Its wants are supplied, to be sure, but not in measured dole related to its activities. The exertions of the heart bear relation to the need of the organism to which it belongs, not to its own appetite. If you have to run, your heart works harder; it had no need of extra work, but you had, and, being an organ, it performed the work.
Man’s work is called for by the social demands. Society needs Commerce, and Commerce is developed. Society needs Art, and Art is developed. But man, being a self-conscious individual, had to be convinced from without as well as urged from within, else he stoutly refused to perform his social service. “Why should I,” he asks, “if it does not benefit me? A man works only to get something.” Before he had got even this far in formulating his objection to work, he was forced to it, as we have seen, by the slave system and effectually coerced. To meet this later attitude of refusal he was forced to it by the wage system, and effectually coerced as before. In the first case the anti-social results of that form of labour have led to its being discarded, and in the second case we are rapidly approaching the same conclusion. Social service performed under the persuasion of self-interest is accompanied by so many deleterious and anti-social phenomena that it is high time we adopted a wiser system.
When exertion is recognised as a racial necessity and a high individual pleasure, there is no longer any weight to the first clause of the Want theory. When it is shown that our desires are gratified by the exertion of others exclusively, there is no longer any weight to the second. And when it is shown that the required “exertion” is not an exertion at all, but a relief, a mere letting off of the social steam pressure, the Want theory begins to need a historian to explain it. The only really confusing element lies in the system of exchange now in use, the wage system, and will be taken up in the chapter on Distribution.
X: THE NATURE OF WORK (II)
Summary
Life a verb. Vegetable life processes, animal and social. Work is human life. A sick society. Transmission of energy, pleasure in collective sensation. Pleasure in specific function. Pain of malposition and mal-nutrition. Recapitulation. Work is making, not taking. Squaw and hunter. Maternal energy. Bee. The motherised male. Short circuit of individual action. Production of food. Common defence. The social base and ensuing variation. Attendant evils. Personal consequences and social. Social treason. Sin of common carriers. Contrast between effect of industry and war. Agriculture and peace. Commerce and honesty and justice. Work is altruistic. Steps of development. Female origin of Work. True Human Work has no sex connotation. Male belligerence in industry. The world and the home. Thief and pauper. Production collective. The Social traitor. Work is giving out, not taking in. Slavery an essential transition system, also wagery. Master, Employer, Co-operator. Shame of work based on slavery and self-interest. Social productivity has allowed disease. American attitude toward work. Conservation of energy. Work must not waste force, organic action does not. Accumulated energy must be discharged. Social energy enormous. Normal work an easy discharge. Abnormal work injurious. Social evolution in ease and happiness. Effect of false concepts. Child’s delight in work. Organic action agreeable or unconscious. Conditions of normal work.
X
THE NATURE OF WORK (II)
Life is a verb, not a noun. Life is living, living is doing, life is that which is done by the organism.
The living of a tree consists in the action of the roots in obtaining food; of the leaves in obtaining air; of the sap in circulating, distributing these goods; and in the processes of reproduction. The life of an animal is more complex. He has a somewhat similar internal mechanism; he breathes, circulates, and reproduces; but with him the fumbling root-tip has become a paw, a mouth, a whole group of related members wherewith to meet his needs; he has more to do to find his food than just to poke in the dark. Living, for an animal, involves many interesting activities, and those activities are his life.
The life of Society is higher and wider yet. Here are the separate animal constituents whose life processes must be kept going, and here are the wholly new social life processes to be carried on. Human life involves the performance of the complex social life processes. The plant has poking, absorbing, circulating, breathing, and reproducing to do. That is plant life. The animal similarly circulates, breathes, and reproduces, but he “pokes” in a much more elaborate manner, developing also new methods of offence and defence in maintaining these essential functions. That is animal life. Man, as an animal, breathes, circulates, and reproduces in humble pursuance of previous methods, but as a social being not only has his nutritive process become of enormous organic complexity, but there have appeared also vast and subtle developments of special functions hitherto unknown: industry, trade, commerce, art, science, education, government,—all that we call Work.
In this development is human life. I do not mean that it is essential to human life, it is human life. If the gathering and circulating of nutrition, the absorption of air, the blossoming and fruition of a tree are “essential to the tree’s life,” pray, what remains as “the life” of the tree to which they are essential? You may truly say that breathing, circulating, and reproducing are “essential” to an animal’s life; that life, as distinct from other lives, being the more special activities he has developed. So with the human creature. It is essential to his animal life that he breathe, circulate, and reproduce; it is essential to his human life also that he perform enough varied physical activity to keep him in good form; but it is his human life to be “doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief,” or whatever is his department in the social economy.