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Being poor was once linked to being unemployed. Now, it draws it meaning from the plight of a flawed consumer. This distinction makes a difference in the way poverty is experienced. The book traces this change and makes an inventory of its social consequences.
Producing the work ethic: the meaning of work
Work ethic has 2 presumptions and 2 premises:
Premises:
1. One must do something that is seen as valuable and worthy to others in order to get something they need to stay happy - "to give in order to be given later""
2. working is a value in its own right - one should be satisfied with what they have already got
"To work is good, not to work is evil"
Presumptions:
1. Work is the normal state of all humans and not working is abnormal.
2. Only labour that commands wages has a value recognized by others
Problems faced by the pioneers of modernization:
- "getting people to work" - getting people to expend their skills and their work capacity in the implementation of tasks that were set by other people and hence we meaningless to the workers themselves
To solve this - they had to habitualize the worker into an unthinking obedience
The work ethic was about the surrender of freedom.
The Work Ethic Crusade:
The work ethic crusade was a battle for control and subordination.
- a power struggle
- aimed at detaching things people did from what they saw as worthy of doing
The Work Ethic:
- separated productive efforts from human needs
- priority given to "what can be done" over "what needs to be done"
- "growth for growths sake"
"The working man was to be industrious and attentive, not to think for himself, to owe loyalty and attachment to his master alone.... Take the many virtues we admire in a man and they become vices in a slave"
In the impersonal, inhuman and mechanical factory work, there was a blend of the pre-industrial mentality of the slave economy and the new vision of the world that was trying to gain mastery over nature.
From the end of the seventeenth century, Nature was talked about using military metaphors -
Francis Bacon: nature ought to be conquered so that it serves human interests
Descartes: progress of reason was to be done by a series of battles against nature
etc.
Work or Perish:
- The invalids (sick, weak, old) - desitutes were expendable - the non-working poor
- confine this population to poorhouses - the Poor Law
This worked in the favor of the work ethic as now a dividing line could be drawn between those who were really destitute and those that could work. It also made the poor think twice before deciding whether the requirements of the work ethic were too much for them. As even the most gruelling factory work seemed desirable in comparison. It also saved the working poor from the contamination of the true destitutes.
What is the duplicity of the work ethic? (page 15)
Producing the producers (skipped the pages)
From better to more:
- the American dream - upwards social mobility
- struggle for greater share of the surplus - more
Wage differentials now measured the social standing and prestige of the producers
Chapter 2: From the work ethic to the aesthetic of consumption
A producer society - engaged its members primarily as producers
Ours is a consumer society - society engages its members primarily as consumers
Consumed goods should bring satisfaction immediately but the satisfaction should end the moment the time needed for their consumption is up.
- when this waiting is taken out, the comsumptive capacity of the consumer can be stretched to new limits.
- must be constantly exposed to new temptations
The making of a consumer:
- consumer goods are meant to be used up and disappear - the idea of their temporariness is intrinsic to their very denomination
Work as judged by aesthetics:
Since workers are lazy they need to be paid as little as possible to make sure they need to come back the next day to work again. The quantity of work needs to be disassociated from the ‘needs’ of the worker, their effort needs to be ever increasing. Those who ‘chose’ not to work had the work house to look forward to – a place so hideous that the threat of it alone ought to motivate people towards the benefits of working for starvation wages. As Bauman explains, this was mostly the case in Europe – in the US employees were encouraged by the promise of one day being rewarded for their hard work by becoming a capitalist one’s self or later by the dangling carrot that scientific management provided to the high value man.
Vocation as privilege:
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