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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
What role does the organisation of labour relations play in the health of a democratic society? Axel Honneth’s major new work is devoted to answering this question. His central thesis is that participation in democratic will formation can only proceed from a transparent and fairly regulated division of labour.
The social world of work – where we spend so much of our time – is almost unique in being a space in which we have experiences and learn lessons that we can use to influence the attitudes of a political community. Therefore, by shaping working conditions in a particular way, we have a prime opportunity to foster cooperative forms of behaviour that benefit democracy, both by making mental room for these to flourish and by using the workplace as a rehearsal for democratic interaction in wider society.
A job cannot be so tiring that a worker cannot think about political events; a job cannot pay so little that one cannot engage in political activity in his or her free time; a job cannot demand subordination which inhibits deserved criticism of one’s superiors: economic independence, intellectual and physical autonomy, reduction of strain and crushing boredom, sufficient free time, self-respect and the confidence to speak up, and the chance to practice democratic interaction are all things which we must encourage in order to unblock access to democratic participation. Honneth argues that the reality of labour today increasingly undermines this participation – and he sets out the conditions necessary for a reversal of this injustice.
Tracking the development of labour conditions since the birth of capitalism, this important book engages with a vital topic that has been neglected in democratic theory. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, sociology, politics and the humanities and social sciences generally.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preliminary Remarks
Notes
Part I Normative Beginnings: Labour in Democratic Society
Notes
1. Three Resources for a Critique of Contemporary Labour Relations
(a) Estrangement
(b) Autonomy
(c) Democracy
Notes
2. A Forgotten Tradition
Notes
3. Democracy and the Question of a Fair Division of Labour
Notes
Excursus I On the Concept of Social Labour
Notes
Part II Historical Interlude: The Reality of Social Labour
Notes
4. A Spotlight on the Nineteenth Century
Notes
5. From 1900 to the Threshold of the Present
Notes
6. The Capitalist World of Work Today
Notes
Excursus II On the Concept of the Social Division of Labour
Notes
Part III The Political Struggle for the Future of Social Labour
Notes
7. The Politics of Labour
Notes
8. Alternatives to the Labour Market
Notes
9. Improvements to the Labour Market
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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The Working Sovereign
Labour and Democratic Citizenship
Axel Honneth
Based on the Walter Benjamin Lectures 2021
Centre for Social Critique, Berlin
Translated by Daniel Steuer
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in German as Der arbeitende Souverän. Eine normative Theorie der Arbeit © Suhrkamp Verlag AG Berlin 2023. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag AG Berlin.
This English translation © Polity Press, 2024
Excerpt from A Theory of Justice (Revised Edition) by John Rawls, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1971, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from La Montée des incertitudes. Travail, protections, statut de l’individu by Robert Castel © Editions du Seuil, 2009.
Excerpt from An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts by James Tully © Cambridge University Press, 1993. Reproduced with permission of the licensor through PLSclear.
The translation of this book was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6128-5 – hardback
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Dedication
In memory of
Georg Lohmann (1948–2021)
and
Lothar Fichte (1946–2022)
– friends who passed away too early
Preliminary Remarks
One of the major deficiencies of almost all theories of democracy is that they persistently ignore the fact that most members of their beloved sovereign people are workers.1 We suppose rather fancifully that citizens keep themselves busy by engaging in political debate; the reality, however, is quite different. Most people spend day after day, and many hours a day, in paid or unpaid work. Because of the subordination, underpayment and strain that work entails, workers find it almost impossible even to imagine playing the role of an autonomous participant in the processes of democratic will formation. This blind spot in democratic theory is, in fact, an inability to acknowledge something that precedes democratic theory, and yet finds its way into every nook and cranny of the theory’s object: the social division of labour of modern capitalism. By allotting very different positions to different individuals, the division of labour determines the extent to which each person can influence the processes of democratic will formation. This fateful neglect of the division of labour and its effects means that democratic theory is unable to acknowledge one of the few means by which a democratic state based on the rule of law can influence the conditions that are necessary to maintain it. For apart from education, the social world of work is the only institutional sphere in which most citizens have experiences and learn lessons that exercise a decisive influence over the social and moral views and attitudes of a political community. By shaping working conditions, a democratic state can foster behaviours that are beneficial to democracy, namely cooperative behaviours, or that run counter to it, namely egocentric behaviours.2 The only other area in which the state can exercise such influence is education policy.
The connection between democracy and the social division of labour is the subject of this book. Initial preparatory work for it was done in the academic year 2018/19, during which I was a visiting professor at the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. Having no teaching duties, I was able to acquaint myself with the vast body of literature on the topic. I am very grateful to my friend and colleague Didier Fassin, then head of the School of Social Science at IAS, for providing me with the opportunity to develop the plan for the book. I used an initial draft of the book for the Walter Benjamin lectures in 2021, which, because of the Covid pandemic, I delivered outdoors on three consecutive evenings in Berlin’s Hasenheide park. My thanks go to the two directors of the Centre for Social Critique at Humboldt University, Berlin – Rahel Jaeggi and Robin Celikates. Their invitation stimulated me to return to my reflections about the role of work in modern societies, reflections that go a long way back, and which I have now revised and provided with a new theoretical framework.3 I have fond memories of the evenings in Hasenheide park, not least because of the generous and cordial hospitality of Rahel, Robin and their team – and the weather played along too! Eva Gilmer provided invaluable help with the difficult task of transforming the script for the lectures into a book. Her linguistic sensitivity and sense for textual balance and succinctness have helped to ensure that this monograph is much clearer, leaner and more concise than the original version. I owe her the most heartfelt thanks for her work. The same applies to Daniel Steuer, who has translated this book into English with the finest feeling for nuances of meaning; I hardly think it is possible to produce a better translation of my text. I’m extremely grateful to Daniel for his marvellous work. During my time as visiting professor at the Centre for Social Critique, and in the following months, a number of people pointed out weaknesses and gaps in my arguments. I am grateful for the advice, objections and valuable help of Rüdiger Dannemann, Timo Jütten, Andrea Komlosy, Bernd Ladwig, Christoph Menke, Fred Neuhouser, Emmanuel Renault, Ruth Yeoman, Christine Wimbauer, Rahel Jaeggi and Robin Celikates. For some of them, I suspect, what follows will not be radical or bold enough. They can lay the blame for my somewhat cautious intellectual attitude at the feet of my new academic environment, the Philosophy Department at Columbia University, where John Dewey taught for almost three decades as a pragmatic social reformer and meliorist of the highest rank.
Notes
1
This deficiency is pointed out by Karl Marx in
On the Jewish Question
, which repeatedly speaks about the ‘
secular contradiction between the political state and civil society
’, meaning by ‘civil society’ – following Hegel – the capitalist relations of work and production. Karl Marx,
On the Jewish Question
, in
Early Writings
, London: Penguin, 1992, pp. 211–41; here: p. 226. More recently, Elizabeth Anderson postulates the same ‘contradiction’, albeit from within a very different theoretical framework, in her
Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It)
, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017, pp. 41f.
2
This also contradicts Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde’s famous dictum according to which the modern ‘liberal, secularized state is sustained by conditions it cannot itself guarantee’. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, ‘The Rise of the State as a Process of Secularization’, in
Religion, Law, and Democracy: Selected Writings
, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 152–67; here: p. 167. I would argue that the democratic state under the rule of law has two tools at its disposal – education and labour policy – which it can use, if not to guarantee the cultural and intellectual conditions that sustain democracy, then at least to improve the likelihood of their emergence.
3
See Axel Honneth, ‘Work and Instrumental Action’,
New German Critique
26, Critical Theory and Modernity (1982), pp. 31–54; Axel Honneth, ‘Labour and Recognition: A Redefinition’, in
The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition
, Cambridge: Polity, 2012, pp. 56–74.
PART INormative Beginnings: Labour in Democratic Society
In liberalism, we speak of rights, liberty, and community. We also discuss the self-governing forms of subjectivity or agency, and the range of abilities of deliberation, judgement, discussion, and action required in the exercise of rights, liberty and community in practice. Yet, when we examine our producing practices we see that the way they are organized, and so the forms of subjectivity and the types of abilities they foster, undermine the development of agency and abilities necessary to engage in liberal practices of rights, liberty, and community.
James Tully1
Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Western world saw the emergence of both a new understanding of society and an entirely new set of ideas about the value of human labour. In the wake of the Enlightenment, societies were no longer seen as hierarchical systems in which, on the basis of an allegedly God-given class structure, small minorities could exercise political power over the vast majority. Instead, they were understood as voluntary associations of citizens with equal rights in which, in principle, membership was sufficient to give someone the right to political participation. This revolutionary reinterpretation of what constitutes the legitimacy of a social order necessarily brought about a fundamentally different understanding of the work someone did to secure their livelihood. Work could no longer be seen merely as a duty owed to a political ruler. Rather, it had to be regarded as an expression of the willingness to actively contribute to the common good and prosperity of the political community. Alongside the nascent idea of the sovereignty of the people, then, there emerged the idea that a society is a cooperative association in which each must contribute as much as they can to societal prosperity, and in this way show that they are worthy members of the political association. This is still the guiding idea today. What happened in the eighteenth century was a decisive intellectual step that established a close connection between the concept of political democracy and the concept of a fair division of labour.2
With this step, the ancient, and dismissive, idea of work as a matter of mere individual need and as a sign of political immaturity was finally overcome, at least in theory. Before the bourgeois revolution, the individual’s work was seen as essentially a burden, and nothing more: the daily toil that betrayed their position as a dependent member of a particular estate. In the ‘new age’, it became a condition of free existence and full membership in society. Suddenly, what had once simply signalled one’s need to make a living became a symbol of social emancipation and freedom. No one expressed this connection between political equality and social cooperation as succinctly as Hegel in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, published in 1821. Hegel devotes a whole chapter to the new significance of work as a condition of membership in a legally constituted corporation. Every (male) member of bourgeois society, he writes, ‘is somebody’ – that is, possesses the full social status of a citizen – because of his ‘competence and his regular income and means of support’, and in this recognized existence as a tradesman he has ‘his honour’.3
However, Hegel’s confident claim was not borne out, of course, in the social reality of early capitalism. Around 1800, the daily working lives of the vast majority of people in Western Europe took the form of the oppression and unfreedom of workers in the early industrial factories, the dependence of domestic servants in the homes of rich bourgeois and aristocratic families, or the misery of agricultural day-labourers on the farms.4 The discrepancy between these wretched conditions and Hegel’s promise – that employment would henceforth be the uncoerced expression of personal honour and social cooperation – is obvious. On the one hand, there was drudgery, unchecked exploitation, subordination and enforced labour contracts – conditions that prompted Marx, in 1849, to speak of the resurrection of ‘slavery’.5 On the other, there was the new, modern ideal of work as ‘free’ and self-determined and as the route to a secure social status. This contradiction between social reality and normative idea, between facticity and validity, forms the subject matter of this book. In it, I pursue three questions. How should the ideal of free labour, of work that is no longer forced upon the individual, be understood in normative terms if it is meant to guide us in our search for political change (Part I)? What were labour relations like in the capitalist past, and what do they look like today (Part II)? And what can be done, under present conditions, to reduce, or perhaps close altogether, the stark gap between the aspirational idea and the reality (Part III)? In addition, two excursuses will aim to clarify two concepts that are crucial to substantiating the claim that there is a mutual dependence between democratic participation and sufficiently good working conditions. The first of these concerns the concept of social labour: how must we understand this term if it is to capture all those activities that are seen to be necessary in society and must thus be governed by publicly justifiable regulations? The second discusses how we should view the genesis and functioning of the social division of labour if we are to understand it as the primary means of facilitating broader political participation through the improvement of labour conditions.
Notes
1
James Tully,
An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 260.
2
John Rawls is without a doubt the political philosopher who puts the strongest emphasis on this connection. See e.g. his
Justice as Fairness: A Restatement
, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, esp. §2. Also: Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson,
Democracy and Disagreement
, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1996; especially chapter 8. Russell Muirhead,
Just Work
, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004; esp. chapter 1. However, Rawls never discusses what follows from this, his central thesis, for social labour relations themselves. I shall return to this question in Chapter 3.
3
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Elements of the Philosophy of Right
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, §253, p. 271. On the idea that work gives the worker the social status of being ‘free’, see among others Robert J. Steinfeld,
The Invention of Free Labour: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture 1350–1870
, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
4
Jürgen Osterhammel,
The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century
, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014, esp. chapter XIII. To get a vivid impression of the conditions that characterized early industrial work, it suffices to take a look at Friedrich Engels,
The Condition of the Working Class in England
, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 [1845].
5
Karl Marx,
Wage Labour and Capital
, New York: International Publishers, 1933, p. 16.
1Three Resources for a Critique of Contemporary Labour Relations
This introductory chapter addresses the question of how the modern idea of free, dignified labour should be understood if it is to be used as the guiding principle of a critique of contemporary labour relations. This is no simple task. Various competing conceptions of what counts as a normatively ‘good’ or appropriate organization of social labour have been around for quite some time. There are many diverse perspectives from which work can be considered as a good for the individual or society – as something that transcends the mere satisfaction of needs and the provision of sustenance – and there are just as many traditions that advocate ways of improving, transforming and even revolutionizing working conditions. I therefore start by distinguishing and evaluating three modern schools of thought that offer critiques of capitalist working conditions but on the basis of very different ideas about the good or correct organization of social labour. In Chapter 2, I then take a closer look at the most promising and plausible of the three, the one that looks at labour as a social good and considers the impact of working conditions on democratic practice and participation. This approach once was taken for granted by some social theorists but unfortunately has since been almost completely forgotten. Chapter 3 is a systematic attempt at justifying the normative perspective from which the remainder of the book discusses the contemporary and future condition of social labour. I hope that, by the end of that discussion, it will have become clear why my argument focuses on the complementary relationship between a fair division of labour and political democracy.
Before the great transitions that took place between 1750 and 1850, there were few theories of how best to arrange labour relations. Premodern works contain only scant remarks about possible marginal improvements to the quality of daily activities in the crafts, the household or agriculture. The reason for this lack of utopian imagination is that, as I have already mentioned, work was held in such low regard: from antiquity to the early modern period, any activity that counted as work was so strongly associated with pure necessity, humiliating drudgery and low social status that criticizing it seemed as superfluous as thinking about how to improve it. According to the historian Moses Finley, ‘neither in Greek nor in Latin was there a word with which to express the general notion of “labour” or the concept of labour “as a general social function”’.1 But this contemptuous attitude began to change in the wake of the Protestant work ethic, bourgeois emancipation and the legal assertion of ‘free work’,2 and it gave way to the idea, articulated by Hegel, that labour is a means of securing individual independence, social status and honour.3 In the nascent capitalist countries, there soon emerged, alongside the critique of existing labour relations, ideas of a completely different world of work. It was only at this point, after work had become ‘free’ in the sense that it was no longer tied to personal tutelage and membership of a particular estate,4 that the idea of work was also ‘free’ to become associated with hopes for something better, more agreeable, more just or more in tune with human nature – in short, with normative ideas of a ‘liberated’ form of labour. Such visions for the future of social labour were fuelled either by historically specific ideals of certain ‘free’ and ‘self-determined’ kinds of activity or by the discrepancy between actual working conditions and the promise of democratic liberty. Some believed that all work could be as cooperative and fulfilling as the work of craftsmen or artists; others believed that the ideals and principles of democratic participation should also govern labour relations. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, employees became ever more conscious of the misery created by the new capitalist working conditions, and this period therefore saw the increasing dissemination of ideas of liberated and humanely organized forms of labour. Workers and craftsmen formed associations in France, the British Isles, the German states and North America, and these groups began to combine their criticisms of working conditions with proposals for improvement. If we are to determine what normative framework governed this complex mixture of social outrage, moral critique and utopianism, we need first to ask what, in each case, these critics saw as wrong, reprehensible or immoral. Doing so will allow us to explicate the normative bases of the various demands for a reorganization of social labour. Proceeding in this way, we can identify three movements that were critical of capitalist labour relations. The object of each movement’s critique – what exactly was considered wrong, immoral or ethically suspect – will allow us to determine, indirectly, the movement’s arguments in favour of another, better, more just organization of the sphere of labour. This historical reconstruction enables us, in turn, to identify three normative paradigms that, as I see it, may be employed in a critique of labour relations today.
(a) Estrangement5
The first of our three movements emerged just two decades after the French Revolution, and thus at the same time that Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right first appeared. At the time, some early socialists were criticizing working conditions in the privately owned factories. Their point was not just that workers were exploited to the point of complete exhaustion, that they were not given any security or that they were subject to the harshest forms of discipline; their main accusation was that the new regime of work deprived workers of the ability to experience their activity as a part of themselves – as an externalization of their own personality.6 The theme was picked up by the early Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts; combining it with Hegelian ideas, Marx created one of his most enduring theoretical motifs, that of estranged labour.7 According to this idea, what is truly scandalous about capitalist relations of production is that they dissect communal work into quantifiable pieces that can then be assigned to individuals and traded as commodities on the market. Marx is convinced that if labour becomes such a commodity, it loses all those properties that make it valuable to us; we are no longer able to experience labour as a productive use of our specific powers and skills as species-beings for the benefit of the social community. As it appears in Marx’s early writings, the idea of estranged labour rests on questionable assumptions and contains a number of inconsistencies, and the early writings therefore demand significant interpretive effort. It is not clear, for instance, whether Marx wants to claim that in its original, uncorrupted form labour necessarily involves the translation of one’s intentions and capacities into a tangible product. Such a claim would imply a highly problematic exclusive focus on material products, and it may well rest on untenable idealist premises. It is also unclear whether work that involves the productive – even pleasurable – exertion of the powers that we possess qua species-beings is possible only collectively or whether it can also be performed by a single subject. We would therefore be justified in interpreting non-estranged labour as just as much an ideal of individual self-realization as an ideal of un-coerced cooperation.8 Despite the concept’s inherent difficulties, the core of Marx’s idea – that labour under capitalist conditions is estranged because it can no longer be experienced as the exertion of the capacities we possess qua species-beings – quickly became popular in the emerging labour movement. And not only there: the British Arts and Crafts movement and other reform movements also soon picked up on the idea that, for work to again become a cooperative or individual exercise of specifically human capacities, as it still was in the arts and crafts, it was necessary to battle against the prevailing conditions of production.9
With this popularization, the philosophical elements of Marx’s thesis gradually receded into the background, but the idea’s intuitively plausible core – that the capitalist economy ‘estranges’ labour and turns it into something separate from the labourer, something ‘thing-like’ – nevertheless became one of the most influential paradigms in the critique of labour relations.10 The chief accusation is that capitalist working conditions do not allow the labourer to identify with his activities as an expression or exertion of his specifically human abilities – a fact that Marx, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, describes in Hegelian terms as the ‘worker’ no longer being ‘at home’ in his work, which is now traded as a commodity.11 The worker therefore cannot see work as an end in itself, as a productive ‘objectification’ done for its own sake, but only as a ‘means of physical subsistence’.12 Marx’s insight is still alive today, even if it is not necessarily expressed in his terms – terms that derive from the world of Hegelian thought. Today, work is described as ‘meaningless’ rather than ‘estranged’, which helps to avoid the idealist assumption of a fixed human nature that consists in uncoerced, pleasurable work – an assumption that now seems untenable. But despite this softening of the rhetoric and change of emphasis, the phenomenon is the same: other-directed work that is treated as a profitable commodity cannot be experienced as gratifying and meaningful, but only ever as estranged. But what would meaningful, non-estranged work be like? And how might we justify the normative demand for such work?
Contained in this way of talking is the thesis that non-estranged labour, as a specific form of human activity, possesses a unique intrinsic value. On this view, work itself is valuable; it is not valuable simply because it creates goods that are external to it, such as the achievement of socially defined goals or social recognition. If work was valuable simply in virtue of the creation of such external goods, it would suffice to ensure that work had some meaningful purpose, or to improve wages, or to accord the work more recognition, and we would not need to ensure that the work processes themselves were meaningful and gratifying.13 To justify the demand for meaningful work processes and to guarantee their implementation, we must maintain that work has intrinsic qualities that imply that work activities be designed in a certain way. Without reference to such intrinsic qualities we would have no criteria for deciding whether a given labour process satisfies the necessary conditions for meaningfulness and the absence of estrangement. It would not be enough to point to subjective evaluations, because this would open the door to arbitrary individual judgements about what constitutes meaningful work.14 The idea of estranged or meaningless work requires us to identify the objective intrinsic qualities of work, which alone allow us to determine whether the desired conditions are actually given in social reality.15
It is very difficult, however, to identify among the numerous ideas about the intrinsic values of work those that are objective, rather than a matter of personal or collective preference. In more recent intellectual history, many ethically desirable qualities have been attributed to work as such, from its disciplining effects to the way in which it strengthens community.16 But within the Marxian tradition, there is widespread agreement on the way to objectively determine work’s intrinsic value. Work allows us to exercise the skills and abilities that characterize us as human beings and which we can realize only through work. Of course Marx, as we have seen, added a few other elements to this idea. In his early work, he adopted Hegel’s conception of genuine work as activity that objectifies one’s intentions and talents in an object and thus makes them visible.17 But we may leave aside this claim, which plays hardly any role in his later work. Marx tells us that the intrinsic value of work is objectively given by the fact that it allows us to make uncoerced and collective use of the powers that are peculiar to the human being. Among the advocates of this first normative paradigm, there is also widespread agreement about what these ‘powers’ or ‘abilities’ are: the capacities to constructively plan, to design or to set purposes – capacities that can be realized only through work. However, if we ask for a normative justification as to why work should always take a social form in which its intrinsic value can be realized, answers begin to differ. Marx’s own argument is almost Aristotelian. He claims that the capacity to work on and transform nature purposefully and creatively is part of the essence of man, so the exercise of this capacity is a central condition for the successful realization of the human form of life. More recent proponents of the view that there is a moral obligation to ensure that work is meaningful argue more cautiously. They point out that human beings have a deep-seated need for meaningfulness in everything they do and that this need must also be satisfied in the world of work.18 Despite these differences, the various versions of the first paradigm all agree that a good and appropriate organization of social labour must allow every employee to exercise distinctively human capacities such as the ability to rationally formulate purposes, engage in cooperative action and creatively shape their activity and environment.
(b) Autonomy
The second normative paradigm is autonomy, which has been, and still is, an important concept in the critique of labour relations. This paradigm does not rely on any assumptions about the intrinsic value of work, and it does not look to a future of meaningful work that is free from estrangement. Instead, it asks how we are to rid work of any kind of paternalistic domination or arbitrary rule. The social movement that first formulated this aim emerged around the same time as the socialist movement in Europe, but surprisingly this social movement was located on the east coast of the United States – a country that many European commentators would later claim, somewhat condescendingly, could never produce an organized, socialist workers’ movement.19 The craftsmen, workers and self-employed small businessmen who came together in Philadelphia, New York and Boston in the early nineteenth century to revolt against the new capitalist forms of wage labour drew on the normative promises contained in their country’s republican constitution. It had been only a few decades since they had battled, successfully, to ensure – through the First Amendment to the constitution – that the state could no longer exercise power over the formation of its citizens’ political opinions. Now, the question was over the fate that their newly won freedoms were suffering in the manufacturing halls and factories that gradually began to emerge along the east coast during industrialization.20 The position of the state was that the employees of those factories were free because they could freely decide, without being in any way coerced, whether to accept their work contracts.21 But wage labourers soon found that such freedom did not go very far, for they were dependent on the entrepreneurs in various ways. They could reject the work contract on offer only if they could find alternative work and had sufficient savings – and that was rarely the case. Once they had entered into a contract, the factory owner enjoyed an almost unlimited right to determine the work processes. And workers had no legal or other means of seeking redress if they were fired. The groups that began to rebel against such conditions soon invented a term that encapsulated all these forms of dependence: wage slavery. In this, they anticipated Marx, who would later repeatedly claim that wage labour was a new form of slavery.22 The intention behind the phrase was not to present the working conditions of wage labourers as on a par with the slavery still suffered, at that time, by the African-American population. It was clearly understood that slave owners legally owned the whole person of the enslaved individual whereas the capitalist was legally entitled only to the output of the worker’s labour. Still, for American labour leaders of the 1820s and 1830s, the manifold forms of dependence involved in everything from contracts to working conditions were enough to justify talk of a new form of slavery. Their pitch to the masses was that, in a democratic republic, wage labour was intolerable: it exposed employees to the whims of entrepreneurs in a way that was incompatible with the newly established principle of individual independence and freedom.23
Among the leadership of the labour movement, however, there was more agreement about what they did not want than about what they did. There was a more or less general consensus that the conditions of the wage labour system contradicted the principle of independence from arbitrary rule. But when it came to possible alternatives to the capitalist labour market, the picture was rather different. The proposals for agricultural cooperatives put forward by Robert Owen when he toured the US in the 1820s were met with scepticism: the proposals were seen as having limited benefits for the majority of wage labourers, and implying a great degree of dependence on wealthy and philanthropically minded individuals.24 Some leading figures of the movement suggested a broader distribution of the ownership of productive capital across the population, which it was supposed would ensure that wage labourers were better able to participate in discussions about contracts and labour relations. Yet another faction believed that the evil of wage labour could be overcome only if the factories were the property of the employees and run as cooperatives.25 But none of these proposals matured into a clear programme that convinced the majority of the population. Any hopes for rapid improvement ended once and for all with the beginning of the American Civil War, which shifted public attention on to the question of the legitimacy of the old, genuine slavery.
Shortly after the end of the Civil War in 1865, the labour activists’ battle against wage labour was rekindled. The basic argument had not changed. They still insisted that workers’ dependence on the good will of the owners of capital was incompatible with the republican promise of freedom. But they had sharpened their ideas about the economic order that would put an end to this unfreedom. The new watchword was the ‘cooperative commonwealth’. Its aim was to put the whole system of industrial production into the hands of worker cooperatives that would peacefully compete over market profits.26 Over two decades, these radical demands even found support among organized labour. Even politically minded intellectuals like John Dewey came to believe that the project of a democratic republic was incomplete without the democratization of the economy – albeit, in Dewey’s case, against the background of a different concept of freedom.27 However, these impulses soon died down again with the establishment of a national trade union in 1886, when the influence of the more radical wing of the labour movement began to wane significantly.
Today, the republican paradigm for the critique of labour relations is experiencing a revival. Several authors, among them Elizabeth Anderson, invoke the tradition of the early ‘Labor Republicans’ (as Alex Gourevitch calls them) in their arguments against private capital’s control over labour power.28 To reiterate the point, this argument is not about the nature of work – whether it is meaningful or estranged – and still less is it about work’s intrinsic qualities. Rather, the argument is that, as long as workers cannot autonomously determine the details of their work contracts and conditions of work, or at least participate in the relevant decision processes, they are subject to the arbitrary rule of private employers. As these two alternatives indicate, there are more and less radical versions of the argument. Some advocates of this paradigm are convinced that a genuine liberation from arbitrary rule in the sphere of social labour requires the total abolition of wage labour and the total self-administration of businesses by employees. Others believe that the principles of republican freedom would be satisfied by rights that guarantee participation in the formulation of contracts and the determination of working conditions.29 These different approaches appear to result from different evaluations of the economic efficiency of self-administered businesses. Whether one inclines to one or the other republican position will depend on one’s assumptions about the feasibility of running an economy without private investors and the incentives of market competition.
Within this paradigm, the demand for the absence of paternalism and arbitrary rule in the sphere of social labour is also justified in two different ways. And a justification is needed here, for those who defend the liberal market economy can easily insist that working conditions and the aims of a business should be a matter for the business owner – the person who bears the risk. One republican argument against this position is that the right of every person to be independent of the arbitrary will of other persons or institutions must not end when they clock in at work. Even at work, ‘you are subject to no one’s arbitrary and unaccountable will’, because such autonomy is a universal right of every individual30 and because ‘exercising autonomy’, as Anderson says, ‘is a basic human need’.31 The other argument is of a more immanent character. It claims that there is a contradiction between the political sphere, where the principle of freedom from paternalism and arbitrary rule is long established, and the area of social labour, where this principle is yet to be introduced. If autonomy is legally guaranteed in the sphere of politics, there can be no justification for the absence of this guarantee in the economic world. Notwithstanding the differences between these two normative justifications, the normative principle of the second paradigm is always the same: the social organization of labour is only good, fair or justifiable if employees are no longer exposed to the arbitrary rule of business owners and employers.
(c) Democracy
The third paradigm for a critique of labour relations differs from the other two in decisive respects. Where the republican tradition ignores the question of whether work might have ethical value, and the question of work’s intrinsic qualities more generally, the third paradigm takes work to be an important social good. Unlike the first – Marxian – paradigm, however, the third paradigm does not take this good to be an end in itself or to be intrinsically valuable. Rather, social labour is seen as valuable because it serves another, more important purpose. The third paradigm is thus characterized by the fact that it sees work as a valuable social practice, but one that is valuable only because it is useful for the achievement of a higher good. Like the second paradigm, it does not investigate work’s positive intrinsic qualities, but unlike the second paradigm it takes work to be valuable, if only as a means and in a mediated fashion.
According to the third paradigm, the purpose that makes work an instrumental good is political will formation among the citizens of a particular community. On this view, social labour should be organized such that it facilitates an intrinsic good, namely the greatest possible and most effective participation of all members of a society in the processes of democratic self-determination. By the same token, work is seen as bad, wrong or inappropriate if it does not promote such participation. However, as we shall see, for this tradition the social division of labour’s contribution to successful democratic will formation is not just of random or contingent instrumental usefulness. Of course, many conditions must obtain if all citizens are to be included in the processes of political deliberation: for instance universal suffrage and a functioning public sphere.32 These conditions are more than just instrumentally valuable for the realization of democratic inclusion and participation; they are the foundations of democratic life, and thus represent essential and constitutive conditions for inclusion and participation. What distinguishes the third normative paradigm is the claim that the same is true of a well-organized and fair division of labour. Like universal suffrage and the integrity of the public sphere, sufficiently well-organized social labour is seen as an integral and irreplaceable precondition for the inclusion of all citizens in the processes of democratic will formation. The fair division and appropriate organization of social labour is not only of instrumental but of constitutive value for the democratic process.33
Perhaps surprisingly, concerns about the detrimental effect that the mechanization and fragmentation of work might have on politics were already being voiced by Adam Smith. In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Smith mentions in passing his worry that, with increasing division of labour, the workers’ monotonous, meaningless tasks would lead to such an impoverishment of sentiment and understanding that informed participation in political life would become impossible.34 Some fifty years later, Smith’s aside became the key to Hegel’s analysis of the modern market economy. In the chapter on labour in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel says that the working estates are capable of ‘universal life’ – and thus of active participation in the ‘reasonable whole’ that is society – only if their professional activities are sufficiently complex and protected, and only if the working estates are organized in trade-specific corporations that celebrate their particular professional ethos.35 We can now formulate the third paradigm’s fundamental claim: the division of labour within which the majority of the population works must satisfy the normative condition that it provides all employees with the self-confidence, knowledge and honour that enable them to take part in opinion formation in society at large without shame or fear. After Hegel, this rough idea gave birth to a whole tradition of thought, albeit one that mostly exercised its influence under the surface. In France, this tradition began with Émile Durkheim’s ‘organic solidarity’; in Britain, G. D. H. Cole’s guild socialism, which influenced the English labour movement, played a similar role.36 Both shared the idea that a flourishing democracy requires a fair, inclusive and conscious division of labour, and that an attitude of democratic cooperation depends on various mechanisms that promote a shared awareness of the mutual dependencies that result from the division of labour. The normative argument for this complementary relationship between democracy and a fair division of labour can already be found in Hegel: only those with a profession that is worthy of recognition, and that is in fact recognized, can possess the cognitive abilities and psychological self-confidence that are required for a level of effective participation in social will formation, in line with the idea of active citizenship. Socially necessary labour is considered to be organized appropriately, or at least well enough, only if it does not constrain employees’ ability to take part in democratic life. Of course, what that claim means for the detailed organization of the vast number of activities that make up social labour depends on empirical assumptions about the aspects of actual working conditions that are particularly detrimental to participation in political will formation. The representatives of this third position may therefore come to very different conclusions about how the situation might be improved. But the essence of their critique is always the same: the criticism takes aim at those conditions that make it impossible for the majority of the working population to fully take part in deliberative exchange in democratic society – conditions such as excessive physical or psychological strain, the excessive fragmentation of work processes, a lack of recognition or an absence of secure integration in the social division of labour.
We have sketched the three most important versions of the critique of capitalist labour relations. The first critique takes aim at the fact that individuals are forced to perform meaningless, objectively non-gratifying tasks; the second at the fact that they are subjected to the arbitrary rule of private actors; and the third at the fact that they cannot develop the physical and psychological preconditions that would allow them to participate as equals in processes of democratic will formation. I shall now critically compare these three versions of the critique, with a view to preparing for our discussion of contemporary labour relations. I begin again with the Marxian paradigm, which I shall call the ‘critique of estrangement’. According to this critique, a non-estranged relationship with our work activities is possible only if we can see these activities as an expression or representation of talents and abilities that are specific to the human species.
The obvious strength of this paradigm – its plausibility and clarity – is at the same time its greatest weakness. Setting aside the metaphysical connotations of Marx’s version of the critique of estrangement,37 the idea that all work should express specifically human abilities and capacities is undoubtedly attractive and, to that extent, convincing. Activity that allows agents to creatively materialize their intentions and feel that they are effective actors in their physical environment is the paradigm of action – action that is an end in itself and that is gratifying for its own sake. Even if we weaken the conditions for non-estranged activity – that is, drop the requirement that an object must be transformed, leaving only the condition that a specifically human capacity must be exerted – the paradigm does not lose much of its original appeal. Work that does not involve the transformation of an object, for instance delivering mail, teaching young people or caring for the elderly, will be all the more attractive and gratifying if the workers can freely express their own abilities and talents.
We must bear in mind, however, that we are talking not about subjective feelings or impressions – merely being happy with one’s work – but about the fulfilment of an ‘objective’ standard. It is not enough that people experience their own activities as ‘meaningful’ or that they feel them to involve the exertion of specifically human abilities; rather, the activities must be such that they are actually, or ‘objectively’, the instantiations of one or more of these abilities.38 But at this point it becomes immediately clear that it will be extremely difficult to apply this criterion to individual cases among the multitude of work activities. Everything will depend on what we mean by a ‘specifically human ability’. Is, for instance, the capacity to do basic arithmetic such an ability? If so, it would follow that working at a supermarket checkout, even if such work is monotonous and physically and psychologically stressful, counts as non-estranged labour. If we are to avoid arbitrariness, we need to define specifically ‘human’ abilities – those that, for Marx, might represent the ‘powers of our species-being’ – as narrowly as possible. But if we define them narrowly, the number of abilities that count as eminently human reduces, and the sphere of work activities that might count as ‘non-estranged labour’ shrinks. Ultimately, this narrowing down runs the risk of forcing us into a kind of ethical perfectionism: the normative demands are raised to such a level that the majority of necessary work falls short. Whether a building inspector, auto body painter or worker at a laundrette is paid fairly for their work becomes irrelevant, as do the level of safety at work and whether the work makes them happy. Regardless of those issues, if the work does not realize one of the capacities that truly characterize us as humans – the ability to create complex plans, be creative, set goals or cooperate – it must be considered estranged. The critique of estrangement thus seems to end up in a cul-de-sac, because its criteria for non-estranged work must be either too strict or too relaxed. If they are too relaxed, almost any work activity must qualify as non-estranged, because, trivially, some rudimentary elements of human ability are always involved. If they are too strict, only very few kinds of labour can potentially count as non-estranged. On this second, perfectionist version of the view, most kinds are work that are necessary now, and will be necessary in future, do not qualify as non-estranged. We can also put this extreme view differently: the demand that socially necessary work activities must always be carried out for their own sake and must ‘objectively’ express our highest capacities is based on a tendency vastly to overestimate the plasticity and modifiability of socially necessary work.39
The fact that the critique of estrangement ends up in this cul-de-sac is not the only problem associated with it. Even in the early Marx, it is not clear whether the description of estranged labour applies only to the work of individual subjects or whether it applies also to the joint activities of groups. The relevant passages in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts sometimes speak of the activity of an individual subject, and sometimes about cooperation, and Marx never really makes it clear whether the question of estranged labour concerns the future well-being of individuals or that of whole communities.40 I would argue that this indecision is typical of the critique of estrangement in all its forms. Representatives of this paradigm generally leave open the question of whether meaningful, non-estranged labour would benefit individual subjects or the whole community. The fact that little effort is made to establish a firm link between the non-estranged labour of individuals and the well-being of the social community speaks in favour of the first possibility. The idea that meaningfulness and non-estrangement depend on cooperation, and thus are likely to benefit the community, is usually not explicitly expressed and tends to play only a minor role. This gives rise to the second problem with the critique of estrangement: its marked tendency towards ethical individualism. The primary focus is on forms of work that might benefit the individual, and the idea that good or just labour relations are important for societal well-being recedes into the background. The suggestion that actual labour relations may threaten family life, active citizenship or participation in the public sphere seems to play almost no role at all. In sum, the critique of estrangement
