Screening Response #4

Hi there so this is a communications class called “Critical studies in Advertising and Consumer culture” and for this you will need to Watch the first 30 minutes of American Factory

https://thoughtmaybe.com/american-factory/

Why did the previous factory close in Ohio? Describe the circumstances and the impact. What replaced it and what difficulties did it encounter? Provide details from the film.

Apply the reading  ” Work, consumerism and the new poor. By Zygmunt Bauman”to the film.

COMS 3308B
Screening Response #4
Watch the first 30 minutes of American Factory (posted on Brightspace in the Inclusions and
Exclusions module). Respond to the questions. Submit by Sunday, MARCH 2ND by 11 pm on the
Dropbox.
1. Why did the previous factory close in Ohio? Describe the circumstances and the impact.
What replaced it and what difficulties did it encounter? Provide details from the film.
2. Apply the Bauman reading to the film.
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
Introduction to the first edition
The poor will be always with us: this much we can learn from popular
wisdom. What popular wisdom is not as confident and outspoken about is
the tricky question of how the poor are made to be poor and come to be
seen as poor, and how much the way they are made and seen depends on
the way we all – ordinary people, neither rich nor poor – live our daily
lives and praise or deprecate the fashion in which we and the others live
them.
This is a regrettable omission: not just because the poor need and
deserve all the attention we may give them, but also because it so happens
that it is in the image of the poor that we tend to invest our hidden fears
and anxieties, and so looking closely on the way we do this may tell us
quite a few important things about our own condition. This book attempts
therefore to answer these ‘how’ questions, and so to tell the often overlooked, glossed over or wilfully concealed part of the story of modern
poverty. While attempting to find such answers, it may also add a bit to our
self-knowledge.
The poor will be always with us, but what it means to be poor depends
on the kind of ‘us’ they are ‘with’. It is not the same to be poor in a society
which needs every single adult member to engage in productive labour as it
is to be poor in a society which, thanks to the enormous powers accumulated by centuries of labour, may well produce everything needed
without the participation of a large and growing section of its members. It
is one thing to be poor in a society of producers and universal employment;
it is quite a different thing to be poor in a society of consumers, in which
life-projects are built around consumer choice rather than work, professional skills or jobs. If ‘being poor’ once derived its meaning from the
condition of being unemployed, today it draws its meaning primarily from
the plight of a flawed consumer. This is one difference which truly makes a
Bauman, Zygmunt.. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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2
Work, consumerism and the new poor
difference to the way living in poverty is experienced and to the chances
and prospects of redemption from its misery.
This book attempts to trace this change which took place over the
duration of modern history, and to make an inventory of its consequences.
On the way, it also tries to consider to what extent the well-remembered
and tested means of fighting back the advancing poverty and mitigating its
hardships are fit (or unfit, as the case may be) to grasp and tackle the
problems of poverty in its present form.
The first chapter recalls the origins of the work ethic, which from the
beginning of modern times was hoped to attract the poor to regular factory
work, to eradicate poverty and assure social peace – all in one go. In
practice, it served to train and discipline people, instilling in them the
obedience necessary to make the new factory regime work.
The story told in the second chapter is of the gradual yet relentless
passage from the early to the later stage of modern society: from a ‘society
of producers’ to a ‘society of consumers’, and accordingly from a society
guided by the work ethic to one ruled by the aesthetic of consumption. In
the society of consumers, mass production does not require any more mass
labour and so the poor, once a ‘reserve army of labour’, are re-cast as
‘flawed consumers’. This leaves them without a useful social function –
actual or potential – with far-reaching consequences for the social standing
of the poor and their chances of improvement.
The third chapter traces the rise and fall of the welfare state. It shows the
intimate connection between the transformations described in the previous
chapter, the sudden emergence of public consensus in favour of collective
responsibility for individual misfortune, and the equally abrupt emergence
of the present consensus against that principle.
The fourth chapter is concerned with the consequences of all that: a new
way in which the poor are socially produced and culturally defined. The
recently fashionable concept of the ‘underclass’ is scrutinized and found to
act mainly as a tool of the ‘power-assisted’ condensation of widely different
forms and causes of deprivation into the image of one inferior category of
people afflicted with faults common to them all and therefore presenting
one ‘social problem’.
Finally, the likely futures of the poor and poverty are considered, as well
as the possibility of giving the work ethic a new meaning, more relevant to
the present condition of developed societies. Can poverty be fought and
conquered with the help of orthodox means, made to measure for a society
no longer in existence? Or should we seek new solutions, such as the
‘decoupling’ of the right to livelihood from the selling of labour, and the
extension of the socially recognized concept of work beyond that recognized by the labour market? And just how urgent is it to confront such
questions and try to find practical answers to them?
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Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
PART I
Bauman, Zygmunt.. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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1
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
The meaning of work: producing the
work ethic
What is the work ethic? It is, in a nutshell, one commandment with two
outspoken premises and two tacit presumptions.
The first outspoken premise is that in order to get something which one
needs to stay alive and happy, one must do something which is seen by
others as valuable and worthy of being paid for; there are no ‘free lunches’,
it is always quid pro quo, ‘tit for tat’; you need to give first, in order to be
given later.
The second outspoken premise is that it is wrong – morally mischievous
as well as silly – to be satisfied with what one has already got and so to settle
for less rather than more; that it is unworthy and unreasonable to stop
stretching and straining oneself once what one has seems to be satisfying;
that it is undignified to rest, unless one rests in order to gather force for
more work. In other words working is a value in its own right, a noble and
ennobling activity.
The commandment follows: you should go on working even if you do
not see what that could bring you which you do not have already or don’t
think you need. To work is good, not to work is evil.
The tacit presumption without which neither of these premises nor the
commandment would seem as obvious as they do is that most people have
their working capacity to sell, and indeed may earn their living selling it
and getting what they deserve in exchange; whatever they possess is a
reward for their past work and their willingness to go on working. Work is
the normal state of all humans; not working is abnormal. Most people fulfil
their duty, and it would be unfair to ask them to share their benefits or
profits with others, who could also fulfil their duties but for one reason
or another fail to do so.
The other tacit presumption is that it is only such labour that has a value
recognized by others – labour which commands salaries or wages, which
Bauman, Zygmunt.. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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6
Work, consumerism and the new poor
can be sold and is likely to be bought – that has the moral value the work
ethic commends. This is, albeit a simple, summary of the form which the
work ethic assumed historically in our kind of society, registered under
the name of ‘modernity’.
Whenever you hear people talking about ethics, you should be pretty
sure that someone somewhere is dissatisfied with the way some other
people behave and would rather have them behaving differently. Hardly
ever has this advice made more sense than in the case of the work ethic.
Since it erupted into the European consciousness in the early stages of
industrialization, and in its many avatars throughout the twisted itinerary
of modernity and ‘modernization’, the work ethic served politicians,
philosophers and preachers alike as a clarion call to, or an excuse for,
attempts to uproot, by hook or by crook, the popular habit which they saw
as the prime obstacle to the new brave world they intended to build: the
allegedly widespread inclination to avoid, if one could, the ostensible
blessings of factory employment, and to resist docile submission to the
rhythm of life set by the foreman, the clock and the machine.
The morbid and dangerous habit that the work ethic was meant to fight,
destroy and eradicate at the time it entered the public debate, was rooted in
the traditional human inclination to consider one’s own needs as given and
to desire no more than to satisfy them. Once their habitual needs had been
met, the ‘traditionalist’ workers saw no rhyme nor reason to go on
working, or for that matter to earn more money; what for, after all? There
were so many other interesting and decent things to do, things one could
not buy but could well overlook, neglect or lose if one was running after
money from dawn to dusk. The threshold of decent life was set low, was
fixed and forbidden to cross, and there was no urge to climb higher once
that threshold was reached. This is, at any rate, how the entrepreneurs of
the time, and the economists who zealously made sense of their troubles, as
well as the moral preachers eager to improve things, painted the picture.
Historical memory is held in safe keeping and history is written by
victors. No wonder that this composite painting entered the classic canon
of history telling, becoming the official record of the valiant battle waged
and won by pioneers of modern reason against the irrational, ignorant,
totally unreasonable and completely inexcusable popular resistance to
progress. According to that record, the stake of the war was to make the
blind see light, to force the silly and retarded to use intelligence, and to
teach people how to wish for a better life, to desire things new and
improved, and by desiring them to self-improve, to become better persons.
Or, if need be, to compel the recalcitrant to act as if they had such desires.
As it happened, the true course of events was exactly the opposite to
what the early entrepreneurs implied in their complaints against shiftless
and laggard factory hands, and what the economists and sociologists took
later for the tested truth of history. It was in fact the advent of the factory
system that spelled the collapse of the love affair between the craftsman and
his work which the ‘work ethic’ postulated. The moral crusade recorded as
Bauman, Zygmunt.. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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The meaning of work: producing the work ethic
7
the battle for the introduction of the work ethic (or as the training in the
application of the ‘performance principle’) was in fact an attempt to
resuscitate basically pre-industrial work attitudes under new conditions
which no longer made them meaningful. The moral crusade aimed at the
re-creation, inside the factory under owner-controlled discipline, of
the commitment to the wholehearted, dedicated workmanship and the
‘state of the art’ task performance which once upon a time came to the
craftsman naturally when he himself was in control of his work.
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
Getting people to work
When John Stuart Mill complained that ‘we look in vain among the
working classes in general for the just pride which will choose to give good
work for good wages; for the most part, the sole endeavour is to receive as
much and return as little in the shape of service as possible’,1 he bewailed in
fact the too rapid conversion of the craftsmen-turned-workers to the
market’s unemotional, cost-and-effect rationality, and the too fast shedding
of the last remnants of pre-modern workmanship instincts. Paradoxically,
the appeals to the work ethic seem in this context to cover up the erstwhile
drive to exempt factory employees from the rule of market rationality which
seemed to have a deleterious effect on their dedication to the task. Under
the guise of the work ethic, a discipline ethic was promoted: don’t mind
pride or honour, sense or purpose – work with all your strength, day by
day and hour by hour, even if you see no rhyme nor reason to exert
yourself and are unable to adumbrate the meaning of the exertion.
The true problem which the pioneers of modernization confronted was
the need to force people, used to putting meaning into their work through
setting its goals and controlling its course, to expend their skill and their
work capacity in the implementation of tasks which were now set and
controlled by others and hence meaningless for their performers. The way
to solve this problem was a blind drill aimed at habitualizing the workers to
an unthinking obedience, while at the same time being denied pride in a
job well done and performing a task the sense of which escaped them. As
Werner Sombart commented, the new factory system needed parthumans: soulless little wheels in a complex mechanism. The battle was
waged against the other, now useless, ‘human parts’ – human interests and
ambitions irrelevant for productive effort and needlessly interfering with
the parts deployed in production. The work ethic was, basically, about the
surrender of freedom.
That true meaning, which the moral preachings masqueraded as the
‘work ethic’ had for the people on the receiving end of the crusade, was
vividly portrayed in a statement left by an anonymous hosier in 1806:
I found the utmost distaste on the part of the men, to any regular
hours or regular habits . . . The men themselves were considerably
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8
Work, consumerism and the new poor
dissatisfied, because they could not go in and out as they pleased, and
have what holidays they pleased, and go on just as they had been used
to do; and were subject, during after-hours, to the ill-natured
observations of other workmen, to such an extent as completely to
disgust them with the whole system, and I was obliged to break it up. 2
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
For all intents and purposes, the work-ethic crusade was a battle for
control and subordination. It was a power struggle in everything but name,
a battle to force the working people to accept, in the name of the ethical
nobility of working life, a life neither noble nor responding to their own
standards of moral decency.
The crusade was also aimed at detaching things people did from what
they saw as worthy of doing and thus as sensible things to do; detaching the
work itself from any tangible and understandable purpose it might have
served. If fully implemented and absorbed by the logic of life, the work
ethic would have replaced all other human activities, such as reflecting,
evaluating, choosing and goal-setting, by ‘going through the motions’. The
motions, moreover, were dictated by rhythms not of one’s own making.
No wonder that the critics of up-and-coming modernity, in the name of
the preservation of what they conceived as the truly human values, spoke
in support of the ‘right to laziness’.
If implemented, the work ethic would have also separated productive
effort from human needs; for the first time in history, it would have given
priority to ‘what can be done’ over the ‘what needs to be done’. It would
render the satisfaction of human needs irrelevant to the logic, and most
importantly to the limits, of productive effort; it would make possible the
modern paradox of ‘growth for the growth sake’.
. . . a result of the introduction of machinery and of large-scale organisation was the subjection of the workers to a deadening mechanical
and administrative routine. Some of the earlier processes of production afforded the workers genuine opportunities for the expression of
their personalities in their work, and some of them even permitted the
embodiment of artistic conceptions affording pleasure to the craftsmen . . . The anonymous author of An Authentic Account of the Riots of
Birmingham (1799) explains the participation of workers in the riots by
saying that the nature of their employments is such that ‘they are
taught to act, not to think’.3
In the poignant summary by J.L. and Barbara Hammonds:
. . . the upper classes allowed no values to the workpeople but those
which the slave-owner appreciates in the slave. The working man was
to be industrious and attentive, not to think for himself, to owe
loyalty and attachment to his master alone, to recognise that his
proper place in the economy of the state was the place of the slave in
the economy of the sugar plantation. Take many virtues we admire
in a man, and they become vices in a slave.4
Bauman, Zygmunt.. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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The meaning of work: producing the work ethic
9
Indeed, in the chorus of exhortations to submit, placidly and unthinkingly, to the impersonal, inhuman and mechanical rhythm of factory work,
there was a curious blend of such an essentially pre-industrial and antimodern mentality of slave economy and the new bold vision of the
wonderful, miraculously plentiful world which once the fetters of traditional ways were broken was bound to emerge as a result of human
invention, and above all of human mastery over nature.
As Wolf Lepenies observed, the language in which ‘nature’ (that is, all
things already shaped through divine creation, things ‘given’, unprocessed
and untouched by human reason and skills) was talked about from the end
of the seventeenth century on was saturated with military concepts and
metaphors.5 Francis Bacon left nothing to the imagination: nature ought to
be conquered and set to work hard so that it could serve human interests
and comfort better than it ever could when left alone. Descartes compared
the progress of reason to a string of victorious battles waged against nature,
while Diderot called the practitioners and the theorists to unite in the name
of the conquest and subjugation of nature; Karl Marx defined historical
progress as the unstoppable march towards human dominion over nature.
No difference of opinion here, whatever their other disagreements, with
Claude Saint-Simon or August Comte.
Once the ultimate goal had been spelled out, the sole significance
ascribed to practical undertakings was the shortening of the distance which
still separated people of the time from the final triumph over nature. The
authority of other criteria could be successfully contested and gradually yet
relentlessly rendered null and void. Among the progressively dismissed
criteria of evaluation, the precepts of pity, compassion and care figured
most prominently. Pity for the victims weakened the resolve, made the
compassionate slow down the pace of change, and whatever arrested or
slackened progress could not be moral. On the other hand, whatever
served the ultimate conquest of nature was good and ‘in the last account’
ethical, serving ‘in the long run’ the improvement of mankind. The
craftsmen’s defence of their traditional rights, the resistance to the rational,
effective and efficient regime of mechanized work which the pre-industrial
poor had shown, were seen as another obstacle among the many which
nature in its bland stupor had stood in the way of progress as if to stave off
its imminent defeat. That resistance had to be broken with as little
compunction as all nature’s other shrewd contrivances had already been
broken, debunked and defused, or merely swept out of the way.
The leading lights of the glorious world which was to be built with
human wits and skills – the designers of machines and the pioneers of their
use – had no doubts that the real carriers of progress were the creative
minds of the inventors. James Watt argued in 1785 that all the others,
whose physical exertion was needed to make the inventors’ ideas into flesh,
‘are to be considered in no other light than as mere acting mechanical
powers . . . it is scarcely necessary that they should use their reason’. 6 While
Richard Arkwright complained that:
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10
Work, consumerism and the new poor
it was difficult to train human beings ‘to renounce their desultory
habits of work, and identify themselves with the unvarying regularity
of the complex automaton’. To be efficiently used, the complex
automaton required to be constantly watched; and few countrymen
or women relished the idea of spending ten or more hours a day shut
up in a factory watching a machine.
Their resistance to join in the concerted effort of humanity was itself the
oft quoted proof of the moral laxity of the poor and the moral virtue of a
tough and rigid, no-punches-held factory discipline. Getting the poor and
‘voluntarily idle’ to work was not just an economic, but a moral task. The
enlightened opinions of the time, differing as they might have been from
each other in all other respects, had little to quarrel about on this point.
Blackwood’s Magazine wrote that ‘the influence by the master over the man,
is of itself a point gained in the direction of moral improvement’,7 while
the Edinburgh Review acidly remarked, about the ongoing cultural crusade,
that:
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
. . . it is not in [the charity] spirit that the new schemes of benevolence
are conceived . . . They are celebrated as the beginning of a new moral
order . . . in which the possessors of property are to resume their place
as the paternal guardians of those less fortunate . . . to extinguish, not
indeed poverty – that hardly seems to be thought desirable – but the
more abject forms of vice, destitution, and physical wretchedness.8
P. Gaskell, the author and social activist who went down in history as
one of the most philanthropic, warm-hearted and compassionate friends of
the poor, held, despite this, little doubt that the objects of his compassion
‘differ but little in inherent qualities from the uncultivated child of nature’ 9
and that they needed other, more mature people to watch their moves and
take responsibility for their actions. Among the contributors to the learned
opinion the agreement was common that the present or would-be
labourers were not capable of managing their lives on their own. No more
than silly, unruly children were they able to govern themselves, to tell what
was right and what was wrong, what was good for them and what harmful,
let alone to see what might prove in the long run to be ‘in their best
interest’. They were but a raw human material to be processed and given
the right shape; at least for some considerable time to come they were
bound to remain on the receiving end of social change – to be the objects,
not the subjects, of the ongoing rational overhaul of human society. The
work ethic was one of the pivotal items on the sweeping moral/educational agenda, and the tasks it set for the men of thought and action alike
constituted the core of what came to be dubbed later by the eulogists of
modern departures the ‘civilizing process’.
Like every other set of ethical precepts for proper, decent, meritorious
conduct, the work ethic was simultaneously a constructive vision and a
prescription for a demolishing job. It denied legitimacy to the habits,
Bauman, Zygmunt.. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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The meaning of work: producing the work ethic
11
preferences or desires entertained by the human targets of the ethical
crusade. It painted the pattern for the right kind of behaviour, but above all
it cast suspicion upon everything that the people earmarked for ethical
training might have been doing while unschooled and unforced. Their
inclinations could not be trusted; free to act as they wished and left to their
own whims or predilections, they would rather starve than make an effort,
wallow in filth rather than care about self-improvement, put a momentary,
ephemeric diversion above more distant yet steady happiness, and all in all
prefer doing nothing to doing work. All these morbid, uncontrolled
impulses were part of the ‘tradition’ the emerging industry had to stand up
to, fight against, and in the end exterminate. As Max Weber (in Michael
Rose’s apt summary) was to point out, looking back on the job already
performed, the work ethic ‘amounted to an attack’ on the ‘traditionalism of
ordinary workers’ who ‘had operated with a fixed image of their material
needs which led them to prefer leisure and to forego opportunities to
increase their income by working harder or longer’. Traditionalism ‘was
disparaged’.10
Indeed, for the pioneers of the brave new world of modernity, ‘tradition’ was a dirty word. It stood for the morally disgraceful and
condemnable inclinations that the work ethic rose up against: the inclinations of the creatures of habit to settle today for what they had yesterday,
for eschewing ‘the more’ and neglecting the better if getting it called for an
extra effort (in fact, for surrendering to a crude, cruel, off-putting and
incomprehensible, alien regime). The officially named enemies in the war
declared by the work ethic against the ‘traditionalism’ of the pre-industrial
poor were ostensibly the modesty of human needs and the mediocrity of
human wants. The actual battles – most ferocious and merciless battles –
were waged against the reluctance of would-be factory hands to suffer the
discomfort and indignity of a work regime they neither desired nor
understood, and most certainly would not have chosen by their own
volition.
Work or perish
The work ethic was meant to kill two birds with one stone: resolve the
labour-supply problems of burgeoning industry, and dispose of one of
the most vexing nuisances the post-traditional society had to encounter –
the necessity to provide for the needs of those who for one reason or
another could not catch up with the change of circumstances, make ends
meet and eke out their own existence under the new conditions. Not
everyone could be pushed through the treadmills of factory labour; there
were invalids, the weak, sick and old who by no stretch of imagination
could be envisaged as coping with the harsh demands of industrial
employment. Brian Inglis portrayed the mood of the time:
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12
Work, consumerism and the new poor
. . . the case gained ground that the destitute were expendable, whether or not they were to blame for their condition. Had there been
any way simply to get rid of them, without risk to society, Ricardo
and Malthus would certainly have recommended it, and governments
would equally certainly have given it their favourable attention,
provided that it did not entail any increase in taxation.11
But no such method ‘simply to get rid of them’ was available, and in its
absence another, less perfect, solution needed to be found. The precept of
work – any work, on any condition – as the sole decent, morally passable
way of gaining one’s right to live went a long way towards finding it. No
one spelled out this ‘second best’ strategy in more blunt and candid terms
than Thomas Carlyle in his 1837 essay on Chartism:
If paupers are made miserable, paupers will needs decline in
multitude. It is a secret known to all rat-catchers: stop up the granarycrevices, afflict with continual mewing, alarm, and going-off of traps,
your ‘chargeable labourers’ disappear, and cease from the establishment. A still briefer method is that of arsenic; perhaps even a milder,
where otherwise permissible.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her monumental study of the idea of poverty,
unpacks this view in the following fashion:
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
Paupers, like rats, could indeed be eliminated by this method, or at
least driven out of sight. All that was required was the determination
to treat them like rats, on the assumption that the ‘poor and luckless
are here only as a nuisance to be abraded and abated’.12
In the efforts to cause the paupers to ‘decline in multitude’ the contribution of the work ethic was indeed priceless. That ethic asserted, after
all, the moral superiority of any kind of life, however miserable, providing
it was supported by the wages of labour. Armed with such an ethical
canon, the well-wishing reformers could proclaim the principle of ‘less
eligibility’ of all ‘unearned’ assistance which society might have offered its
poor, and consider that principle a deeply moral step towards a more
humane society. ‘Less eligibility’ meant that the conditions purveyed to
people relying on relief instead of wages must make their life yet less
attractive than the life of the poorest and the most wretched among the
hired labourers. It was hoped that the more the life of the non-working
poor were degraded and the deeper they descended into destitution, the
more tempting or at least the less unendurable would appear to them the
lot of those working poor who had sold their labour in exchange for
the most miserable of wages; and so the cause of the work ethic would be
helped and its triumph brought nearer.
These and similar considerations must have been high in the minds of
the ‘Poor Law’ reformers of the 1820s and 1830s, who after protracted and
at times acrimonious debate came to a virtually unanimous decision to
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The meaning of work: producing the work ethic
13
confine all the available assistance to the indigent part of the population
(the part which Jeremy Bentham preferred to call the ‘refuse’ or the ‘dross’
of the population) to the inside of the poorhouses. This decision had a
number of advantages, as far as the advancing of the work-ethic’s cause was
concerned.
First and foremost, it sorted out the ‘true paupers’ from those who were
suspected of merely masquerading as such in order to avoid the discomforts
of regular work. No one but the ‘true pauper’ would choose confinement
to the poorhouse if the conditions inside were made sufficiently horrifying.
The limitation of assistance to such as could be obtained in the drab and
squalid interior of the poorhouse made the ‘means test’ redundant, or
rather self-administered by the poor themselves: whoever agreed to be
locked up inside a poorhouse must indeed have had no other way of
staying alive.
Second, the abolition of outside assistance made the poor think twice
before deciding that the requirements of the work ethic were ‘not for
them’, that they could not cope with what regular work demands, or that
the stern and in many ways abhorrent demands of factory work were a
choice worse than its alternative; even the most niggardly wages and the
most gruelling and tedious drudgery on the factory floor would appear
bearable – even desirable – in comparison.
The principles of the new Poor Law also set a clear and ‘objective’
dividing line between those who could be reformed and converted to
abide by the precepts of the work ethic, and those who were fully and truly
beyond redemption and from whom no service for the benefit of society
could be squeezed, however ingenious or unscrupulous were the measures
taken.
Finally, the Poor Law guarded the working (or potentially working)
poor from contamination by the hopelessly idle, separating them from
trouble with the help of massive, impenetrable walls, soon to be duplicated
by the invisible, yet no less tangible for that reason, walls of cultural
estrangement. The more terrifying the news leaked from behind the poorhouse walls, the more the slavery of factory hands would look like freedom
and their wretchedness like a stroke of luck and a blessing.
It can be guessed from what has been said so far that the project of
sorting out once and for all the ‘true paupers’ from the merely pretending,
malingering and counterfeit ones, and so setting apart the hopeless from the
hopeful objects of working drill in order to stave off the danger of morally
morbid contamination, was never to succeed in full. The poor of the two
legally distinguished categories of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ did influence each other a lot, though not necessarily in the fashion which the
reformers declared to be the main reason for the construction of poorhouses.
True, the establishment of new and particularly appalling and repulsive
conditions for those who had been administered the plight of the paupers
(or, as the reformers preferred to say, ‘had chosen’ it) made the poor more
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14
Work, consumerism and the new poor
receptive to the doubtful attractions of hired labour and so warded off the
much publicized threat of contaminating them with idleness, but it did
contaminate them with poverty, and so contributed heavily to the perpetuation of the same bane which the work ethic was meant, once
triumphant, to eliminate. The dreadful ugliness of poorhouse existence,
which served as the reference point for assessing the quality of factory life,
lowered further the depths to which employers could push their
employees’ endurance without fear of either rebellion or withdrawal of
labour. In the end, there was little to distinguish between the lot of those
who embraced the instructions of the work ethic and those who refused to
do so or had fallen by the wayside while trying to embrace it and to live
according to its commandments.
The most insightful, sceptical or cynical among the moral reformers of
early modernity did not in any case entertain the illusion that the theoretically elegant distinction between the two – genuine and pretending –
categories of the poor could be expressed in two distinct strategies. Nor did
they believe that such bifurcation of strategy would make much practical
sense either in terms of economy of resources or in the form of a tangible
ethical benefit.
Notably, Jeremy Bentham made no distinction between the regimes of
‘houses of industry’: workhouses, poorhouses and manufactories (as well as
prisons, lunatic asylums, hospitals and schools, for that matter).13 Whatever
their ostensible purpose, he insisted, all faced the same practical problem
and shared the same concerns: all of them had to impose one, uniform
pattern of regular and predictable behaviour upon a variegated and
essentially unruly population of inmates. All of them, in a nutshell, had to
neutralize or cancel out the variety of human habits and inclinations so that
one standard of conduct could be attained for all. The same task confronted
the supervisors of industrial plants and the wardens of poorhouses. In order
to obtain what they desired – a disciplined, repetitive routine – both kinds
of inmates, the ‘working’ and ‘non-working’ poor alike, had to be subjected to an identical regime. No wonder that the differences in moral
quality of the two categories, given such close attention and assigned such a
crucial importance in the arguments of the ethical preachers and reformers,
hardly ever appear in Bentham’s reasoning. After all, the hub of his strategy
was precisely to render such differences totally irrelevant to the stated
purpose, and sufficiently impotent so as not to interfere with the outcome.
In taking such a stance, Bentham spoke in unison with the economic
wisdom of his times. As John Stuart Mill was to write shortly after, political
economy is not interested in human passions and motives, ‘except those
which may be regarded as perpetually antagonizing principles to the desire
for wealth, namely aversion to labour, and desire of the present enjoyment
of costly indulgencies’.14 Like all scholars searching for the ‘objective’,
impersonal, will-independent laws of economic life, Bentham stripped the
task of promoting the new social order of evangelical adornments so
common in the work ethic debate right down to its hard core, which was
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The meaning of work: producing the work ethic
15
the entrenchment of routine, regular behaviour based on unconditional
discipline aided and guarded by effective supervision from top to bottom.
He had no time for worries about spiritual enlightenment or mind reform;
he did not expect the inmates of a panopticon-like establishment to love
their work (he took their incurable aversion to work virtually for granted)
and did not bother to eulogize over the work’s morally ennobling impact.
If the inmates were to behave in line with the precepts of the work ethic,
this could happen not so much thanks to their moral conversion, as to their
being cast in a situation of no choice, one containing no alternative to
acting as if the commandments of the work ethic had been embraced and
absorbed into their consciences. Bentham did not vest his hopes in the
cultivation of the choosers’ virtues, but in the simplicity of the choice they
faced, or the complete absence of all choice. In the panopticon, be it a
poorhouse, a workhouse or a factory, ‘if a man won’t work nothing has he
to do, from morning to night, but to eat his bad bread and drink his water,
without a soul to speak to . . . This encouragement is necessary to his doing
his utmost; but more than this is not necessary’.
Promotion of the work ethic inspired a lot of preaching from the church
pulpits, the composition of many moralizing tales, and the mushrooming of
Sunday schools which did their best to fill young heads with the right rules
and values; but for all the practical intents and purposes it boiled down – as
Bentham with his characteristic straightforwardness and sobriety of mind
revealed – to the radical reduction of choice that the present and the
intended factory hands were facing. The principle of no relief outside
the poorhouse was one manifestation of the thrust to establish the ‘nochoice’ situation. The other manifestation of the same strategy was the
induction of the hand-to-mouth existence – keeping wages at a level low
enough to allow for no more than physical survival until the dawn of the
next day of hard work, and so make another day of hard work a ‘no
choice’, a necessity.
Both expedients entailed, though, an element of risk, since in the end
they appealed willy-nilly to the rational faculties of their objects, in
however demeaned a version: to be effective, both needed thinking,
calculating persons at the receiving end. But thinking could be a doubleedged sword; or, rather, a dangerous crevice left in an otherwise tight wall,
through which troublesome, unpredictable and incalculable factors such as
the human passion for dignified life or a motivation towards self-assertion,
could crawl back from enforced exile. An additional insurance needed to
be taken up, and none promised more security than physical coercion.
Corporal punishment, cutting the wages or food supply below the subsistence level, and above all a continuous and ubiquitous surveillance and
prompt penalty for the violation of any rule, however trivial, could be
trusted to bring the plight of the poor yet closer to the situation of no
choice.
This made the preaching of the work ethic look suspiciously duplicitous.
Indeed, counting on moral integrity of the human objects of industrial drill
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16
Work, consumerism and the new poor
would have to entail the expanding of their realm of freedom – the only
soil in which moral selves can grow and moral responsibilities can come to
fruition. But the work ethic, in its early history at least, opted for the
cutting down, or a complete elimination of, choice.
Duplicity was not necessarily intended, nor always conscious. There is
no reason to suppose that the promoters of the work ethic were indifferent
to the moral consequences of their actions, let alone that they were
immoral themselves. The cruelty of the proposed and applied measures was
honestly viewed as an indispensable part of a moral crusade, itself a powerful moralizing agent and so by itself a highly moral act. Hard work was
praised as an uplifting experience – a spiritual enhancement which could be
achieved only by the all-brakes-released service of the common good. If
inducing people to hard work and making hard work their habit called for
the affliction of pain, then this was a reasonable price to pay for future
gains, not least for the moral benefits which the life of hard work would
secure. As Keith McClelland pointed out, if ‘manual work was seen by
many as a necessary, burdening, compulsion’, it was ‘also seen as an activity
to be celebrated’,15 on account of the honour and wealth it would bring to
the nation, and not least for the moral improvement it would bestow upon
the workers themselves.
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Producing the producers
Societies tend to hold an idealized view of themselves which allows them
to ‘keep on course’: to spot and locate the scars, warts, and other blemishes
spoiling their present look, as well as to conceive of a remedy sure to heal
or smooth them up. Going to work – taking up employment, having a
master, doing things which the master must have considered useful since he
is prepared to pay to have them done – was thus the way to become a
decent human fellow for all those whose decency or indeed humanity had
not been assured in any other way, was doubted and had yet to be proved.
Giving work to all and making all into workers was commonly seen as the
recipe for all ills and troubles society might have endured because of its
(transitory, as it was hoped) imperfection or immaturity.
Neither on the right nor on the left of the political spectrum was this
historical role of work questioned. The dawning realization of living in an
‘industrial society’ went hand in hand with the conviction and the confidence that the number of people transformed into industrial workers was
bound to grow unstoppably and that the ultimate shape the industrial
society was obliged to assume would be a sort of gigantic factory, in which
every able-bodied male was productively employed. Universal employment was the norm not-yet-fully-met, but represented the shape of things
to come. In the light of that norm, being out of work appeared as
unemployment, abnormality, a breach of the norm. ‘Get to work’ and ‘get
people to work’ were the twin exhortations/conjurations that it was hoped
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The meaning of work: producing the work ethic
17
would put paid simultaneously to personal troubles and shared, social ills.
These were modern slogans, reverberating on both sides of the great divide
which was to separate the capitalist and the communist versions of modernity. The war cry of the Marxist-inspired opposition to capitalism was
‘who does not work, does not eat’, and the vision of the classless society to
come was that of a society built in all its aspects after the likeness of a
factory. In that classic era of modern industrial society, work was simultaneously the pivot of individual life, social order and the survival capacity
(‘systemic reproduction’) of society as a whole.
To start with individual life. The work a man performed supplied his
livelihood; but the kind of work performed defined the standing a man
could reasonably hope for or claim inside his immediate neighbourhood
and in that imagined totality called ‘society’. Work was the main factor of
one’s social placement as well as of self-assessment: for all people except
those who thanks to hereditary or acquired wealth could combine a life of
leisure with self-sufficiency, the question ‘who are you’ was answered by
pointing to the company by which the asked man was employed and the
capacity in which he was employed by it. In a society known for its knack
and fondness for categorizing and classifying, the type of work was the
decisive, pivotal classification from which everything else relevant to living
among others followed. It defined a man’s equals, to whom he could
compare himself and orient himself with, his superiors, to whom he owed
respect, and those lower down, from whom he was entitled to expect or
demand deference. The type of work defined the life standards which one
should match and obey, the kind of Joneses to which one ought to ‘live up
to’ and other Joneses one should steer clear of in social life. The work
career marked the itinerary of life and retrospectively provided the prime
record of one’s life achievement or one’s failure; that career was the
principal source of self-confidence and uncertainty, self-satisfaction and
self-reprobation, pride amd shame.
In other words, for the large and growing majority of males in posttraditional, modern society – a society which assessed and rewarded its
members on the assumption of their capacity for choice and the duty of
self-assertion – work stood at the centre of the lifelong construction and
defence of a man’s identity. The life-project could spring from many
ambitions, but they were all wrapped around the type of work to be
chosen or be assigned to. The type of work coloured the totality of life; it
determined not just the rights and duties directly relevant to the work
process, but the expected standard of living, the pattern of the family, social
life and leisure, norms of propriety and daily routine. It was that one
‘independent variable’ which allowed a person to shape up and to forecast,
with little error, all other aspects of their existence. Once the type of work
had been decided and the scheme of career ascribed, all the rest fell into
place and one could be pretty certain what was to be done in virtually
every field of life. To sum up: work was the main orientation point, in
reference to which all other life pursuits could be planned and ordered.
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18
Work, consumerism and the new poor
As to the role of the work ethic in the regulation of social order, since
most of the male members of modern society in its industrial phase spent
most of their waking hours and most years of their mature life at work
(according to Roger Sue’s calculations, 70 per cent of waking life was on
average taken up by work in 1850),16 the workplace was the primary site of
social integration; the setting in which the essential habits of obedience to
norms and of disciplined behaviour were expected to be trained and
absorbed and in which the ‘social character’ was to be formed – at least in
all its aspects relevant to the perpetuation of an orderly society. Alongside
the mass conscript army, another of the great modern inventions, the
factory was the main ‘panoptical institution’ of modern society.
Factories turned out many and varied commodities, but all of them, in
addition, produced the compliant and conforming subjects of the modern
state. This second though by no means subsidiary productive line, albeit
less salient and less talked about, secured for industrial work a function
more basic for society’s survival than one might deduce from the work’s
ostensible role – that of the production of material wealth. Just how crucial
that other, latent function was, one can gather from the panics which
periodically erupted throughout the modern era whenever the news broke
out that a considerable part of the adult population was physically unfit for
regular factory employment and/or army service. Whatever explicit reasons were given to justify the concern, invalidity, weakness of the body and
mental impairment were seen as a threat and were feared because they cast
their victims outside the reach of the panoptical drill on which the
maintenance of social order relied; people out of employment were also
masterless people, people out of control – not surveilled, not monitored,
not subjected to any regular, sanctions-fortified, routine. No wonder that
the model of health developed during the nineteenth century by socially
conscious medical sciences was that of a male capable of the kind of
physical exertion required by factory work and military service.
If the subjection of the bulk of the male population to the drilling impact
of factory work was the principal method of production and maintenance
of social order, the strong and stable patriarchal family with the employed
(‘bread providing’) male as its absolute, uncontested ruler was its necessary
supplement; not by chance the preachers of work ethics were as a rule also
the advocates of family virtues and the unshakable rights and duties of the
family heads. Inside the family, husbands/fathers were prompted to
perform the same surveilling/disciplining role towards womenfolk and children as factory foremen and army sergeants performed in relation to them
on the factory floor or on the exercise range. Modern disciplining power, as
Foucault insisted, was dispersed and distributed after the pattern of capillary
vessels which conduct the blood pumped by the heart to the most distant
tissues and cells of a living organism. The husband/father’s authority inside
the family conducted the disciplining pressures of the order-producing and
order-servicing network to the parts of the population which the panoptical
institutions would not be otherwise able to reach.
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The meaning of work: producing the work ethic
19
Finally, a decisive role was allotted to work in what the politicians
habitually presented as the question of society’s survival and prosperity, and
what made its way into sociological discourse under the name of ‘systemic
reproduction’. The substance of modern industrial society was the reprocessing of natural resources with the help of (again natural) supplies of
workable energy, ‘wealth’ being the outcome of that reprocessing. Such
reprocessing was organized under the auspices of the owners/managers of
capital, but achieved through the application of hired labour. The continuity of that reprocessing depended therefore on the owners of the capital
successfully engaging the rest of the population in the role of producers.
The volume of product, utilized as the essential resource in the
expansion of wealth, depended on the direct involvement of ‘living labour’
in the productive effort and its subordination to that effort’s logic; productive roles were the essential units of the system. The coercive powers of
governments were used primarily to make this possible – that is, for the
purpose of ‘commodification’ of capital and labour. In other words, for
realizing the potential of wealth as capital (i.e. such wealth as can be used to
produce more wealth), and of individual members of society as the ‘valueadding’ labour. The growth of active capital and employment were the
main issues of politics. The successes or failures of policies were measured
by the extent to which that task had been fulfilled: by the hiring powers of
the capital and the extent of engagement of the population in the process
of production.
To sum up: work occupied the focal position on all three analytically
distinguishable levels of modern arrangement – individual, social and systemic. In addition, work served as a linchpin bringing the three levels
together, and as the main factor through which communication and
coordination between the three levels was negotiated, achieved and preserved.
The work ethic was thus crucially instrumental in bringing the modern
arrangement about. The mutual engagement of capital and labour indispensable for the daily functioning and perpetuation of modern industrial
society were presented by the work ethic as the moral duty, mission and
vocation of all its members (more exactly, all its male members); the work
ethic called men to embrace willingly, gladly, enthusiastically, what was in
fact an unavoidable necessity – a plight which the practitioners of the new
economy, aided and abetted by the legislators of the new state, did their
best to render inescapable. But to embrace that necessity willingly meant
giving up all resistance to rules experienced as an alien and painful
imposition. In the workplace, autonomy of workers was not tolerated. The
work ethic called people to choose a life devoted to labour; but a life
devoted to labour meant no choice, inaccesibility of choice and prohibition of choice.
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20
Work, consumerism and the new poor
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From ‘better’ to ‘more’
The precepts of the work ethic were preached with a zeal proportional to
the resistance of the would-be labourers to their loss of freedom. Preaching
was aimed at overcoming that resistance. The work ethic was an instrument,
while the end that instrument was to bring closer was the compliance with
the factory regime and the loss of independence it entailed.
Instrumental reason allows all means to be chosen, critically assessed and
– if need be – discarded and replaced according to their effectiveness in
bringing the desired result about. The work ethic, and more generally the
appeal to the sentiments and the consciences of the current and would-be
factory workers, was but one of several alternative means of making the
wheels of the industrial system turn. It was not necessarily the most efficient one, and certainly not the only one conceivable. Neither was it the
most reliable; work morality which the preachers of the work ethic sought
to instil was likely to remain, like all morality, fickle and erratic – a poor
guide to expected human behaviour and a pressure not steady enough to
match the strict, unyielding and monotonous work effort required by the
factory routine. The latter could not rely on moral sentiments, on appeals
to moral responsibility (and so in the end to choice), for securing the
immutable rhythm of physical exertion and unqualified obedience to the
work regime.
We have already noted that when addressed to the poor and indolent the
preaching of the work ethic went hand in hand with resorting to more
reliable means of pressure, like compulsory confinement, legal bonding,
refusal of all relief except that available inside the poorhouses, ending with
the threat of corporal punishment. The preaching of the work ethic called
for moral choice; the practice of work reduced or eliminated the choice
altogether, striving to make sure that its objects would behave as if they
have been converted whether the conversion was sincere or not, whether
the work ethic’s gospel was believed or not. The general trend in the
modern organizations, which the modern factories shared, was towards
rendering the moral sentiments of human agents irrelevant to their actions
(‘adiaphoric’) so that those actions were regular and predictable to an
extent which notoriously non-rational moral impulses would never be
counted on to reach.
The work ethic seems to be a mainly European invention; most
American social historians agree that it was the spirit of enterprise and the
desire for upward mobility, rather than the work ethic, that lubricated
the wheels of American industry. Work, dedicated work, and ever more
dedicated work, was seen almost from the beginning by both the immigrant and the American-born workers as a means rather than a value in its
own right, a way of life or a vocation: the means to get richer, and so more
independent; the means to get rid of the repulsive necessity to work for
others. Even the semi-slavery of sweatshops was accepted and placidly
endured in the name of future freedom, without any pretence as to its
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The meaning of work: producing the work ethic
21
ennobling quality. Work did not need to be loved or believed to be the
sign of moral virtue; it could be openly resented without incurring the risk
of the collapse of discipline, as long as bearing with even the most horrid
conditions was seen as a price temporarily paid for the happiness of freedom never too far away.
In Michael Rose’s opinion,17 the trend to disregard and push aside the
ethics of work deepened in America and acquired a new speed at the dawn
of the twentieth century; main managerial innovations which gained
popularity by that time operated ‘in such a way as to destroy moral
commitment to work effort. But they took on the character they did, it
seems likely, because moral commitment to work effort was generally
undependable’ – or so it was seen in the acquisitive atmosphere of the land
of riches and enrichment. The overall tendency culminated in the scientific
management movement initiated by Frederick Winslow Taylor:
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Appeal to a Work Ethic played virtually no part in his package of
management techniques. Positive work commitment was encouraged
primarily through carefully manipulated money incentives. Taylor’s
model labourer was not a native-born American, but a Dutch
immigrant, a certain Schmidt. What fascinated Taylor in Schmidt was
certainly not any sense of moral obligation on Schmidt’s part to work
effectively and ingeniously, but his excitable response to the sight of a
dollar bill and his willingness to do whatever Taylor told him to do in
order to get his hands on it.
Not counting on the labourers’ belief in the intrinsically ennobling
quality of work was a sensible choice, as inequality of human conditions
grew more and more salient and the pressure of the incapacitating factory
discipline ever more merciless. And yet the advantages of playing down the
promise of the American Dream – that all factory-floor sufferings would
prove in the end but a temporary nuisance and that the surrender to the
whims of the bosses was but a means to become a boss in one’s own right –
became also increasingly obvious. After all, the chance to firm up one’s feet
enough to stand on them became increasingly vague and remote, and the
passages leading from manual labour to the freedoms of ‘working on one’s
own account’ shrunk and clotted. Independence of the work effort from
moral commitment to work and from the elevated views of the virtues of
working life had to be secured by other means.
Another means was found, in America as well as elsewhere, in the
‘material incentives to work’: rewards attached to the obedient acceptance
of factory discipline and so to the renunciation of the worker’s independence. What had been achieved with sermons, aided or not by the threat of
a stick, was more and more often sought through the seductive powers of a
carrot. Rather than asserting that work effort is a road to a morally superior
way of life, it was now to be advertised as a means to earn more money. Do
not mind the ‘better’, the ‘more’ is the sole thing that counts.
What was at the start of industrial society a power conflict, a fight for
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22
Work, consumerism and the new poor
autonomy and freedom, has been gradually yet relentlessly channelled into
the struggle for a greater share of the surplus while tacitly accepting the
extant power structure and striking its rectification out from the agenda.
Increasingly, it was the ability to win a greater share of the surplus that
came to be seen as the definitive way to restore that human dignity which
was lost when the craftsmen turned into factory hands. Appeals to the
morally ennobling capacity of the work effort fell, in the process, by
the board. It was now wage differentials, not the genuine or putative
virtues or vices of keen dedication or a lukewarm attitude to work, that
measured the prestige and social standing of the producers.
The fact that the power conflict about the quality of social existence was
channelled into the struggle for the quantity of monetary income and that
economic gains became the sole expression of the ambitions to autonomy
and self-assertion, has had a profound influence on the whole course of
development of modern, industrial society. It elicited the kind of conduct
which the original work ethic, supported by the means of economic and
occasionally physical coercion, strove to achieve in vain. It instilled in the
minds and the actions of modern producers not so much the ‘spirit of
capitalism’ as the tendency to assess human value and dignity in terms
of monetary rewards. It also shifted human motivation and the craving for
freedom firmly and thus irretrievably into the sphere of consumption.
These effects came to determine in large measure the later history
of modern society as it moved from a society of producers to that of
consumers.
This latter path was not followed in the same measure or with the same
consequences in all branches of modern society. Though a mixture of
coercion and possessive stimuli was used to assure the obedience to the
work ethic in all parts of the modern world, the ingredients were blended
in different proportions. Most notably, the appeal to the consumer hiding
in the producer was to remain inconsistent, half-hearted and unconvincing
in the communist version of modern society. It was for that reason among
others that the hiatus between the two versions of modernity grew in time
ever deeper, and that the ascent of consumerism which profoundly
transformed the modality of life in the West made the communist regime
awe-struck, and found it totally unprepared, unable to catch up, and ever
more inclined to cut its losses, admit its inferiority and throw in the towel.
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From the work ethic to the aesthetic
of consumption
Ours is a consumer society.
We all know, more or less, what it means to be a ‘consumer’. A consumer is a person who consumes, and to consume means using things up:
eating them, wearing them, playing with them and otherwise causing them
to satisfy one’s needs or desires. Since in our part of the world it is money
which in most cases ‘mediates’ between desire and its satisfaction, being a
consumer also means – normally means – appropriating most of the things
destined to be consumed: buying them, paying for them and so making
them one’s exclusive property, barring everybody else from using them
without the one’s permission.
To consume also means to destroy. In the course of consumption, the
consumed things cease to exist, literally or spiritually. Either they are ‘used
up’ physically to the point of complete annihilation, such as when things
are eaten or worn out, or they are stripped of their allure, no longer arouse
and attract desire, and forfeit their capacity to satisfy one’s needs and wishes
– for example, an overused toy or an overplayed record – and so become
unfit for consumption.
This is what being a consumer means, but what do we mean when we
speak of a consumer society? Is there something special about being a
consumer in a consumer society? And besides, is not every known society
a society of consumers, to a greater or lesser extent? All the features listed in
the preceding paragraph, except perhaps the need to pay money for things
meant to be consumed, are surely present in any kind of society. Of course,
what sort of objects we see as the potential stuff of consumption, and how
we consume them, may differ from time to time and from one place to
another, but no human being anywhere or at any time can stay alive
without consuming.
And so when we say that ours is a ‘consumer society’ we must have in
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24
Work, consumerism and the new poor
mind something more than the trivial, ordinary and not particularly illuminating fact that all members of that society consume. Ours is a
‘consumer society’ in a similarly profound and fundamental sense in which
the society of our predecessors (modern society in its industrial phase
described in the previous chapter) used to deserve the name of a ‘producer
society’ in spite of the fact that people have produced since the beginning
of the human species and will go on producing until the species’ demise.
The reason for calling that older type of modern society a ‘producer
society’ was that it engaged its members primarily as producers; the way in
which that society shaped up its members was dictated by the need to play
this role and the norm that society held up to its members was the ability
and the willingness to play it. In its present late-modern, second-modern or
post-modern stage, society engages its members – again primarily – in their
capacity as consumers. The way present-day society shapes up its members
is dictated first and foremost by the need to play the role of the consumer,
and the norm our society holds up to its members is that of the ability and
willingness to play it.
The difference between then and now is not as radical as abandoning
one role and replacing it with another. Neither of the two societies could
do without at least some of its members taking charge of producing things
to be consumed, and all members of both societies do, of course, consume.
The difference is one of emphasis, but that shift of emphasis does make an
enormous difference to virtually every aspect of society, culture and
individual life. The differences are so deep and ubiquitous that they fully
justify speaking of our society as a society of a separate and distinct kind – a
consumer society.
The passage from producer to consumer society has entailed many
profound changes; arguably the most decisive among them is, however, the
fashion in which people are groomed and trained to meet the demands of
their social identities (that is, the fashion in which men and women are
‘integrated’ into the social order and given a place in it). Panoptical
institutions, once crucial in that respect, have fallen progressively out of
use. With mass industrial employment fast shrinking and universal military
duty replaced with small, voluntary and professional armies, the bulk of
the population is unlikely ever to come under their direct influence.
Technological progress has reached the point where productivity grows
together with the tapering of employment; factory crews get leaner and
slimmer; ‘downsizing’ is the new principle of modernization. As the editor
of the Financial Times Martin Wolf calculates, between 1970 and 1994 the
proportion of people employed in industry fell from 30 per cent to 20 per
cent in the European Union and from 28 per cent to 16 per cent in the
USA, while industrial productivity progressed on average by 2.5 per cent
per annum.1
The kind of drill in which the panoptical institutions excelled is hardly
suitable for the training of consumers. Those institutions were good at
training people in routine, monotonous behaviour, and reached that effect
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From the work ethic to the aesthetic of consumption
25
through the limitation or complete elimination of choice; but it is precisely
the absence of routine and the state of constant choice that are the virtues
(indeed, the ‘role prerequisites’) of a consumer. And so, in addition to
being much reduced in the post-industrial and post-conscription world,
the panoptical drill is also irreconcilable with the needs of a consumer
society. The qualities of temperament and life attitudes which the
panoptical drill excels in cultivating are counter-productive in the production of ideal consumers.
Ideally, acquired habits should lie on the shoulders of the consumers just
like the religiously/ethically inspired vocational and acquisitive passions
used to lie, as Max Weber repeated after Baxter, on the shoulders of the
protestant saint: ‘like a light cloak, ready to be thrown aside at any
moment’.2 And habits are indeed continually, daily, at the first opportunity
thrown aside, never given the chance to solidify into the iron bars of a
cage. Ideally, nothing should be embraced by a consumer firmly, nothing
should command a commitment forever, no needs should be ever seen as
fully satisfied, no desires considered ultimate. There ought to be a proviso
‘until further notice’ attached to any oath of loyalty and any commitment.
It is the volatility, the in-built temporariness of all engagement that counts;
it counts more than the engagement itself, which should not outlast the
time necessary for consuming the object of desire (or for the desirability of
that object to wane).
That all consumption takes time is in fact the bane of a consumer society
and a major worry of the merchandisers of consumer goods. Ideally, the
consumer’s satisfaction ought to be instant, and this in a double sense.
Consumed goods should bring satisfaction immediately, requiring no
delay, no protracted learning of skills and no lengthy groundwork; but the
satisfaction should end the moment the time needed for their consumption
is up, and that time ought to be reduced to a bare minimum. This
reduction is best achieved if the consumers cannot hold their attention nor
focus their desire on any object for long; if they are impatient, impetuous
and restive, and above all easily excitable and equally susceptible to losing
interest.
When waiting is taken out of wanting and wanting out of waiting, the
consumptive capacity of consumers may be stretched far beyond the limits
set by any natural or acquired needs or determined by the physical
endurability of the objects of desire. The traditional relationship between
needs and their satisfaction will then be reversed: the promise and hope of
satisfaction will precede the need and will be always greater than the extant
need, yet not too great to preclude the desire for the goods which carry
that promise. As a matter of fact, the promise is all the more attractive the
less the need in question is familiar; there is a lot of fun in living through an
experience one did not even know existed and was available. The
excitement of the new and unprecedented sensation is the name of the
consumer game. As Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen put it, ‘desire does
not desire satisfaction. To the contrary, desire desires desire’;3 the desire of
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26
Work, consumerism and the new poor
an ideal consumer at any rate. The prospect of the desire fading off, dissipating and having nothing in sight to resurrect it, or the prospect of a
world with nothing left in it to be desired, must be the most sinister of the
ideal consumer’s horrors.
To increase their capacity for consumption, consumers must never be
given rest. They need to be constantly exposed to new temptations in order
to be kept in a state of a constantly seething, never wilting excitation and,
indeed, in a state of suspicion and disaffection. The baits commanding them
to shift attention need to confirm such suspicion while offering a way out
of disaffection: ‘You reckon you’ve seen it all? You ain’t seen nothing yet!’
It is often said that the consumer market seduces its customers. But in
order to do so it needs customers who are ready and keen to be seduced
(just as, in order to command his labourers, the factory boss needed a crew
with the habits of discipline and command-following firmly entrenched).
In a properly working consumer society consumers seek actively to be
seduced. They live from attraction to attraction, from temptation to
temptation, from swallowing one bait to fishing for another, each new
attraction, temptation and bait being somewhat different and perhaps
stronger than those that preceded them; just as their ancestors, the producers, lived from one turn of the conveyer belt to an identical next.
To act like that is, for the fully-fledged, mature consumer, a compulsion,
a must; yet that ‘must’, that internalized pressure, that impossibility of
living one’s life in any other way, reveals itself to them in the form of a free
exercise of will. The market might have already picked them up and
groomed them as consumers, and so deprived them of their freedom to
ignore its temptations, but on every successive visit to a market place
consumers have every reason to feel in command. They are the judges, the
critics and the choosers. They can, after all, refuse their allegiance to any
one of the infinite choices on display – except the choice of choosing
between them, that is. The roads to self-identity, to a place in society, to
life lived in a form recognizable as that of meaningful living, all require
daily visits to the market place.
In the industrial phase of modernity one fact was beyond all questioning:
that everyone must be a producer first, before being anything else. In
‘modernity mark two’, the consumers’ modernity, the brute unquestionable fact is that one needs to be consumer first, before one can think of
becoming anything in particular.
The making of a consumer
In recent years we heard politicians of all political hues speaking in unison,
wistfully and enticingly, of ‘consumer-led recovery’. Falling output, empty
order books and sluggish high-street trade all tend to be blamed on lack of
consumer interest or ‘consumer confidence’ (which means the consumer’s
desire to buy on credit strong enough to outweigh their fear of insolvency).
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From the work ethic to the aesthetic of consumption
27
The hopes of all these troubles being chased away, of things starting to hum
anew, are pinned on the consumers doing their duty again – wishing once
more to buy, to buy a lot, and to buy ever more. ‘Economic growth’, the
main modern measure of things being normal and in good order, the main
index of a society working as it should, is seen in the consumer society as
dependent not so much on the ‘productive strength of the nation’ (healthy
and plentiful labour force, full coffers and daring entrepreneurship of the
capital owners and managers), as on the zest and vigour of its consumers.
The role once performed by work in linking together individual motives,
social integration and systemic reproduction, has now been assigned to
consumer activity.
Having dismantled the ‘pre-modern’ – traditional, ascriptive mechanisms of social placement, which left to men and women only the relatively
straightforward task of ‘sticking to one’s own kind’, of living up to (but not
above) the standards attached to the ‘social category’ into which they were
born – modernity charged the individual with the task of ‘self-construction’:
building one’s own social identity if not fully from scratch, at least from its
foundation up. Responsibility of the individual – once confined to obeying
the rules that defined in no uncertain terms what it meant to be a nobleman,
a tradesman, a mercenary soldier, a craftsman, a farm tenant or a farm
hand – now extended to include the choice of social definition itself and
having this socially recognized and approved.
Initially, work was offered as the prime tool in coping with this new,
modern duty. The sought-after and diligently built social identity took
working skills, the site of employment and the career scheme attached to
employment as its major determinants. Identity, once selected, had to be
built once and for all, for life, and so was in principle at least the
employment, the vocation, the life-work. The building of identity was to
be steady and consistent, proceeding through a succession of clearly
defined stages (no wonder the metaphor of ‘building’ was picked to convey
the nature of ‘identity work’ to be done), and so was the work-career. The
fixed itinerary of work-career and the prerequisites of lifelong identity
construction fit each other well.
A steady, durable and continuous, logically coherent and tightly structured working career is however no longer a widely available option. Only
in relatively rare cases can a permanent identity be defined, let alone
secured, through the job performed. Permanent, well guarded and assured
jobs are now a rarity. The jobs of the old, ‘for life’, sometimes even
hereditary, character are confined to a few old industries and old professions and are rapidly shrinking in number. New vacancies tend to be fixed
term, until further notice and part-time. They are often combined with
other occupations, and deprived of any safeguards of continuity, let alone
of permanence. The catchword is flexibility, and this increasingly fashionable notion stands for a game of hire and fire with very few rules
attached, but with power to change the rules unilaterally while the game is
still being played.
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Work, consumerism and the new poor
Nothing truly lasting could be reasonably hoped to be erected on this
kind of shifting sand. Purely and simply, the prospect of constructing a
lifelong identity on the foundation of work is, for the great majority of
people (except, for the time being at least, the practitioners of a few highly
skilled and highly privileged professions), dead and buried.
Nevertheless, this momentous departure has not been experienced as a
major earthquake or an existential threat. This is because the nature of
common preoccupations with identities has also changed in a way which
would render the old-fashioned work-careers utterly unsuitable and indeed
out of joint with the kind of tasks and worries which the new kind of
identity-care entails. In the world in which, according to George Steiner’s
pithy aphorism, all cultural products are calculated for ‘maximal impact and
instant obsolescence’, a lifelong construction of an a priori designed
identity would indeed spell trouble. As Ricardo Petrella put it, the present
global trends direct ‘economies towards the production of the ephemeral
and the volatile – through the massive reduction of the life-span of products and services – and of the precarious (temporary, flexible and parttime jobs)’.4
Whatever identity one may contemplate and desire must possess, just
like today’s labour market, the quality of flexibility. It must be amenable to
a change at short notice or without notice and be guided by the principle
of keeping all options, or at least as many options as possible, open. The
future is bound to be full of surprises, and so proceeding otherwise would
amount to a self-deprivation: to the cutting off of the yet unknown, only
vaguely intuited benefits that the future meanderings of fate, as well as the
unprecedented and unanticipated life-offers, may bring.
Cultural fashions dynamite their entry into the public vanity fair, but
they also grow obsolete and turn ludicrously old-fashioned even faster than
it takes to grasp public attention. It is therefore better to keep each current
identity temporary, to embrace it lightly, to make sure that it will fall away
once the arms are open to embrace its new, brighter, or just untested
replacement. Perhaps it would be more to the point to speak of selfidentity in the plural: the life-itinerary of most individuals is likely to be
strewn with discarded and lost identities. Each successive identity is likely
to remain incomplete and conditional, and so the snag is how to stave off
the danger of its ossification. Perhaps even the very term ‘identity’ has lost
its usefulness, since it belies more than it reveals of the most common lifeexperience: more and more often concerns with social placement are fed
by the fear of an identification too tough and stiff to be revoked if need be.
The desire of identity and horror of satisfying that desire, the attraction and
the repulsion that the thought of identity evokes, mix and blend to produce a compound of lasting ambivalence and confusion.
Concerns of this kind are much better served by the volatile, infinitely
inventive and erratic market of consumer goods. Whether meant for
durable or momentary consumption, consumer goods are not, by definition, intended to last forever – no resemblance here to a ‘lifelong work
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From the work ethic to the aesthetic of consumption
29
career’ or ‘jobs for life’. Consumer goods are meant to be used up and to
disappear; the idea of temporariness and transitoriness is intrinsic to their
very denomination as objects of consumption; consumer goods have
memento mori written all over them, even if with an invisible ink.
And so there is a sort of preordained harmony or resonance between
these qualities of consumer goods and the ambivalence endemic to contemporary identity concerns. Identities, just like consumer goods, are to be
appropriated and possessed, but only in order to be consumed, and so to
disappear again. As in the case of marketed consumer goods, consumption
of an identity should not – must not – extinguish the desire for other, new
and improved identities, nor preclude the ability to absorb them. This
being the requirement there is not much point in looking any further for
the tools than the market place. ‘Aggregate identities’, loosely arranged of
the purchasable, not-too-lasting, easily detachable and utterly replaceable
tokens currently available in the shops, seem to be exactly what one needs
to meet the challenges of contemporary living.
If this is what the energy released by identity problems is expended on,
then no specialized social mechanisms of ‘normative regulation’ or ‘pattern
maintenance’ are necessary; neither do they seem desirable. The traditional, panoptical methods of drill would clearly go against the grain of the
consumer’s tasks and prove disastrous to the society organized around
desire and choice. But would any alternative method of normative regulation fare any better? Is not the very idea of normative regulation, at least
on a global-societal scale, a thing of the past? Once crucial to ‘get people to
work’ in a society of working people, did it not outlive its usefulness in the
society of consumers? The sole purpose of any norm is to use the human
agency of free choice to limit or altogether eliminate freedom of choice; to
elbow out or to cut off completely all possibilities except one – the one
promoted by the norm. But the side effect of killing choice, and particularly the choice most abominable from the point of view of normative,
order-instilling regulation – a volatile, whimsical and easily revokable
choice – would be equal to the killing of the consumer in the human
being; the most horrifying disaster that may befall the market-centred
society.
Normative regulation is thus ‘dysfunctional’ and so undesirable for the
perpetuation, smooth functioning and prosperity of a consumer market,
but it also appears repulsive to its clients. The interests of consumers and
market operators meet here; in a curious and unanticipated form the
message conveyed by the old adage ‘what is good for General Motors is
good for the United States’ comes true (with the proviso that ‘United
States’ is nothing else but an aggregate of its citizens). The ‘consumer
spirit’, much like the merchandising companies which thrive on it, rebels
against regulation. A society of consumers is resentful of all legal restrictions
imposed on freedom of choice, of any delegalization of potential objects of
consumption, and manifests its resentment by widespread support willingly
offered to most ‘deregulatory’ measures.
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30
Work, consumerism and the new poor
Similar resentment is shown in the hitherto unheard-of approval given
in the US and elsewhere to the reduction of social services – centrally
administered and guaranteed provisions of necessities – providing the
reduction goes hand in hand with the lowering of taxes. The slogan of
‘more money in the taxpayer’s pocket’, so popular on the left and right of
the political spectrum that it is no longer seriously contested, appeals to
consumers’ duty to exercise choice, a duty already internalized and
reforged into the life-vocation. The promise of more money left in the
pocket after taxes is attractive to the electorate not so much for the promise
of more consumption, as for the prospect of more choice of what is to be
consumed, more pleasures of shopping and choosing; it is to that promise
of more frequently exercised choice that it is believed to owe its astonishing seductive power.
For all practical intents and purposes, it is the means, not the end, that
counts. Fulfilling the vocation of the consumer means more choosing,
whether or not this results in more consumption. To embrace the modality
of the consumer means first and foremost falling in love with choice; only
in the second, and not at all indispensable place, does it mean consuming
more.
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Work as judged by aesthetics
Producers can fulfil their vocation only collectively; production is a collective endeavour, it presumes the division of tasks, cooperation of actors
and coordination of their activities. Certain partial actions can be performed on occasion singly and in solitude, but even then dovetailing them
with other actions which converge on the creation of the final product
remains the crucial part of the task and stays high on the performer’s mind.
Producers are together even when they act apart. The work of each one
can only gain from more inter-individual communication, harmony and
integration.
Consumers are just the opposite. Consumption is a thoroughly individual, solitary and, in the end, lonely activity; an activity which is fulfilled
by quenching and arousing, assuaging and whipping up a desire which is
always a private, and not easily communicable sensation. There is no such
thing as ‘collective consumption’. True, consumers may get together in the
course of consumption, but even then the actual consumption remains a
thoroughly lonely, individually lived-through experience. Getting together
only underlies the privacy of the consuming act and enhances its pleasures.
Choosing is more satisfying when performed in the company of other
choosers, preferably inside a temple dedicated to the cult of choosing and
filled to the brim with worshippers of choice; this is one of the foremost
pleasures of going out to dinner in a heavily booked-up restaurant, of
milling around a crowded shopping mall or amusement park, of group sex.
But what is jointly celebrated in all these and similar cases is the individuality
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From the work ethic to the aesthetic of consumption
31
of choice and consumption. The individuality of each choice is restated
and reconfirmed through being replicated by the copy-cat actions of the
crowd of choosers. Were this not so, there would be nothing to be gained
by the consumer from consuming in company. The activity of consumption is a natural enemy of all coordination and integration. It is also
immune to their influence, rendering all efforts of bonding impotent in
overcoming the endemic loneliness of the consuming act. Consumers are
alone even when they act together.
Freedom to choose sets the stratification ladder of consumer society and
so also the frame in which its members, the consumers, inscribe their life
aspirations – a frame that defines the direction of efforts towards selfimprovement and encloses the image of a ‘good life’. The more freedom of
choice one has, and above all the more choice one freely exercises, the
higher up one is placed in the social hierarchy, the more public deference
and self-esteem one can count on and the closer one comes to the ‘good
life’ ideal. Wealth and income do count, of course; without them, choice is
limited or altogether denied. But the role of wealth and income as capital –
that is, money which serves first and foremost to turn out more money –
recedes to a second and inferior place if it does not disappear from view
(and from the pool of motivations) altogether. The prime significance of
wealth and income is in the stretching of the range of consumer choice.
Hoarding, saving or investing would make sense solely for the promise
they hold for the future widening of consumer choice. They are not,
however, the options intended for the bulk of ordinary consumers, and
were they embraced by a majority of consumers, they would spell disaster.
Rising savings and shrinking credit purchases are bad news; the swelling of
consumer credit is welcomed as the sure sign of ‘things moving in the right
direction’. A consumer society would not take lightly a call to delay
gratification. A consumer society is a society of credit cards, not savings
books. It is a ‘now’ society. A wanting society, not a waiting society.
Again, there is no need for ‘normative regulation’ with its attendant
disciplining drill and ubiquitous policing to make sure that human wants
are harnessed to the market-operators’ profits, or any need to reforge the
‘needs of economy’, the consumer-goods economy, to match the desires of
consumers. Seduction, display of untested wonders, promise of sensations
yet untried but dwarfing and overshadowing everything tried before, will
do nicely. Providing of course, that the message falls on receptive ears and
that all eyes are focused on thrill-presaging things when scanning the
signals. Consumption, ever more varied and rich consumption, must
appear to the consumers as a right to enjoy, not a duty to suffer. The
consumers must be guided by aesthetic interests, not ethical norms.
It is aesthetics, not ethics, that is deployed to integrate the society of
consumers, keep it on course, and time and again salvage it from crises. If
ethics accord supreme value to duty well done, aesthetics put a premium
on sublime experience. Fulfilment of duty has its inner, time-extensive
logic and so it structures time, gives it a direction, makes sense of such
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Work, consumerism and the new poor
notions as gradual accumulation or delay of fulfilment. The search for
experience, however, has no good reason to be postponed, since nothing
but ‘waste of opportunity’ may follow the delay. Opportunity of experience does not need nor justify groundwork, since it comes unannounced
and vanishes if not instantly grasped (waning, to be sure, shortly after
having been grasped). Opportunity of experience is something to be
caught in full flight. There is no peculiar moment especially suitable for
doing this. One moment does not differ in this respect from another, each
moment is equally good – ‘ripe’ – for the purpose.
Besides, the choice of the moment is the one choice not available to
those who have chosen choice-making as their mode of life. It is not for
the consumer to decide when the opportunity of a mind-boggling
experience may arise, and so she or he must be ever ready to open the door
and welcome it. He or she must be constantly on the alert, permanently
capable of appreciating the chance when it comes and doing whatever is
needed to make the best of it.
If the producer society is Platonian by heart, seeking unbreakable rules
and the ultimate patterns of things, the consumer society is Aristotelian –
pragmatic, flexible, abiding by the principle that one worries about crossing
the bridge no earlier (but no later either) than one comes to it. The sole
initiative left to a sensible consumer is to be on that spot where opportunities are known to be thick on the ground, and be there at the time
when they are known to be particularly dense. Such initiative can
accommodate only wisdom of a ‘phronesis’ kind, a c…