I was reading something written for me by a graduate student the other day about the problem of labor in Livy’s first decade. I took the author’s points about debt, recognition, and Livy’s depiction of a strangely fiscal state under the last Roman kings. I was surprised, however, to encounter here – in a text I thought I knew pretty well – echoes of a different conception of labor that I’d thought was the special province of ancient Greek thinkers, in particular Xenophon and Aristotle. Usually, we think of labor as something productive; we evaluate organizations of labor, in large part, by their ability to manage efficient production of stuff (thus, even in 20th-century debates over American plantation slavery, one major point of disagreement has been whether slave labor was economically efficient or a developmental dead end, doomed to be driven out of business by the factories of the free North). Hegel and Marx also perceived that labor could produce people, in the sense that some labor structures can lead to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a rich few but also in the sense that one’s functional place within an organization of productive forces also becomes, whether one likes it or not, the baseline of one’s identity. Subtract the dialectical progressive whiggism that underlies both thinkers’ views (something my graduate student did quite well) and you have a flexible, critical theory of labor as (part of) the infrastructure of social forms.
In The Mental and the Material, Maurice Godelier develops an analysis of Classical Athens along these lines that I’ve always found pretty compelling. There, he says, politics is also part of the order of productive forces, since it generates and protects the citizen/slave division on the basis of which surplus value was produced, accumulated and consumed at Athens through most of its ancient history. On this account, being an Athenian citizen is all about not having to work – which seems sensible enough. On the other hand, Athenian citizens did not generally regard themselves as idle. They thought they were working too, although obviously they didn’t have to do the really hard labor (and any citizen who did was, per Plato and Aristotle and Xenophon, only dubiously entitled to citizen status). What kind of work, exactly, did Athenian citizens think they were doing?
This is a complicated question; I’ve been working on an answer for a while, and I’ll probably publish it in book form someday. The problem with Athens, of course, is that you have so many answers from so many different perspectives. A general response would amount to characterizing a discourse, which is a lot harder to do perspicaciously than, say, summarizing what Plato said.
Outside Athens, the question takes on different contours – especially in places where the line between ruler and ruled is better-defined. Aristotle and Xenophon agree that tyrants face a labor problem, not because they need to organize their subjects to produce a surplus – most tyrants take over an infrastructure that already does this work – but because they need to keep their subjects busy. For Aristotle at least, the tyrant’s fear would seem to be that if his subjects had leisure (a relative term for the Greeks: schole pros ti), they would use it to undertake the sort of work with which Athenians busy themselves, namely politics. Under a tyrant, political activity of any sort can’t help but be seditious. Conversely, tyrannicidal conspiracies require free time, which you don’t have if you’re off fighting wars or laboring on distant farms.
From the standpoint of a strongly hierarchical society, then, labor is not so much a productive force as a barrier against social change. Hierarchy survives by maintaining the status quo, but its ability to do this directly, by force, is usually rather limited by comparison with the magnitude of the population that needs to be governed. To the extent that labor to produce things can be made to take the place of labor to produce change, a population can be induced to govern itself in ways that obviate the need for force. The result is not exactly consent; it’s more like indifference to the fundamental issues of politics, which seem trivial by comparison with the exigencies of laboring life in much the same way that the sun, because of its distance, seems smaller than the coin you hold close to your face.
Marxism, with its exclusive concern for labor as production, imposes a kind of myopia to which hierachy’s more uninhibited modern defenders and detractors have not been subject. On the right, take Samuel Huntington’s notorious white paper for the Nixon administration arguing that cuts to the social safety net would, by forcing people to work more for less money, curtail participation in progressive politics; on the left, consider David Graeber’s recent attack on “bullshit jobs” as a combination social bribe and social pacifier. If Marx was right to think that the conditions of work could produce revolutionary solidarity, his contribution seems to have been all-too-well understood by reactionary forces that have transformed those conditions in order to produce distraction and negative solidarity. Now, what needs to be attacked is work itself.
Capitalism completes its dominion by making leisure impossible. The twentieth century saw leisure time colonized by consumption, which the attention economy has supplemented in the twenty-first. Our leisure time produces angst, not relaxation, because we’ve filled it with activities – button-pressing in pursuit of various ephemeral pleasures – that resemble nothing so much as less infrastructure-intensive factory work. That work is, of course, productive of nothing, but it does keep us too busy to do the kind of work that would transform our basic conditions of life, either individually or collectively.
Marshall Sahlins, in an essay titled “The Original Affluent Society,” observed that people who subsist by hunting and gathering only have to work a few hours each day. This observation was original and transformative at a time when most anthropologists still thought, like everybody else, that “civilization” had enriched us while freeing us from the constant struggle for survival that was supposed to characterize “primitive” cultures. If Sahlins’ “affluent” means “rich in time” – the one sense of the word in which nobody has been able to challenge Sahlins’ argument – then a better title for his essay might have been “The Only Affluent Society.” Only in a situation broadly free of hierarchy can people really be allowed to have “free time.” Otherwise, it’s always in the interests of whoever happens to be at the top of the hierarchy to fill this time, either with more work or with “leisure” activities that resemble work.