Work is the most prominent feature of human life. So large a majority of human beings spend most of their lives at work that the few diseased and defective members of society who do not need scarcely be considered. As usual, the prominence and constant insistence on the facts about work have prevented our thinking much about it, and, when we did think, our mistaken basic concepts made us think wrong. Our general attitude toward work varies somewhat in accordance with race, place, and time, but is traceable, easily enough, to certain general root ideas.
One line of racial feeling on this subject has been most fully and ably treated by Veblen in his “Theory of the Leisure Class.” He shows how labour, being first performed by women and then by conquered opponents made slaves, was despised by the early mind, and how, further, the ability not to work, involving power to make others work for you, soon became an ingrained principle of pride; further, how the leisure class, an aborted part of the body politic, has preserved these errors of the early mind and added heavily to them by the increment of tradition and long association. This accounts satisfactorily enough for a large share of the popular feeling about work.
It is perhaps as part of this feeling that the ancient Hebrew religion, postulated by a people of pastoral ideals and Oriental temperament, takes the extreme ground that work is a curse, a punishment, visited upon man for his sins; and that Eden behind us or Heaven before us has its main attraction in ceaseless idleness.
This mischievous error, incorporated in so important a religion, and forced upon the human mind for so many centuries, has done incalculable harm. In vain have later and wiser religionists protested that “labour is prayer,” a divine curse is not to be whiffled away by any such pretty phrase as that. It is not enough to receive a new truth, you must discharge the old lie, if your mind is to work straight.
Our attitude toward Work rests also, however, upon other errors than these, the most fundamental of which are the Ego concept and the Pay concept. Under the first we relate our ideas and sentiments about work to the individual, in which position no understanding is possible; we might as well try to understand mastication in relation to a tooth. Under the second, we think only of the “reward of labour”; and have carried this absurdity to its logical height in classing the industries of the world under the phrase of “getting a living,” as if the maintenance of the worker were the object of the work. This again is as absurd as if we believed that chewing was done in order to maintain teeth.
When we accept the organic nature of society, the whole proposition changes, we then see all varieties of work to be social functions, performed in the interests of the whole; and that the maintenance of the individual normally depends, not on a reward for the value or amount of the work he does, but on the general health of the social body and his having proper access to its currents of nutrition. Yet even this perception will not wholly free us while we are still muddled by the pay theory, still holding that a man or a society only works in order to get something, and that, in justice, there must be a return for the effort expended.
This common assumption is accepted as basic by our political economists, and their further theories, systems, and alleged laws all rest on it. It is called the Want Theory. Fully and fairly stated the common definition of work, based on the want theory, is this: Work is an expenditure of energy by the individual in order to obtain the means to gratify a desire. This is almost universally believed. We accept it so fully that one of the steps taken by missionaries to arouse industrial energy in savages is to make them want things. As further manifestation of our belief in it we hold that if people were supplied with anything they did not work for, did not previously expend energy to get, they would, of course, cease to work. On this ground, honestly and logically held, every step toward free public provision for popular need has been opposed.
Before going further in discussion of our common errors, let us lay down the main thesis of this book, advanced as the true theory of work.
It is this: Work is an expenditure of energy by Society in the fulfilment of its organic functions. It is performed by highly specialised individuals under press of social energy, and is to them an end in itself, a condition of their existence and their highest joy and duty.
The difference between the two positions is best seen in studying organic action in lower forms. Consider, for instance, the action of the heart in our bodies. Here is a small muscular machine, which keeps up a violent and continuous activity for some seventy years. Why? and How? Why should this organ work so hard and so incessantly? My stomach gets some rest—my legs get more—but this member is always at work. What want does he gratify by it? Is he any better paid than leg or stomach?