Jobs vs Work

At the beginning of the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s quotes a passage from St Augustine where he describes the process of learning a language as learning the names of objects. Wittgenstein objects to this description, saying that while Augustine “does describe a system of communication… not everything that we call language is this system”. Wittgenstein goes on to use the example of board games to illustrate the distinction he’s thinking of:

“It is as if someone were to say: ‘A game consists in moving objects about on a surface according to certain rules…’ - and we replied: You seem to be thinking of board games, but there are others.”

Augustine’s may be an “appropriate description” of language, Wittgenstein writes, “but only for this narrowly circumscribed region, not for the whole of what you were claiming to describe”.

Now, the whole point of Wittgenstein’s later work - culminating in the posthumously-published Philosophical Investigations - is that our language, like everything else in our “form of life” arises out of the particularities of our social relationships. It is our relationships to each other, to the natural world, etc, that determine how we understand and use ideas, concepts, words, opinions, theories, values, etc. All it takes to make this proposition a Marxist one is to place the mode of production - the ways in which human beings engage with the natural world (including humans) in order to produce their means to live - as the overarching relationships among the set of all social relationships. It is unsurprising that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, despite being staunchly non-ideological (as Terry Eagleton has pointed out), should be so closely related to Marxist thinking. Wittgenstein remarks in a prefatory note to the Investigations how much his thinking was indebted to the Marxist economist (and friend of Gramsci’s) Piero Sraffa.

What this means is that for both Marxists and Wittgenstein it is important to understand not only how the word “work” functions in a particular form-of-life but how work itself functions, as a practice and an activity, within a particular mode of production. Our mode of production is capitalism, which is structurally organized around the principle that work (like everything else) is a commodity, to be bought and sold. The products of labour do not belong to the labourers, but are alienated from them, and as a result the practice of labour becomes alienated from labourers as well. This alienation appears natural because our form-of-life (mode of production) has produced this state of affairs. This leads to all kinds of political positions which call for an end of work. The latest is a piece in Jezebel called “What’s the Point of non-Essential Work?”

The writer, Marie Solis, seems at some points to distinguish between work-under-capitalism and work, jobs and work. “I’ve certainly bought into many of society’s prescriptions about work, viewing it as both an economic necessity as well as a way to satisfy an existential need to feel useful and whole.” But at other times, the distinction collapses: “I was just one of roughly 21 million Americans who lost their jobs. I felt worn out and disillusioned, not just with my particular line of work, but with the idea of work itself.” But by collapsing the distinction, Solis falls into the same trap Augustine did with respect to language: the description of alienated, capitalist work is appropriate in the narrow, circumscribed region of capitalist jobs, but it does not describe all work.

“I was frustrated that I had tied so much of my self-worth to my job, especially when I could lose it at any moment. Why didn’t I have something else that gave me the same feelings of satisfaction and purpose? Why did work seem to be the centerpiece of my life, rather than just one other thing in it? Why did I have to work?”

I take the point about refusing the “max productivity” hustle of post-neoliberal capitalism we’re currently living in. I also accept that refusal of capitalist working conditions and the social requirements that go along with them (success, prestige, leisure time, property-ownership) is necessary for any state of future liberation. But I think it’s important to retain the distinction between alienated labour under capitalism and the human practice of non-alienated work.

One of the ways the language of capitalism produces our ways of understanding is by assigning terms other than work to non-alienated work (playing, crafting, hacking, hobbying, etc). It does this to ensure that work only ever has the narrowly circumscribed meaning of working for salary, dehumanized working conditions, alienation. But when we cook, when we repair our bikes, when we knit or sew or paint, when we draw or take photographs, this is all work. We tend to say we do this work for ourselves and mean we don’t do it for pay. But doing it for ourselves has another meaning: we do it to participate in the non-alienated human practice of labour, the transformation of the world through technique and craft.

We continue to live in capitalism. It is important that workers continue to get paid to survive. But if we want to hold sight of a possible future in which all work is non-alienated, all work is meaningful, and human(e), and fulfilling, and feels like play, feels like crafting, feels like a hobby, then we need to resist the capitalist push to define work solely as the dehumanizing, alienating relationship of selling labour power. We need to resist the bracketing off of non-alienated work as something silly or trivial; we need to retain in our language the distinction between capitalist work - which, to be sure, has only been the dominant form of labour for a few hundred years - and work itself.

Capitalism tries to say that all work is only the games where you move pieces across a board; it is important to bear in mind the many different and varied kinds of games that really exist in the world.