The authors seek to critically reflect on the meaning of work in a globally emancipated society. They start by arguing that work is a central issue for human societies, whether to produce socially useful goods, to provide basic needs or as the making, objectification, and safeguarding of ontological humanization of Mankind itself – even if in the field of socialist politics this centrality has been overshadowed by programs mainly focused on the defense of assistentialism, philanthropy, or even charity. To conceive work today, in the current stage of the capitalist society, we have to mobilize several concepts, methods, and areas of knowledge, among which the authors highlight critical sociology, global labor history, and psychodynamics of work. Finally, they argue about what would be the fundamental aspects of work in an emancipated society.
TopIntroduction
Work occupies a central place in societies: in politics, culture and economy. It supports the social production of goods or services; it has a fundamental social value and is preponderant in human socialization. Work ensures access to consumption; it is the source of social rights and political citizenship; it qualifies and situates people in society at large; it seems relevant in solving all environmental and ecological problems. This prominent centrality constituted a complex path of struggle and resistance for the dignity of the worker and against alienation. A rare balance between the individual and the collective, affirming and reaffirming human work as a universal historical value is the aim. Indeed, labor is all these aspects and much more, for the individual and for the humankind. The centrality of work is a fundamental starting point of our own intellectual work (Antunes, 2013; Dejours & Deranty, 2010).
Work is undoubtedly central, but despite all the efforts of dialectical criticism in the last two centuries, it is still necessary to affirm something that is even more immanent and transcendental: work is a vital human life activity. Work is central and decisive in the process of production and reproduction of the social being for the historical form assumed by the humankind over time. Karl Marx – as stated in both his critique of idealist philosophy and his first critique of political economy – took a foundational step by formulating a radically new conception of work. He observed that private property, by opposing to the so-called free human development, created the conditions for the enduring objectification of what he described as alienated work.
The production processes of the means necessary to satisfy human needs have been transformed into a fundamental condition in human life. They became the basis of the process of humanization, or hominization, of long historical duration. Work is inherent to the life of those who have become human beings, so much so that – from the bipedal upright posture to the articulated language and complex thought – everything that defines us as “hominids” – distinct from natural beings – is and must be attributed to the fact that – as Eduardo Galeano wrote in the Open Veins of Latin America,
We are what we do, and especially what we do to change who we are (Galeano, 1973, p. 13).
It is because of the categorical invention of work, that it becomes possible for us to transform nature, history and human nature itself. Affirming the centrality of work, therefore, is not an act without consequences.
Once the social production of commodities became widespread, the capitalist socio-metabolic system subsumed the activity of work as a form of ‘wage labor’. The decommodification of work, as well as the deprivatization of the means of production beyond the historical overcoming of state apparatuses, were described as an effective possibility for a real community made up of free, collaborative and associated workers. From a critique to the reification of social relations, which appear – in the capitalist system – as relations between things and against the fetish of the State-form it becomes possible to think about the disalienation of work. Not to mention atrocious relations of exploitation assumed in the wage-earning regime itself, naturalized by the notion of ‘labor market’.
The dawn of the 21st century brought all these debates back to life. Social sciences turned from the mainstream declaration of the ‘end of work’, ‘post-history’ and so on to the now so trendy topic of the ‘future of work’.
On the basis of the numerous studies (teachers, doctors, dockers, cabin crew, civil servants, train drivers, metro operators, nurses, journalists and metalworkers from AutoEuropa, among others) the Authors have carried out in the Observatory on Living and Working Conditions, at the New University of Lisbon, in dialogue with social critical theory and the centrality of work, this Chapter conceptualizes labor and work today, in an eventual, non-marketized future.
TopThe Multidimensional Centrality Of Work
The pusillanimous or apologetic denial of the centrality of work, an important and persistent theme in the social and human sciences has become more pronounced in recent decades, coinciding with the genesis of a structural crisis of capital (Varela & Pereira, 2016). The origins can be traced back to 1925, when Karl Mannheim, in his famous work titled Ideology and Utopia, claimed that ‘classes are merging’, since – according to the idea borrowed from the German philosophical tradition – we are living in an ‘era of equalization’.