Socialism's Failures: Modernization and Productivist Marxism

Okay, so this episode was initially going to cover an area Weeks identifies as failures of Productivist Marxism; Socialist Modernization and Socialist Humanism, but we're going to be addressing the latter in the next episode. This one ran long enough as is. We're also going to be taking a minute to address, and correct, a mistake I made in the last episode as regards the conservative, capitalist approach to the if, then clause regarding waged work and profit maximazation that has some surprising implications, and we'll take look down the rabit hole of progressive taxation and the Trump tax cuts. We've, um, got a lot to go over. 

Join the conversation on Patreon!

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

Klein, Ezra, and Derek Thompson, Abundance. Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, 2025. 

Tucker, Robert C., Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. Second edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. P.538 

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

Links:

"Current Population Reports; Consumer Income” U.S. Department of Commerce. May 1953  

"Historical U.S. Federal Individual Income Tax Rates & Brackets, 1862-2021” 8/24/2021. Tax Foundation 

Fry, Richard. “Are You in the American Middle Class? Find out with Our Income Calculator.” Pew Research Center, September 16, 2024.

Picci, Aimee. “Do you know what you pay in taxes? Here's who pays the most and least to the IRS.” 4/15/2025 

York, Erica. “Summary of the Latest Federal Income Tax Data, 2024 Update.” 3/13/2024. Tax Foundation 

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 23: Socialism’s Failures: Modernization and Productivist Marxism

The Problem of Work part 4.

Okay, so this episode was initially going to cover some areas Weeks identifies as failures of Productivist Marxism; Socialist Modernization and Socialist Humanism, as well as Marxist Autonomism and lead us into the Refusal of work and antiwork politics, but in writing this it ran long – really long. So I’m breaking it up, or I’d probably still be writing instead of getting any content out.  I also need to note a quick correction to the last episode. I kinda screwed up the ‘if, then’ part of a pretty key passage and left out almost the entire consequent clause. So, here’s how this should have gone, plus some insights I realized after clarifying the original missed point. 

Previously I noted, regarding exchange and sacrifice, that if the worker ought to 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 Benjamin 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, (quick recap, an analogous measure, based on their ability to freely enter an employee/employer relationship, to transform one’s living capacity to work, bodily, intellectually, etc., to a use-value with an exchange-value (wages)), then, 1. sex work is work (and to be clear this categorically excludes any form of trafficking or other abuse – slavery is slavery regardless of the work and is in all cases wrong), and, 2. all work - at the top and bottom of the income scale - as well as non-renumerated house and care work, ought to be valued (i.e. waged) at a worker-oriented wealth maximizing level, not an employer-oriented profit maximizing level. Profit is what’s left over after the necessary expenses, including wages, are paid. (And, yes, I am familiar with profit-first self-employment and small business accounting. I think it’s a great way to control your spending, but it’s unethical and illegal to pull your profits out of your revenue and then not pay due wages to your employees because you ran out of funds – you didn’t, you stole wages and claimed them as profits. Granted, I seriously doubt any profit-first certified accountant would sign off on a plan that leaves you stealing wages. If you’re freelance or running a small business, it does offer some interesting organizational principles, so check it out)

Conservative rhetoric regarding 'fair market value' for labor versus minimum wage laws betrays a basic contradiction in conservative, supply-side economics. Corporate profit maximization (of the kind we see today, as typically distributed in executive bonuses and shareholder dividends) and individual wealth maximization, among the working class, cannot exist at the same time. If the entire American labor force, let alone the entire global labor force, took seriously Hayek’s and Posner’s insistence that workers are free-contracting rational actors and demanded wealth maximizing wages, refusing to work for wages any lower than they themselves deem appropriate to their own self-value in pursuit of wealth maximization – who knew the refusal of work could comport with both Marxist and Republican legal theories about work? – either the economy would collapse, for a near complete loss of workers, or entire industries would be transformed into something more like a workers’ co-op with broad, equal profit sharing. Stock markets would collapse as fundamentally irrelevant to the purpose of corporations raising funds to invest in growth and productivity as every employee now has as equal a stake in the success of the company as any executive or board of directors member, leaving perhaps some small portion of the venture capital market – though, if we think back to Abraham Lincoln’s theorizing about the value of free labor, of working for others long enough to build one’s wealth enough to go into business for oneself, this version of the economy has potentially little use for venture capital as it exists today, where it would best serve is large scale infrastructure, cultural, and reach-for-the-stars-type projects, that have historically  required government investment, of the type the US used to invest heavily in via the Works Progress Administration, the Interstate Highway Program, NASA and JPL, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (and its successor, DARPA, after ARPA was moved into the Department of Defense) which invented things like the internet, the NIH and the CDC, and the NEA and CPB – the same alphabet soup of departments, programs, and institutions that made America a global leader, once upon a time, in science, technology, education, and culture; all of which are now under direct assault by the Trump administration and Republicans across the country. Make America Great Again my ass.

If there was a time America was “Great,” you know, at something other than incarcerating people, selling guns, high healthcare costs, poor healthcare outcomes, high maternal mortality rates, child poverty, extended working hours, reality TV production, and “number of people that think angels are real;” and using the economy, industry, science and technology as a basis for “greatness,” then the closest thing to an answer is the New Deal and Post-War period in the US, when there was major investment in public projects and infrastructure, basic science (also called pure or research driven science), rather than project or tangible-outcome (i.e. profit) based science, education, and building homes; all funded by tax rates on corporations that were 50% or more and top tier income taxes of up to 91% (adjusted for inflation today, earnings over 2 million a year), for an overall tax rate of about 40%. 

Now, the center-right Tax Foundation claimed in 2017 40% is about the same rate top earners were still paying; but that data is misleading, it ignores the fact that the majority of top earners accrue money from sources other than income that are taxed at substantially lower rates, such as capital gains, and/or are able to take advantage of tax loopholes that reduce their effective tax to 0% or less. CBS News, citing a different report from the same organization, the Tax Foundation, in 2022, showed the top 10, 5, and 1 percent of earners paid an average tax rate of 21, 23, and 26 percent, respectively. 

I also pulled Tax Foundation’s summary of IRS data for 2021, which includes summaries of data 1997-2021, which shows the combined adjusted gross income of the top 10% (which they further breakdown to 10, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, .1, .01, and .001 percent) amounted to about 7.8 trillion dollars. The top .001% alone, about 1800 people, taking in 442.7 billion that year (compared to the bottom 50%, about 77 million people, taking in a combined 1.5 trillion, which averages to about 20k per earner). Now, that 42% number for the top 1% in the 50s (that the Tax Foundation misleadingly claims is about the same, despite their own data showing it’s actually just under 27%, in 2017) if applied in 2021, would have raised federal revenue from a little over 1 trillion, to 1.626 trillion, over 622 billion dollars. If applied to the top 5%, it would have increased revenue 1.16 trillion dollars. 

Given the Tax Policy Center (a joint venture of the center-left Urban Institute and the centrist, bi-partisan (but generally anti-Trump and therefore quote-liberal these days) Brookings Institution (the oldest think tank in the country, founded by Robert Brookings in 1916 as the Institution for Government Research)) identified last year that the real impact for working-class Americans of the TCJA, the Trump tax cuts, about to be renewed and enhanced, amounted to a savings of $500-1000 a year, and given the Tax Foundation data on the bottom 50%, at even $1000 a year amounts to a maximum of $77 billion in reduced revenue; if you’re wondering where the Trump tax cuts took effect, in the 1.16 trillion dollars in tax breaks for the wealthiest 5%, there it is. That’s 150 times the tax break for the wealthiest 5% over the bottom 50%, 77 million Americans. 

Imagine what an influx of a trillion dollars a year could mean for schools, universities, student loans, healthcare costs, infrastructure projects, housing, the programs that do real good to increase the standard of living for working class Americans. Generally, when you hear about the costs of big government programs like the ACA (Obamacare) or the Inflation Reduction Act, or the Green New Deal, the costs are summarized, often in the hundreds of billions, or even trillions of dollars, but over 10 years. This is a potential trillion dollar per year increase, that will still leave top earners extremely well off. And before you feel too bad about increasing taxes on the top 5%, rather than just the 1%, we’re talking about average annual earnings over $800,000. And this of course is saying nothing about the money the nation is bleeding in corporate tax breaks. 

Okay, so, what about bottom tier tax rates? Given the House’s recent passage of Trump’s Big Baneful Bill, it’s only fair to take a look at how bottom tier taxes have changed since the 50s. Now, this is difficult to track as a one-to-one comparison. I would love to see the breakdown of the bottom 25 and 10 percent as well, but the Tax Foundation doesn’t track this and the official IRS Data Book doesn’t provide a breakdown by earnings groups, only individual vs business, total forms, total revenue, total refunds, IRS workload, etc. for that particular year. So, per the Tax Foundation summary, the bottom 50% took in 1.5 trillion compared to the top 10% 7.8 trillion. The tax foundation claims the individual income tax rate increased 1.3% from 13.6 to 14.9, but, and this is a big but, this is an overall average of all individual income receipts. Recall, the individual income of the top 5% ($6 trillion) came from about 7.7 million “people” (filed returns), for average earnings of $805,204 (average earnings of the top 1% exceeded 2.5 million per year). However; the bottom 50%, have average annual earnings of merely $19,937. In terms of income inequality, this is a disparity of 80 to 1. 10 times the number of people, 77 million to 7.7 million, earn 1/8th the income. Getting, again, to why I’d really love to find a more granular breakdown of the bottom 50%. If the median individual income in the US is allegedly $42 thousand, yet the bottom 50% average less than 20, how much broader are the poverty earnings differences within the bottom 50%? 

So, what about the bottom 50%? The bottom 50 include fairly well paid, typical middle-class earners at the top end as well as those disabled, unemployed, etc. with below poverty earnings that still file taxes, likely in order to retain some government benefits. As to where the actual brackets differentiate, 2021 saw a pre-deduction rate of 10% on earnings up to about 10k, per individual, and a max of 37% for earnings over $523,000. Per the IRS, there were over 8 million returns for those earning between $1 and $5000, and about 106.5 million returns for those earning less than $50k per year, 72 million returns for earnings over 50k. So, let’s consider, by earnings, the bottom 50% (about 78 million people) earn less than 40k a year, with the largest group, 16 million, earning between 30 and 40k per year. Percent of taxable income for earnings below 100k ranged from -2% (for those earning less than 10 thousand per year) up to 7.9% for earnings between 75 and 100k. The two highest brackets were actually between 100 and 500 thousand, the two brackets hitting 23 and 20%, and from there, the tax rate drops again, precipitously, in 6 different brackets, 5 in single digit rates and a top tier of 11.7% for earnings over $10 million per year. 

And what about how these rates have changed? Well, the bottom 50%, per the Tax Foundation, have an average tax rate of 3.3% - now, obviously this is misleading based on their averages. This includes those that owed negative 2% (they received a complete refund and the government owed them on top of that) and, if their averages are correct at less than 20k per year, their bracket would have only hit up to .4%, but, of course, the Tax Foundation is looking at the bottom 50% of dollars, not the bottom 50% of people. 

Historical data shows taxes across the board have dropped since the 1950s when that top tax bracket rate was 93% (1951, income over 200 thousand, no difference between single or married filing joint or separate, adjusted for inflation, $2.5 million per year). The lowest in this period, 19%, on income greater than $2000, adjusted for inflation about $25 thousand today, (recall, a house in the US in 1951 cost about $9000, less than 5 years’ earnings for the bottom taxable income group). There was no tax due on earnings below this level. So, from 1951 to 2021? Well, if you now earn less than 25 thousand, you now have to file taxes, but those earning less than 10 got full refunds and then some. From 10 to 25 (completely still in poverty territory), taxes went up from nothing to less than a percent. Figuring out the bottom 50% is a little tricky, it’s not impossible, I’m just pressed for time and think we’re running a little long on this, but requires doing some math on both IRS data and census data – what I was able to find doesn’t organize the data as such as the concerns in the 50s were different. But, per the Census Bureau, the average blue collar wages (laborers, foremen, operatives, and craftsmen) ran from $900 to $3600 per year (which they note a nearly threefold increase from 1939) with white collar “professionals” seeing a smaller but still substantial doubling of their salaries; with well over the bottom ‘50%’ of earners, almost pushing the 90% mark, earning less than $4000 per year (about 50k today) with a top tax bracket of 22.4% - so, yes, it’s true that while taxes have plummeted for the rich, they’ve also gone down considerably for the middle class; that said, the bottom 50% today earn less than the bottom 25% of 1951. The middle class of 1951 included most waged and salary workers of the time, and has shrunk dramatically since then, relying on debt to afford things like houses, cars, and schooling (not to mention credit card debt) to try to remain in the middle class; let alone attempt any kind of social class mobility. 

And as to what is middle class today? Without attempting a deep dive on this question, since it’s basically worth its own podcast worth of content, just looking at the tax data, a middle income American, based on the tax foundations’ groupings of tax filings according to earnings, earns somewhere between 80 and 160 thousand per year; but if you break it down by number of returns, the middle third, about 50 million people, range from 30 to 50 thousand a year, with the bottom third earning less than 30, and the majority of top third, just shy of 50 million, earning between 75 and 500 thousand a year, about 800 thousand earning a million or more, and 45 thousand earning 10 million or more.  Interestingly, a 2024 survey by the centrist, “gold standard” Pew Research Center places American middle class earnings between 56 and 170 thousand dollars a year by organizing the middle 52% (a literal majority) as the middle class, and placing top and bottom on either end, moving the goalposts to make the American middle class appear both larger and more affluent. 

I may be taking this a little too far down the tax rabbit hole now though, I gave myself some leeway here since our progressive income tax, based in early 19th century socialist-leaning ideals, potentially qualifies as a modern failure, by those same ideals; what say you we get back to Weeks? We’re almost ready to turn this conversation toward some potential political action and the anti-work politics of Refusal, but need to tie up a loose end regarding ‘the Work ethic’ and the Protestant Ethic - or as Weber identified, the evolution of the Protestant ethic into a potential Secular ‘work’ ethic. Weeks refers to three forms of this modern/secular Ethic; Work, a Family ethic, and Laborist ethics.

The Work ethic is what we’ve been talking about pretty much since day one, it’s the modern descendant of the specifically Protestant work ethic, derived from the irrationality of living to work (as opposed to the traditionalist ethic working to live), encultured and socialized (not like Socialism, like ‘socialized healthcare,’ but in the traditional sense of the process of learning, teaching, etc. how we behave in society from customs, to dialect, to politics, etc.) through education, politics, discipline, control, praise, shame, etc., that makes us, generally willing, complicit, docile subjects of and subjects to work. 

For brevity’s sake, I’ll sum up as such: what Weber articulates in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is that (and how) the Protestant Ethic becomes the Work Ethic. The Protestant Ethic, as regards work and treating work as a calling, is best demonstrated by the Puritans, who hold a distinctly fundamental place in the development of American culture, from the role of the Protestant Ethic on work, to its shaping of how we view leisure, sex, alcohol, nudity, entertainment, education, violence… or in other words, American social, moral ills, failings, faults, and taboos are all deeply indebted to the Protestant Ethic.

The Family Ethic (of Work) is what’s often taken as what is prescribed as traditional gender roles and gendered division of labor; who qualifies as a worker, what jobs (under this gendered, and often racialized, division) count as work, the dependence on the family as a site of reproductive labor, and gendered and racial exclusion from work. 

And Laborist ethics, which draw on a variant of the Labor Theory of Value that celebrates the worth and dignity of work. This concept of rationalized labor, the hallmark of the Bourgeoisie as a class – think Aristotle’s distinction between the work of citizens (free to engage in the work or craft of their choice, as their skills and resources allow) and the work of slaves (those that toil away in manual labor, with no choice except to work), adopted by the working class in order to valorize work itself. This leads to an ethic of work, in itself, independent of the Protestant Ethic’s emphasis on treating work as a calling from God, salvation through work; which, on the one hand, liberated work from religion and subjugated workers to work, and, on the other, frees religion, and, specifically, Protestant Christianity (especially Prosperity Gospel Protestantism) to appear as savior from a system that it fostered in the first place; and, finally, creating a ‘capitalist-utopia’ that liberates the wealthy from the previous religious condemnations against sloth and luxury. 

Laborist ethics pose another set of problems in that, while they can be leveraged by workers as a cause for insubordination – if work is the source of one’s dignity and worth, then the worker ought to fight for their own dignity and worth in the workplace; but is often exploited for both subordination – work is the source of dignity, so you must work if you’re to have any self-worth (or receive government benefits) – and exclusion – by sowing division amongst individual race and gender groups and other identity classes within the larger working class; the ‘they took your jobs’ so blame X minority group, or Y immigrant population, and not the person/persons actually in positions of economic and political power. Thus preventing social mobility among economic classes by sowing discord within the lower economic class. We can’t fight them if we’re always fighting each other. 

Whereas the Protestant Ethic was distinctly bourgeois, the Laborist/Work ethic is valorized by the Working Class (and to the benefit of, well, we’ll just call it the Leisure Class, to kind of blend the implications of Marx, Weber, and Aristotle). And you can certainly read some ‘footnotes to Nietzsche’ in this as well. The mentality that ‘because I work, I am morally superior to those that don’t (whether or in spite of their being rich or poor, able or not, industrious or lazy). The idea that the rich (and/or intellectual and creative workers that do less or no ‘manual’ labor) are soft and lazy in comparison can easily be read in light of Nietzsche’s analysis of ressentiment and the ‘Weak Will to Power.’ Rather than recognizing another’s power over you, this mentality valorizes one’s economic weakness as industrious working class and vilifies the other’s economic strength as lazy elites. 

Alright, I think with that all said, it’s finally time to start toward the Refusal of Work; antiwork politics, its roots in Autonomist Marxism, Weeks’ approach to Refusal as both theoretically and politically/practically productive, and some Marxist tradition precursors in Socialist Modernism and Socialist Humanism (and why these, both, fail). 

I’m going to open here, or, re-open, rather, with the same epigraph Weeks opens chapter two with, “If hard work were really such a great thing, the rich would have kept it all to themselves.” Attributed to an unnamed Union Activist. Weeks continues, “A cultural dominant the work ethic may be; seamless and incontrovertible it is certainly not.” Sidenote, we can give a little nod of the head here to Foucault, if you get nothing else from Foucault, remember this, what the archeological and genealogical method do for critical analysis, of any discourse; system, structure, ethic, value, etc., is that it proves none of these objects of critique are natural, immutable, and no matter how embedded they may be in society, just as they were developed over time, they can be unmade. No societal structure is fixed, no matter how dominant. While chapter one set up these work ethic antinomies, inclusion and exclusion, subordination and insubordination, the idea of alternative work ethics as an attempt to redeem work, chapter two takes a different tack and focuses on the “various disavowals and resistances to the normative discourse of work.” 

Weeks gets into a bit of the history of Refusal in American labor theory and activism; bad subjects, protest, those that pivoted the discourse from seeking leisure in order to enable reproduction of work effort (reproductive labor), to arguing for reduced hours as a way of expanding the labor market – the idea that ‘business hours’ as presently conceived, 40 per week, is some kind of ideal value to productivity and by reducing individual hours to say 30 per week, we create an increase in the number of available jobs, a theory that wildly ignores the pressures technological innovations and automation constantly exert on industries’ needs for actual labor hours, but this takes us in the wrong direction for now; if your curious about this, check out James Livingston’s No More Work and David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs – and, circling back, of course the hippies, beatniks, hipsters, etc. that have, over various generations, sought some version of ‘dropping out’ of the current political-economic system; the second wave feminists arguing for wages for housework, precarians (or the precariat, the trendy labor-critical jargon word for the class of temp, contract, and gig workers that don’t exactly qualify for the kind of working class as the proletariat was defined or the underclass Marx called the Lumpenproletariat, the unthinking, unpolitical, unorganized lower class  - as opposed to dropped out hippies, who were explicitly and actively political, or the precarious gig worker that seeks but lacks stable work, the Lumpenprol has no interest in things like class consciousness or revolution against political and economic oppression, they are unemployed, poor, often criminals and vagrants, willfully ignorant and ambivalent to their own oppression and the oppression of others. 

Weeks’ point in this brief survey of American labor resistance is, “…that the history of the imposition of waged labor and its dominant ethic is incomplete without a parallel history of rebellions and refusals; the ethic generates not only oppositions and their recuperations but also lines of flight.” From here, Weeks pivots from retracing history to focusing on “theoretical resources that might illuminate and enrich antiwork politics and postwork imaginaries.”

Okay, I want to take a brief detour here for a minute to acknowledge this particular turn of phrase, “lines of flight,” as it’s a callout to Deleuze and Guattari’s epic, Capitalism and Schizophrenia; Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus – it’s also a term McKenzie Wark adopts for her book Capital is Dead; is this Something Worse? in her description of vectoralism and the capitalist-supplanting vectoralist class – those with so much wealth and power over the current economic regime that, beyond controlling the means of production, they own the very marketplaces of goods and services, as well as the communications systems of the marketplace of ideas; they own communicability. As Orwelian as that sounds, she makes a strong argument for it, and the likes of Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg seem to be doing everything in their power to prove her right. 

Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘lines of flight’ is a term they never actually define, per se, but use, in various ways, to signify departure, interruption, and mutation in the ways different bodies, assemblages, and multiplicities interact with and/or act upon each other. Now, I know that sounds like a lot jargon, and it is, so, I’ll try to simplify this. One of their key points is that nothing is static, they privilege difference and multiplicity over sameness – think Star Trek’s Vulcan culture’s emphasis on Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. When you think of a person, or a self, it’s a being that is always in a state of becoming, it’s never fixed, think the adage from Heraclitus; a man cannot step in the same river twice, for it’s neither the same man nor the same river.

There are “molar” lines (the ones that connect in a binary fashion, A to B, B to C, and so on, branching like a tree); “molecular” lines (these are more fluid but still diverge and reconnect at various points, think natural waterways); and lines of flight, in French, ligne de fuite, fuite meaning literally, in English, flight, as well as being analogous to flee, elude, leak, etc. Rather than rigid or fluid, branching departures or ruptures, lines of flight are rhizomatic, they go anywhere, forward, backward, up, down, constantly changing, evolving, and becoming.

Now, we’ll get to Deleuze eventually, but I feel like we need a lot of groundwork laid first. His and his work with Felix Guattari tends to be lexically and theoretically dense. He doesn’t merely stand on the shoulders of giants, as it were, leaning heavily on the works of Spinoza and Nietzsche, as well as the history of philosophy and psychology broadly speaking, but tends to leap around, using language metaphorically and just insisting the reader keep up. For those willing to do the work, it is a rich and fascinating corpus of work with applications for politics, art, cinema, literature, ethics, psycho-therapy, economics, and so much more. 

So, when Weeks states that “the [work] ethic generates not only oppositions and their recuperations but also lines of flight.”, she’s referring to an extraordinarily broad range of possibilities as a result of the ways in which we interact and act upon each other, as well as how political forces, social structures, and other such assemblages interact with and act upon us. On the one hand, this poses the incredible possibility of political imagination in response to the work ethic, but it also warns of the equal potential of alienating and exploitative structures to remain in place through their own dynamic evolution.

She also takes the opportunity here to introduce Autonomist Marxism as an alternative to the Productivist practices in the tradition, but I’m going to skip ahead and briefly go over those, then dig into Autonomism in a bit more detail as Refusal plays a critical role here. Then, from there, we’ll get into Weeks’ application of the Refusal of Work and how it can be applied as both critical analysis and activist/political project. 

Alright, if I could just interrupt myself for a minute here – Um, sure, I guess, go ahead. I’ll just sit here and hold that thought while you do whatever you need to do – Thanks! I’ll try to be quick. 

Real talk, Philosophy vs Work is a bit of a passion project, but it’s primarily a format for me to hash out the ideas and the organization for an eventual book on critical theory of work and meaningful work as an ethical basis for political action. In order to do that, I need two things: first, time. I need time to do the research, writing, and production of the podcast, and that means the podcast eventually needs to generate enough revenue to enable me to take time away from simply chasing money, whether it’s corporate work, voiceover, bartending, or what have you. If you value the content and you’re in a position to do so, please consider supporting the channel. Subscriptions can be made on the Philosophy vs Work Patreon for as little as $2 US per month, or on podcast webpage philosophyvswork.buzzsprout.com ranging 3-10 dollars per month. Alternatively, one of the best ways to support the project is to comment, like, follow, etc. on whatever platform you’re listening on. Engaging with the podcast on the platform is totally free and, most importantly, it’s the metric that tells the platform people are actively engaging with the content, which raises the content in the platform’s algorithm. More engagement means more people getting to see the content while they’re scrolling through other options, and that’s how we grow the audience. 

Okay me, I’m done, you can return to the philosophy stuff now. 

Okay, so lets dig into Marxism and Productivism; which will also illustrate, I believe, why Marxism – as much as Conservatives love using it as some kind of boogey man – is fundamentally at odds with totalitarian, Soviet Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, and much of what has historically been purported to be “Socialism” and “Communism” in the American media, in American schools, and certainly as according to the majority of American politicians, Right and Left, as well as the authoritarian and totalitarian parties and states that have laid claim, nominally, to Marxism, Socialism, and Communism, in a rhetorical effort to attract the support of the populace. 

If we’re supposed to be looking at the refusal of work and antiwork politics, why are we doing this? Why look into different lines of Marxist theory? We need to address the genealogy of conflict within Marxism in order to focus what the Refusal of Work ought and can do. Why? I’ll put it this way, I’m a fan of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but the reformist policies of both ultimately leave us in slightly better versions of the subjugated position we’re in now. Neither offer a vision of an economy of truly free labor (as Lincoln had put it). The struggle for better wages is just better payment for the slave. There is nothing truly liberatory in either’s visions of the future. And as to everyone further to the right, including the politically centrist, economically conservative, Liberal Democrats, as they say in the place of my birth… fuhgedaboudit. The lot, right and left, are fully committed to the status quo of a capitalist economy built on obligatory work, alienation, exploitation, and wage slavery. 

A well-paid slave is still a slave. Yet, the struggle for better work, whether you want to call it socially necessary labor, meaningful work, poiesis, etc., without bringing an end to obligatory work, is simply chasing better work for the slave. Or, put another way, there is no Freedom to work without Freedom from work, and that is the utopian vision we’re chasing.

Weeks cites French cultural philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard, author of Simulacra and Simulation, among many others, “most [succinct] and certainly most [provocative]” “criticism of productivism in Marxism…” Notes Weeks, citing Baudrillard, “a specter haunts the revolutionary imagination: the phantom of production. Everywhere it sustains an unbridled romanticism of productivity.” 

Personally, I’d note productivism isn’t the only specter haunting the revolutionary imagination; thinking back to Barthes’ semiotics of myth, the idea of Marxism is itself burdened by historical and political baggage, like McCarthyism and the Red Scare, that makes things all the more difficult for many in America to even imagine anything other than capitalism; cutting themselves off from the wealth of knowledge in Marx’ analysis and Marxist thought before even considering any economic or political project regarding work, labor, wages, class, and so on.

Weeks continues, “As he sees it, historical materialism reproduces political economy’s fetishism of labor, the evidence of Marxism’s complicity can be found in a naturalized ontology of labor and a utopian vision of a future in which this essence is fully realized in the form of an unhindered productivity…” which Baudrillard centers in the “sanctification of work.” Baudrillard’s criticism of Marxism isn’t, however, a defense of capitalism; rather, it’s a condemnation of productivism, which he notes Marxism fails to overcome, remaining, instead, as committed to it as capitalism, “its inability to break from the work values that have developed alongside and in support of Western capitalist social formations, [which] represents a failure of both critical analysis and utopian imagination.”

“The residues of the traditional ethics of work also appear,” Weeks claims, “in the ways that the language of creativity is in some instances deployed as a synonym for labor,” think Arendt and Poiesis, “at least when it has the effect of not only selectively expanding what counts as labor but also elevating its status as a worthy human practice.” She continues, “Thus… by describing postcapitalist society in terms of a liberation of creative activity, even nonwork can be imagined as a disciplined practice directed toward a laudable goal [say Aristotle’s ‘noble leisure’] and distanced from something that risks association with the sin of sloth.”

The ideology we need to keep in our sites is productivism, which, Weeks highlights, takes two forms in the Marxist tradition; what she calls Socialist Modernization – the pursuit of liberation from exploitation, a recovering or redistribution of the means of production to the working class – and Socialist Humanism; a recentering of the worker to work in an attempt to end alienation; the latter, I’ll note, I find myself sympathetic to, though with some critical differences.  

Socialist Modernization. “The utopia of modernization,” writes Weeks, “constitutes the characterization of a post-capitalist alternative most popularly ascribed to Marxism. In this vision, communism is equated with the full realization of the productive potential of the forces of production developed under capitalism. The critique of capital, in this version, centers on the problematic of exploitation and the contradiction between the forces and relations of production. Exploitation proceeds from the private ownership of productive forces and consists of the private appropriation of the fruits of surplus labor.” After citing the direct link between this standpoint and the argument put forward by Marx and Engles in the Communist Manifesto, she continues, “Communism, in contrast, would democratize the economic relations of ownership and control. The relations of production – class relations – would be thus radically transfigured, while the means of production and the labor process itself would merely be unfettered.”

If this sounds at all familiar to you, and it should, it’s because this rendition is at the ideological root of what’s typically been dubbed State Socialism; the problem isn’t work, the problem is private property, and only the State, as the representative of the People, can save us. Even though there are some merits to this argument – unfettered production with both product and profit left in the complete control of the few is a recipe for economic disaster for the many – the political legacy of Modernization, State Socialism, is inextricable from the political legacy of Leninism, and Lenin’s idea of ‘transition’ – the term Berardi hates so much, recall the last episode. 

Sidenote, Communism interpreted as unfettered production draws an interesting inverse parallel to Neoliberalism’s aim of unfettered Markets; and having arisen during the Cold War and in the immediate aftermath of the political trauma of the Vietnam War, for Democratic and Republican politicians and think tanks, in the US, it’s impossible to consider Neoliberalism without considering productivist Communism as a reason for its existence. Which also connects to what I see as a problematic relationship between the aims of Neoliberalism, which require international free trade (which Trump is adamantly and ironically opposed to) in order to supply cheap, unlimited consumer goods, sourced from systems of limited production, and market them to an unlimited consumer base that’s otherwise limited by both populations and wages; and the product of Neoliberalism, large scale consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few, the recuperation of a wealth based aristocracy, which directly benefits the likes of Trump and his allies. Granted, based on his actions and policies, there’s a good chance Trump sees himself less as a capitalist and Republican, and more as a feudal land baron turn King. 

 Okay, so let’s take a look at Socialism and why it might have needed “modernization,” even over a century ago. As stated earlier, this is one version of applying Marx to Socialism – Marx was not the founder of Socialism, he was both a Socialist party member and an outspoken critic of it as a movement he generally sympathized with, but otherwise found to be too conservative in its aims, a stance I totally understand.

Socialism developed in the early 1800s from works by utopian thinkers such as Welsh political philosopher Robert Owen, who’s work precursors the humanist side after Marx, French philosophers Charles Fourier and positivist social critic (i.e. early sociologist, along with Compte and Durkheim) Henri de Saint-Simon, whose views favor the productivist, work-as-dignity and work-as-pleasure side (who, it needs to be noted, also had views that favored, for Fourier, feminism (he’s attributed with the original use of the term) and women’s rights, but also ‘economic’ antisemitism and, for Saint-Simon, euro-centrism, colonialism, and racism). Saint-Simon also notably divided the economy into two classes, the industrial class, those that work and centering Industry at the core of his philosophy, and the idle class, those who make no economic contribution to society. The industrial class included waged workers, manufacturers, scientists, bankers, merchants, and basically anyone that did something to advance creation, innovation, production, and distribution; whereas the idle class include the wealthy aristocracy, landlords, (you know, what Republicans in the US today call “job creators”), the clergy, and the military – all of whom are essentially parasites that live on the work of others. 

I’m going to swing back to Weeks now, but we’ll be coming back to the early days of Socialist thought, in the upcoming section on History, as well as the later Marx’ “Critique of the Gotha Program” (where you find his famous phrase, ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs,’ as well as his demand, formative to the likes of Lenin, for the “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” Now, this statement is often taken broadly out of context. Marx follows this demand and description of the transition period from capitalist to communist society as revolving around a “democratic republic” of the working class, liberated from a “police-guarded, military despotism” the rules over the people rather than being of and by the people. An argument that should sound pretty damn familiar to pretty much all Americans.)

Weeks notes modernization is typically associated with the history of state socialism.

Important distinction here, since this seems to be a trending conservative buzz-term; this is the history of state ownership and state organization of the means of production,  most  commonly associated with Leninism, not Nazism. The German National Socialist party (NSDAP) was not the same party Marx was addressing regarding the Gotha Program, a plan to unify two parties of the German Social Democratic movement into a single German Social Democratic Party (SDAP). The NSDAP had previously been known as the German Worker’s Party, 1919 to 1920, prior to their recruiting Hitler and appointing him leader in 1921. This party was, from its inception, far right and fundamentally opposed to both the liberal reforms of the Weimar government (post World War 1) and almost rabidly opposed to Marxism and Communism. Notably, Hitler’s move in these early days, as far as swaying the public, was to oppose Marx’ ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ with a rhetoric of identity politics, harping that the German people were German first and members of whatever class or religion second – it would be a little while before the stark antisemitism became policy. ‘Germany First’ was a rallying cry against the German liberals and socialists, the elites and globalists, who were to blame for Germany’s post-war economic woes. Well, doesn’t that sound familiar?

Lenin’s aim in modernization was an effort to achieve Marxist Communism, through revolution and transition – and taking full advantage of the “dictatorship” part while ignoring the “democratic republic” part. In contrast to Hitler, who took advantage of working-class socialist sympathies to achieve totalitarianism under his sole control, Lenin sought to take advantage of authoritarianism to achieve a Communist society; but, well, we all know how well that turned out. 

As previously mentioned, this period of Leninist transition is the sentiment Berardi hates so much (and, I think, for multiple good reasons), as it relies on both this intensification of capitalist production and a willingness to engage in authoritarian dictatorship – which, I believe, following the text, is not what Marx was calling for. We’ll revisit this when we get to Marx properly, it’s too much to unpack just now. 

The modernization project, in a twisting of classical liberal ideologies of open markets –or today an inversion of neoliberal ideologies of unfettered markets – the modernization project, in the transition period, calls for a strictly planned and government regulated market to yield unfettered production and through the elimination of scarcity (and a willingness to commit all of society to obligatory work) the creation of a state of superabundance with the State as guarantor that no private entity can hoard the benefits and impose some artificial scarcity. 

Interestingly, Lenin’s ideal model for the implementation of this economy is Taylorism. Lenin was fascinated by Taylor’s positivist approach to process management and thought to model the Transition on Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, the same text that has so enamored so much of American business over the last century. Though Lenin was an advocate for Taylorism, as a practice it never really saw the light of day in Soviet Russia as the soviets – the local, state, regional, etc. governing councils that made up the pyramidal centralized government (imagine a mirrored version of our federal government where power isn’t shared between governing bodies, but delegated down, not unlike the way most large corporations operate today) – never implemented them, preferring to tell workers to increase production without making any process improvements, as process improvements would upset the ideology of the soviet worker as superior (inevitably collapsing into a system in which no real gains were ever made, but gains were always reported up the chain anyway – this is Stalin’s ‘Socialist Realism’). 

“Nowhere in this utopia of Modernization more clearly prefigured than in Lenin’s fascination with and admiration of Taylorism, and his insistence on the need for an iron work discipline [my emphasis] to combat petit bourgeois laziness, selfishness, and anarchy.” Wow, swap out that “petit bourgeois” for ‘kids today’ or ‘gen Z’ and Lenin might be able to find himself a place alongside Republican Boomers, or Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk.

An interesting alternative though is laid out in the very recent book, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. In it, they call for American government policy, or a suite of policies really, that takes advantage of state economic planning and capitalism to produce a society of abundance rather than scarcity – they don’t approach socialism or modernization in any form like Weeks does, but as their argument is distinctly productivist, I think it fits here nicely.  The authors’ chief complaints are that, 1. The policy positions of both conservatives and liberals today focus too much on preserving an economy built on scarcity; and 2. That many of our governmental problems today stem from the fact that policies put in place to resolve problems in the 30s or 50s or 70s and so on, addressed those problems, but a. they no longer reflect today’s problems and b. they’ve become part of the modern problems themselves. The authors’ alternative promotes substantial investment in scientific and technological research and development, housing construction, green energy, sustainable agriculture, and the clearing of bureaucratic hurdles put in place, by both the left and the right, that either preserve scarcity or hinder production, or both, however well intended those earlier policies may have been. Personally, I find quite a lot to disagree with in their argument, but they do offer a practical, if productivist capitalist, utopian vision that is certainly miles ahead of anything currently being voiced by the ‘Liberal’ left in the US. 

Weeks also points out how the modernization approach is fundamentally flawed from a Marxist perspective. Notes Weeks, “the problem with this version of the productivist vision is that it is founded upon an insufficient critique of capital, its vision of an alternative preserves too many of capitalism’s structures and values. [Sidenote, a criticism I’ve voiced of some Feminist arguments that essentially aim to swap Patriarchy for Matriarchy, rather than offering a truly different vision of a future based on cooperation and empathy rather than competition and greed, that, I think, we need] This tribute to proletarian labor and to the progressive development of productive forces replicates the fundamental attributes of capitalist society; in this account the working class inherits and carries on the historical role of the bourgeoisie… an endorsement of economic growth, industrial progress, and the work ethic… an official Soviet version of the political economist’s parable about the ethically deserving and undeserving, but with the class positions reversed: the worthy industrious worker and the useless lazy nobleman.” She also notes this version fails to account for Marx’ condemnation of the mindless, repetitive (machinic) nature of factory work and the dehumanizing effect it has on workers, as well as Marx’ insistence that “freedom requires a shortening of the working day.” 

Alright, we’re going to break here for now and pick up with the other side of the productivist equation, Socialist Humanism, which aims to address the problem of alienation over exploitation and leans mostly on earlier writings by Marx, next time. I haven’t forgotten about the pending Happy Hour conversation, it’s just been challenging to get this one scheduled. But if you enjoyed that format the last time, I’m still looking at doing more. Let me know your thoughts on the format, or anything else we’ve discussed. 

‘til next time. 

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