What Price Work?

...he is entirely on the side of Protestants, as of course was Marx...

...Neither of these panaceas restore intellectual pride and physical pleasure to the work process...

...Sense of achievement may be denied to the manual worker (excepting the chambermaid and the hairdresser), but is often reported by people functioning in communication— from entertaining to public relations, despite Spectorsky and Kronenberger, and from teaching to social work...

...No doubt, Puritan asceticism provided strong moral support for the socialist criticism of Capital, and even for the imagery of a socialist philosophy...

...its possible loss need not produce a crisis of socialist thought, but may force socialists to consider or to reconsider the hierarchy of their values...

...Not because it fails to confirm yesterday's illusions but because it threatens to deprive us of all illusions does the present hold so little future...

...As the pursuit of a social Utopia was the hall-mark of the old-style worker, so individual illusion is the hall-mark of the new type...

...Daniel Bell, the labor editor of Fortune and a former editor of The New Leader, modestly calls his little essay "notes on work...

...And the final sentence of the pamphlet: "It is a question of carrying social contacts on the vertical plane, of making individuals 'at zero' [Bednarik's term for the moral situation, the metaphysical significance of which at least one reader failed to understand] into persons...

...I submit that two criteria are incorruptible judges of the situation—spontaneity and meaning...

...The difference is that Bednarik's idea of not boring us like the others is to beculturize and to be-metaphysicize us...

...2.50...

...Yet, this sense may be either true or false, or even completely phony...

...Moreover, the few good results that may come from these developments are pregnant with danger...

...Yet writers like Whyte and Riesman, who view this development not as decay but as a conflict of two ethics, may be closer to the Marxian method, which treated the capitalistic work ethic as the ideology of a new society...

...Most work no longer is meaning...

...Again, this may be true...

...Secondly, our sensitivity has become more refined, and our greater awareness of the discontent may be just that, or may be due only in part to an actual increase in soullessness...

...More often they are of a curiously personal, impressionistic nature, such as "I know a young worker who orders his skis from Norway...

...Conspicuous consumption was the badge of a rising middle class, conspicuous loafing is the hostile gesture of a tired working class...

...ful in the sense of satisfying a physical and intellectual need for creativeness...

...Attention always was focused on such sources of satisfaction as pride of achievement, recognition by others of a "job well done," the pleasure of "working together" or the competitive spirit of racing against other groups, insight into the usefulness or necessity of the task, understanding of the full production process, participation in the planning and other factors which give "meaning" to the work and endow the worker with the feeling that his effort "makes sense...

...or to borrow from Lenin: Alle Macht den Studienraeten...

...in the large-scale new industries workers are required to study continuously, and the vogue of going to night-schools is intimately related to the new job situations...

...Another "tries to dress like the Duke of Windsor"—on what salary, may I ask...

...The concentration of his thesis into a sequence of brilliantly antithetical statements rewards the reader with elegant fireworks which vainly try to conceal the profundity of the intellectual effort underneath...

...It is true that pride no longer refers to the end-product or any material object, but to the skills, the processes and the functions which must be mastered in the act of producing...

...Fulfilment for the worker no longer is dependent on the well-being of his class but on individual preferences, and is achieved not through his productive job attitudes but at best in his leisure hours...

...Ignoring earlier observations to the same effect—from "the incomprehension of the masses" in the German labor version of the "Marseillaise" to Durckheim's "anomic type" —he freely contributes his own which occasionally are shrewd...

...This playful character of work, Le., the spontaneous expressiveness of the act of working, has too often been overlooked...

...Unimpressed by the propaganda of "Americanism," refrigerators and concomitant instalment debts, Bell finds the basic law of capitalistic enterprise unchanged by evershortening work days, ever-lengthening hours of play or even the final prospect of eliminating all "Work" (in the sense of manual contact with reality) through automation...

...William F. Whyte of Cornell and William H. Whyte of Fortune have told the same story in greater detail and partly with more biting satire, but Bell has placed it in the right context: without naming Marx explicitly, he has indeed brought the famous fifth chapter of Das Kapital up to date, showing how "communication and participation" as well as other "psychological gimmicks" of manipulation and accommodation help to perpetuate the system...

...But it is equally true that in Bednarik we meet again our old friend the ethical Protestant yearning for the good old times...

...Indeed, the reality of a social worker often is a faked world—but it happens to be the make-believe which weaves the cloth of values by which we live: Conceding further that fewer people than before may have an opportunity to deal with reality in any, even the widest sense, a second question remains unanswered: why should production be the basic experience which "colors" all other perception...

...He hardly ever allows a reader to compare his observations with others, but hurries him from "recently I came across a couple of drunks" to generalizations which are German meta-sociology at its worst, and proceeds to the immediate construction of a new metaphysical type...

...that question being solved, the Social Ethics of our day fits the worker's concern with others and with his quest for a meaningful life outside working hours...

...Even in their absolutism some of them may be eyeopeners for many a Marxian dogmatist who was not around when Henrik de Man said the same things more convincingly...

...He chastizes self-misstyled "socialists" whose vision of Utopia is just a highly efficient capitalism without capitalists, and others who vainly try to cope with the basic difficulty through such schemes as "workers' participation in management...

...both have been absorbed into the hateful jungle of a boss-ridden mass society...

...Romantic notions of "productiveness," "creativity," "meaning," "sacrifice," "group spirit," "togetherness" then may become hackneyed and trite, or even mechanical, as Whyte has so eloquently shown in his sarcastic discussion of "togetherness...

...The negative, horrid or ludicrous features of this new ethic may be apparent first...

...Inasmuch as true creativeness is a free, playful and non-utilitarian expense of energy, this pleasure may even be purer than that of the artisan beholding his handiwork...

...but I am not concerned here with the cultural significance and quality of the protest movement, but with the fact that it is a protest of highest intensity...

...the end of economic man has never been proclaimed in earnest for anyone but workers...

...The producer attitude is not the only possible basis of socialist virtues...

...the joyful experience of workmanship need not find a material embodiment in the created object...

...The irresponsible Li'l Abner is to exurbia what the ingenuous "noble savage" was to the ancien regime...

...moreover it mimics certain attitudes of play instead of liberating real playfulness...

...But we should not condemn it for the wrong reasons...

...To UNDERSTAND how today's "young worker" functions and relates himself to his social world, is the ambition of a book by Karl Bednarik which has acquired rapid fame in Europe where its references are understood, and is quoted even in the sociological literature of this country which, ever since Riesman, has covered similar ground again and again...

...Erich Fromm has recently dealt with the social and human cost of industrial labor which cost accountants fail to include in their calculations...

...He manages to raise practically all important questions of the post-war labor situation by way of allusion and parenthesis, without ever picking up a tool to handle them...

...Work, he postulates with Fromm, ought to be a source of creative pleasure, and his indictment of industrial society, including classical capitalism as well as the WebbLenin variety of socialism, is just this —that it no longer affords the worker this kind of satisfaction, destroying in the process his best human possibilities...

...Socialist youth in Vienna were so much nicer when they wore sandals and were interested in folk dancing...

...How true...

...Bednarik finds that scientific socialism drew its emotional strength from its vulgarized form which was a "saviour religion...

...If Bednarik's complaint is the lack of frustration in the young worker, he has provided the same for at least one intellectual...

...Nor, for that matter, does graceful presentation ever interfere with one reader's awareness that Mr...

...what happens in electric kitchen appliances cannot be explained in terms of sense perceptions...

...For his "questions" attack the basic myth of our society—that the value of work, its cost to society, is measured by its "efficiency," its cost to the user...

...The present evasion of the cultural protest into rock 'n roll and consumer satisfactions certainly is as unhealthy as the conditions which caused it...

...In fact, it bursts into the "bang" which may save this society from dying "with a whimper...

...But man the creator of his natural environment now is being superseded by man the creator of his social environment...

...146 pp...

...This reviewer would gladly subscribe to a number of them if they but followed from their premises...

...considering that a modern skiing outfit costs the equivalent of a month's wages in Vienna, Bednarik boldly concludes that these workers revel in luxuries...

...Since the ideological "heaven" crumbled, the workers withdraw into the makebelieve Paradise of the back garden...

...Coming generations will have to learn functional thinking before they can shape the outside world, but their immediate experience will be of people and of play...

...the one supplied is poor...

...This is exactly the fallacy against which Bell vainly tries to caution modern sociologists: substituting Puritan sermons on "mass culture" for economic analysis...

...The reaction now seems to be a shift away from the hollow, craven morality of the industrial society...

...Bell persuasively urges that such work is less concerned with reality than, say, whittling at a stick is...

...He deplores the man in the grey flannel suit instead of probing for the rationale of his attitudes...

...Bell actually is handling dynamite...

...The young worker must be discovered as a person, he must be able to discover himself as a person...

...The interest of this rambling comment on a social worker's experience with postwar youth is almost entirely biographical— an ex-member of the once famous Viennese Socialist Youth Movement, Bednarik was disappointed when he found out that the class-conscious young worker, as defined in Marxist phraseology, "has no metaphysical existence" but is interested in movies, fashion, spectator sports and motorcycles...

...But if Bellamy's technological utopia comes true through automation, and all work necessary for the maintenance of a luxurious standard of living actually can be done by a few years' "Labor service" for each citizen (as Marx undoubtedly thought)—then indeed all experience of "work" would be confined to school, training and those few service years (I forget which Utopian had invented an "electronic rat" to clean the sewers, so that argument is disposed of happily...

...our grandparents certainly took more drudgery for granted...

...But his criticism is not related to the social ethics as Marx's criticism was to the Puritan ethics...

...Any conception which originally expressed the protest of man against the institutions may be institutionalized and become an instrument of suppression...

...it was unable to return spontaneity and meaningfulness to the crippled and frustrated humans who have to adjust to objective conditions of work...

...Even sturdy peasants no longer smoke virtuous pipes in Alpine backwood sheds but parade flippant cigarettes while riding on tractors...

...Mr...

...The morality of the socialist movement vainly tried to uphold the values of industrial society...

...and they dream of the glamors of leisure in terms of non-work instead of meaningful work...

...without that, there can be no break with the old burgher-virtues" (my translation...

...Hobbies pitifully recreate work attitudes which the worker may cultivate no longer in the factory...

...The worker's humanity asserts itself in attempts to make the work more interesting, to "loaf on the job," to cheat the system, to extend leisure time and to tinker with hobbies...

...If work ceases to be the free assertion of the person's capabilities and if it no longer seems to "make sense" to the individual, then one of two things will happen...

...if it ever will be again, it must return to work the attributes of spontaneity and meaning...

...Automation, while opening for the first time an opportunity to do away with the drudgery of labor, at the same time deprives the switch-pullers and adjusters of all opportunities to find satisfaction in their work...

...We had better face the fact that children now grow up in a world of miracles: the mechanics of the pot-belly stove are easy to understand...

...The average man forty years ago was morally closer to the old pre-technique man than to the youth of today...

...It is by no means easy to persuade garage attendants and file clerks that they are alienated...

...It might be desirable to have manual production as the basis for our social ethics, but that is neither necesary nor likely in the coming age...

...Management recognizes the problem which its purely technological reasoning has created for the worker, but instead of abandoning its approach, which is so intimately wedded to the whole socialeconomic system of industrial capitalism, it substitutes "human relations" and "satisfactions of human associations in the plant" for the satisfaction of work itself...

...His abstractions are as brilliant as they are misplaced...

...it no longer fits into the natural life rhythm of the worker...

...I suppose we have to have amorality if we ever expect to get a new morality...

...The emphasis on "play" in this turnabout movement points to an effort to recapture precisely those two decisive factors of human dignity and fullness: spontaneity and meaning—of sorts, I will admit...

...How DO WE KNOW that such a point has been reached...

...Finally, Bell seems to under-estimate the actual amount of satisfaction and pride which many factory workers still derive from "a job well done," from their ability to function properly, to invent short-cuts, to understand the processes of their machinery and to learn about the field of which their work is a part...

...It is all the fault of the high standard of living...

...WORK AND ITS DISCONTENTS—THE CULT OF EFFICIENCY IN AMERICA, by Daniel Bell...

...but the poverty of the analysis which was supposed to lead up to these conclusions is revealed in the remedy which Bednarik suggests, and I quote: "Think how it would be if every man who lives in the spirit— we call them intellectuals or cultured men—struck up an acquaintance with just one worker...

...If the basic human experience were to shift from the productive to the consuming attitudes, and our relatedness to man and nature were no longer determined by our working behavior, then indeed some traditional foundations of socialist ethics might be doomed together with the traditional values of the capitalist society...

...The Protestant ethic was useful to the worker whose concern was the mastery of Nature...

...And while some panaceas may give the workers something else to enjoy instead, none replaces the capitalistic concept of cost accounting by a human and socialist concept of work as means of self-fulfilment...

...but—and this Marx neither knew nor expected—alternating between the fallacies which Russell calls "misplaced concretization" and "misplaced abstraction," they have substituted "human situation" for "economic man" and psychology for the profit motive...

...then and only then will he be able to overcome the dangers of the new type...

...for at the end of all this emaciation of human substance there lies the cold revolution of totalitarian democracy, the substitution of social techniques for democratic processes...

...EVEN so, the question which Bednarik raises (or rather lowers to the level of Ortega y Gasset) is the same which Bell discusses more profoundly...

...Bell suggests, without saying so, that the profit motive still is the sacred root of industry as far as management is concerned...

...With the increasing importance of the service industries and the decreasing number of production workers, the opportunities for personally "interesting" work are widening and monotonous routine tends to be the fate of fewer people...

...and they may be doubly painful to an observer who has inherited from his Protestant teachers such a wealth of effective tools of social analysis...

...Efficiency" still is measured as a price-cost ratio...

...Bell is no less disturbed by the discrepancy between the declaratory and the practical ethics of our society than Marx was about his...

...Indeed, had he elaborated on all the ideas with which these "notes" are crammed, he might have written a full-fledged "philosophy of labor...

...if it ever was, it interpreted work as derived from play...

...The more "play" a manipulation allows, the less fatiguing it is...

...No longer is capitalism the enemy, nor is class solidarity the protective shield...

...Management consultants transform a problem of inner conflict into an administrative problem...

...Even the abominable rock 'n roll craze betrays more vigor and primitive originality than the schmalz and crooning escapades of the more "adjusted," though crippled denizens of an integrated producers' group...

...Whenever he has an opportunity, the worker lapses into "play"—as the barber snipping his shears idly in the air, for instance...

...It neither extends his personality into the outside world nor enriches the person by imbedding him in the outside world...

...Either the values of the group ethics are turned against the institutions in a desperate effort to restore eroded dignity, or the values will be rejected wholesale...

...The reverse of this efficiency cult, says Bell, is the cult of leisure as a conditioned protest reflex...

...This assumption applied to the majority of mankind at the time of Marx and may still apply to all countries less developed than most industrialized parts of the United States and Western Europe...

...Bell does not discuss their relationship in terms of conflict but rather as the discrepancy between the true morality of the industrial age and its ideological "derivation...

...However, "economic man" today is no longer driven to work by hunger and cold, but by advertising and the standard of living...

...it can be the experience of mastering the process...

...workers try to escape from the monotony of their job by arbitrary changes of pace...

...But it never was the only, and not even the most important support of its kind...

...The aim is neither to fight it nor to reform its abuses, but to evade involvement in it by tactics of noncommittal conformism and to escape from it to a dancing joint...

...Since a book review is not the place to develop a theory, it is necessary to state alternative interpretations aphoristi cally...

...Should it fail to rediscover these qualities, the human need for them will become manifest in other ways...

...I should like to qualify Bell's analysis here in three directions...

...The rules of the game are different from those of old-style handicraft, and notably so is the emphasis on "group" work...

...From his point of view, all the later developments are at best regrettable decadence, at their worst mere ideological veils of a still horrible reality...

...Utopian faith in progress was the people's opium...

...BELL'S ESSAY should be read in conjunction with William H. Whyte's picturesque account of The Organization Man which dwells in greater detail on the conflict between the Protestant work ethic and the "Social Ethics" of our communications age...

...The original values to which these words refer are intensely human, but their perverted use in the context of a given society may tend to de-humanize them...

...tied together] by a mood, and some questions...