Lecture on work for dinner-performance at Hotel Maria Kapel, Hoorn NL.
Introduction by host: Vibe Overgaard is here to talk to us tonight about work and more specifically about the history of work. She will generally speak from the perspective of a western society such as the Dutch - or the Danish where she is from herself. She will not talk so much about specific cases of work, but about work as a system and way of life. So it’s not a matter of who works in what way or how much, but how we can relate to the greater power structure that demands from citizens in a capitalist society that they live to work.
In response to the idea that we live to work I will start by suggesting the opposite or the alternative: Imagine that you only worked to live. Meaning: you would stop working when you had what you needed to survive and then the rest of your time would be reserved for the things you cared about and the things you wanted to create. And you could create them completely on your own terms, not the terms of a job. For most of human history work and life was organized like this – that we worked to survive and did everything else in our free time. But it is far from how things look today. Today being at work seems to be the state in which we invest not just most of our physical energy but our social and intellectual capacity as well.
We don’t actually need to work as much as we do. John Maynard Keynes predicted in his essay from 1930, that by 2030, we would only need to work 15 hours a week in order to support comfortable lifestyles. This estimation was based on the direction in which labour time and productivity was proceeding. When people got more machines to do the work for them, they needed to put in fewer hours to produce the same amount of wealth.
His predictions were right: for a long time people did work less and less and productivity still increased. But that was only until around 1980 where labour time stagnated though productivity kept increasing. Political reforms made sure that the all the extra wealth was directed towards the wealthiest class and toward an explosion in the production of consumer goods. So what we got in return for free time, was a vast number of objects that we could purchase at cheap prices. This was of course a faustian bargain that didn’t really do us much good but mostly made sure that whenever we did get off work, we could spend our time consuming.
To go back to the initial suggestion: Can we imagine a society where we only work 15 hours a week and then separated from that, realize our human potential for play, care and creation completely on our own terms? I think that if it seems a bit hard to imagine, it is partly because we don’t really know what those terms would be because we have become so used to think of value as something related to a job.
To be able to keep things separated, let’s call it “labour” when we talk about the activities that humans do to stay alive and reproduce and “work” when we talk about the activity of creating one’s universe. Hannah Arendt formulated this differentiation in her book, The Human Condition, where she also introduced a third category: “action” - the realm of life that makes us political beings. In today’s western society, being “at work” usually describes the performance of all of these categories, labour, work and action, within the constraints of a job: the requirements of an employer and the imperatives of the market.
What does it mean that we don’t separate, on the one hand, the labour that we do out of necessity; to get food on the table and a roof over our heads, and on the other hand, the work and actions we perform, that gives shape to the world we live in? An obvious answer is, that this lack of division means, that the market gets power to dictate all the realms of life. Not just how we make some money and survive, but also how we relate to the world and shape our lives and communities.
This would perhaps be okay if the market was a fair and free construction and at a first glance it might look like it is: It organizes society without the use of any direct force or punishment and if you have property, you’re free to exchange it as you see fit. Obviously, as we are proceeding towards ever more extreme measures of social inequality, both within individual nation states and globally, something is flawed about the logic of the market being a fair construction.
So there is a big contradiction here and I think we need some tools to better understand the market and how it enfolds so many aspects of life into its logic. History can be such a tool because it gives us a possibility to look at how the market is fundamentally constructed. So now I will talk about the history of the market.
The system that existed before capitalism in most of Europe is Feudalism. This is the image that we associate with the Middle Ages with the king and the church in the top of a hierarchy and in the bottom of that hierarchy, the peasant population that had to work in the fields for a lord. The peasants had small land strips where they could do their own farming to support themselves and they had direct access to the resources of nature. Since they were themselves directly in charge of the production of food they were quite independent from the power that ruled them and when they rebelled against the lords they had a strong position. It’s even plausible to say that by the end of the 14th century they were about to win this battle for a more free and just society.
But this is not what happened. Power found a way to operate, not by direct force this time, but by making people participate voluntarily – because they had no other choice. Basically the change that happened had to do with private property. Common land, that was before accessible to the feudal population, was now privatized in a process called Enclosures. What was before considered just the natural process, in which a human being lives from nature, was now made highly illegal. The land-strips were also taken away from the peasant and rented out to the highest bidder, which meant that the peasants who could produce competitively and pay good rents would gain access to more land, while others lost access all together.
Those that didn’t have access to private property had no other way of sustaining themselves than to sell the only thing they had left: their labour power. And they sold it to those who had a production. So instead of a feudal hierarchy, two distinct classes came about and they were involved in the creation of production and business.
Once capitalism set into effect, every person and every business would have to enter the market to survive. I want to pay extra attention to, how the imperative of growth starts with the transformation of property rights. When land, resources and labour-power is available on the market to the highest bidder, a business always has to expand to be able to compete with other businesses for the access to resources and labour-power. And this expansion is growth. We know that this imperative for growth has driven us to put earth’s planetary health at risk but the growth-model is also a carrier of social inequality: The way to make profit is essentially to pay the worker less than what their labour is worth.
This inequality between capitalists and workers started within the nation states but the growth imperative is significantly also a carrier of social inequality on a global scale. Colonialism created a global hierarchy and placed a series of countries in a dis-favorable position that forced them to sell their natural resources for less than what they are worth. Hoorn where we are located right now is a good example of a place that became rich in the 17th century by setting up colonies and slave-plantations in the area that is now Indonesia. Then the products were brought back here to Hoorn where they were sold with huge profits. Colonialism is perhaps not actively practiced anymore, but Western Economy tends to keep the same foreign countries in a dis-favorable position by not taking responsibility, change the game and offer fair compensation. Again, the market dictates this practice, because of the competitive factor of obtaining production-resources as cheaply as possible.
We start to get the picture of how un-free we really are as a society, when our best hopes for the future are played out against market imperatives. There is a general agreement that we would like to see equal societies on a healthy planet, but if the market dictates that other countries must be exploited for cheap labour and natural resources if western economy is to grow, that is the direction we pursue. We would perhaps like to have an educational system that guided our children to become healthy, sensitive and thoughtful human beings, but as our living standards depend on growth, instead we focus on teaching them how to be attractive for the job-market. We are free only to the extend that we can decide in what way we will adapt ourselves to the market, and the market limits any decision-making to be about different options for expansion.
The class relations between workers and capitalists and the power (both concrete and abstract) exercised by market-forces, is most thoroughly analyzed by Karl Marx. He had a materialist view on the progression of history, meaning that society is shaped by the production of resources. Religion, culture and ways of thinking are secondary to modes of production, not because they are not important, but because they are essentially formed according to the materialist aspect of how a society is organized.
Marx also talks about alienation. Basically both labourers and capitalists are alienated in the process of production. Workers spend their time creating a product that doesn’t belong to them and the capitalists must set up the production under the limitations of what the market dictates.
Under Industrialisation, workers were working long hours for low pay under harsh conditions and Marx believed that a revolution was inevitable: Workers would demand ownership and control over the production process that now left them alienated and without political claims. After all, the machines of the factory would not produce anything without the participation of the workers and when they realized this power of their own, they would demand a fair distribution.
Left wing social politics were strong in the 20th century. Many were inspired by the ideas of Marx and the Workers Movement did secure rights for labourers in Western countries. But the ownership and control over the production remained with the capitalists. And we see that today capitalist ideology rules the social and political agenda - the same story is always told: that the market is a fair and impartial regulator that individuals can freely enter.
But even if we are somehow convinced by this ideology on a superficial level, a sense of unfairness and exploitation still prevails in most of us. The thing is that we have been told that this sensation of unfairness; well it can’t come from capitalism as an unjust ruling system. We are supposed to be free in this system. So our sense of alienation is often directed elsewhere and populist politicians have a lot of success these years, pointing out something else for people to blame: very often immigrants. And if people don’t turn hateful towards others, they have often learned to blame themselves. Blaming themselves for not working hard enough or for making bad decisions. More and more people suffer from work-related mental illnesses, but are being told that it is because there is an imbalance in the chemistry of their brain and get medicated for it. Which again plays out to the favour of private drug companies.
The capitalist system is pretty much an oppressive ruling system like any other – the power sits with a small elite and everybody else lives constrained lives in order to enhance the wealth of this small group of people. But at the same time we have very little opportunity to rebel against it because it is all based on the appearance of freedom in the positions of being a jobholder and consumer. You can just take the job that you want and buy the stuff that you like so what’s the problem?
One of the things that really puzzle me is how this effective system came to be. How did power manage to organize itself with such ingenuity? To keep us oppressed under the appearance of being free. It is not as if one person or group of persons sat down and constructed Capitalism on the drawing board before they went out and executed it and it is also hard to think of market forces as an autonomous spirit that swept into the human mind, regardless of human intervention or preconditions. Marx’s historical materialism helps us to recognize how much things that appears to be technical, such as private property, come to rule our way of thinking. But then we can also ask what kind of culture allowed for property relations to transform? We are faced with a “hen and the egg” question: Was it the culture that came first, or the material conditions that shape the culture?
Here I would like to point attention to the building we are sitting in. Hotel Maria Kapel is an art-institution situated in an old chapel. The first version of the chapel was constructed in wood in 1432 as a part of a monastery in Hoorn. It was the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church played a leading role in the feudal hierarchy and monasteries were important social institutions. They fulfilled local needs for health-care and poor-relief, preserved historical archives and developed new knowledge.
Most monasteries were closed down under the protestant reformation, also the one in Hoorn in 1572. So religion changed and became protestant instead of catholic right before capitalism set into effect - Here is our clue to what culture that might have allowed for capitalism to happen. The German sociologist Max Weber wrote an essay in 1905 called the Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. In contrast to Marx, Max Weber said that ideas are not secondary to material conditions, but primary. That it is culture and religion that changes society. And that it was specifically Protestantism that held the ingredients for Capitalism in the following way:
In contrast to Catholicism, you could not just confess your sins and get absolution. This made people feel more guilty. Also there was no way of knowing if your accumulated sins would send you to hell and this made people feel anxious. The only thing you could do while being alive to please God, was to suffer in hard work. Protestantism made people rational, methodical and hard working and Capitalism could have never happened without this mental preparation of the labour-force and entrepreneurs.
The culture for methodology and standardization was also key in the creation of the bureaucracy machinery. When everything is just according to the standards and the rules, where is the space for the individual to critique the system? This was one of Weber’s main concerns and something that I think is especially worth noticing in his theory today.
I also want to mention that there is something that we might have to be a bit careful with if we follow Weber’s analysis: Weber implicitly appoints the capability of making good business to Northern-European culture, where Protestantism had given people the necessary cultural background for rational behaviour. This can lead to the assumption that global social inequality only exists because poorer nations didn’t have the necessary mental capacity and work ethics to form “healthy” economies.
Here the Historical Materialist conception seems more useful, as it teaches us that inequality is fundamentally inscribed into Capitalism and that it is not the cultural capacity for ingenuity that gave Western countries an economic advantage, but the fact that the West has formed its wealth on the basis of actively placing other nations in unfavourable positions to exploit their natural resources and labour. Our economy and wealth actively depends on global inequality. Rosa Luxemburg analysis in her book the Accumulation of Capital from 1913, how capitalism needed to make its exploitation global in order to survive as a system.
Now I hav come to the conclusion of my lecture: The market will never even out the global economy and create a fair distribution of wealth. That would be contradictory to its demand for inequality. Still wealthy countries keep justifying their expansion and growth and exploitation based on the logic that the market is an open construction that anyone can freely and fairly enter. And the assignment that politicians seem to treat with most importance is to create jobs and expand the market. Of course, in the system as it is, in our individual lives, we need those jobs to get by. But if we zoom out and see the greater perspective of things, the political focus on jobs and expansion is so contradictory to the disaster that the capitalist system really is.
I would like to invite you to see the scale of things. If we zoom out, work is part of a superstructure that needs to be challenged and changed. And if we zoom in work is also local, it is in our everyday life and it is where we meet to power face to face. This means that we have local knowledge of a global structure. The Yellow West movement can be a good example of this: People take to the streets in protest of their individual work situations and their common demand resonates as a demand for redistribution of wealth. I think it is quite powerful to see that what you experience in your local work situation can translate as knowledge for a political struggle.
This text is the outline for a performance-lecture that was held at Hotel Maria Kapel in Hoorn NL in February 2020. The audience sat around a table and the lecture was "served" along with the main course of a potato based dinner. The dinner-performance is called Working Potatoes and is created in collaboration with artist Emilia Bergmark.