4.
According to one thesis, butchers, brewers and bakers were not always so ruthless. They may once have put food and drink before a man not because he was able to offer them payment in return, but because he had a pleasant manner or was an acquaintance of a distant relative. Financial self-interest has not, this theory holds, forever enjoyed exclusive rule; rather, it is a relatively recent historical development, a product of the modern age and of advanced capitalism. In the feudal age, this thesis goes on, such self-interest was well counterbalanced by nonmaterial considerations. Workers were thought of as members of their employers’extended families and commanded a fitting measure of loyalty and gratitude. Christian teachings helped to foster a general concern for the vulnerable and the hungry, promoting a tacit understanding that in difficult times, they should be cared for.
But such patriarchal, communal relationships were, this selfsame thesis alleges, destroyed by the bourgeoisie’s ascent to power in the second half of the eighteenth century. The bourgeois class, hugely powerful through its tight grip on capital and technology, was interested only in wealth. Unsentimental and utilitarian, it viewed employees as nothing more than a means to its acquisitive ends; it cared little for their families and refused to be dictated to by the needs of the sick or the old or the wide-eyed young. At the same time, populations were gravitating towards the larger cities, where neighbourly care was trampled by the competitive, hurried atmosphere of the marketplace. Adding to the woes of the underclass was that Christianity had lost its grip on the imagination of those holding the levers of power, and with it all influence over their treatment of the poor and their sense of community.
In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx, the most forceful proponent of this thesis, described the triumph of financial concerns in visionary and apocalyptic prose: “The bourgeoisie has … pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value.”
In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), Immanuel Kant had argued that behaving morally towards others required one to respect them “for themselves” and not use them as a “means” to one’s own enrichment or glory. With reference to Kant, Marx now accused the bourgeoisie, and its new science of economics, of practising “immorality” on a grand scale: “[Economics] knows the worker only as a working animal—as a beast reduced to strictest bodily needs,” he charged in the Manifesto. The wages paid to workers were, he believed, just “like the oil which is applied to wheels to keep them turning … The true purpose of work is no longer man, but money.”
5.
Marx may have been a poor historian, erratically idealizing the preindustrial past and unduly castigating the bourgeoisie, but his theories are of value for capturing and dramatising an inescapable degree of conflict between employer and employee.
Beneath the many regional variations and differences evident in style and management, the rationale for almost all commercial organisations can be broken down into a simple and arid equation:
INPUT OUTPUT
Raw Materials + Labour + Machinery = Product + Profit
To maximise output, every organisation will strive to obtain its necessary raw materials, labour and machinery at the lowest possible cost and combine them to turn out a product that it will then attempt to sell at the highest possible price. From a purely economic perspective, there is no distinction to be made among any of the elements on the input side of the equation. All are commodities that the rational executive will seek to source cheaply and handle efficiently in pursuit of profit.
And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between “labour” and other commodities, a difference that conventional economics does not have a means of representing or giving weight to but that is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: that labour feels pain.
If production lines grow prohibitively expensive, they may be switched off and will not cry at the seeming injustice of their fate. A business can move from using coal to using natural gas without the neglected energy source jumping off a cliff. Labour, by contrast, has a habit of reacting emotionally to any attempt to reduce its price or its presence. It sobs in toilet cubicles, it drinks to ease its fears of underachievement and it may choose death over redundancy.
Such emotive responses alert us to two divergent imperatives that coexist within the arena in which status is accorded: the economic imperative, which dictates that the primary task of business is to realize a profit; and the human imperative, which causes employees to hunger for financial security, respect and tenure.
While these imperatives may for long periods coincide without apparent friction, all but the most deluded of wage-dependent workers knows for a certainty that whenever a company is faced with making a serious choice between the two, it is the economic imperative that will always, by the very logic of the commercial system, win out.
Struggles between labour and capital may no longer—in the developed world, at least—be as bare-knuckled as they were in Marx’s day. Yet despite improvements in working conditions and advances in employment legislation, workers de facto remain tools in a production process to which their own happiness and economic welfare are incidental. Whatever camaraderie may be nurtured between employers and employees, whatever goodwill the latter may display towards the former and however many years they may have devoted to a job or task, workers must live with the anxiety of knowing that their status will never be guaranteed but will be forever dependent on both their own performance and the economic well-being of their organisations. They must accept that they are only a means to an end and not, much as they might long to be so on an emotional level, an end in themselves.
6.
Although the fear of being left penniless is a primary reason for our worry over the instability of our employment, it is not the only reason. We also worry—and here we return to our earliest theme— because of love, for our work is the chief determinant of the amount of respect and care we will be granted. It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided.
Unfortunately for our mental health, our capacity to provide a sufficiently elevated answer to the query rarely lies securely in our own province. It depends instead on the peaks and troughs of the economists’ graphs, on struggles in the marketplace and on the vagaries of luck and of inspiration. Meanwhile, for its part, our need for love remains unwavering, no less steady or insistent than it may have been when we were infants, an imbalance between our requirements and the uncertain conditions of the world that constitutes a stubborn fifth pillar on which our status anxieties rest.
PART TWO
SOLUTIONS
I