The History of Work

Richard Donkin: The History of Work, translated by Xie Zhongwei, Electronic Industry Press, 2011.

Generally speaking, a title like “The History of XX” is always interesting, especially when that “XX” looks all the more dull and ordinary; its history is often all the more interesting. For history tells us that anything we have long taken for granted and found unremarkable has its own origins and development; by tracing history we can let our imagination unfold: is it necessary? Is it inevitable? In what other forms might it still take place?

Recently, I happened upon this The History of Work, and felt it was quite good. Along with Technical Elements, Electronic Industry Press seems to have published a number of popular books on history of technology and philosophy of technology that have scholarly value; of course, this also suggests that questions in history of technology and philosophy of technology are beginning to enter the public eye.

However, judging from the author’s background and from the way publishers and critics position it, this book is mainly classified under the category of “management studies.” But in fact, this book is entirely different from ordinary works on management studies, and is by no means confined to the history of management studies. The threads it follows involve the history of technology, the history of ideas, and social history, and even interweave material from the history of science, the history of religion, and the history of philosophy, ranging from the Stone Age to the information age, with an extremely broad horizon. Yet in terms of the concrete unfolding of the prose, I am still not especially satisfied: the force of reflection is still somewhat lacking, and at times the narration feels too verbose—though perhaps, as a popular read, it is necessary to tell the story with a bit more fullness.

Although management studies do in fact occupy a considerable portion of the book, the author’s central question is far more basic than management studies itself: “Why do we work?” As for so-called management studies, it is itself one of the consequences of “work”; only after baptism by Christianity and under the influence of modern science (specialization, mathematization, cybernetics, and so on) did “management” of work become possible.

“Nowadays, everyone probably takes work for granted,” and “many people insist that the only reason they work is simply to make a living” (p. 15). But we find that even after people have long since acquired enough property to sustain life, they still work assiduously. Why is that?

Of course, people are pursuing a “better life,” but the question is, what counts as “better”? The modern understanding of a better life comes precisely from the opposite of “work”: work is tiring, monotonous, boring, and oppressive, whereas “life” ought to be leisurely, rich, interesting, and free. In other words, the purpose of work is to “not work”; but what if I simply do not work? For instance, if I live off inherited family wealth and enjoy leisure without needing to work, I would still be despised as lazy and living off others without effort. When I say that I do not need to do anything that makes me feel pain, and that every day I do only what I want to do, all the while enjoying life, even saying this will somehow evoke an inexplicable sense of guilt. In other words, the thing called “work” has an external goal that always points toward the negation of work itself (leisure), while its internal meaning is precisely only its dullness. “People all think that work is a kind of hard labor, something we do not want to do but have to do” (p. 19).

The author points out that this “work ethic,” which opposes work to leisure, diligence to laziness, suffering to enjoyment, is a product of Western Protestant ethics. From the very beginning, Christianity regarded hard labor as a punishment from God that people had to bear, and Protestant ethics further affirmed the sacred meaning of these worldly sufferings. Modern people abolished slavery, but then they put shackles on themselves, becoming slaves of work and slaves of the machine.

When I ask about the meaning of “work,” especially when I raise the question as a philosopher who has eaten his fill and is not speaking as a laborer, one likely criticism is: you’re preaching from a position of privilege; sure, you can choose not to work, but if nobody worked, what would you eat, how would society develop, how would people survive, and so on. Of course, we must admit that for present-day society, it is indeed necessary for some people to toil at work, and the rules of work are even a fundamental part of the whole social order. But this does not mean that we cannot reflect on it; the same situation could also arise in the age of slavery—when philosophers at the time asked about “labor service” and questioned slavery, others could likewise criticize them: if nobody performed labor service, what would you eat? You may choose not to be a slave, but if nobody were a slave, wouldn’t social order collapse?

The key is that reflecting on “work” is precisely a reflection on our existing social order: whether this modern social order, built upon the rhythm of nine-to-five life, is truly self-evident, or whether, like the slave system, it is also a stage that must eventually be broken. If “work,” like “labor service,” should also be broken, then how could that be possible?

How can blue-collar and white-collar workers in the modern world be compared with the slaves of antiquity? The slaves of antiquity had no freedom, whereas modern workers are free. But apart from the fact that modern people can resign and change jobs at any time and can proactively change the relations of personal dependence under which they live, what other meanings does this freedom have? Does a slave who can choose his master cease to be a slave? In ancient Greece, free men meant those not subject to anyone; apart from war, free men rarely participated in organized collective work. Yet in the twenty-first century, employees of modern enterprises are all hired by others within a strict management system to perform tiring work—what difference is there, really? Perhaps a Greek slave who traveled through time to the modern world would report only this: “Two thousand five hundred years later, the condition of slaves will have greatly improved.” (p. 21)

Whether one wants to defend the claim that “work” is indeed different from slavery, or wants to criticize work as nothing more than a new form of slavery, we all need to return to history and trace the origins and development of “work.”

The author discovers (see around p. 64) that the concept of “work” as something measured by time, involving a long-term employment relationship and a fixed income, is very recent. From antiquity to the early modern period, and even until the eighteenth century, the main meaning of “work” was nothing more than something that needed to be done, a “task.” Therefore, the earliest employment relationships were also mostly temporary: one “outsourced” a task and settled the reward upon completion. Fixed, long-term employment relationships in the ancient world may perhaps be traced back to systems such as military recruitment or corvée labor, but they were still far removed from “work” in the modern sense, as a fixed rhythm of life and a profession. The rhythm of modern work is related to the rise of new technologies such as time control and the factory system.

Some may say that ways of making a living such as hunting and gathering in primitive tribes, or plowing and weaving in the agricultural age, are the prototypes of “work”: just as hunting was the means of subsistence in tribal times, and plowing and weaving were the means of subsistence in the agricultural age, work is the means of subsistence in the industrial age—this is, in a sense, not wrong. But the problem is that for ancient people, these so-called “subsistence” activities were not opposed to their lives. The author cites some studies of primitive tribes and finds that although they also had the concept of bothersome chores and miscellaneous tasks, hunting activities were precisely not included in that category.

For ancient people, there was no clear boundary between activities of livelihood and recreation. In fact, even just over a decade ago, “knitting sweaters” was still a common way for women to pass the time. And with the development of modern technology, on the one hand “work” has become highly organized, while on the other hand “entertainment” has also become highly technologized (a point the author does not mention), and the gulf between work and leisure has gradually widened.

This is what Marx called “the alienation of man”: human creative practical activity becomes an inhuman task; work is like being a beast of burden or a machine, while it is when humans as animals satisfy their most primitive desires—eating, drinking, sleeping—that people feel they are living a “human life.” The “work ethic” erodes “professional ethics,” and work and its remuneration have become the values or beliefs of modern people.

But can these conditions change? Obviously they can, and indeed must. The network age will inevitably form a rhythm of life different from that of the industrial age. “An intensified, regularized, mechanized rhythm of life” ought to be replaced by dispersed, fluid network time; if so, then sooner or later we will have to reexamine the meaning of “work.”

For example, today I happened to see a news item: “An American ‘genius programmer’ who outsourced his work to a Chinese company was exposed,” which said that an American programmer working from home spent one-fifth of his salary hiring a company in Shenyang, China, to help him program. In this news item, apart from the “one-fifth” aspect, which is a bit of an eye-catcher, we can notice that the form of “work” is changing. That American company has already begun trying a new work order—it has eliminated fixed time and place, allowing people to “work from home.” And within this, “work” is returning to the original meaning of a “task.” Of course, this company is not the only case; in fact, in the information age, breaking the fixed time-and-place form of work has already become a trend. But this company has only reformed the working environment, while the fixed employment relationship remains preserved. In fact, we find that this company originally did not need to hire such a fixed programmer at all; it could have directly outsourced the corresponding task to a third party, and in that case it might even have saved four-fifths of the cost! If the boss of this company were as clever as that lazy programmer and could find an appropriate contractor to undertake the designated work, or if network platforms became increasingly open and abundant so that people could always easily find contractors to complete every “task,” then a great many fixed employees like that programmer would in fact be unnecessary. Companies would not need to publicly recruit “positions”; they would only need to release each task. The communist way of life that Marx envisaged—“hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, herding in the evening, and criticizing after dinner”—really does seem possible in the network age.

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.