 2009 at 17:27:24 PM UTC

I was crazy to write it (4.00 / 1)

SO thank you for your thoughtful response.

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Seeing The Forest -- Who is our economy FOR, anyway? Twitter: dcjohnson

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by: DaveJ @ Mon Jul 27, 2009 at 17:54:33 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

i think that second point is key (4.00 / 1)

what you see in the US is the absence of the countervailing forces against the "damn peasants" mentality. which i think comes from the heterogenous nature of the population here. you know - they're shiftless freeloaders, we're hardworking Americans. dividing people up by race, by country of origin, by language or accent, whatever levers were at hand. it still works pretty well.

not everything worth doing is profitable. not everything profitable is worth doing.

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by: tatere @ Mon Jul 27, 2009 at 18:24:40 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Indeed (0.00 / 0)

If you look at non-plutocratic media in the second half of the 19th century, you'll see lots of connections drawn between wage work and slavery (and many still use the term "wage slave" today). The argument is that our economy has moved from a system of owning workers to a system of renting them - however, aside from that distinction, there's a ton of overlap when it comes to how the two are perceived.

Chomsky has some great stuff to say on the topic (and of your previous post) during his famous BBC interview on anarchism.

In a just society, the onerous work that needs to be done would be shared, instead of sloughed off onto a desperately poor underclass (and in such a society one can imagine that much R&D would go into minimizing onerous work). With a guarantee of the means of survival (housing, good food, water, electricity, etc.), and with the decentralized, democratic control of industry by the workers who work there (and the surrounding communities), we'd be free to pursue the kinds of productive work we are most competent - and passionate - about.

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by: Liberaltarian @ Mon Jul 27, 2009 at 17:38:24 PM UTC

Not so universal (4.00 / 2)

Land ownership was hardly universal.  Take the case of Thomas Lincoln, Abe's father.  When Abe's granfather was killed by Indians in Kentucky, his oldest son inherited all the land (5,000 acres).  Abe's father got nothing and had to work for 15 years to be able to buy 237 acres of less than prime land.

Many famous pioneers were "cheated" out of their land and forced to move on, a fact that was made easier because they were poorly educated (at least in formal education) and barely literate.  Daniel Boone moved on in part because he like wildernss but in good part because he was swindled.  IIRC Davey Crockett, a congressman no less, had a similar story.

So while prosperous land speculators (like George Washington) sometimes did well, many people did not.  Fittingly, Abe Lincoln himself did a lot to change this through passage of the Homestead Act during the Civil War.  By then, land was available in fairly remote areas for free or in settled areas at a cost.  The railroads were more accurately land speculators, receiving land next to the right of way as a gift from the government.  The best free land was soon gone.  Good but remote land was available.

Puritan religion and the continued tie of some religion to the wealthy needs to be worked in to your story.  Some of the early robber barons had a divine right feel to their activities.  There was also a tendency for some policy to bless those who got there first (or the first "Americans", Sutter was s.o.l.).  We do that today in California through Proposition 13.  Even in my home town in suburban Jersey, the old timers blame everything on the newcomers (from 10 miles away).  

And the current robber barons continue to play the divide and blame game using cheap labor from outsiders and preventing reform by demonizing the same outsiders.

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by: David Kowalski @ Mon Jul 27, 2009 at 20:20:27 PM UTC

I Wish I Didn't Have To Work Today (4.00 / 1)

Or I'd plunge right into this discussion.  It's a great post, and some good responses so far.

I wish more folks would join in.

I wish I could be one of them.

But I'm lazily working my butt off, now that this brief little work break is over.


"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Mon Jul 27, 2009 at 21:15:38 PM UTC

I think you are right. (4.00 / 1)

Working is natural, like playing, sleeping and eating. We are born for it and under natural circumstances we enjoy it. The instinct for craftsmanship is universal.

What's boring is not work, per se, but forced work. Unfortunately that is the only kind most people ever experience in our society.

Montani semper liberi

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by: Sadie Baker @ Mon Jul 27, 2009 at 22:20:29 PM UTC

I don't have my copy handy (4.00 / 1)

and there is no Google books preview, but if memory serves me right, Edmund Morgan in American Slavery - American Freedom argued that the idea of the lazy worker, like many racial stereotypes associated with slavery, had its origins in English stereotypes of the lower classes, who were white. That is, British elites made claims to justify their domination of the lower classes, and used similar claims to justify slavery.

You're point, I think, is unassailable.  If people don't want to do the most unrewarding work for little in the way of respect or pay or benefits, all the while enriching someone else, it hardly makes sense to accuse those people of laziness.

What's more, most people who make these claims don't really believe it. If they did, they would demand a 100% tax on money transferred from parents to their children- what other way could we ensure the the children of the rich will work? No one is concerned about that because it is not the station in life of the rich to work.  Ditto for the lottery. We would also need a pretty steep wealth tax - otherwise someone might get so wealthy that they might stop working!

Politics is the art of the possible, but that means you have to think about changing what is possible, not that you have to accept it in perpetuity.

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by: David Kaib @ Mon Jul 27, 2009 at 23:15:39 PM UTC

Life, Inc. and My Life In France (4.00 / 1)

Two perhaps disconnected reflections:

I am currently reading Julia Child's "My Life In France" and there is a bit where she is talking about American consultants in post WWII France promoting "modernization" and "efficiency" to French businessmen as part of the Marshall Plan.  She says that the general reaction of the French was a shrug of the shoulders as if to say "I make a decent living, my business is reasonably successful, I have time in the evenings to work on my monograph of Balzac and time on the weekends to spend with my family -- your ideas are interesting but I think I will keep things as they are."  (I am making this quote from memory.)  

There is the sense in the book that everyone there had some arcane intellectual pursuit outside of their work that they were completely devoted to and that had great value because it contributed to their culture ... and maybe to their national pride?  She also mentions that to a country that had lost hundreds of thousands of men in the war and still had many parts of the infrastructure in ruins the idea of "improving efficiency" was bizarre -- they were just trying to regroup.

Thinking of that -- can anyone in this country even imagine what it would be like suffer comparible losses?Could a lack of appreciation of the full measure of life be caused by never having faced any real threat to it?

On a recent episode of the Colbert Report the guest was Douglas Rushkoff who just wrote a book called Life, Inc.  What I took away from the brief exchange was that he feels that corporate values have basicaly suplanted other values meaning that all of our actions are only judged in terms of whether or not they are making a corporation money. For example, any moment of the day where we are not either doing something they can charge money for or consuming something someone is paying for is a lost moment.  He made the incredible analogy that if every person in the audience was struck with cancer right at that moment from the corporate point of view it would be wonderful because now we would all have to spend a bunch of money on cancer treatment.

I wonder if it is the corporatization of our values that is more of a contributing factor than past slave experiences?

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by: yoda @ Mon Jul 27, 2009 at 23:20:25 PM UTC

Wow, a real alienation discussion? (4.00 / 1)

This is a really interesting and complicated issue.  I'm not going to fake confidence in my position, because, honestly, I don't really have one.  I'll just state some scattered thoughts...

1) It's not as simple as you're making it out to be (but nothing ever is).  The fact is, some people really wouldn't work if they could have a comfortable unemployed lifestyle.  As a matter of fact, many people do not work, now, at least partly because they have a comfortable unemployed lifestyle.  This is actually a problem for a few countries, particularly Japan (look up "NEET" in Wikipedia if you have the time).

(Note: The NEET situation is pretty complicated.  Part of the reason for it is because Japan's economy has been in a recession for something like 20 years now.  But being able to have a comfortable unemployed lifestyle definitely plays a role.)

2) Europe had slaves.  Europe had slaves far longer than the US did (because the US is less than 250 years old).  Now, some European countries outlawed slavery a bit before America did, but Europe has had slaves for about as long as it's had people.

3) Yes, European welfare states have shorter workweeks, longer vacations, etc.  But that's a difference in degree, not kind.  If there was the political will for it, the US could implement all of those policies tomorrow with no actual change in the culture, or any greater amount of "respect for the people."  What you're groping towards is something more like Karl Marx's Communist Utopia, which is a lot different than the welfare state (for one thing, there isn't a state in the Communist Utopia).

[Quick aside on the Communist Utopia: I think it would be a great place to live (I'd sure as hell like to live there, at least), but it's impossible to actually implement on a large-scale basis.]

4) Wage work isn't slavery as long as you can quit your job without getting arrested.

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by: DavidN @ Tue Jul 28, 2009 at 04:38:19 AM UTC

communism (4.00 / 1)

[Quick aside on the Communist Utopia: I think it would be a great place to live (I'd sure as hell like to live there, at least), but it's impossible to actually implement on a large-scale basis.]

Well of course it's impossible, with THAT kind of attitude. ;)

I'm a big fan of David Graeber's notion that communism (defined, loosely, as "from each according to their ability, to each according to need) is already around us, and always has been. I can't find the relevant essay, but here's a brief video of him talking about it.

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by: Liberaltarian @ Tue Jul 28, 2009 at 05:52:36 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

That's an awful loose definition :p (0.00 / 0)

Look, if you have a group of people with a common task, then yeah, "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" is the best way for them to accomplish that ask (albeit a slightly weird way of stating the ideal group dynamic).

That's not what Communism is.  Communism is the notion that the way the world should be is a stateless society wherein everyone works as much as they want doing whatever they want, and then the outputs are distributed among people according to whoever needs those outputs the most (which will be agreed upon by all somehow).  Also all necessary jobs get done, and you don't need a police force because nobody commits crimes, or criminals are punished by the collective fairly, or...something.

Look, Karl Marx never actually said how he thought the Communist Utopia would develop--the closest he came was "first, government will take control of retail...then the Communist Utopia!"  He was a smart guy--he had no idea how his vision could/would (he believed it was an inevitability too...) come into reality.

The problem with chasing the Communist Utopia is (1) A half-utopia is worse than what you started with (state control of retail didn't work out very well) and (2) The "utopia" part justifies any evil act you commit in trying to establish it.

On a more practical level, I think serious debates need to be held about which industries should be for-profit (capitalism), which should be state-controlled (socialism), and exactly what kind of a safety net we should have ("to each according to his need," so under your loose definition, maybe the welfare state really is communism).  I think objective right answers can be found to most of these issues.  This is what we should be focused on, not chasing an impossible dream.

I get the feeling that you probably agree with me, so I apologize if I've taken an inappropriate tone.  I love arguing (in the positive sense), so I can get kinda worked up sometimes. :p

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by: DavidN @ Tue Jul 28, 2009 at 06:42:23 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Crap... (0.00 / 0)

"Agree with me" was the wrong way of putting it.  Better would've been something like "on a reread, your first sentence seems to be snark."  Of course I read over my comment twice and then I miss something like that. v_v

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by: DavidN @ Tue Jul 28, 2009 at 06:43:58 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

In truth, (0.00 / 0)

the first sentence was only half-snark. ;)

I think the dichotomy between state-run and wealthy-run is false: the most interesting and promising trends on the left over the past two decades have been in small-s socialism, where workers themselves operate workplaces and industry, and communities, through assemblies, decide upon and coordinate municipal budgets and projects.

If the means are just as important as the ends - indeed, if on an important level they're the same - then we can avoid your problem #2, or as I like to call it, "Utopians With Guns."

Capitalism can't be abolished from the top-down; that's a truth that Lenin and his torch-bearers across the past hundred years have refused to admit. Left radicals of late are finally tossing aside the goal of seizing government power - one of the more poisonous legacies of the French Revolution - which leads to a very different conception of what utopia, and how to get there, might look like.

My guess? It'll look a helluva lot more like January 1st 1994 (Chiapas) than January 1st 1959 (Havana).

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by: Liberaltarian @ Tue Jul 28, 2009 at 07:21:09 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Well, of course (0.00 / 0)

There's a very large variety of different private-run systems (Capitalism, at least in the abstract, doesn't have to be wealthy-run), as well as a large number of possible government-run systems.  But the debate about, say...how one particular corporation should be run (one CEO?  Board of directors?  Have all the workers vote?) isn't really between socialism and capitalism.

Let me put it this way: if a nation where all industries are controlled by groups of private citizens is "small-s socialism" (which you imply), I don't even know what 'socialism' means anymore.  Then again, since the word has been thrown around so often as to have lost most meaning, I guess that wouldn't be much of a change. :p

You can never achieve a utopia, you can only progress further towards it.  If the world would be a better place with absolutely no capitalism, so be it--but we're a long way away from that being the case.  IMO, anyway. :/

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by: DavidN @ Wed Jul 29, 2009 at 01:43:08 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

A market economy (0.00 / 0)

where all economic organizations are run by their participants (worker cooperatives, participatory credit unions, etc.) would be a flavor of "market socialism."

At any rate, posts and discussions like this are why I <3 OpenLeft so much.

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by: Liberaltarian @ Wed Jul 29, 2009 at 04:47:21 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Depends on what you mean by work (4.00 / 2)

You think those people who are not "working" are just sitting around watching TV?  Meditating?

I'll bet they are doing something that is useful to someone -- at least themselves...

--

Seeing The Forest -- Who is our economy FOR, anyway? Twitter: dcjohnson

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by: DaveJ @ Tue Jul 28, 2009 at 15:32:12 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Oh, of course they are (4.00 / 1)

Spending most of my time watching TV and meditating sure would be a lot more useful to me than, say, being a waiter would. :p

I was just thinking that the reason we form societies is so that we could be useful to others as well as ourselves.  You know, the "we all benefit when we all help each other" kind of thing.  So ideally, you wouldn't have a large number of people helping only themselves.

Look, would I like being able to live comfortably even if I didn't have a job?  Yeah.  Would I, on a personal level, care if we had to tax incomes over $300,000 say 50% to achieve this (I just pulled these numbers out of my ass)?  Not really--I don't have a lot of use for lots of money myself.  I'm just not sure this is the best way to organize society for everyone.

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by: DavidN @ Wed Jul 29, 2009 at 01:51:56 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Bob Black has a great bit (0.00 / 0)

from his essay The Abolition of Work:

Nor am I promoting the managed time-disciplined safety-valve called "leisure"; far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is the time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacation so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation.
[...]
The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. But workers do.

With the kind of work most people are subjected to today, no wonder our idea of non-work is sitting in front of the TV, or meditating. When I was a kid (waaaaay back in the early 90s), the few of us who spent their summers watching TV were looked at askance by everyone else. In my neighborhood at least, TV watching was reserved for when we collapsed from exhaustion after running around and playing for 12 hours straight. Now we sit in offices sedentary all day, and get home feeling the same exhaustion, except without any of the mental satisfaction or physiological benefit or freshly-constructed treehouse in the back yard.

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by: Liberaltarian @ Wed Jul 29, 2009 at 04:58:58 AM UTC

[ Parent ]