Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

This reverses the whole proposition. It is no longer a matter of the individual workman seeking to satisfy his wants à la Bear. It is Society seeking to raise the productive value of its integers by carefully supplying those forces which produce more and better work. Quite without knowing it Society does this to a considerable extent, hence the working value of a member of an advanced society is greater than that of a member of a low society; but because we have not known the real laws of human production, we have continued to interpret the whole field of social activity in terms of individual competition.

The supply of a man’s needs we have tried to limit strictly to his earning power, refusing to observe that there was no ratio whatever between what a man needs and what he can do—unless, indeed, an inverse one. The fact that a man, well started in lines of work suited to him, will produce continuously long after all his needs are supplied we have tried to account for by assuming new needs as the necessary incentives. Nothing could be clearer—to our view. If a man works only in order to supply his needs, then a given man who does work worth a thousand times as much as another man’s must of course need a thousand times as much. He must, because there is no other reason for his working. And if the working power of the average man shows large and general increase, it is only to be accounted for by shining ranks of hitherto undreamed-of needs, which were evolved to lead him on!

So the missionary, acting on this theory, tries to rouse the contented savage to want things, holding that attitude to be a productive one; and the economist, satisfied with his theory, never looks to see if there is any observable connection between want and work, in race, class, or individual. In reductio ad absurdum the Want theory comes to this. Man works to supply wants. As the act of working does not supply wants, this involves another clause; man works to get wealth to supply wants. And this, if a real law of nature, involves some inevitable connection between the clauses: work must produce wealth and wealth must supply want. Also, if a real law, there must be some proportion between these clauses, the less the want the less the work, the greater the want the greater the work, with the same proportion in the “wealth” which is the intermediate factor understood.

This would make the proposition: A given amount of want urges to an equal amount of work which secures the desired wealth; or, Want equals Work and Work equals Wealth.

If this be so we shall find in society those who want the most do the most work, and those who do the most work have the most wealth. Poverty would be a healthy state, inevitably developing into wealth. Is this the fact? Hardly. What is the fact? This: that man does the most work who is best able to do it, and likes it most.

The way to make people work is to make them able and willing, strong, skilful, ambitious, enthusiastic. When we wish to develop horses to work more and better than previous horses, we do not seek to attain that end by cutting off their oats. The power to work comes from the energy already supplied, not the hypothetic energy of a future reward.

The “pay” comes first; not as payment, but as investment. A man’s work is his payment to Society for value received, and he has to receive it before he can return it. The conscious attitude of the worker should be that of gratitude, of a proud and lavish return for the rich supply received from infancy; his unconscious attitude one of irresistible pressure, discharge of energy. Each of us owes the world our best, because to it we are indebted for all we are and have. In personal intercourse we all know the difference between services done for love, or from a sense of honourable obligation, and services done merely for pay. We know the dignity and honour of the first attitude, the meanness of the second. And yet we prefer to have the whole world’s vital processes degraded and minimised to the level of that hireling service, rather than elevated and multiplied as the limitless outpouring of richly developed members of society.

To which the Want theorist replies: “It is not what we prefer, but what is,” to which again I answer—It is not. The facts of sociology do not bear out the Want theory. The true place of that theory is in the stage next to primitive slavery. The first compulsion to co-ordinate effort was force and fear and pain. Only the slave in danger of death could be made to work. The next compulsion to the still unsocialised ego was that of hireling self-restraint, of withheld food. Observe that this is a purely arbitrary and social condition, involving the ownership of that food by someone else. Primitive man ate without working for many thousands of years, and does yet in many a favoured isle.

He simply picks his food off trees, or hunts and fishes for it, even fights for it. But he does not work for it at that stage of social evolution, much preferring starvation. Later on, being no longer a free agent, the food being forcibly detained until he worked, why, work he did, under the action of such pressure as he could then feel. In that period of evolution when only cruel slavery made men work, the thought that they would ever work in the comparative freedom of the contract system would have been scouted as wildly visionary and Utopian. We can see something of this among our own freedmen, members of a much earlier social status, forcibly incorporated with our advanced body and failing to respond at once to the same stimuli.

Under compulsion they worked. Free, and under no compulsion save self-interest, they do not work as industriously as further advanced races. This does not prove that self-interest is less powerful than compulsion, or that slave labour is better than wage labour, but merely that the negro race is less socialised than the Anglo-Saxon. And we, in order to aid in his social development, are learning to supply him with the social stimuli he needs. Wage labour was a useful stage in economic evolution, just as slave labour was, but the incentive of self-interest is no more final than that of compulsion.