Oct 17, 2018 06:50 PM
(This post was last modified: Oct 17, 2018 06:50 PM by C C.)
https://www.thenation.com/article/what-we-do/
INTRO: . . . Over recent years, however, the definition of work has become more complicated, as a host of debates have flared up around it. What kinds of activity deserve recognition and reward, and what kinds do not? Which forms of labor create value, and which ones absorb it? Socialist feminists have long insisted that housework is work and should be paid, and a new generation of feminists have extended this insight: When women are expected to console and cheerlead in everyday life, isn’t this a kind of unpaid work? It’s certainly draining. The logic of this argument, in turn, travels from informal caregiving to the official caring industries: Why is it a teacher’s job to buy supplies for her students, instead of the responsibility of the employer? And why must a nurse exhaust herself on the job to make up for corner-cutting management decisions?
Nor are the only contested categories of work related to care labor. One finds such arguments across American society. Interns still labor in a gray zone of quasi-volunteer traineeship as much as employment. Universities claim that graduate students don’t do work, while a burgeoning campus union movement declares otherwise. Uber insists that its drivers are small-business people, not employees, as do 10 to 20 percent of other employers in America. Environmentalists call for recognition of the “services” provided by the ecosystem; some even argue that we need to acknowledge what political theorist Alyssa Battistoni calls the “work of nature.”
Naming an activity as work gives it standing. Through work, we gain entry into the powers of citizenship, the ability to participate in democratic life as valued, autonomous, and self-determining beings; recognized labor brings us into collective life. The question of what counts as work is therefore not a technical issue, but a question of who is valued, who bears rights, and who must be heard. It is, in this sense, ineluctably a political question and a question of power. Far from being determined by the market alone, the mutating definition of work tracks long-term historical changes and political struggles. If it’s difficult to maintain this perspective about our jobs as we go about them, it’s because work so often seems to be the same thing hour after hour, shift after shift, year after year: another day, another dollar. But in a larger historical context, it becomes possible to discern the constant churn in both work itself and our ideas about it.
Capturing this churn is the difficult task that historian Andrea Komlosy attempts in her new book Work: The Last 1,000 Years. Echoing David Graeber’s widely read 2011 tome Debt: The First 5,000 Years—which sought to give an account of borrowing’s place in human history in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis—Komlosy attempts the monumental task of writing a large-scale global history of labor adequate to the growing instability in how we define and participate in work. Altogether, it must be said, her task is probably even harder than Graeber’s. In one form or another, almost everybody in every society works, so there’s a lot of history to convey in a slender 272 pages.
Komlosy begins by clearing the ground. “The term ‘work,’” she explains, “encompasses both market-oriented and subsistence activities; it includes human activity for the sake of naked survival and also the satisfaction of desires for luxury or status, as well as activities for the sake of cultural representation or demonstrations of power and faith.” Within this wide category, two extraordinary changes stand out over the last millennium: the increasingly widespread distinction between work and home in space, and between labor and leisure in time. The gradual and uneven emergence of these distinctions gives Work its main narrative arc; Komlosy argues that these separations help mark our modern age. The innumerable points in history when these distinctions blur or collapse also give us a sense of how arbitrary they are.
In Europe, two traditions—the Greek and the Judeo-Christian, which eventually intermingled in the vast post-Roman world—gave shape to premodern ideas of work and defined the relationship between work and home and between labor and leisure. The Greek tradition, the product of a slave society, saw work as an unambiguous curse, fundamentally incompatible with freedom and citizenship—and therefore relegated to those considered outside the polis. The Judeo-Christian tradition upheld the possibility of redemption through labor, recasting idleness as sinful, not civic. The interplay between the two gave the West its ambiguous cultural inheritance on this question: a notion of work that could encompass both mass enslavement and the pathway to salvation; something absolutely alien to dignified and autonomous selfhood, yet also central to it. This inner tension has shaped the gradual separation of work from the worlds of home and leisure.
While Komlosy, an Austrian historian, keeps Central Europe at the heart of her narrative, she is quick to acknowledge the exclusions that might serve as a counterpoint. In many parts of the world outside Europe, “indigenous languages knew no generalized concept of work. Instead, specific names were developed for activities like hunting, farming, fishing or preparing food.” In those cases where a general concept of work did exist, it named only the harshest tasks of survival. The brute force of empire changed this, imposing what Komlosy calls “a general, market-oriented concept of work.” European conquest thus remade daily life around the world, devaluing “the reciprocal, the immediate and the gratuitous,” which had once defined many forms of human activity in the past.
Much of Komlosy’s writing about the evolving understanding of labor is illustrated with excellent examples of linguistic differences. [...] If the first half of Work is spent teasing out these kinds of linguistic and categorical distinctions and some of their historical grounding, Komlosy sets out in the second half to make good on the book’s subtitle: “The Last 1,000 Years.” Her approach is to take global cross sections in the years 1250, 1500, 1700, 1800, 1900, and the present....
MORE: https://www.thenation.com/article/what-we-do/
INTRO: . . . Over recent years, however, the definition of work has become more complicated, as a host of debates have flared up around it. What kinds of activity deserve recognition and reward, and what kinds do not? Which forms of labor create value, and which ones absorb it? Socialist feminists have long insisted that housework is work and should be paid, and a new generation of feminists have extended this insight: When women are expected to console and cheerlead in everyday life, isn’t this a kind of unpaid work? It’s certainly draining. The logic of this argument, in turn, travels from informal caregiving to the official caring industries: Why is it a teacher’s job to buy supplies for her students, instead of the responsibility of the employer? And why must a nurse exhaust herself on the job to make up for corner-cutting management decisions?
Nor are the only contested categories of work related to care labor. One finds such arguments across American society. Interns still labor in a gray zone of quasi-volunteer traineeship as much as employment. Universities claim that graduate students don’t do work, while a burgeoning campus union movement declares otherwise. Uber insists that its drivers are small-business people, not employees, as do 10 to 20 percent of other employers in America. Environmentalists call for recognition of the “services” provided by the ecosystem; some even argue that we need to acknowledge what political theorist Alyssa Battistoni calls the “work of nature.”
Naming an activity as work gives it standing. Through work, we gain entry into the powers of citizenship, the ability to participate in democratic life as valued, autonomous, and self-determining beings; recognized labor brings us into collective life. The question of what counts as work is therefore not a technical issue, but a question of who is valued, who bears rights, and who must be heard. It is, in this sense, ineluctably a political question and a question of power. Far from being determined by the market alone, the mutating definition of work tracks long-term historical changes and political struggles. If it’s difficult to maintain this perspective about our jobs as we go about them, it’s because work so often seems to be the same thing hour after hour, shift after shift, year after year: another day, another dollar. But in a larger historical context, it becomes possible to discern the constant churn in both work itself and our ideas about it.
Capturing this churn is the difficult task that historian Andrea Komlosy attempts in her new book Work: The Last 1,000 Years. Echoing David Graeber’s widely read 2011 tome Debt: The First 5,000 Years—which sought to give an account of borrowing’s place in human history in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis—Komlosy attempts the monumental task of writing a large-scale global history of labor adequate to the growing instability in how we define and participate in work. Altogether, it must be said, her task is probably even harder than Graeber’s. In one form or another, almost everybody in every society works, so there’s a lot of history to convey in a slender 272 pages.
Komlosy begins by clearing the ground. “The term ‘work,’” she explains, “encompasses both market-oriented and subsistence activities; it includes human activity for the sake of naked survival and also the satisfaction of desires for luxury or status, as well as activities for the sake of cultural representation or demonstrations of power and faith.” Within this wide category, two extraordinary changes stand out over the last millennium: the increasingly widespread distinction between work and home in space, and between labor and leisure in time. The gradual and uneven emergence of these distinctions gives Work its main narrative arc; Komlosy argues that these separations help mark our modern age. The innumerable points in history when these distinctions blur or collapse also give us a sense of how arbitrary they are.
In Europe, two traditions—the Greek and the Judeo-Christian, which eventually intermingled in the vast post-Roman world—gave shape to premodern ideas of work and defined the relationship between work and home and between labor and leisure. The Greek tradition, the product of a slave society, saw work as an unambiguous curse, fundamentally incompatible with freedom and citizenship—and therefore relegated to those considered outside the polis. The Judeo-Christian tradition upheld the possibility of redemption through labor, recasting idleness as sinful, not civic. The interplay between the two gave the West its ambiguous cultural inheritance on this question: a notion of work that could encompass both mass enslavement and the pathway to salvation; something absolutely alien to dignified and autonomous selfhood, yet also central to it. This inner tension has shaped the gradual separation of work from the worlds of home and leisure.
While Komlosy, an Austrian historian, keeps Central Europe at the heart of her narrative, she is quick to acknowledge the exclusions that might serve as a counterpoint. In many parts of the world outside Europe, “indigenous languages knew no generalized concept of work. Instead, specific names were developed for activities like hunting, farming, fishing or preparing food.” In those cases where a general concept of work did exist, it named only the harshest tasks of survival. The brute force of empire changed this, imposing what Komlosy calls “a general, market-oriented concept of work.” European conquest thus remade daily life around the world, devaluing “the reciprocal, the immediate and the gratuitous,” which had once defined many forms of human activity in the past.
Much of Komlosy’s writing about the evolving understanding of labor is illustrated with excellent examples of linguistic differences. [...] If the first half of Work is spent teasing out these kinds of linguistic and categorical distinctions and some of their historical grounding, Komlosy sets out in the second half to make good on the book’s subtitle: “The Last 1,000 Years.” Her approach is to take global cross sections in the years 1250, 1500, 1700, 1800, 1900, and the present....
MORE: https://www.thenation.com/article/what-we-do/
