Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

But well we know that it is not! Bitterly and deeply we know that it is not. Some malign force is working at cross-purposes to clog and check and divert this social circulation, and produce the morbid conditions we know so well—the congestion of supplies in some quarters, with the ensuing train of social diseases, and the lack of supplies in other quarters, with another train of diseases consequent.

If there is one conspicuous fact in social economics, it is this peculiar perversion of our distribution system. Those streams of coal and wheat and oil are mysteriously checked at various points, they accumulate where they are not wanted, they filter, slow and scant, in insufficient driblets where there is most need. They are violently pumped out in sudden jerks, they sullenly retreat and coagulate for long, slow periods. What is it that ails our all-important processes of distribution? Merely the human mind. Only our superstitions. Simply the action of false concepts upon conduct again, our old enemies, the Ego concept and the Want theory, gaining headway in these vast currents of modern industry, and doing in large conspicuous ways the same evil they always did, less visibly. From the very beginning, the men through whom these great processes must needs be carried on, have been labouring under a delusion. They supposed that all this commerce and exchange was due to their individual exertions, and that the purpose of it all was to pay them. Better proof of the elastic capacity of the human brain could hardly be asked.

That a man carrying a pack on his back should say, “I do it,” is natural; that he should still say, “I do it,” when he puts the pack upon a mule and drives the beast unwillingly along, is still natural. But that this “I” should swell and swell from mule train to train of cars, from canoe to Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, is marvellous. Now that such a myriad “we” do all this work for such a myriad “us,” it would seem as if the various component “I’s” might have been lost in the shuffle before now. Not a bit.

Acting under the Ego concept, with a sense of justice and of ownership dating from the Ego period, we have arduously bent our minds to the development of a system of laws more elaborately ramified than the twigs of a tree; to follow and preserve the individual rights along every broadening branch of social growth. Governed by the Want theory and its derivatives, we have planted an arbitrary system of inter-individual exchange, like a set of interlocking toll-gates, along every inch of these great roads of progress.

Let us analyse again this group of allied errors, the Want theory. “Work is an expenditure of energy by an individual man whereby to obtain something for the gratification of his wants.” This rests on the assumption that what the man needs to gratify his wants is to be had only by his working. As we know that he does not himself manufacture the articles needed to gratify his wants, but that these articles all and several are made by other people; we assume further that each man owns what he makes, and will not give it up to another without value received—“If a man will not work, neither shall he eat.” And as the supplies of the world are assumed to belong to the existing inhabitants in private ownership, each newcomer, unless inheriting a share in the privately owned world, is expected to “work” before he receives anything.

Confronted by the glaring fact that a new human creature cannot work before he receives anything, but must be supplied with many social products for many years before he can produce in return, we then fall back on the parent and say, “the new human being shall receive nothing from Society except so much as his father is able to earn,” i. e., pay for in work. That system of supplying the young by the unaided activities of the parent, which we find among animals, we assume to be the best for the human race, and so the final distribution of social products is filtered through, not the consuming capacity, but the “earning” capacity of individuals.

If the man with ten children is but a low-grade workman, his earning capacity being but $1.50 a day at our rating, his children receive from Society less than fifteen cents’ worth of supplies each. Their consuming capacity is naturally much greater, but under our assumption that the father represents the family as an economic unit, and that the family shall be restricted in consumption within his power of production, the children are thus supplied with the equivalent of one-tenth an individual’s output.

In some ways we have recognised the mischievous results of this method of distribution, and have begun to supply some of the necessities of life on a wiser plan, as in our system of public education, where we frankly reverse the position. We therein say: “Children are members of Society. The maintenance and progress of Society require that its members be educated to some degree. This degree of common education the individual earning power of the parent cannot provide, but the collective funds of the community can.” So we publicly distribute education, and even enforce it—or try to—on the clear ground that the output of the future citizen depends on his income in youth, and that Society cannot afford to leave that income to be measured by a fraction of a low-grade worker’s output.

Some strictly logical and scientific-minded thinkers do indeed object to this free public education, maintaining that since effort is only made to satisfy wants, therefore, if you satisfy any of man’s wants, you decrease by so much his efforts, you lower the output of Society.

The advocates of free public education, though still clinging to their idols in other departments of life, maintain that education is a different matter, and point with honest pride to the results, showing that a publicly educated community does produce more and behave better than one wherein each man must provide as he can for his children. But in spite of this patent proof they still refuse to fairly admit the new principle involved, and to fairly give up their fallacious old one.