Shadow Work E-Book

Ivan Illich

• Herausgeber: Marion Boyars
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1981

Beschreibung

In five essays, followed by extensive notes and bibliographies, Ivan Illich embarks on a major historical and sociological analysis of modern man's economic existence. He traces and analyzes options which surpass the conventional political 'right-left' and the technological 'soft-hard' alternatives and presents the concept of the 'vernacular' domain: "...to name those acts of competence, lust or concern that we want to defend from measurement by Chicago Boys or Socialist Commissars...the preparation of food and the shaping of language, childbirth and recreation, without implying either a privatized activity akin to the housework of modern women, a hobby or an irrational and primitive procedure." Illich deals provocatively with the controlling uses of language and science and the valuation of women and work. Drawing on unfamiliar historical sources, he lays bare the roots of much of the social ordering which affects industrial man: his own creation, but one which, at the same time, connives at his own oppression.

Leseprobe

Shadow Work

Ivan D. Illich

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I The Three Dimensions of Public Choice

II Vernacular Values

III The War Against Subsistence

IV Research by People

V Shadow Work

Notes and Bibliographies

Books By the Same Author

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Portions and different versions of the essays in this book were published in TeachersCollegeRecord, Columbia University, Volume 81, Number 1, Fall 1979, Co-EvolutionQuarterly, Sausalito, California, No. 26, Summer 1980 (under the title VernacularValues) and TheGuardian, London, October 4, 1980.

Introduction

I am grateful to Marion Boyars for publishing this collection of essays in an original soft cover edition with just enough hard bound copies to satisfy librarians. These are indeed essays, or drafts. Each reports some aspect of the progress I have made on a book I shall finish within the next three years. Each was originally addressed to a different audience in 1979 and 1980. I have decided to publish them together now in order to call attention to an urgent issue without, however, rushing to a premature conclusion of my major study on the history of scarcity.

The essays gathered here deal with the rise of the shadow economy. I have coined this term to speak about transactions which are not in the monetized sector and yet do not exist in pre-industrial societies. The acquisition of taught mother tongue is an example on which I elaborate in this book.

From Karl Polanyi I take the idea that modern history can be understood as the ‘disembedding’ of a market economy. However, I do not analyze this uniquely modern, disembedded economy from the perspective in which the concepts of formal economics can be meaningfully applied to it. Rather, I am interested in its shadowy underside. I want to describe those of its features which escape both the categories of formal economics, and those which anthropology finds applicable in the study of subsistence cultures. Looking at early nineteenth century history, I find that with the progress of monetization a non-monetized and complementary hemi-sphere comes into existence. And both these hemi-spheres are equally, however differently, foreign to what prevails in pre-industrial societies. Both degrade the utilization value of the environment; both destroy subsistence.

With the rise of this shadow economy I observe the appearance of a kind of toil which is not rewarded by wages, and yet contributes nothing to the household’s independence from the market. In fact, this new kind of activity, for which the shadow work of the housewife in her new non-subsistent domestic sphere, one prime example is a necessary condition for the family wage earner to exist. Thus shadow work, which is as recent a phenomenon as modern wage labor, might be even more fundamental than the latter for the continued existence of a commodity-intensive society. Its distinction from the vernacular activities typical for subsistence-oriented popular cultures is the most difficult and the most rewarding part of my research.

My study is not motivated by mere curiosity. I am moved by concern over a trend which manifested itself during the seventies. During this time professional, economic and political interests converged on an intense expansion of the shadow economy. As ten years ago Ford, Fiat and Volkswagen financed the Club of Rome to prophecy limits to growth, so they now urge the need for self-help. I consider the indiscriminate propagation of self-help to be morally unacceptable.

What is here propagated as self-help is the opposite of autonomous or vernacular life. The self-help the new economists preach divides the subject of social policy (be it a person or entity) into two halves: one that stands in a professionally defined need, and the other who is professionally licenced to provide it. Under the policies that are thus labelled as self-help, the apartheid of production and consumption, characteristic of industrial economics, is projected into the subject itself. Each one is turned into a production unit for internal consumption, and the utility derived from this masturbation is then added to a newfangled GNP. Unless we clarify the distinction between this self-help and what I shall call vernacularlife, the shadow economy will become the main growth sector during the current stagflation, the ‘informal’ sector will become the main colony which sustains a last flurry of growth. And, unless the apostles of new life styles, of decentralization and alternative technology and conscientization and liberation make this distinction explicit and practical, they will only add some color, sweetener and the taste of stagnant ideals to an irresistibly spreading shadow economy.

The distinction I make between shadow work and the vernacular domain is thus not of merely academic importance. The distinction is crucial to understand the third stage into which the public discussion on the limits to growth is just now entering.

The first stage occurred more than ten years ago. Then, newsmakers within the universities and in the media suddenly focused public attention on the obvious danger that soon the biosphere might be rendered uninhabitable unless the prevailing trends of industrial production were changed. The alarms stressed the physical environment, and the ensuing discussions tended to be monopolized by concerns about fuels and poisons. It seemed important, then, to call attention to the need for analogous limits in the service sector. This I tried to do with DeschoolingSociety. There I argued that the service agencies of the Welfare State inevitably lead to destructive side effects which can be compared to the unwanted side effects which result from the overproduction of goods. Limits on care had to be envisaged as the necessary complement to limits on goods. Further, both kinds of limits were fundamentally independent from political choices or technological fixes. In the meantime, such limits to care have been recognized: limits to the medicalization of health, to the institutionalization of learning, to the insurance of risks, to the intensity of media exposure, to the tolerance for professional social work and care – all now form part of the discussion on the ‘ecology’.

With the Eighties, the discussion on the limits to growth is moving into a third stage. The first stage had focused primarily on goods, the second on care. The third is focussing on the commons.

Speaking of the commons, one immediately imagines meadows and woods. One thinks of the enclosure of pastures by which the lord excluded the peasant’s single sheep, thereby depriving him of a means of existence marginal to the market, and forcing him into proto-industrial wage labor. One thinks of the destruction of what E. P. Thompson called the moral economy. The commons now under discussion are something much more subtle. Economists tend to speak about them as the ‘utilization value of the environment’. I believe that in its third stage the public discussion on limits to economic growth will focus primarily on the preservation of these ‘utilization values’, values which are destroyed by economic expansion, whatever form it takes.

In principle, the reason for this is not difficult to understand. Up to now economic development has always meant that people, instead of doing something, are instead enabled to buy it. Use values beyond the market are replaced by commodities. Economic development has also meant that after a time people must buy the commodity, because the conditions under which they could get along without it had disappeared from their physical, social or cultural environment. And the environment could no longer be utilized by those who were unable to buy the good or service. Streets, for example, once were mainly for people. People grew up on them, and most became competent for life by what they learned there. Then streets were straightened and reshaped to serve vehicular traffic. And this change occurred long before schools were abundant enough to accommodate the young who were now driven from the streets. The utilization value of a formerly ‘common’ environment for learning disappeared much faster than it could be replaced by institutions for formal instruction.

In ToolsforConviviality, I called attention to how the environment is ruined for use-value oriented action by economic growth. I called this process the ‘modernization of poverty’ because in a modern society precisely those who have least access to the market also have least access to the utilization value of the commons. I ascribed this to the “radical monopoly of commodities over the satisfaction of needs”.

Subsequently I tried to illustrate how this radical monopoly of commodities tends to remove entire populations from precisely those goals for which the production and general distribution of the product had been originally advocated. I chose the motorization of locomotion and the medicalization of health as my two prime examples for this paradoxical counter-productivity. In my next book I will trace the institutionalization of scarcity, Europe’s most important contribution to the modern world, back to its origins in medieval beliefs.

In publishing these essays I am reporting on the progress of my study – but also reaching out for criticism and guidance. Each of these essays has its history: TheDimensionsofPublicChoice was first written at the request of Paul Streeten for delivery at the Conference of Development Economists in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in August 1979. The paper TheWar AgainstSubsistence grew out of conversations with Devi P. Pattanayak, Director of the All India Institute of Languages in Mysore. ResearchbyPeople is based on one of twelve lectures on texts of the early twelfth century given at the University of Kassel. I wrote it as my contribution to a reader on convivial tools which Valentina Borremans is preparing. It will appear there, along with contributions by Karl Polanyi, Lewis Mumford, André Gorz and others. The essay ShadowWork grew out of conversations with Barbara Duden and Claudia von Werlhof, as well as with Christine and Ernst von Weizsäcker. It was widely used as an outline for seminars both within and outside universities in late 1980, and I now publish it with the draft of a study guide which I prepared for these students.

The entire text is the outcome of a conversation with Lee Hoinacki that now enters its third decade. He has edited the manuscript. I often cannot recall who coined which phrase, before or after it was first written down.

Ivan Illich Göttingen, November 1980

I

THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF PUBLIC CHOICE

WHERE the war against subsistence has led can best be seen in the mirror of so-called development. During the 1960’s, ‘development’ acquired a status that ranked with ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’. Other peoples’ development became the rich man’s duty and burden. Development was described as a building program – people of all colors spoke of ‘nation-building’ and did so without blushing. The immediate goal of this social engineering was the installation of a balanced set of equipment in a society not yet so instrumented: the building of more schools, more modern hospitals, more extensive highways, new factories, power grids, together with the creation of a population trained to staff and need them.

Today, the moral imperative of ten years ago appears naive; today, few critical thinkers would take such an instrumentalist view of the desirable society. Two reasons have changed many minds: first, undesired externalities exceed benefits – the tax burden of schools and hospitals is more than any economy can support; the ghost towns produced by highways impoverish the urban and rural landscape. Plastic buckets from Saõ Paulo are lighter and cheaper than those made of scrap by the local tinsmith in Western Brazil. But first cheap plastic puts the tinsmith out of existence, and then the fumes of plastic leave a special trace on the environment – a new kind of ghost. The destruction of age-old competence as well as these poisons are inevitable byproducts and will resist all exorcisms for a long time. Cemeteries for industrial waste simple cost too much, more than the buckets are worth. In economic jargon, the ‘external costs’ exceed not only the profit made from plastic bucket production, but also the very salaries paid in the manufacturing process.

These risingexternalities, however, are only one side of the bill which development has exacted. Counterproductivityisits reverseside. Externalities represent costs that are ‘outside’ the price paid by the consumer for what he wants – costs that he, others or future generations will at some point be charged. Counterproductivity, however, is a new kind of disappointment which arises ‘within’ the very use of the good purchased. This internal counterproductivity, an inevitable component of modern institutions, has become the constant frustration of the poorer majority of each institution’s clients: intensely experienced but rarely defined. Each major sector of the economy produces its own unique and paradoxical contradictions. Each necessarily brings about the opposite of that for which it was structured. Economists, who are increasingly competent to put price-tags on externalities, are unable to deal with negative internalities, and cannot measure the inherent frustration of captive clients, which is something other than a cost. For most people, schooling twists genetic differences into certified degradation; the medicalization of health increases demand for services far beyond the possible and useful, and undermines that organic coping ability which common sense calls health; transportation, for the great majority bound to the rush hour, increases the time spent in the servitude to traffic, reducing both freely chosen mobility and mutual access. The development of educational, medical and other welfare agencies has actually removed most clients from the obvious purpose for which these projects were designed and financed. This institutionalized frustration, resulting from compulsory consumption, combined with the new externalities, totally discredit the description of the desirable society in terms of installed production capacity. As a result, slowly, the full impact of industralization on the environment becomes visible: while only some forms of growth threaten the biosphere, all economic growth threatens the ‘commons’. All economic growth inevitably degrades the utilization value of the environment.

Defense against the damages inflicted by development, rather than giving access to some new ‘satisfaction’, has become the most sought after privilege. You have arrived if you can commute outside the rush hour; have probably attended an elite school if you can give birth at home; are privy to rare and special knowledge if you can bypass the physician when you are ill; are rich and lucky if you can breathe fresh air; not really poor if you can build your own shack. The underclasses are now made up of those who must consume the counterproductive packages and ministrations of their self-appointed tutors; the privileged are those who are free to refuse them. A new attitude, then, has taken shape during these last years: the awareness that we cannot ecologically afford equitable development leads many to understand that, even if development in equity were possible, we would neither want more of it for ourselves, nor want to suggest it for others.

Ten years ago, we tended to distinguish social options exercised within the political sphere from technical options assigned to the expert. The former were meant to focus on goals, the latter more on means. Roughly, options about the desirable society were ranged on a spectrum that ran from right to left: here, capitalist, over there, social ‘development’. The how was left to the experts. This one-dimensional model of politics is now passé. Today, in addition to ‘who gets what’, two new areas of choice have become lay issues: the very legitimacy of lay judgment on the apt means for production, and the trade-offs between growth and freedom. As a result, three independent classes of options appear as three mutually perpendicular axes of public choice. On the x-axis I place the issues related to social hierarchy, political authority, ownership of the means of production and allocation of resources that are usually designated by the terms ‘right’ and ‘left’. On the y-axis, I place the technical choices between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, extending these terms far beyond a pro and con atomic power: not only goods, but also services are affected by the hard and soft alternatives.

A third choice falls on the z-axis. Neither privilege nor technique, but rather the nature of human satisfaction is at issue. To characterize the two extremes, I shall use terms defined by Erich Fromm. At the bottom, I place a social organization that fits the seeking of satisfaction in having; at the top, in doing. At the bottom, therefore, I place a commodity-intensive society where needs are increasingly defined in terms of packaged goods and services designed and prescribed by professionals, and produced under their control. This social ideal corresponds to the image of a humanity composed of individuals, each driven by considerations of marginal utility, the image that has developed from Mandeville via Smith and Marx to Keynes, and that Louis Dumont calls homoeconomicus. At the opposite end, at the top of the z-axis, I place – in a fan-shaped array – a great variety of societies where existence is organized around subsistence activities, each community choosing its unique life style tempered by skepticism about the claims of growth. On this z-axis of choice I do not oppose growth-oriented societies to others in which traditional subsistence is structured by immemorial cultural transmission of patterns. Such a choice does not exist. Aspirations of this kind would be sentimental and destructive. I oppose to the societies in the service of economic growth which I place at the bottom of the z-axis those which put high value on the replacement of both production and consumption by the subsistence-oriented utilization of common environments. I thus oppose societies organized in view of homoeconomicus societies which have recovered the traditional assumptions about homoartifix,subsistens.

The shape of a contemporary society is in fact the result of ongoing choices along these three independent axes. But due to the current one-dimensional conception of politics, most of these choices are the result of a synergy of unrelated decisions, which all tend to organize the environment as a cage for homoeconomicus. This trend is experienced by ever more people with deep anxiety. Thus a polity’s credibility begins to depend on the degree of public participation in each of the three option sets. The beauty of a unique, socially articulated image of each society will, hopefully, become the determining factor of its international impact. Esthetic and ethical example may replace the competition of economic indicators. Actually, no other route is open. A mode of life characterized by austerity, modesty, modern yet hand-made and built on a small scale does not lend itself to propagation through marketing. For the first time in history, poor and rich societies would be effectively placed on equal terms. But for this to become true, the present perception of international north-south relations in terms of development must first be superseded.

A related high status goal of our age, full employment, must also be reviewed. Ten years ago, attitudes toward development and politics were simpler than what is possible today; attitudes toward work were sexist and naive. Work was identified with employment, and prestigious employment confined to males. The analysis of shadow work done off the job was taboo. The left referred to it as a remnant of primitive reproduction, the right, as organized consumption – all agreed that, with development, such labor would wither away. The struggle for more jobs, for equal pay for equal jobs, and more pay for every job pushed all work done off the job into a shadowed corner hidden from politics and economics. Recently, feminists, together with some economists and sociologists, looking at so-called intermediary structures, have begun to examine the unpaid contribution made to an industrial economy, a contribution for which women are principally responsible. These persons discuss ‘reproduction’ as the complement to production. But the stage is mostly filled with self-styled radicals who discuss new ways of creating conventional jobs, new forms of sharing available jobs and how to transform housework, education, childbearing and commuting into paid jobs. Under the pressure of such demands, the full employment goal appears as dubious as development. New actors, who question the very nature of work, advance toward the limelight. They distinguish industrially structured work, paid or unpaid, from the creation of a livelihood beyond the confines of employment and professional tutors. Their discussions raise the key issues on the vertical axis. The choice for or against the notion of man as a growth addict decides whether unemployment, that is, the effective liberty to work free from wages and/or salary, shall be viewed as sad and a curse, or as useful and a right.

In a commodity-intensive society, basic needs are met through the products of wage labor – housing no less than education, traffic no less than the delivery of infants. The work ethic which drives such a society legitimates employment for salary or wages and degrades independent coping. But the spread of wage labor accomplishes more – it divides unpaid work into two opposite types of activities. While the loss of unpaid work through the encroachment of wage labor has often been described, the creation of a new kind of work has been consistently ignored: the unpaid complement of industrial labor and services. A kind of forced labor or industrial serfdom in the service of commodity-intensive economies must be carefully distinguished from subsistence-oriented work lying outside the industrial system. Unless this distinction is clarified and used when choosing options on the z-axis, unpaid work guided by professionals could spread through a repressive, ecological welfare society. Women’s serfdom in the domestic sphere is the most obvious example today. Housework is not salaried. Nor is it a subsistence activity in the sense that most of the work done by women was such as when, with their menfolk, they used the entire household as the setting and the means for the creation of most of the inhabitants’ livelihood. Modern housework is standardized by industrial commodities oriented toward the support of production, and exacted from women in a sex-specific way to press them into reproduction, regeneration and a motivating force for the wage laborer. Well publicized by feminists, housework is only one expression of that extensive shadow economy which has developed everywhere in industrial societies as a necessary complement to expanding wage labor. This shadow complement, together with the formal economy, is a constitutive element of the industrial mode of production. It has escaped economic analysis, as did the wave nature of elementary particles before the Quantum Theory. And when concepts developed for the formal economic sector are applied to it, they distort what they do not simply miss. The real difference between two kinds of unpaid activity – shadow work which complements wage labor, and subsistence work which competes with and opposes both – is consistently missed. Then, as subsistence activities become more rare, all unpaid activities assume a structure analogous to housework. Growth-oriented work inevitably leads to the standardization and management of activities, be they paid or unpaid.

A contrary view of work prevails when a community chooses a subsistence-oriented way of life. There, the inversion of development, the replacement of consumer goods by personal action, of industrial tools by convivial tools is the goal. There, both wage labor and shadow work will decline since their product, goods or services, is valued primarily as a means for ever inventive activities, rather than as an end, that is, dutiful consumption. There, the guitar is valued over the record, the library over the schoolroom, the backyard garden over the supermarket selection. There, the personal control of each worker over his means of production determines the small horizon of each enterprise, a horizon which is a necessary condition for social production and the unfolding of each worker’s individuality. This mode of production also exists in slavery, serfdom and other forms of dependence. But it flourishes, releases its energy, acquires its adequate and classical form only where the worker is the free owner of his tools and resources; only then can the artisan perform like a virtuoso. This mode of production can be maintained only within the limits that nature dictates to both production and society. There, useful unemployment is valued while wage labor, within limits, is merely tolerated.