So, a friend suggested I read this given it's intensely relevant to my interests and my own projects, and I did, and now I'm basically reviewing it.
Honestly, I have mixed thoughts about this book. While it is, on the one hand, an extremely informative cataloguing of information, documenting the history of the protestant work ethic from its inception to modern times, and going into all of its different forms, I do ultimately come to a different conclusion than this book. In my own analysis of the past, all of these old ideologies have an "old book" problem of being stuck in the past, unable to deal with the 21st century's problems. Alternatively we can frame it in Bob Black's way of "all of the old ideologies are conservative because they all believe in work". Either way, I come to the same conclusion that I've expressed in other recent posts: that the problem is the work ethic itself, that the work ethic can be saved, and the only true solution to our problems is to liberate workers and work from it. As long as people are forced to labor under some sort of regime, directed by others (whether this takes the form of employers, the state, other workers, etc.) or even themselves, then people are not truly free. And the problems with the work ethic will inevitably rear their ugly heads again.
I mean, Anderson did have a lot of good points in her book. She actually documented the rise of the work ethic as envisioned by Calvin, and how Locke's motivations weren't right libertarianism as he was often claimed, but the protestant work ethic. This doesn't, in my mind, make these guys any better. Basing your entire economic system on religious fundamentalism is messed up regardless of intentions. And Locke appropriating it for his purposes doesn't make it any better. Still, it does slightly soften my condemnation of them relative to what it would otherwise be. Yes, F these guys for creating such harmful ideas, but ultimately, back then, we had the opposite problem we had now. Without ANY work ethic, most just worked to meet their subsistence, and rarely any more. This meant that if people were ill, or elderly, etc., that there would not be enough to go around. The work ethic was intended, at least once it got beyond Calvin himself, to encourage everyone to work so that they could share with others via charity. If everyone worked only for themselves, and there was never any surplus, then poverty would always exist. The solution was to encourage people to work more so that everyone could have their needs met. So...was the work ethic functional, despite its flaws? Yes, it was. But that doesn't make it a good thing in the long term. Just because religious fundamentalism happened to get something right for once, albeit for twisted reasons does not make this a good idea at least in the long term. It did establish the basis for much of modern capitalism and its growth, for better or for worse, but just because something worked back then for a specific purpose does not mean it is good to hold NOW. And that's if I'm being as charitable from a functionalist perspective as possible.
Anyway, in Anderson's mind, the big villains were the conservatives of the early 1800s. Ya know, the ones that implemented the poor laws and then repealed speenhamland and then forced the poor into workhouses. The conservative aristocracy did not really value the poor much. They believed they were lazy, stupid, didn't know what they were doing with their lives, and that they needed the work ethic to be FORCED onto them. Their poverty allegedly demonstrated their lack of work ethic and virtue and they needed to make the poor miserable to make them work. Combine this with the enclosure of land forcing people off of the rural countryside and into cities, and you got tons of desperate people looking for factory work.
The english were also quite horrible to people outside of the country. They believed the irish were lazy and forced the work ethic on them. The irish mostly grew potatoes before this because they werent very labor intensive. And this made the english unhappy because their lack of work ethic showed an internal failing in their eyes, and they needed to be put to work. And obviously, they imposed the work ethic overseas as well wherever they could, basically enslaving the rest of the world to their way of life. That's why I wrote that article about the savage vs the civilized. The non english people half way across the world don't spend all of their time working? They're savage, they're only civilized if they adopt the protestant work ethic. That's why I felt the need to differentiate given me looking down on a lot of foreign cultures as of late. But my own looking down is based on not adopting liberal values like democracy, freedom, secularism, etc. I dont give a crap about work ethic. If anything I hear these 19th century accounts of people who gain access to fertilizer and then instead of using it to grow twice as much, they work half as hard, and I think they have the right idea. But not european colonizers. Much like as outlined in Widerquist's books about private property, basically imperial powers took over the world and basically forced everyone into wage slavery, where they still remain today. And then we have the gall to act like we're doing foreign countries a favor by giving them jobs in sweatshops, ha! Fricking neoliberalism...
But I digress.
In Anderson's mind, all of this is a perversion of the original work ethic. Anderson sees the work ethic as good and noble, and just thinks this conservative version based on cruelty and authoritarianism is just a perversion of it. She even talks about more liberal and socialist thinkers who discussed it, like John Stuart Mill, and David Ricardo, and Marx, and how they all supported more middling or progressive work ethics. Mill was a mixed bag who, while better than his conservative counterparts like Bentham, Burke, and Malthus, still seemed horribly authoritarian to me, despite being the dude who wrote fricking ON LIBERTY. I mean...really, can we get past this idea that the work ethic needs to be beaten into people? Please? Anyway, Ricardo and Marx ended up inversing it. They ended up developing variations of the labor theory of value, which, rather than driving resentment downward toward the poor, drove it upward toward idle classes like landlords, estate owners, and of course, the bourgeoisie. And these guys wanted to give workers more value for their work while having social programs for the deserving poor, and they basically wanted to force the elites and the rich out of their cushy lifestyles based on simply owning things and into ahving to work too. And as you guys know, I kind of have mixed views on that. While I do think that no one should be able to own so much that they end up exploiting others as a consequence of their ownership, I dont resent people who are idle and simply have property inherited to them as inherently bad. Because again, to me, the work ethic is what ultimately sucks. People being forced to work is what ultimately sucks. Wage slavery is what ultimately sucks. While those at the top are often responsible for exploiting the poor as a consequence of their ownership, I'm not really one of those types who want to abolish all inheritance and force the rich to work. This is, in part, because I recognize that here in America, we dont have the idle rich the Europeans used to. The rich here DO work hard, I think anderson mentioned later in the book that CEOs put in 60-70 hours a week, we do tend to embrace the work ethic a little differently here and it takes the form of meritocracy. I'll come back to that later. I just want to point out that I'm less inclined to want to seize entire estates and adopt "eat the rich" mentalities because here in America, things do manifest differently, and I swear a lot of leftists care more about punishing the rich than in uplifting the poor, as evidenced by my analysis of their policies.
And of course, Marxism eventually rose out of this, and was just as horrifying as the conservative work ethic. Much like the conservative thinkers of old, these socialist weirdos had their own work ethic visions imposed on people and this didn't make peoples' lives better, but rather imposed tyrannical systems on them. Marx himself didn't really have a good idea of what communism would look like, and most attempts that have been devised ended up ending as horribly as your most charles dickens-esque 19th century dystopias.
So....we ultimately ended up getting reformist traditions toward the end of the 19th century and the 20th century. And these led to the social democracies of Europe. And for Elizabeth Anderson, these are the real deal. They made work good for people, finally, apparently. And she goes on about their generous safety nets, and long vacation times, and how the workers have freedom. But...she still insists on forcing people to work. She believes in reciprocity, like most social democrats, which means that for the benefits society gives us, we need to put the work back in and give back. A feel good sentiment that undermines the whole thing.
And seriously, this is my issue with socdems and people like Anderson. I don't care how much you try to dress up the work ethic, as long as youre basically forcing people to work, it's not good enough. Socialist and liberal traditions never really undid or compensated people for the original sin of wage slavery. Everything is about making work "good" for people, rather than freeing people from it. And that is why we've backslidden in my personal opinion.
And yeah, she went on about that too. How neoliberalism is bringing back the conservative work ethic, and how the late 1900s and the 2000s so far resemble the early 1800s in attitudes. And history is repeating itself. She sees this as the second hijacking of the work ethic. The first being the conservatives of the 1800s. But then the "progressive" work ethic made work good for people, and now neoliberals are imposing austerity on people. And me, living through this crapshow in America, a country that, in Anderson's mind, never properly adopted a progressive work ethic but went in a more moderate direction of social liberalism, is getting it worse than anyone. But Europe is regressing too.
And now she thinks that we dont need to abandon the work ethic, we just need to go back to the social democrats and reclaim it again. Ok, how many times are we going to do this? As is commonly said, those who dont learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This entire book is a long two hundred plus year history of the work ethic. And we've seen this happen time and time again. Weirdo protestants come up with this idea, conservatives force it on humanity and it leads to horrifying results. Then socialists adopt it, and it leads to horrifying results. And then liberals and socdems adopt it, and it kinda sucks less, but is then repealed and coopted by the conservatives again. When will it end? I'll tell you when, WHEN WE ABANDON THE FRICKING PROTESTANT WORK ETHIC.
The work ethic, is, in my mind, the ring from LOTR. It is something considered very precious and valuable, and also something that represents great power. And that power is the power of the dominant class to oppress all other classes. In capitalist countries, it's the economic elite, but as we saw under communism, they end up getting their own oppressive class imposing crap on everyone else too. And then liberals kinda come in, make the situation bearable, think they solved the problem, but never go far enough to actually solve it, since worker freedom and well being is highly dependent on the reforms and workers are given little to no autonomy themselves, they simply operate within the reforms that mask the symptoms but don't solve the problem.
Seriously, the reason the new deal ultimately ended up "failing", and the same with social democracies of Europe, is they were only as good as the reforms. The things that hold social democracy together are unions, regulations, and safety nets. But if the unions end up collapsing, and the regulations aren't updated or repealed, and the safety nets are given stricter eligibility requirements, and the like, guess what? You're back to living in the 1830s all over again. Which is where we are as a society. And me, I look at this, recognize these problems, want to do something different, but then I get weirdo leftists like Anderson who are like "no, the work ethic isn't broken, we can fix it". No, no we want.
What we need is a rejection of the work ethic. We need to value freedom and autonomy and having peoples' basic needs met above the work ethic. We need to move beyond forcing people to work for their basic needs. As Anderson points out, we have internalized it to the point that even my basic income proposal wouldnt reduce work ethic that much, we still have a forward facing supply curve of workers or whatever. If anything, my ideas give people true freedom. if people still want to work, and many will, as many people wanna do something with their lives, and many people want more than a poverty line level UBI, then we can both ensure our basic needs are met while maximizing freedom. But we can't maximize freedom, as long as we stick to the idea in any which form, that people need to be coerced to work. It doesnt matter if it's conservative, socialist, or liberal/reformist. We need to get rid of this idea that humans are to be dominated, that they need to have this idea forced onto them, and that this is more important than true freedom. What we need is a basic income as a right of citizenship, treated as seriously as we would any negative freedom in the constitution. If anything, a UBI is a prerequisite for people to be able to truly exercise their freedom. If we, in America, really care about life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (NOT PROPERTY), then we need this. Because unless people have their basic needs met with no conditionality, they are not free. They are dependent on whatever entity provides for them, be it employers, the state, or markets themselves. We need to get rid of the idea that a job somehow provides people independence, it certainly does not. It makes people directly dependent on others, and basically enslaves them to their employer. Unless people can realistically say no, then they can't be free?
I think Karl Widerquist said it best of leftist and liberal thinking: "if you're an egalitarian, why do you want to be the boss of the poor?" It's a valid question. And this is the problem Anderson's ideology has. She seems to be so close to getting it, but doesn't seem to realize that as long as reciprocity, or some form of enforced work ethic is a thing, people aren't really free. People are only free when they have the absolute power to say no.
Of course, Anderson scoffs at basic income. As I said in the interview I posted yesterday, she called it a "tech bro fantasy". She really seems to believe we can save the work ethic. But again, that's where i differ from social democrats. I embrace the thinkers of the likes of Phillippe Van Parijs and Karl Widerquist who seem to go full on against reciprocity. Van Parijs more than Widerquist I would say. He actually ruffled a lot of feathers over the past 40 years or so promoting his "real libertarian" philosophy. Something about the idea that people not be forced to work drives him mad. Even John Rawls came out against him. It's baffling to me. And that's why I think his ideas are necessary. All of these ideologies are so work centric and we actually need one that isn't.
The traditions were always there. Anderson mentioned them. She talked about Max Weber's iron cage, and Keynes wanting reduced work weeks, and David Graeber in BS jobs. And those guys are right up my alley. I mean, I agree, the protestant work ethic is an iron cage that enslaves humanity by subjecting them to horrible anxiety. Keynes talks about how at this point not only have we overcome the scarcity problem (in terms of how it was originally presented by the original purveyors of the work ethic), but by now we should be able to work like 15 hour weeks. His predictions are actually correct, the problem is the darned work ethic. And of course BS jobs exist because we insist on subjecting people to this system of jobs and a lot of people end up pretending to work just not to have more pressure exerted over them directly, leading to a lot of jobs that dont need to be done, done. Our incentives are messed up. If youre honest, you lose your paycheck. The reward for being efficient at work is more work and possibly losing your job. That's the problem with the economy. It's the darned, freaking work ethic.
Of course, Anderson doubles down, and argues even if we wanted to shift toward a life of leisure we cant because we have to spend the next century working to avert climate change. My sister in political theory, did it ever occur to you that the reason climate change is a problem is because of the work ethic? John Mills proposed capitalism as a race without end, with the runners running forever, and the economy ever growing. But it is precisely that growth that drives climate change. While efficiency standards and even a green new deal would help stave off the consequences, at some point, we're gonna have to stop prioritizing growth at all costs. It's not healthy for us, OR the planet.
Besides, I dont buy the green new deal nonsense. It's made up of the same work ethic that drove the original new deal, the one that thinks that the answer to everything is "more jobs". They want this overly expensive jobs programming retooling our entire economy to be green, and I dont deny that there are aspects of this that are useful and attractive, but quite frankly...it seems like a lot of work, and it isn't worth it. We can allegedly avert the worst effects of climate change with 1/10 of the resources in a "build back better" style deal like Biden wanted to do, so why don't we just do that?
And the answer is the economic ideology of the progressive work ethic, that glorifies jobs programs, something that the British did in the early 1800s in enforcing the protestant work ethic on people in the first place. To a bog standard leftie, the answer to everything is more jobs, just from the government. They think they can fix the work ethic, without abolishing it, and that has never actually worked.
So sorry, Elizabeth Anderson, I don't like your solutions. While yes, a progressive work ethic that raises up workers, gives them a better quality of life, and some leisure is better than the iterations of the idea that seem to be driven by cruelty, that doesn't make the progressive work ethic a good thing. It's just less bad. What we need is a rejection of the work ethic and to give people their liberty. And that's my final verdict here. The book is good, but this person is seriously misguided in their solutions. You would think that given the sordid history of the work ethic that you would turn against it entirely, but her main thesis is basically "well no, it's these people who are bad, here's how my own version of this that has been tried before to mild success can fix this". Well, at least she didn't go full tankie like communists do. Social democracy actually does have a solid track record. I'd rather not be a luddite though and fight against progress to try to preserve jobs of all things though. As I always like to say, 20th century solution to a 21st century problem. We need 21st century solutions to 21st century problems.
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