Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The miser merely robs society to a certain degree, the employer of much labour for his own gratification robs it by so much more, and beyond that comes the steady deterioration of an illegitimately directed product, a true poison, with the progressive breakdown of the tissues ensuing.

This effect on Art is quite plain in history. The artist doing great work for the public grows and serves the world. The artist catering to an employer does not grow, but deteriorates. The work is not only withheld from Society, to which it belongs, but is lowered in kind. Art is always corrupted and lowered by the patronage of luxurious wealth. So is manufacture. No plea of “furnishing employment” to the artist can cover this injury to the world.

The artist should be working for the world which made him instead of putting his social product in one man’s hands, and the work he does should be noble and should improve, as it cannot in that position of personal dependence. The value of an artist to the world is that he shall do as good work as he can for as many people as he can reach; it is of no use to the world that he be “employed” on other lines, nor is it good for him.

Every worker stands in this same social relation. The value of a workman to the world is that he do the best work for the most people, not that he be “employed” to make clothes for dogs, or to wear an ostentatious livery behind a mutilated horse. Every human being is to be measured by his value to society, and the value is in his work, not in his being “employed”—or paid.

Our non-productive consumer, therefore, is unable to return to a healthy place in the world. He cannot work because he “does not have to,” and his efforts to re-distribute the wealth for his own gratification form merely a “vicious circle” of futile and injurious activity.

Now see the pitiful results. Cut off from normal connection with the living world by failure to produce, and only generating disease in his efforts to consume, the unfortunate ex-human begins to die. He may, if sufficiently wise and self-restrained, keep his body alive; members of the leisure class frequently live to a great age; but this well-preserved animal existence only allows more time to suffer from the unnatural exile. He is not part of the living world, and so falls victim to various hideous abnormalities. He dwindles and shrivels in social usefulness till, instead of a vigorous, valuable man or woman, you have the futile, inadequate creature which cannot even wait upon its own wants; or, keeping up animal health by caring for the body, he shows the deformity of his position in furious and senseless activities.

The most conspicuous feature of our leisure class is the elaborate round of purely arbitrary and unnatural activities in which they ceaselessly whirl. The only natural activities open to them, the physical, become abused and perverted in vicious excesses, and their other activities are a series of arduous games and sports, changing from age to age and year to year, the purposeless and hopeless spasms of social energy misused.

The working class, on the other hand, suffer differently. That they are underpaid is plain, that they are overworked is plain; we hear much of this of late years; what we do not hear so much of is that they suffer most from the same misunderstanding of what work is. Looking always at the Pay as the end, the Work only as a means, they labour drearily on like a blind horse in a treadmill, never seeing their real position in Society, their real duties, nor their real power. That the unproductive consumer should believe the absurdities on which his absurd position rests is comprehensible; but that the producer, not properly supplied with social nourishment, and overtaxed in the production of the very supplies he does not get enough of, should accept the basic fallacies which hold him in his even more absurd position,—this is not so comprehensible.

Perhaps what does account for it is this: that with all his labour and suffering the worker after all is Society; he is in the main performing great service; he has a right to be more contented than the ex-man who does not work. He is in the more normal position, though he does not know it; and the sociological laws are always stronger in their action than our notions. As a matter of fact the working class, which does not mean merely the “labouring class” of our present terminology, but which includes all workers with hand and brain, is the world. They are the acting factors in those processes which constitute social life.

Through all these centuries of unbelief and misbelief they have done the things which kept the world alive. They have clothed the world, fed the world, housed the world, taught the world, beautified and improved the world; yes, and have lifted it from savagery to its present level. To-day in our democracy they need only enlightenment to see a further duty to the world in a better organisation of its economic processes. Thrilled as they are by the swiftly growing current of social consciousness, conscious as they are that things are wrong, anxious as they are to set things right, they are still hindered by these economic errors of us all.