No More Work? Part One: The Philosophy Part

Aaaand… we’re back! Welcome to the first episode of 2025, a year that I’m sure will prove, um, noteworthy? Today we’re moving on to another, and even smaller book (literally, it’s like 5 by 7 inches and only a hundred and seven pages, including the acknowledgements), No More Work; Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea by James Livingston, University of North Carolina Press, 2016. And fair warning, there are going to be a lot of ‘f-bombs’ in this episode - and the next, to be honest.

In this Episode? Work and Labor; Classicial Philosophy, history, economics; Aristotle, Marx, Arendt, and much more.

Join the conversation on Patreon!

Obligatory bibliography, or books (and articles) you may also want to check out:

“Question concerning Technology.” in Heidegger, Martin, David Farrell Krell, and Taylor Carman. 1977. Basic Writings : From Being and Time (1927) to the Task of Thinking (1964). Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought.
Livingston, James. 2016. No More Work : Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Links to check out:

PHILOSOPHY - The Good Life: Aristotle
HAC Bard. "Arendt on Resentment."
The Noble Leisure Project. “Aristotle on Work vs. Leisure.”
libcom.org "Socially Necessary Labor Time"  

Transcript

Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other philosophical and socio-political questions regarding Work, Life, and Death. I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey. 

Episode 18: No More Work? Part 1, the Philosophy Part

Aaaand… we’re back! Welcome to the first episode of 2025, a year that I’m sure will prove, um, noteworthy? Today we’re moving on to another, and even smaller book (literally, it’s like 5 by 7 inches and only a hundred and seven pages, including the acknowledgements), No More Work; Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea by James Livingston, University of North Carolina Press, 2016. And fair warning, there are going to be a lot of ‘f-bombs’ in this episode

This one is a… complicated book for me, as when I was originally forming my MA thesis, I was fully on board with what Livingston had to say; however, I eventually ran into multiple problems with parts of his argument, specifically around his opposition to “meaningful work” and his almost inverted capitalist realist ‘there is no alternative’ stance except “fuck work.” While Livingston’s personal experiences in both blue collar/manual labor and academia and conversations with blue collar workers, musicians, sex workers, etc. lead him to conclude there can be no such thing as meaningful work (as such, at least under capitalism), as 1. meaning-less work (manual labor, maintenance, janitorial, construction, manufacturing, etc.) is never “mindless” labor, and 2. any form of waged work for others is some form of slavery, imprisonment, or deceit as proven by the fact that at both the top end of the income scale (wall street brokers, corporate executives, etc.) and the bottom end (teachers, nurses, caretakes, artists, etc.) wage renumeration has long since already been disconnected from the value of the labor performed. I still agree with Livingston that the second point is plainly evident, but I, after a great deal of arguments, have found myself on the side of advocating for meaningful work – though my definition (check out episode 6 for more detail on this) extends beyond mere craftsmanship or poiesis as the sole determinant of meaningful work. 

Another problem, though this is less an issue with the text itself and more an issue of the passing of time since it was written, is in Livingston’s emphasis on love and his ‘be your brother’s keeper’ ethical scaffolding, as to why we should, politically, reject work as such; given that it seems this kind of thinking has been soundly rejected by half the country’s voting populace twice, in favor of grievance and resentment, since the text was written. And even more so this past time around, by the same working class that could benefit most from Livingston’s proposals. Though I find it a bit ironic that a key justification for Livingston’s universal-or-basic income argument – the Nixon administration’s experiments with a Family Assistance Program (the FAP), headed by no less ‘progressive’ champions than Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheyney, and the data regarding both its successes and the disproval of conservative fears that government ‘hand outs’ would cause people to stop working – was once the preferred policy of the Republican party. Granted, this was a time before both political neoliberalism and the Republican courting of conservative Christians and nationalists, when there were both liberals and conservatives (small L, small C) in both the Republican and Democrat parties. But I’m going to put a pin in this particular subject until we get to History and Neoliberalism, A bit more on Nixon’s FAP later though, since it’s formative to Livingston’s argument. 

First, who is James Livingston? His bio page for Rutgers University’s School of Arts and Sciences lists him as Professor Emeritus of History, specializing in Modern US: Intellectual and Economic History – so, we’re working with our first ‘historian’ in a library comprised principally of philosophers. He notes that he “started out as an economic historian writing about banking reform in the Progressive Era.” (the late 1890s to the 1920s) He did his PhD at Northern Illinois in 1980, so it’s not much of a surprise his historical approach is informed by post-structuralist theory and pragmatism – this is the same period Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and Girard, on the post-structuralist side, and Richard Rorty, Jürgen Habermas, and Cornel West, on the history and pragmatism side, were doing the 1980s academic equivalent of going viral. He’s authored several books, such as Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890-1913 (which he notes drove a lot of attention his way from people seeking an explanation for the Great Recession, which led to 2011’s); Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul; and The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century (2009). The original title of the book we’re working with now was F@!% WORK, with a then working (and as Livingston notes, “endless”) subtitle, “Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea, or, When Work Disappears, What is to be Done?”

To get the gist of No More Work we need to unpack a couple of things; the distinction between what Livingston refers to as “socially necessary labor” (drawing on what Marx defined in Capital as socially necessary labor-time, in contrast to Adam Smith’s and David Ricardo’s contributions to the Labor Theory of Value – and we’ll go over this in brief for now, but in more detail when we get to Marx) and “socially beneficial labor.”  We also need to address a bit of Keynesian economics (the school of economic thought attributed to John Maynard Keynes, which is typically considered ‘liberal’ economic theory in the US today (despite being the basis of the economic policies that got the US out of the Great Depression and through the massive economic expansion and growth of the middle class in America through the 50s and 60s, basically until the rise of neoliberalist theory in the late 70s which has generally held sway over US economic (as well as political and even military) policy since). Side note, if you live in Charlotte, North Carolina and have ever been around the University area (shout out to Armored Cow Brewing Company, not sponsored in anyway, but one of my favorite locals) you’ve probably been down the tiny little strips of JM Keynes Boulevard and JM Keynes Drive that connect Harris and Tryon (49  and 29) to the University Shops. It’s an interesting intersection of historical figures; Tryon, named for North Carolina’s colonial governor, Harris, named for a former US commissioner of education (this was the late 19th century, there was no Department of Education or Secretary yet), Keynes, the afore mentioned economist, and… JW Clay, a geographer that assisted with the development of UNCC and the University area. Hey, whaddya know, a little local flavor thrown into the middle of an episode on work. 

Right, Livingston’s argument: socially necessary versus socially beneficial labor, Keynes’ prediction of how much work (manual labor) would need to be done in the future and what that promises in terms of leisure time and the working class, a little bit of Abraham Lincoln’s acknowledgement that waged labor was little better than slavery and ought be no more than a mere and temporary stepping stone to freedom (i.e. self-ownership, i.e. self-employment), that economists and politicians on the Right and Left whose economic policy for improving people’s lives centers on full-employment are deluded, ignorant, oppressive, and/or just plain wrong;  that our society is somewhat trapped between religious (specifically Protestant Christian) thinking about work and the work ethic on the one hand and philosophical thought from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt and on, about work (labor) as the “essence of man,” his opposition to arguments for “meaningful work” and work as poiesis, and his aim of replacing “work” with “love” and transforming work into being your brother’s keeper. 

Okay, so, since our general theme here is ‘philosophy versus work,’ let’s start with the philosophy side of this argument, the debunking of work as the essence of man, and we’d might as well start at the beginning: work according to Aristotle in the “Nicomachean Ethics.” 

Quick bit of background, the Nicomachean Ethics is basically the beginning of Virtue Ethics – the critical examination of ‘what is good, or what is the good life?’ in terms of ‘what is virtue and what is virtuous?’ followed by establishing those virtues as prescriptive of how to be ethical. Take the virtue of courage for example; on the one hand you have cowardice and on the other, recklessness, neither contribute to the ‘greater good.’ They either harm oneself, harm others, leave unsatisfied desires, etc. Courage is the ‘right action’ that is acting in the face of fear without cowardice, yet also not acting such that one recklessly endangers themselves or others, and, most importantly, knowing the difference between the two. This takes work to develop, and it falls on the state to cultivate, by education, training, and, where necessary, by law. Over the time the individual’s desires will align with the virtue, possessing no desire in conflict with courage, and thus getting closer to the good life, or “eudaimonia” (human flourishing). 

I’m going to pivot to work and poiesis, but swing back to Aristotle and work in a minute. If you want to watch a good summary of Aristotle’s ethics, check out Wireless Philosophy’s “The Good Life: Aristotle” on YouTube, I’ll leave a link in the show notes.

You may recall my talking about poiesis before in the episode on Heidegger, and it follows that poiesis is a critical concept for Hannah Arendt as well, as she was a student (and lover) of Heidegger’s. 

Livingston notes in his discussion of labor as the essence of man (following Marx, following Hegel, in reference to Martin Luther and the Lutheran Reformation), and this is a bit of a passage, but sets up why we need to talk about poiesis, quote:

Before then [the Modern world, as explained by Hegel in The Philosophy of History as regards changing sentiments about work and Luther’s conception of work as a calling from God], socially necessary labor was understood by everyone – not just the philosophers and the priests – as the lot of slaves and serfs, underlings all. Freedom and its correlates, including the ability to attain the truth by reasoning, required exemption from the demands of economic necessity, from work itself. You couldn’t even think for yourself, let alone virtuously or “objectively,” on behalf of the common good, if you were beholden to another for the material rudiments of mere survival. As a slave or a serf, you didn’t follow your own inclinations, you did your master’s bidding: you had relinquished your will, you had sacrificed your volition to his, not because you wanted to but because you had to, to avoid death or destitution.

The exception to this rule in the ancient and medieval world of the West was the skilled labor, you might even say the omnicompetence, of the craftsman, the artisan, the freeholder. The work these men performed went by the name of poiesis, as in “making” or “composition” – as in poetry. It was creative work and it was unforced by a master. So its performance created intellectual as well as economic independence, and therefore the possibility of citizenship. If you were independent in this twofold sense, you couldn’t be coerced or duped by the wealthy men who lived off the labor of slaves and serfs. You were your own boss, as we would put it today: you answered to nobody.

Livingston is not a fan of this conception of work as poiesis, or rather, the idea of redeeming or rehabilitating “work” (through projects that aim at meaningful work) through basing work on craftsmanship (artisanal, artistic, etc.), and he calls out Hannah Arendt specifically, and we’ll get to that in a minute, but I want to stay on poiesis for a bit. I’ll also note that, in my opinion, Livingston’s criticism here feels a bit contradictory at times, as far as arguing against poiesis as identifying any kind of positive to work, while also pointing to musicians, in other places, as doing the kind of work worth doing, socially beneficial work, once we get beyond a world of compulsory work. Either that or he thinks the work of being a musician isn’t any different from construction, sanitation, office or sex work. More on this in a bit as well. 

Heidegger, in the Question Concerning Technology, identifies a specific difference between the Greek techne and poiesis, though the one belongs to the other. Notes Heidegger, quote

Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth. 

This prospect strikes us as strange. Indeed, it should do so, should do so as persistently as possible and with so much urgency that we will finally take seriously the simple question of what the name “technology” means. The word stems from the Greek. Technikon means that which belongs to techne. We must observe two things with respect to the meaning of this word. One is that techne is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic.[1] 

Okay, now let’s start tracing this back to Aristotle, and then back up to Livingston and Arendt, through a couple of Greek terms; poiesis, techne, and praxis. 

The Dictionary of Untranslatables (to the extent I could ever call a reference book “fun,” this is a fun one), in its entry for “Poetry,” subsection “Poiesis and Praxis,” notes, quote

The English word “poetry” (archaic, “poesy”) derives, via Latin, from the Greek poiesis, from poiein (to make, produce), referring to the production of an object, as distinguished from praxis, from prattein, (to do, act) referring to an action that is its own end. On this fundamental difference between poiesis and praxis, see PRAXIS [which I am not going to cite here, that entry is 12 pages long, 2 columns per page, in tiny font; but, I will note the following as regards “the system of Aristotelian praxis”:]. … Praxis is inseparable from the ramified [branched out] uses of the verb prattein, and its qualifications as established in the first lines of the Nicomachean Ethics... actions, good living and good acting, men of culture and men of action – practically synonymous with political action: acting in accord with justice, and so on.”[2]

So, on the one hand, we have poiesis (which Heidegger likewise refers to in Being and Time) meaning a work that is a bringing-forth, as in the sense of poetry; techne, meaning a work in the sense of the work of art (and also any such work of mental, artistic, creative faculties); and praxis, the doing of a thing, and, specifically, the doing of a thing in such a way that is in accord with justice (right action) – not just doing, but doing the right thing, the right way, for its own sake, the thing that contributes to human flourishing in the broad sense. 

A big part of Livingston’s argument is his not-quite Aristotelian defense of leisure, so, back to Aristotle. Sidenote – there’s a great, short summary version you can read quickly called “The Noble Leisure Project” hosted by archive.blogs.harvard.edu written, well, founded (none of the entries list an author specifically) by Bruce Taub, a former financial services exec turned adjunct faculty at Boston College. Link in show notes. 

Aristotle, in the Ethics, looks at work in contrast to leisure in his discussion of education, specifically what amounts to ‘proper’ work and ‘noble’ leisure (think praxis as far as what is ‘proper’ and ‘noble’). He considers both to be ‘good’ but work is extrinsically good – it aims at some other end than itself (war, politics, household management (economics), commerce, etc.) – and leisure to be intrinsically good – in that it is done for its own sake. And, remember, this is both work and leisure under the terms of praxis; justice, right action. Also keep in mind, the ‘shit jobs’ (as Graeber would define them today), the manual labor and daily toil, cannot qualify as ‘proper’ work (in accordance with praxis) as the worker, a slave, typically, or some other, lesser underling, doing the work, has no say in the matter. They cannot choose to do otherwise than the work they’ve been assigned. At war; not the soldier, but the latrine digger. At politics; not the politician, but their valet. At household management; not the patron (or matron); but the slave. It is not their lot to try to achieve proper work or noble leisure. 

As regards education, notes the author, and I’m going to cite the full paragraph here as it’s a great summary, quote

Aristotle also tells us that children should be taught those useful things that are truly necessary, but not all of them, since there is a difference between the tasks of the free and those of the unfree.[3] This is the second distinction [the first is the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction of the good in work and leisure]. “What one acts or learns for also makes a big difference. For what one does for one’s own sake, for the sake of friends, or on account of virtue is not unfree, but someone who does the same thing for others would often be held to be acting like a hired laborer or a slave” [note, for Aristotle, this is a distinction without a difference].[4] Earlier, Aristotle remarks famously, “there is no leisure for slaves”.[5] Similarly, the activities of farmers, shepherds, craftsmen [my emphasis, as this understanding of Aristotle conflicts with Livingston’s], etc., will be un-leisurely, even if mixed with play and relaxation; their whole lives will be spent on their occupations. “Amusements are more to be used when one is at work, for one who exerts himself needs relaxation, and relaxation is the end [the point] of amusement, and work is accompanied by toil and strain… we should be careful to use amusement at the right time, dispensing it as a remedy to the ills of work” [opiate of the masses? Anyone?].[6] By contrast, to be at leisure is to be free to pursue studies and activities aimed at the cultivation of virtue (such as music, poetry and philosophy). These are properly the ends of noble leisure [my emphasis].[7]

Livingston’s critique of Arendt and meaningful work projects takes an interesting turn, and I say “interesting” as regards both critical and personal opinion, which I feel completely justified in voicing here since he does the same in his own argument. On the one hand, I find it interesting that, while objecting to Arendt’s position in The Human Condition (1958), he leans on Hegel’s famed master-slave dialectic from the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) – crash course version, it is only the slave that is capable of self-consciousness (through their pain and their work), whereas the master is fundamentally reliant upon the slave to be a master; they cease to exist as such outside of that relationship – while simultaneously Livingston is making an ‘always-already’ argument as far as both workers working under conditions of capitalism, and the “people of leisure” (from the unemployed, to the underemployed, to the laid-off) defined as those who have time instead of work because of capitalism (i.e. how it has succeeded in limiting labor costs to maximize profits for the capitalist class whose money does their work for them. The ‘always-already’ being a Heideggerian move (the Being-with-others, one’s always already having been thrown into the world), and Heidegger having been Arendt’s mentor, it seems to me this was low hanging fruit, but was left untouched, despite calling Arendt out for “riffing” on Heidegger as regards his concept of “worldness” from Being and Time, and then pivots to make another Being-with-others move himself as regards one’s never being alone “when on the job.”

As far as my personal opinion, I have to completely disagree with Livingston’s comments regarding one’s mind always being in “high gear” at work regardless of the work, claiming “mindless, merely manual labor” to be non-existent as all labor is social labor. While Livingston refers to previous “crappy” jobs “on a grounds crew, at a construction site, [and] as a janitor,” my experience of manual labor, be it washing dishes, doing restaurant prep, stocking retail, or packing and shipping laptops, most of that work was done very much mindlessly and very much alone (yes, there were often others nearby, but anyone whose ever worked any of these jobs is undoubtedly familiar with a supervisor bitching at them, or someone nearby, to stop talking and get back to work). That said, I actually learned to enjoy the mindlessness of it – especially once smart phones, digital audiobooks and podcasts came to be. The mindlessness of the work freed my mind from having to focus on the work so that I could focus on other things, like philosophy, or politics, or Harry Potter. I also suspect Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance would also disagree that one’s mind is always in “high gear” at work either just because they’re at work or because they’re among others. 

Livingston is pretty explicit though that he thinks the worst, or perhaps more accurately the most insidious problem, isn’t the capitalists or the politicians (Right and Left) shooting for full employment, but the intellectuals (the philosophers, sociologists, historians, etc.) arguing for “meaningful work” (and I guess I need to include myself in this prestigious group). Notes Livingston, “But the real trustees of this system, the ones who keep us comfortable in the prison house of work, are the people who have written most passionately, eloquently, and convincingly on behalf of craftsmanship. … There’s no point in exhuming the entire intellectual genealogy, from Aristotle to Arendt, but we need to see how political philosophers and professional historians have shaped our thinking about work.” [8]

Given Livingston claims Hannah Arendt “is the key figure”, let’s focus on the passage from Arendt’s The Human Condition that Livingston finds particularly objectionable; Livingston’s problems with it, and then I’ll say a bit about why I think Livingston is, well, not wrong, but not quite right either. 

Says Arendt, 

The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society. The fulfillment of the wish[9], therefore, like the fulfillment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating. It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won… [Even] [Livingston has edited a bit here] among the intellectuals, only solitary individuals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living. What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society without labor, that is, without the only activity left to [us] [Livingston’s edit again]. Surely, nothing could be worse.[10] 

Follows Livingston, 

Her task, as she saw it, was then to rehabilitate work (poiesis) and political action as the “higher” activities that could only occupy us as we passed beyond the realm of necessity – beyond socially necessary labor – so that something more than spastic consumption of worthless goods would characterize our daily lives.” He continues, “Arendt measured the modern world against ancient ideals and found it empty, crass, ridiculous, even disgusting. So she wrote as if her complaints were self-evident. For example: “Viewed as part of the world, the producers of work [again, poiesis] [and again, a Livingston edit] – and not the products of labor – guarantee the permanence and durability without which a world would not be possible at all.” 

If I [Livingston] understand what she’s saying here, I want to laugh out loud. She can’t be serious.[11]

Okay, lets unpack that. 

So, first, The Human Condition was published in 1958, about 20 years prior to Neoliberalist theory gaining real political traction in the US and UK (though Hayek-inspired Milton Friedman’s anti-Keynesian A Theory of the Consumption Function was published the year prior, and his free market fundamentalist Capitalism and Freedom was published a few years later in 1962), so she was writing at the time that early Neoliberalist theory was forming. Livingston points to the fact that The Human Condition was “funded by the Rockefeller Foundation as a critique of Marx”,[12] but then leaves that hanging, as though now self-evidently condemnable. Yet, if Livingston’s implication here is correct, it feels strange that Arendt, writing at the same time and on the same general subject matter (political and economic structures, Marxism, totalitarianism, etc.), that Arendt is, by no means, considered among these early, principle, pro-capitalist, pro-work, Neoliberal theorists. 

Remember, Arendt was a student of, and closely, even intimately, involved with Heidegger, and one of Heidegger’s primary critical methods is the queering of words. It’s only in breaking something, or in making it strange (disrupting its equipmentality, to use Heidegger’s parlance), that we stop taking something at face value and investigate it to try to understand what it really means. I suspect that as frequently as Arendt uses the term “labor,” and how she uses it and “work,” and uses them distinctly, she’s using them to mean distinctly different types. Where Arendt refers to labor, she doesn’t mean a simple synonym for work, or labor as the doing of work. She is using “work” in the sense of poiesis, I don’t disagree with Livingston here, but I believe she’s using “labor” to indicate something else, neither poiesis nor techne nor praxis. That “work” carries the connotation of creation, while “labor” is just a mere “doing” without actually bringing anything forth, and that her criticism of a “laboring society” is that we’ve become a society that labors, and now only knows how to labor, without doing any work. I suspect Livingston may be conflating the two terms, using them interchangeably, as would be the common English usage. 

I disagree with Livingston that Arendt’s aim was to “rehabilitate work,” I don’t think Arendt saw there was anything to rehabilitate in “work,” though I can’t say the same for society. I believe Arendt’s argument was that we have allowed labor to replace work, and we need to recover “work” (in the sense of poiesis) before our labor-society consigns “work” to oblivion – a word I choose pointedly, Arendt was also close with Walter Benjamin. And to do that, to save (or salvage) work (poiesis) requires political action, but to do that, the society needs to have the means – the leisure time (not just time off work, but time free from economic necessity) to free one’s mind to consider larger problems than one’s immediate needs. I believe Arendt’s fear, and this also play into a criticism of Marx (and this would apply to Keynes as well), is that the automation of labor, the replacement of labor-jobs by machinery, rather than producing a society of leisure, will produce a lost, aimless society that no longer remembers work (poiesis) or higher intellectual pursuits, and that, in turn, will propagate resentment, of the type she warned about in 1951’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. 

Grace Hunt, writing for Amor Mundi, an online newsletter and collection of essays, reviews, etc., of Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, notes, “Although Hannah Arendt never dedicated an entire chapter or essay to the emotion, she was nonetheless well aware of the insidious pull of resentment. In The Origins of Totalitarianism resentment is mentioned 16 times.” She continues, 

Arendt refers to resentment as one of many "evil motives" that had in the past made crimes understandable. With the advent of radical evil typical of the Third Reich, however, crimes against human plurality that could neither be punished nor forgiven could also not be explained away by unsavory human emotions and intentions. Here we can see a shift in meaning: in the beginning stages of Nazi occupation, resentment is an emotion that helps to make sense of antisemitic attitudes. With the advent of the death factories we find that evil human motives of self-interest, lust for power and resentment are no longer able to make sense of the world.

It was resentment that fueled the brutality of the Nazi SA, the “brown shirts,” (and, likewise, as identified in Rachel Maddow’s Prequel: an American Fight Against Fascism, the militant American, Christian Nationalist and Nazi-inspired “Silver Shirts” movement, that, thankfully, never found a ‘fuhrer’ of their own with substantial enough national political clout to mount a real challenge to FDR – though this movement bears a disturbing parallel to the modern “Proud Boys,” whose political figurehead is about to move back in to the White House).

Hunt points to an ambiguity in Arendt’s use of resentment, in that it represents both the catalyst for the SA’s brutality as well as the “last remnant of humanly recognizable relations” before the totalitarian destruction of the SS. Hunt continues, quote

Whereas torture for the SA officer was provoked by a heated resentment against all those the SA guard perceived to be better than himself, torture of the magnitude required for the annihilation of a people—the kind that was effectively able to exterminate people long before they became biologically dead—was not the result of any human emotion. It was precisely the total lack of human emotion that enabled this atrocity. Arendt contrasts the irrational, sadistic type of torture driven by resentment and carried out by the SA to the rational calculations of the SS:

[Citing Arendt] Behind the blind bestiality of the SA, there often lay a deep hatred and resentment against all those who were socially, intellectually, or physically better off than themselves, and who now, as if in fulfillment of their wildest dreams, were in their power. This resentment, which never died out entirely in the camps, strikes us as a last remnant of humanly understandable feeling [Hunt’s emphasis, on this last part]. The real horror began, however, when the SS took over the administration of the camps. The old spontaneous bestiality gave way to an absolutely cold and systematic destruction of human bodies, calculated to destroy human dignity; death was avoided or postponed indefinitely. The camps were no longer amusement parks for beasts in human form, that is, for men who really belonged in mental institutions and prisons; the reverse became true: they were turned into "drill grounds," on which perfectly normal men were trained to be full-fledged members of the SS.

I [this is Hunt again] glean two points from this passage. First, Arendt believed that the human destruction perpetrated by the Third Reich was an exemplification of what she called the "banality of evil." This is to say that it was not pathologically sadistic and neurotically resentful and self-interested men, but rather "perfectly normal men" who, by following the rules, fulfilled the brutal logic of the Third Reich. Second, the annihilation of the Jews required cold calculation that in effect destroyed the very condition of possibility for resentment: human plurality [my emphasis]. 

Where Livingston sees the end of work (waged “labor” in the ordinary sense), as utopian – we’ll get to this in a bit – Arendt sees the end of “labor” without work (poiesis) as the breeding ground of totalitarianism. A perspective I used to think of as overly fatalist, but given the 2024 election and the surge of working-class voters for Trump, I’m increasingly convinced that Arendt was, and still is, right. 

And, quick recap, if you haven’t listened to the episode “Toward Meaningful Work,” first, I’m not sure “meaningful work” is this objective category we can point to and say, “that ‘job’ is meaningful,” it’s not a prescriptive argument, my view is more in keeping with Kathi Weeks’ non-teleological, utopian method. Second, I think meaningful work is a critical ethics project, as the vast majority of humanity spends their lives working, and, therefore, it’s a political project. And, finally, I think “meaningful work” must possess, intrinsically, at least one of the following categories; a form of poiesis (as we just discussed), a form of monumentality (it must survive you, whether we’re talking about actual physical art, or music, or stories about you, or child rearing or teaching, writing, etc.), and/or a form of gift-giving as a radically different form of exchange, than mere goods or services for money, that is centered in the authentic relationship with the Other (modern ‘customer service’ is something of a perversion of this idea, based more in the Bernaysian sense of propaganda and manipulation than any ethical sense of relationship with the Other – and, take your pick here, Aristotle, Kant, Said, Heidegger, Levinas, Freud, Marcuse, and so many more, hell, read ‘em all and develop your own ethical theory of interpersonal relationships, go for it). 

Okay, lets pivot to a different aspect of Livingston’s argument; socially necessary v socially beneficial labor. 

Livingston draws an important distinction here, but it’s one that needs a little set up, and for that, we need to turn to the Labor Theory of Value and our old friends John and Karl. 

Now, we’re not going to go headlong into Keynesian economics or the Labor Theory of Value here, but here’s a quick glance at the background. Economic theory in the late 18th and early 19th century, Adam Smith, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, etc., you get a theory of prices based on use-value (utility, or, Utilitarianism), exchange-value, supply and demand, etc. and the issue of labor and recuperating labor costs. Profit is essentially a question of what the market will allow – if the baker down the street is selling better bread cheaper, you need to adjust your costs and/or prices accordingly if you want to sell any bread – and morality – if you’re the only baker, just how much are you willing (morally) to charge above and beyond the cost of labor and production? In the midst of all of this is the question of labor, and, with increasing importance due to the growth of cities, industry, and employment (working for others, i.e., selling one’s labor to others) and, therefore, the question of wages. 

Now, while Ricardo, like Smith, earlier, and Marx, later, points to labor as the primary determinant of value (price), he also identifies a danger in raising wages beyond mere subsistence as self-defeating to the economy and the polity as a whole – though good for the land-owners. 

Notes Daniel Hausman (Research Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers), writing for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, quote

David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy (1817), draws a portrait in which wages above the subsistence level lead to increases in the population, which in turn require more intensive agriculture or cultivation of inferior land. The extension of cultivation leads to lower profits and higher rents; and the whole tale of economic development leads to a gloomy stationary state in which profits are too low to command any net investment, wages slide back to subsistence levels, and only the landlords are affluent.[13]

Another problem for prices and wages, however, is the same market competition that advocates for market capitalism hold up as being good, in terms of options, for both consumers; (in terms of keeping prices down) and workers (in terms of the availability of jobs in the labor market). A 2016 libcom.org article on “Socially Necessary Labor Time” (the author is identified simply as “vincent,” with a lowercase “v”) summarizes the problem well, quote

Alone on his tropical island Robinson Crusoe can take as long as he wants to build a cabin for himself. It’s up to him. We don’t have that luxury when we produce for market exchange. When Wonder Bread makes bread they are competing in the market against Pepperidge Farm, Arnold and White Rose. If their workers are less productive, if they take longer to make bread, that doesn’t mean they can sell their bread for more money. The social value of bread is not set by individuals but by the average amount of time it takes to produce bread. This is called the “Socially Necessary Labor Time”.[14]

Now, that last part isn’t quite accurate, at least in terms of Marx’ conception, and the author cites Marx throughout the article. Marx’ update to the Labor Theory of Value, what he calls socially necessary labor-time (hyphenated), is the time necessary for a worker to produce in value the equivalent (money with which to purchase) of what he needs in order to reproduce his labor, his self-subsistence. If it takes three shillings to cover a widget maker’s day’s worth of food, clothing, shelter, and transportation, and it takes six hours making widgets to earn three shillings, then six hours is the socially necessary labor-time to produce however many widgets the worker produced, relative to the total workers producing widgets and the total widgets produced. The market competition of different factories producing widgets is a related, but different problem. Now, here’s Marx’ problem. The worker is paid daily and required to work 12 hours, if they work less than 12 hours, they don’t get paid (nor do they come back tomorrow, that position will be given to one of the throng of unemployed people waiting outside the factory for work – Marx’ ‘army of surplus labor’). Everything the worker produced beyond what was produced in the socially necessary six hours, is surplus, and generates surplus value. This surplus value is the basis of both profit and exploitation, for and by the factory owner, the capitalist. And much like Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, the capitalist is nothing without the worker, fundamentally reliant upon them to produce goods (though this can be mitigated by automation), and only the worker is capable of self-consciousness (or, in this case, class consciousness). As far as price and value, a wooden widget is worth the price of the wood plus the socially necessary labor-time required to turn the wood into a widget, improving the wood or improving the widget can only ever transfer value from wood to widget; only labor can increase the price of the widget above the cost of the widget. Thus, only labor can create value – Marx refers to this latter step as the conversion of Money to Money-Prime, the how of how capitalism appears to create wealth. The exploitation arises from the fact that the profit of the sale of the widget accrues to the capitalist, and not the worker that created the increase in value in the first place. 

Livingston also leans a bit, or, to use his parlance regarding Arendt and Heidegger, riffs on another bit of Marx (and Freud, as he’s borrowing both Freud’s phrasing and establishing this as a drive or compulsion as well) in his setting of a ‘productivity principle’ as, at least in part, explaining our compulsion to work and justification of attaching income to work:

But by now [he notes] we must know that this definition of ourselves [in a later article written by Livingston for PBS News Hour he changes the phrasing here to “valuation of ourselves”[15]] entails the principle of productivity – from each according to his abilities, to each according to his creation of real value through work – and commits us to the inane idea that we’re worth only as much as the market can register.[16]

For context, I’m going to defer to the original passage (or at least the English translation) from Marx’ 1875 “Critique of the Gotha Program” directed at an upcoming party congress, in Gotha, of the German Social Democratic Party, of which he and Engels were closely associated. The following is in response to the Party’s policy for the ‘fair distribution’ of the ‘proceeds of labor,’ which Marx felt was neither fair nor equal and retained too much of bourgeois differences in rights – haves and have nots, to be a bit reductive. States Marx, quote

But these defects [distribution based on productivity rather than the fundamental equality of society] are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after the prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banner: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.[17]

I’m sticking a pin in the rest of the detail here until we get to Marx in the next section; ‘cause, man, there is a lot to unpack here. 

Livingston is problematizing Marx’ socially necessary labor-time by focusing on socially necessary labor – and I suspect the libcom (libertarian communism) author is making a similar move – a move that isn’t far afield from what Graeber is doing in Bullshit Jobs or what Weeks is doing in The Problem with Work. Livingston, however, is leaning on both what Marx has to say about “dead labor” machinery and automation (though he uses the more modern economist parlance of “plant and equipment”) mitigating labor costs, i.e., eliminating jobs (a task that’s in the capitalist’s best interests in order to increase profit) – sidenote machines are “dead labor” in that labor (human work) was used to build the machinery and it was then purchased, paid for outright, which then replaces labor (human work) in the production process. He’s also riffing on what JM Keynes predicted, positively, in terms of the promise of machinery freeing people from labor, as productivity increases.

Okay, now, I’m not sure if it’s a matter of No More Work being really short and potentially needing a lot of, or at least some familiarity with, the background theory, or if I just have a lot of things to say on the matter, or if I just had a lot of time on my hands thanks to the break, but, I realized pretty late that I wrote a really long episode, so we’re going to wrap things up here, for now. Stay tuned, next episode will be No More Work, Part 2, the Political Part.

Personally, I’m kind of a fan of this pace. It gives me a good bit more time to read and research and make sure my thoughts are in order before dropping an episode, so I’m going to roll with this for a bit and see how it works. If you have any thoughts on it, please comment in iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or check out the Patreon page. I’ve added a ‘join for free’ option to open the discussion over there as well – at least for now, we’ll see if the trolls show up. Don’t feed the trolls, life is too short to bother with them. 

Okay, ‘til next time. 

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[1] Heidegger. Basic Writings. “Question concerning Technology.” P.318
[2] The Dictionary of Untranslatables. “Poetry” and “Praxis.” Pp. 800 and 820, respectively. The entry includes the Greek spelling, and original Greek from the Ethics but I’m leaving this out of the read/podcast version.
[3] Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics 1337b5
[4] Ibid. 1337b15-20
[5] Ibid. 1334a20
[6] Ibid. 1337b40
[7] The Noble Leisure Project. “Aristotle on Work vs. Leisure.” https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/nobleleisure/aristotle-on-work-vs-leisure/
[8] Livingston. 54-55
[9] Need to research this; what wish?
[10] No More Work. P. 56
[11] Ibid.
[12] No More Work. P.55
[13] Hausman, Daniel. “Philosophy of Economics.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/economics/ First published Fri Sep 12, 2003; substantive revision Tue Sep 4, 2018
[14] vincent. “Socially Necessary Labor Time.” https://libcom.org/library/socially-necessary-labor-time. 2/20/16.
[15] Livingston. “Column: Work means everything to us – and hereafter it can’t” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-work-means-everything-us-hereafter-cant
[16] Livingston. No More Work. P.10
[17] Tucker, Robert C., Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. Second edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. P.531