Becoming Victim

Hey all, welcome back. There's a ton to go over from what's been going on on my end lately, what's been happening with the economy, we talk a little about 'where have all the Leftists gone?' (queue Paula Cole), and, for the bulk of the episode, we return to Kathi Weeks' The Problem with Work. For part 3, we're focusing on Weber's primitive construction of subjectivities, what the structures of Capitalism and the Work Ethic do, the antinomy of systems of inclusion and exclusion, and we start digging a little into Marx' Capital to help explain the significance of sacrifice and exchange in the system of waged labor, that identifies this movement from being made subject to being made victim. I hope you're up for a long episode! 

Join the conversation on Patreon!

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

Dictionary of Untranslatables : A Philosophical Lexicon. . Translated by Steven Rendall. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Lawlor, Leonard, and John Nale, eds. “Subjectification.” Chapter. In The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon, 496–502. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. P.496 

Tucker, Robert C., Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. "Capital, Volume One."The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: Norton, 1978. p.321., also “Wage, Labor, and Capital.” Pp.204-5. My emphasis. 

Weber, Max. 2012. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Lexington, Ky.: Renaissance Classics.

Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work : Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.

Links to check out:

“FACT SHEET the HISTORY of the TIPPED MINIMUM WAGE a Civil Rights Issue.” Oct. 2018.

Sacrifice and Prostitution. Etymonline. 

Schmidtz, David and Peter Boettke, "Friedrich Hayek", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2025 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.)

#Work #Commodities #Feminism #SexWork #Trump #Hayek #Marx #Weber #Sacrifice #Exchange #Victim #WorkEthic #Feminism #FarLeft #Leftism #Progressive #Socialism #Existentialism #BadFaith #Capitalism #Structuralism #Democrats #Neoliberalism #PrivateEquity

Transcript

 Philosophy Versus Work – Episode 22

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 22: Becoming Victim

The Problem of Work part 3.

Hey all, welcome back. Thanks for sticking around, I know the releases have been a little lagging lately. About that. The voiceover work has been a struggle so far this year. I had to cancel my membership on Voices.com which really negatively hit me as far as getting auditions, but after doing the math on what the membership fee was compared to my earnings last year, and the other nonsense, it wasn’t worth it (not to mention the site is pretty notorious in the professional VO world for underhanded business practices; hidden terms and fees, exorbitant and sometimes hidden commissions, contract changes after the fact, (I personally saw this happen, after booking a $670 gig, that was to pay $560 after platform fees, then the final contract was reduced again to 452, and finally, when the pay came, it was only $450) and, not to mention, taking an active role in exploiting talent to train AI so that the site can fulfill client needs without needing the talent at all). I did finally get my website up and running. Voiceactor.com’s Support (not sponsored) was a breeze to work with, which is far more than I can say for porkbun.com – I have finally gotten my VO email configured, after over 20 days of back and forth with their Support, which was sending about 1 email a day. Even their request for a Zoom call to get this fixed, after I replied ‘we can do that now,’ didn’t get another reply until the next day, and, once again, from a completely different agent that had no interest in a zoom call or any solutions to offer. Porkbun’s cheap domain registry and email hosting is quickly proving the old adage ‘you get what you pay for.’ 

So, long story short, money’s been tight, and, in the interim, I’m bartending again. If you’re in the Charlotte area, I’m at the Southern Strain taproom in Plaza-Midwood. Come say hi. The beer is legitimately really good, and it’s not a high-traffic spot, so conversation can be had without people yelling at each other.

The downside of all of this is that it’s had a bit of an impact on my time to write and research for this podcast. So, if you’re enjoying the show, please stick around. It’s not going away, it’s just going to be coming with a little less frequency for a while. I’m going to try integrating some more Happy Hour episodes, they’re a lot less time intensive on the research side – as podcasts go, there’s a reason interview shows are so much more common than scripted shows, it’s really a lot less work. Joe Rogan isn’t putting in a fraction of the work of the Thrilling Adventure Hour or Welcome to Nightvale. 

As I’m writing this, the stock market is presently repelling down a cliff – we’re not in freefall yet, but I certainly won’t rule it out. Based on data I was looking at last year, I concurred with the opinion that, based on current and historical data, we’d be looking at a recession, probably a deep one, by about mid-March. Well, fortunately, looks like I was wrong about that, or, maybe, unfortunately, just a little too early in the prediction. Here’s my two cents on the matter. I’m just a little dumbfounded pundits on the left and right continue to analyze Trump’s actions by the terms of the Republican party’s general policies of the past 50 years (pro-business, anti-labor, militant on policing, imperialist on ‘defense,’ yada yada), and so keep getting caught flat-footed about whatever economic damage Trump wreaks next. 

Here's the thing about Trump’s nonchalance about the stock market tanking – he is not beholden to the market. Trump’s own wealth is, as far as it’s known, since he’s never released a tax filing, primarily is in non-stock assets; his Brand and his real property – and don’t forget most of the property with his name on it isn’t his. Since the Trump Taj Mahal fiasco in Atlantic city, most of his real estate business has been in leasing the Trump name to properties other people and firms own, dramatically reducing his liabilities. Trump, and the Trump admin, have hitched their wagons to a handful of would-be oligarch multi-billionaires. Tariffs have never, in the history of tariffs, improved the lives of working-class people. The last time the US attempted anything close to this, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, 1930, it, economists generally agree, tipped the balance of a bad recession to the global Great Depression, and set Herbert Hoover on course to be the worst President in US history (until now) and convinced Congress to pass the tariff responsibility to the President so they wouldn’t have to deal with this themselves again – the last major tariff debacle prior to that, the Tariff of 1828 (also called the Tariff of Abominations), so badly impacted agricultural trade in the South it almost triggered the Civil War some 30 years early .

Make no mistake, this is an attempt at an economic coup, or at least that, best I can tell, is the only motivation that makes sense. If the stock market tanks, the biggest harms are going to be felt by the American people, through their 401ks, IRAs, mutual funds, etc. and the Big Three – BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street (though KKR and the Carlyle Group ought to be included as a ‘big 5, since there’s a lot of coordination, I mean, collusion would be illegal, between them BlackRock and Vanguard) – private equity firms that, combined, own (as of 2017, the most recent aggregate data I could find) some 40% of all American public corporations, some 22 Trillion dollars in shares, almost 80% of which as the primary shareholder. For BlackRock, we’re talking Apple (281 Billion), Nvidia (253 Billion), Microsoft (242 Billion), Amazon, Meta, Google, Tesla; for Vanguard, this is Bank of America, Exxon Mobil, Phillips 66, Merck, and, you guessed it, Tesla, Amazon, Apple, Nvidia, and, interestingly, United Health Group and BlackRock; for State Street, we’re talking Universal Corporation (Universal entertainment), Paramount Global, Chevron, Best Buy, News Corp (formerly owned by Rupert Murdoch, which owns Dow Jones, Market Watch, the New York Post, Harper Collins, and on), Bancorp (which owns U.S. Bank), and so many more. This is, in my opinion, the same strategy, applied on the macro scale, that Elon Musk employed in order to purchase Twitter. Tank the market, buy the carnage on the cheap, likely on debt purchased from a bank you just purchased, and consolidate ownership. New oligarchy takes the helm, the investor class divvy up their new fiefs, and the American working class become literal serfs – the older having watched their life savings and 401ks disappear, and the younger having their student loans, made vulnerable by an impotent Congress and Department of Education, consumed by private equity – Carlyle and KKR already announced the purchase of over 10 billion in student loan debt last year – just in case you were still curious as to why Congress is so opposed to Student Loan relief, it’s got nothing to do with notions of fairness, it’s because they’re trying to sell it all off to private equity. A new feudal America of debt serfdom and wage slavery. That’s the goal here. 

Now, I’ll caveat, this is my speculation about the Trump admin and its allies’ motivation based on the historical data of the past 9 years. I’ll also caveat, I hope I’m wrong about this. Hopefully Congressional Republicans will wake up and smell it’s their own blood in the water, and they’ll do something to reign this in before it gets too bad. I’ll also caveat that the most recent data of US Trewasury bonds and the dollar being down, meaning money is bleeding from the US public, and the stock market is going up, means that money is moving, again. Much like the policies of early neoliberalism, this is a transfer of wealth from the public to private hands. 

Finally, before getting back into Weeks, I want to take up a question I heard at work recently. After my shift ended, I was hanging around for a bit and having a beer with a couple of regulars (I decided to join them after the topic of their conversation turned to Trump and politics and the economy and history, and so on, and I couldn’t resist). As they were talking about Trump as a disruptive force, and that as being generally dissatisfied with the direction of the country having as serious a disruption as Trump that could very well burn the whole thing down, and whether or not that’s a good thing in its own right, the question came up, “Is there still a far left?” and that got me thinking. Looking at Washington, voices like Bernie, AOC, Jasmine Crockett, and Elizabeth Warren, are typically portrayed in mainstream media as the far left in the US; but, consider some of their positions: The Green New Deal, a more environmentally conscious update to FDR’s New Deal. There’s nothing radical here, it’s a return to the policy goals of 90 years ago. Healthcare for all, or some version of it; this was a policy goal of every Democrat and Republican President from FDR to Carter, even Nixon was in favor imposing cost controls on hospitals to reign in healthcare spending. Universal Basic Income, we’ve gone over this already, it was a Nixon admin proposal administered by Cheney and Rumsfeld. It wasn’t until the rise of Neoliberalism, on the left and right, which shifted both parties hard to the right, that these “leftist” aims were abandoned in favor of supporting the “free market.” These are conservative (small C) policies that implement minor reforms to long standing, historical policies. So, if you’re looking at Washington, the “far left” is, historically speaking, just a little left of center. The revolutionary left though, well, they’ve been absent from Washington and the mainstream media since the early 70s – and, no, I do not include the spirit-fingers waving, leaderless, aimless, policy-less self-defeating debacle that was the Occupy movement in the far left. 

When I started my MA program, I considered myself to be “far left,” and was dissuaded of that opinion as I got to know colleagues that were activists and otherwise politically active Communists, of the Marxist, Feminist, and Libertarian varieties, Anarchists, and Autonomists, as well as their positions and their activism. So, if you’re looking for the “far left,” they’re out there, they’re just not getting any attention from mainstream media. And, likely, largely getting drowned out by all of the noise in social media. I don’t mean to sound like I’m opposed to the ‘democratization of information,’ I’m not, but if everyone in the marketplace of ideas has a soapbox and a bullhorn, then no one can actually communicate their ideas. As we used to say in the Asset Management Depot, if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.’ 

As to some resources? Check out the Acid Horizon podcast or Libcom.org, or, if you’re more interested in the more moderate, but still progressive left, check out Justice Democrats, Democratic Socialists of America, or Social Democrats of America – this last one is the specifically “socialist” wing of the Democratic party, and not to be confused with Bernie Sanders. Sanders does self-identify as a democratic socialist, but is politically an “independent.” Social Democrats of America are both Socialists and (capital D) Democrats.  

Okay, what say you we get back to Kathi Weeks’ The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. I hope you’re in the mood for a long episode. 

First, a quick recap of the five antinomies, these seeming contradictions that work in tandem, Weeks notes sustain the work ethic and the work society; rational and irrational behaviors, productivist and consumerist values (this is the Fordist, ‘workers need to be productive and they also need to be able to consume (purchase) what they’re producing’), tools of subordination and insubordination, individual independence and social dependence, and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.

We went over a bit in the last episode rational and irrational behaviors with the transformation from the traditional to the (ascetic) Protestant work ethic; from approaching work as what needs to be done to make things, to approaching work as a calling from God, a divinely ordained obligation, and that even though one cannot know if they are one of God’s elect (those chosen to go to heaven after death), one must act (i.e work) as if they are (again, we’ll get into the details of the Protestant ethic, the elect, salvation, etc. and how this connects to capitalism when we get to Weber specifically). And the move from, rationally, working to live to, irrationally, living to work. 

To keep this episode from ranging too broadly, we’re not going to get into the racial and racialized components of this last category, yet, but for those of you waiting to hear about CRT free from conservative willful ignorance and hate mongering, we’ll get there. It’s not my forte and I don’t want to give the topic short shrift or try to pigeonhole it in. If I can arrange a Happy Hour to do it, my preference is to address it that way, with someone engaged in Critical Theory of Race in academic philosophy. So, we’ll see how it goes. 

The first thing we need to do is try to wrap up this primitive construction of subjectivities that we get from Weber – recall, Weeks is taking this parallel to Marx’ primitive accumulation of wealth as a necessary pre-Capitalist phase that enables Capitalism, and specifically capitalist exploitation of workers, to happen. 

Last time, we spoke about archeology and genealogy, and now we need to talk about structure. Weeks points out that Weber’s archeology of the work ethic and Marx’ archeology of capitalism explains the structure in which subjects are formed, quote

Weber offers an archeology of capitalist development that is in many ways comparable to the one Marx proposed in the brief account of primitive accumulation toward the end of the first volume of Capital. There Marx countered the political economists’ morality tale about two kinds of people, the industrious and the lazy, with a very different kind of origins story, this one about the violent usurpation by a few of the common property of all. In equally polemical fashion, Weber takes on his own enemy, the structural teleologies of the economic determinists, and presents a sharply contrasting analysis that emphasizes the unpredictable emergence and historical force of ideas. Marx and Weber each offer an account of how two classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, came to be; but where Marx focuses on the relations to their means of production as propertied owners and propertyless workers, Weber concentrates on the development of their consciousness as employers and employees.

End quote. Perhaps Lenin might have understood why Hegelian proletariat class consciousness was taking so long had he read his contemporary, Weber, a bit more closely. 

Now, why does structure matter? Well, let’s consult the Big Book, the Dictionary of Untranslatables. 

Structure, pattern, Gestalt

[and skipping over the etymology and related terms]

“Structure,” a concept originating in architecture, designates the skeleton or armature, as opposed to the form or outer appearance. In the twentieth century, use of “structure” has extended from linguistics and anthropology to the whole of the human sciences. Structuralism tends to conceive structure as an unvarying (but abstract or latent) network of relations... 

According to Marx, and I believe this is as self-evident as the fact that I can’t fly, Capitalism is the structure of the network of relations in a capitalist society. Similarly, for Weber, the work ethic is the structure of the network of relations of, what Weeks refers to as, the work society (employer, employee, coworker, etc.). 

I think for the ‘construction of subjectivities’ to really make sense, I need to bring in a thinker that’s always in the back of my mind when I’m reading history or contemporary philosophy or even just watching the news; Michel Foucault. For that, I’m going to lean on a great summary from the entry “Subjectification” in The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon. Quote

There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to” (EAIF, 212). In coining the term “subjectification” (subjectivation), Foucault is making a double reference. On the one hand, he refers to the philosophical tradition, and in particular the modern tradition, in which the concept of the subject as a center of experience plays a central role. On the other hand, he refers to political subjection as a mode of having power exercised over oneself.

The primitive construction of subjectivities, that Weeks notes Weber explains is what is happening in his archeology of the work ethic, the Protestant ethic, and the spirit – the enervating force – of Capitalism, is the “how and why” Capitalism (the structure of the relations of production, Weber following Marx) and the Work Society (the structure of the relations of workers and employers) structures subject formation.

Who I am as a self-conscious being (a Dasein, a Cogito, a Self, etc.) as well as my relationships to those who can exert power over me, either by force (the State, the Police, etc.) or by Contract (an employer), or by dependence or inculcation (a Parent or other customary senior), it is not self-determining, it is determined by and within the limits of the structure. What the Protestant Ethic did (and what the Work Ethic still exists to do), is it made one’s willing subjugation to their employer a part of their very being.

“But the work ethic,” says Weeks, “serves more than simply the classic ideological function of passing off the values of one class [the ascetics, Protestants, Puritans, the bourgeoisie, etc.] as the values and interests of all. It also serves a more disciplinary function: beyond [the] manufacturing [of] common meanings, it constructs docile subjects.”

It is because of this subject formation, within the structure of the work ethic, that the development of the work society is possible. One the one hand, it’s the work ethic that makes Capitalist exploitation and alienation possible, and, so far, safe from the emergence of a proletariat class consciousness. On the other hand, it is also why Week’s notes that Socialism is the “work society perfected.” Socialism, focused on the means of production, may aim at overthrowing Capitalist exploitation, but is still entrenched in the irrationality of living to work. 

Okay, so, what about some possible rebuttals to structuring subject formation? 

First, if we live in a post-structuralist world (such as Mark Fisher’s capitalist-realist one), do “structures” still matter? 

Yes, and don’t get caught up in the semantics here. What post-structuralism, as an analytical method, does is that it identifies that there is more to it than rigid, positivist structure in subject formation and networks of relationships. What we mean by post-structuralism is we’re not talking about teleological theories like Hegel’s ‘end of History.’ There is no definitive thing (Capitalism, for example) that provides the rules and boundaries of subjectification, period. There are myriad factors that play major roles, Capitalism is one of them, race and gender, religion, politics, etc. all play major roles, and taken together form systems of subjectification (and, often, systems of oppression and exploitation). A sweater may not unravel if you only pull one thread, but you can, potentially, unravel one if you know how it was assembled. Which can be pretty handy, if the sweater is actually a straight-jacket. 

Second, the “I don’t accept that the structure limits me, and/or I like capitalism and work and don’t acknowledge these limits as such. 

This one follows one of two paths. In one case, this is capitalist realism in action. Those same structures the individual doesn’t acknowledge function so as to limit one’s political imagination. This isn’t simply cognitive bias, it’s the very limits of the person’s imagination (Fisher’s concern is that capitalist realism works to limit the entire society’s imagination). The same systems and structures this person refuses to acknowledge provide the upper limits of their thought. This may only affect the individual, but if this individual is in a position of power, can also serve to justify exploitation, oppression, and violence. Overcoming this limit isn’t as simple as trying to convince someone to have an open mind or trying to find common ground. It would likely require serious affective disruption, potentially at the level of trauma, before ever getting to a point of being able to acknowledge their fundamental beliefs could be possibly wrong or harmful to others. Cognitive bias is simply the buttressing of those beliefs in the face of mere facts that, without affective disruption, though necessary, aren’t sufficient to overcome fundamental beliefs. 

The second course is what, following Sartre, existentialists call “bad faith.” This is the individual that at some level knows they’re wrong but maintains the self-deception because they perceive it to be easier or safer, either physically or psychologically (or both). Without getting into the weeds here, Sartre’s classic example is the café waiter that (inauthentically) believes he is a café waiter, rather than (authentically) acknowledging he is a human being with freedom and responsibility that is presently working as/playing the role of a café waiter. Keep in mind existentialism arises in France in response to Nazi soldiers and French collaborators denying responsibility for their actions in claiming they were ‘just following orders.’ The abusive cop that can’t or won’t process that he’s guilty of brutalizing or killing someone because he was just following protocol or training or department culture falls into this category; we’re not talking about the abusive, corrupt cop that is intentionally an abuser and trying to hide behind the blue wall. 

Alright, so that’s how structured subject formation works (in brief and for our purposes here anyway, I mean, it is, itself, its own whole field of study). This isn’t simply cognitive bias we’re talking about, it’s the limits of one’s imagination that’s at stake.

Okay, a last word on the antinomy of productionist and consumerist values as it relates to Weber and the Protestant ethic. Recall, the Protestant Ethic is an ascetic one, it rejects worldly pleasure and glorifies toil and suffering. That being the case, how on earth does this comport with Marx’ primitive accumulation of wealth? Why would a people that reject worldly pleasures, simultaneously accumulate wealth? Money, property, art, fine clothes – check out some Northern Renaissance art for some examples. Sure, it was generally stark, black and white attire, but finely crafted, made from fine fabrics, accented with simple but expensive jewelry, exotic furs and other materials, ermine, pearls, gems, etc. 

Weeks, citing Weber, notes, the wordly asceticism of Protestantism, and Puritanism especially, with it’s “prohibitions on luxury and idle amusements” [recall here Aristotle, and that Leisure was the unstructured time of the free citizen, whereas amusement was all that was available to the limited free time of the slave] “… had the psychological effect of freeing the acquisition of goods from the inhibitions of traditionalist ethics.” Weeks continues, “The Puritan ethos serves to restructure our needs and desires as employers and employees, but also as purchasers and consumers.”

Under the traditionalist model, work was done to make the things necessary to sustain oneself and the community (unless, of course, one was a slave or a serf, in which case work and obedience were both unceasingly necessary to one’s continued existence). Accumulation was due to either surplus or theft, and either luxuriously consumed, or immorally hoarded. 

Does this still hold true today? Absolutely. Though the role of structuring needs and desires has transferred from the Puritan ethos to the job of Marketing and Advertising companies, PR firms, spin factories, who have been manufacturing desire since the 50s and 60s; and themselves, now, take advantage of a kind of modern neo-serfdom, outsourcing the labor of advertising to unpaid influencers and content creators – unpaid and redistributed “UGC” (User-Generated Content). Check out Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism if you want a detailed analysis of what’s going on here. 

Weeks continues, “In the Fordist period of industrial capitalism, with efforts to sustain a level of mass consumption adequate to mass production, a new relationship between production and acquisition was forged. Consumption, rather than savings alone, emerged as an essential economic practice [even into late post-industrial capitalism this holds true, recall George W. Bush urging Americans the most patriotic thing they can do in the wake of 9/11 was to go out and buy things, or Trump’s downplaying of the Covid-19 threat, encouraging Americans to go about their business as usual, or Trump just recently, with the wake of his impact on the market and just telling people to “be cool”]; as opposed to mere idleness, nonwork time was recognized as an economically relevant time, time to create new reasons to work more.” 

 Even vacation needed to be taken in an economically productive manner; you needed to be a tourist, and go on vacation, to a hotel, to a resort, to a theme park, and spend money, and so create more jobs so that other people can have more money so that they can spend more. Following from the Protestant ethic, earning wages and working hours authorize the worker to spend money and take time off. In the post-Protestant ethic, that economic activity is relieved of the prohibitions against luxury and squander reconceived in terms of wasted, i.e. non-economic time. 

Buying shit transforms from simple consumption to a requisite economic function, not only how one demonstrates (acts as if) one’s being a good citizen, but, ideologically, supports the demonstration in terms of one’s superiority. The more I can consume, the better a person I am. Weeks continues, “As earning wages gave us the right to spend, working hours authorized leisure time. Thus the producer-consumer antinomy continued to serve as an enervating force under Fordism.” 

This is the same argument in the Northern Renaissance paintings. It was because of work that they had the earnings that they could spend on fine things, and not be engaging in luxury. 

Sidenote, as far as authorized leisure and nonwork time, consider this regarding Taylorist business management practices (which, recall, is supposed to focus on efficiency); if you’ve ever had a supervisor more concerned with your appearance of busyness than whether or not your work was done, this is the result of Protestant ethic in action. In my experience, most workers tend toward the traditionalist approach; seeking to finish their work, typically well, and then enjoying a moment of unstructured time to chat with others, catch up on news, play today’s Wordle, etc. (in other words, amusements). I cannot tell you how many times I’ve pissed off a supervisor by appearing to be idle, but when they rattle off a list of things to do, I inform them I had done them already. You would think discovery that all the day’s work was done would be good news, but nothing seems to set supervisors – especially in the corporate retail and restaurant sectors – into apoplexy like discovering they have an employee on the clock with no legitimate work to do, especially if they know the rush or what have you hasn’t even started yet and they can’t send that person home without screwing themselves. I’ll also note, in pretty much every job I’ve held where I’ve encountered managers like this, there was also far higher turnover among managers than staff. When your supervisor is pissed because you appear idle at work, it’s not you or your job your supervisor is concerned about, it’s their own. They’ve been trained to be taskmasters. Their job is to manage your time, not your work. 

And on that note, let’s get into individual independence and social dependence. The Protestant ethic, as Weeks notes Weber has proven, makes individuals subjects to work and to their employers. It serves as the structure of subject formation. But the Protestant ethic also privatizes the work relationship. Just as Protestantism sought to recenter the relationship to God as direct and private, as opposed to a relationship mediated through the Church hierarchy, the Protestant ethic also recenters one’s relationship to work away from the community and on the self, one’s relationship to themselves as worker and to their employer as employee. 

To this day, this is still fundamental to the American experience. When you meet someone new, often one of the first questions raised is ‘what do you do for a living?’ To which, the American response, without batting an eye at whether or not someone may find this question rude, boring, invasive, personal, etc., is to say ‘I am yada yada job.

Now, personally, I’m in a bit of a weird boat here, now anyway. A few years ago, when asked, it was both an incredibly boring and incredibly tedious question to answer, as most people have no idea what IT Asset Management is, let alone what an ITAM administrator does. Not to mention that for me, having a background in art and philosophy and many interests that have nothing to do with IT, it was kinda depressing to ponder. And it turns into a 10 minute conversation about auditing IT inventories, documenting police reports, and box ticking with Security, HR, and Legal. All the while, at no point having anything to do with typical Asset Management (a well-known Finance job) or IT Support. 

But, now, that I’m writing, podcasting, voice acting, and bartending – this question comes up a lot as a part time bartender – the whole, oh, you’re a voice actor? What does that entail? Or, you do critical theory of work? How does that, um, work? These are questions I could chat about interminably. But, let’s get back to Weeks, Weber, and this movement toward privatization/individualization. 

Okay, bit of means-of-production background. In the pre-capitalist feudal era, the workers (serfs) worked the land in common. The fields where crops were grown and livestock grazed all belonged to the local lord and these lands were worked as commons. The town ‘Green’ was a festival place held in common. The community all worked with each other as they, along with the livestock, the game, and the crops, ‘belonged’ to the local lord. Now, as you may recall from middle school history, these lords were, generally speaking, land rich and cash poor. Merchants, meanwhile, were becoming very wealthy trading the goods others produced. Some of these wealthy merchants chose to set up shop where they could own the means of production themselves instead of having to buy their wares from other producers: the aristocracy, needing money, sold off parcels of land and rented out others, the commons were closed off and the serfs, if they needed land to graze livestock or farm crops, needed to pay rents. With the dawn of industrialization, many fled the rural communities for cities, selling the only thing they owned, their labor. Where communities of workers could once depend upon each other in times of sickness or struggle, they now had no one they could depend upon, for their means of subsistence, but their employer (structurally speaking, extended family groups, multigenerational housing, religious alms practices, and tight-knit immigrant communities aiding each other go more to proving the point that community and collaboration are basic human drives, especially in the face of struggle, then an  exception that absolves social responsibility at the individual level). And, yes, I get this is over simplifying things, but that’s the gist of the historical transformation from feudalism to early, industrial capitalism. We’ll get to detail when we get to Marx, for now we need to back to Weeks and Weber. 

Under the Protestant ethic, “The individual’s economic achievement,” notes Weeks, “or lack of achievement depends on and is reflective of his or her character. What could be seen as the responsibility of a collective becomes the duty of every individual… That is, moral responsibility now lies with the individual rather than the community, and rich and poor alike “shall not eat without working.”

Weeks continues, “as an individualizing discourse, the work ethic serves the time-honored ideological function of rationalizing exploitation and legitimating inequality. That all work is good work, that all work is equally desirable and inherently useful, is, as William Morris once noted [Weeks is citing the 19th Century British artist, writer, and socialist activist William Morris, and his essay, “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil” republished in William Morris on Art and Socialism, 1999; not the 20th century talent agent behind the famed William Morris Agency], ‘a convenient belief to those who live on the labour of others.’” She concludes, “As an individualizing discourse, the work ethic eschews institutional support for what is supposed to be individual responsibility and obscures the structural processes that limit his or her field of opportunity.”

Now, it’s not just historical texts, theology, or philosophy that support the presence of this antinomy of individual independence and social dependence. This is also structural in entire corporate business models. Organizations like Wal-Mart and Dollar Tree fundamentally rely on the encultured individual moralism of the work ethic to generate willingness on the part of underpaid workers in order to staff their stores, while also relying on large-scale, community wide wage-depression and financial precarity to supply them with customers, as well as reliance on state and federal programs to supplement those same low waged employees and customers with the means to purchase cheap products in their stores, it’s a kind of perverse Keynesian-Fordism. Individual independence (the moralization of exploitation, accumulation, and a Hobbesian conception of fairness as every man for himself (I got mine, you’re on your own) in which fairness across the community is reconceptualized individually as unfairness – that because Bob believes he succeeded without any “assistance” (completely disregarding his upbringing and whether he was, as is likely, born into wealth (as much as the Right here loves to flaunt the few exceptions that manage to claw their way out of poverty, the classic logical fallacy that the exception proves the rule), his teachers, coaches, mentors, doctors, partners, colleagues, employees, customers, investors, etc. without whom he could not have possibly succeeded, and this is to say nothing about those that cheat ‘the system,’ the crooks, fraudsters, and thugs that achieved wealth by criminality, exploitation, and/or violence; the zero-sum thinking that in trying to remediate that basic unfairness, by using the community to ensure Carl has a chance to succeed, we do some basic harm to Bob – that and social dependence (the system falls apart without the community, whether you’re talking about a company that shutters because there are no customers, or no employees willing to put up with the terms of their employment, or a company that relies on the State to make up the difference between depressed wages and high cost of living). 

Okay, now, I’m running a bit longer than I thought I would at this point and we’re still not quite to the modern/secular/post-Protestant (or whatever you’d like to call it) work ethic, so we’re going to skip ahead a little into some Feminist theory, critical to making this move from subject to victim, that I think fits in neatly with this discussion of subject and structure. We’ll swing back to the modern ethic in the next part as we get into Laborist ethics, insubordination, and the Refusal. 

Weeks takes her argument to the edge of making the claim that the work ethic makes not only subjects, but victims of work. Now, I don’t know if the intent was to leave the claim implied given modern connotations of the word “victim” or if this simply wasn’t her intent and I’m out on a limb here. That said, to make this leap from subject to victim, I’m leaning on etymology and ancient Rome.  

Weeks got me thinking about this from a passage in a section titled “Race, Gender, and the Propagation of the Work Ethic,” where she’s talking about second wave feminism and sex work. Her use of the term “victim” isn’t actually as regards possible victims of work, but the phrasing, after mentioning “sacrifice” and “exchange” is what set me on another track. 

So, bit of background. First wave feminism was principally concerned with women’s right to vote and basic legal equality. Second wave feminism; however, starting in the 1960s, was concerned with equality at work, equal wages, issues of domesticity (including making spousal and domestic abuse actually illegal – Conservatives today are still fighting against this), and reproductive rights. Two noteworthy issues here are the movement for waged housework and relabeling of prostitution as sex work, and what both of these issues mean for the work ethic. 

Returning to the antinomy of systems of inclusion and exclusion, one of the key problems of the work ethic is that, in privileging waged work as “work,” other forms of work get excluded from what can properly, morally be considered work. Notes Weeks, quote

One feminist response, therefore, was to adopt the traditional ethic’s singular focus on the value of waged labor and claim that women should have equal access to the virtues that employment opportunities could bestow. A second response to the characterization of women as nonproductive citizens insisted instead on the status of domestic work as real work – that is, on its standing as a comparably worthy form of socially necessary and dignified labor. … Second wave feminists were particularly interested in this second approach, insisting on revaluing feminized forms of not only domestic labor but pink-collar wage labor as well – including, for example, caring work and sex work. … Though more interested in finding in caring labor another model of ethical work than in imposing the model of waged work on the practices of care, some of these second-wave authors nonetheless echo aspects of the ethical discourse of waged labor in making the case for caring labor’s significance and worth. Thus the ethic of care could also be construed as an ethic of work.

Here we have a potential alternative model for organizing the economy of work as based on care rather than on productivity and profit, but, yet again, the structures prevalent in the work society (Capitalism and the work ethic) forces even those arguing for an alternative to concede at least part of their argument to a form that fits the predominant structure. Aiming at care as a model for work, but willing to accept establishing a productivist, capitalist calculus for determining ‘fair’ wages for care. 

And this is where we need to fall back on Marx a bit, because we have to talk about wages and fetishism, the exchange value of labor, as a commodity, for money, because we need to get to the other noteworthy issue and sex work and exchanging sex for money; because, it’s “exchange” that’s the central and unifying function here, not the type of labor (waged, care, sex, etc.) in getting from subject to victim. I’ll try to keep this brief, but we’ll get into more detail here in the future when we get to Marx specifically. 

Okay, so, our first real, if brief, foray into Marx’ Capital. Leading into the section, The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof, Marx establishes the basis of the value of commodities as inherently social.  The value of a commodity stems from the labor-time spent in the production of the commodity, its use-value (it must have one, but on its own is insufficient to be a commodity), and the relationship of the exchange value among commodities.  Focusing in on the premise that the value of a commodity is at its root a social relationship rather than a physical property of the commodity (as a thing in itself), Marx seeks to determine the source of the value attributed to commodities where it is determined to be its own thing in itself. 

A great way to think about this is similar to the way my Aestheics professor first pushed our class on the question of ‘what is beauty?’ Price, like beauty, is a subjective, social judgement. There is no inherent, latent, or natural property of a commodity – an economic good, any resource or product or service or what have you that is perceived to have some use and is therefore traded for something else; other goods, money, etc. – that can be called, named, identified, “price,” “cost,” or “value.” There is nothing intrinsic to a bushel of wheat, a pound of steel, a sports car, a computer, a painting, a poem, a play, an hour’s labor, etc. that equals any other good, service, or fungible token like money. 

As a social relation, value is a social construction manifested in the exchange of commodities.  Yet different commodities have differing values irrepresentative of the necessary labor time consumed in their production.  Marx turns instead towards religious concepts as an analogy to determine this external value source in what he refers to as the fetishism of commodities.  A fetish being something that, following the religious faith its particular to, is believed to derive value externally through something like god. The Bible, for example, as a fetish, is more than a book, it’s the word of God. And it becomes (in their view) the literal word of God, valued to be the word of God, because the faithful believe an external force, like a God, can bestow value without their making any subjective value judgement. They take this as given. Marx uses this kind of belief system analogously to explain what previous theorists have gotten wrong about the value of commodities. 

Commodity Value is given existence through exchange.  During exchange, the producers of varying commodities come into contact with each other, and in this way they’re able to assert their individual labor as a part of social labor.  The act of exchange then is “material relations between persons, and social relations between things.” In order to separate the use value of the product of labor and its value as a commodity, that commodity-exchange value must be reified (made real, concrete) as a separate thing, independent of the object’s utility and the social relationship (the labor-time) of its production.  The analysis of prices makes this possible by determining the “magnitude of value, and… the common expression of all commodities in money that alone [leads] to the establishment of their characters as values” independent of the commodity.   

To simplify, maybe oversimplify this, when you go to Harris Teeter and bananas cost 60 cents a pound you think about the value of bananas as money when you’re actually thinking about the price; then when you find bananas at 30 cents a pound at Trader Joes you may place greater value on your relation to Trader Joes than Harris Teeter, meanwhile the real cost of bananas in terms of human labor is totally missing from this valuation. 

This naturalized independence of value of a commodity, from its social production and its utility, is its fetishization.  Value is fetishized, in the religious sense, in that it is a thing irrelevant to its physical properties, given value (valorized) externally, and that value is taken on belief, abstract from the thing’s material history.  The commodity ceases to derive its value from being a product of labor, and generates its utility primarily in terms of its exchange value.

If human labor is actually worth something financially, and, as per the Protestant ethic, all labor is morally equal, then all wages ought, morally, to be the same. Yet we live in a social structure in which not only are different jobs renumerated differently, dramatically, vastly differently across the economy and certainly even within the same companies where makers, sellers, and executives are all supposed to be contributing to the success, in terms of productivity and profit, of the company yet executives earn hundreds of times what front line and back office employees earn; but also one in which various forms of labor are intentionally excluded from being considered work – typically determined along gendered and racialized lines. Hell, the 2.13 federal minimum wage for tipped workers originates racially in 1966 (established then as 50% of the federal minimum, which was then $1.25 per hour (adjusted for inflation would be $12.31 today, a depressingly far cry from the actual current $7.25) as most waged food service jobs in the US were held by blacks and immigrants. Right in the midst of the civil rights movement, and the same year the Civil Rights Act of 1966 (which included the Fair Housing Act) failed, Congress passed an amendment to the Federal Minimum Wage targeted to reduce wages for working black folk and immigrants.  This also being at a time where tipping wasn’t a matter of acknowledging good service, but rather of demonstrating social superiority and inferiority. According to The Leadership Conference Education Fund in a fact sheet based on Bare Minimum: Why We Need to Raise Wages for America’s Lowest Paid Families by Elisa Minoff” (and citing a passage from Forked: A New Standard for American Dining by Saru Jayaraman, an American author, attorney, and activist), “An early 20th-century southern journalist recounted being uncomfortable tipping White working people. As he observed in 1902, ‘one expects … Negroes [to] take tips … it is a token of their inferiority. But to give money to a White man was embarrassing to me.” Tipping was designed to keep African Americans in an economically and socially subordinate position.”

Okay, let’s circle this back to Weeks and sex work, I think you get the point of leveraging the work ethic to exclude certain kinds of work, and certain peoples, from ‘legitimate’ work (and/or wages).

Weeks offers the following summary of the second wave feminist argument to relabel prostitution as sex work. Quote

Introduced originally as a way to intervene in the feminist sex wars, the label “sex work” sought to alter the terms of feminist debate about sexual labor [here she cites Carol Leigh’s 1997 essay, “Inventing Sex Work” in Whores and Other Feminists]. For example, as a replacement for the label “prostitution,” the category helps to shift the terms of discussion from the dilemmas posed by a social problem to questions of economic practice; rather than a character flaw that produces a moral crisis, sex work is reconceived as an employment option that can generate income and provide opportunity.

Okay, before continuing with the passage, I want to pivot to, what I think, is a defense of the term sex work based in the terms of what waged work is; the selling of one’s labor power, and, therefore, the selling of a part of one’s own life. So, we’re swinging back to Marx and the beginning of his essay “Wage, Labor, and Capital.” Marx describes asking various tradesmen about their wages and getting varying responses based on the type of work being done; a mark a day for weaving linen, two marks for typesetting, building a palace, etc., noting what they do all agree on is that the capitalist – the person purchasing their labor with wages – pays wages based on the output of their labor. Here Marx makes an important distinction and sets up the difference between labor (work itself, the activity which produces the output – in the traditionalist ethic sense, the work that makes things) and labor power (the time and effort of the worker themselves that the capitalist is actually purchasing – recall, the laborer doesn’t own the means of the their production, the capitalist does, so the widget maker can’t sell the widget to the widget seller, he can only sell his time and effort - further, he can’t even consider himself a widget maker, it’s only the capitalist (like Ford, for example) that can properly call themselves a widget maker, thus alienating the worker from the product of their work, but we’ll get into this problem later). He also goes on to define labor power as a commodity. The capitalist purchases 12 hours of labor much in the same way he purchases two pounds of sugar. Two marks a day is the price of someone setting type to print your newspaper just as it’s the price of two pounds of sugar. The takeaway here is that by virtue of having a price, and thus being exchangeable in the market, labor power is a commodity like any other commodity. We can get into economics and theory of value and prices later in the Marx section – who knows, with Trump’s self-inflicted trade war this could prove pretty relevant in the near future. 

Notes Marx, quote

Labour power is, therefore, a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to capital. Why does he sell it? In order to live. 

But the exercise of labour power, labour, is the worker’s own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life. And this life-activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of subsistence. Thus his life-activity is for him only a means to enable him to exist. He works in order to live. He does not even reckon labour as part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his life. 

Now, this is where I was going to say, “But, maybe this is a little ‘too leftist.’ I mean, I’m literally citing Marx. Let’s try a different thinker” and roll into a quote from Richard Posner or F.A. Hayek… well, most of what I could find – admittedly, since this was already running a bit long, I didn’t exactly spend a whole afternoon or anything chasing this down, but skimmed a couple of essays – those from Posner were more against labor unions and on his legal-economic theory of wealth maximization, and I found even less by Hayek – apparently there’s so much blog-fluff on the internet that leverages Hayek for its own ends that Hayek’s own work gets lost in the noise; on Google searches anyway. My guess is, if you want to actually read Hayek, go to the library. One particularly infuriating entry was on why Marx was wrong according to Hayek, but at no point – no where – in the argument, does the author ever quote Marx or Hayek, simply poo-pooing Marx’ definition of labor power or calling it illogical because he thinks it’s demeaning. Well, one, that’s not how logic works, and, two, congratulations, part of Marx’ point is that waged labor is demeaning; just because you don’t like that that’s potentially true doesn’t make it false. 

I did find a decent, relevant passage about Hayek in the SEP regarding prices though – Posner makes a similar point as far as wealth maximization, markets, and the act of buying/selling; the problem here though is that while what both have to say about prices can be applied to the labor market, neither take their own advice and do so.

Notes the authors of the Hayek entry, “Buyers who want x but consider it overpriced stay home for a while, waiting for the price to fall. Then they see x flying off the shelves and learn something about themselves: namely, they would rather have the product at that price than not have it at all. To Hayek, only a price mechanism can process changing information almost instantaneously.”

The inverse is true for the labor side of this argument, as, for the majority of workers, wages are the primary means of their basic subsistence. Rather than questioning whether they’re willing to pay X for some good or not, they’re questioning whether they’re willing to accept X wages; especially for the unemployed and underemployed, mounting financial obligations and debts depress the minimum wages they’re willing to accept. They thus often sacrifice, not only their time and effort (which they do already in doing waged work), but what they believe their labor power is worth, accepting lower wages and lower standards of living for the ability to keep their heads above water financially. 

And these are the two key concepts here, exchange and sacrifice, in waged work from which the work ethic makes us the willing victims of work – which sex work serves as the exemplar case in terms of selling one’s time and body. If the worker ought be treated as an entrepreneur, as many conservative and anti-Marxist critics, like Posner and Hayek, argue, and sell their labor at fair market value, seeking to maximize their wealth; or, if, as per Weber, following Ben Franklin, the duty of the worker is to increase their capital value and not waste their resources on luxury; or, as per Marx, what (and all) the worker owns that they can sell is their labor-power, then sex work (minus the morality claims about sex work, which could just as easily be made about violence work, from police and soldiers to street thugs and extremist militias, who get paid to, at potentially, do violence to others) qualifies as work. 

Now we need to take a little etymological detour regarding victim and sacrifice – it’s okay, we’re wrapping this one up soon. 

What is a “victim” in the classical sense? And here I’m leaning on my art history background, there are plenty of depictions across ancient art, across the world, of this sense of victim. Etymonline dates the modern English word to the mid 15th century; “sacrificial animal, living creature killed and offered as a sacrifice to a deity or supernatural power, or in the performance of a religious rite;" from Latin victima "sacrificial animal; person or animal killed as a sacrifice.” Not just a person killed or otherwise abused by another, as is the more common, modern usage, but a killing performed specifically as sacrifice; from the Latin sacrificium, meaning ‘to make sacred.’ It is in the act of killing the victim, for religious or other supernatural purposes, that the victim is themselves made sacred. In addition to which, this sacrifice is an act of exchange. The priest, or other officiant, performs the sacrifice in exchange for some boon from the god, gods, spirits, etc.; a good harvest, fair weather, fortune in battle, forgiveness of sins, etc.  

Further, consider the meaning of prostitution, beyond the simple, common definition as that particular type of work – from latin pro (before) and statuere (cause to stand, to establish), figurative meaning from early 16th century, “to place before or expose publicly;” prostitution then appears in French as the name for the practice as is known today, then late 16th century, “to surrender to any vile or infamous purpose;” and by the mid 17th century, the “act of devoting or offering to a base or infamous use” – the common meaning generally ascribed when using the phrase today as ‘to prostitute oneself’ (when not specifically referring to selling sex for money). A victim is equally ‘exposed before’ with the two differences being, 1. The victim is killed in the process, and 2. The victim’s death is made sacred by the killer. (Which, sidenote, much like the Holocaust (a religious offering) ought more accurately be called the Shoah (the catastrophe) as Holocaust implies a sacralization, modern jurisprudence probably ought to find a better word than victim, one that doesn’t honor the killer) By literal meaning, any base and demeaning job and any exploitive and/or abusive employer/employee relationship can, and I’d argue ought to, be dubbed prostitution. If that causes you some anxiety about your job, you may want to reevaluate your job. Recall, anxiety is natural and healthy, it’s your mind’s way of signaling to you there’s something wrong you just, for one reason or another, aren’t recognizing what it is. Yet. 

This function of sacrifice has deep roots in Christianity. The entire notion of Christ’s death on the cross is adopted by the church as serving the function of all future sacrifices on behalf of all future peoples – which isn’t really, as spiritual metaphors go, much of a stretch. If you figure the ritualistic killing of a lamb is enough to grant the magical benefit of a good harvest, imagine the potential boon of sacrificing a living god to themselves. What kind of sacrifice can follow that? 

Now keep this understanding of victim, sacrifice, and exchange in mind as we get to the rest of this passage from Weeks. She continues, quote

Within the terms of the feminist debate about prostitution, for example, the vocabulary has been particularly important as a way to counter the aggressive sexual moralizing of some in the prohibitionist camp, as well as their disavowal of sex workers’ agency and insistent reliance on the language of victimization. The other side, however, has produced some comparably problematic representations of work as a site of voluntary choice and of the employment contract as a model of equitable exchange and individual agency.  

Unfortunately, the problem the moralizing prohibitionist camp has isn’t prostitution, per se, but sex. As made plain in the Protestant ethic, there is no such prohibition against, and, in fact, every obligation to, throw oneself fully, body and soul, into work. Exposing oneself to be utilized by others for their profit – profit, granted, they ought not be squandering in luxury but dedicating to more work, but we’ve all seen how that model has faired over the past 4 and half centuries. 

The work ethic empowers willing victimization. We, workers, are subjectified – made subject to work and the work society – by enculturation of the work ethic to believe it is right and moral to sacrifice our time, our bodies, our well-being, our relationships, in exchange for wages. The real and symbolic act of exchange, work, justifying, sacralizing even, the work we do. The work ethic makes us not just subjects of, but the willing, sacrificial victims of the work society; its elect, the priestly class, the labor purchasing Capitalists accepting our sacrifice so that they may continue to accumulate vast sums of wealth and enjoy the promised Capitalist Utopia of life liberated from work. 

Okay, I think I’ve gone on quite long enough now. Not exactly sure when the next episode is coming out, I’m aiming for 2 weeks. I think it’s going to be a happy hour episode, but, if not, it will be Weeks part 4, and we’re going to pivot to the Refusal and Anti-work politics. 

‘til next time.  (about 40 minutes, looking at like 1hr, 15mins)

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