Work is more than a job to earn money by Gisela Notz, 12/20/2018

Work is more than just a job you do to earn money

by Gisela Notz
[This article posted on 12/20/2018 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.linksnet.de/artikel/47612.]

The major social theories that deal with work ignore women’s contribution to the creation and maintenance of society (reproductive work). Neither Karl Marx nor Max Weber considered unpaid work to be the basis for the development of capitalism. Housework and raising children do not fall under the definition of work because they do not generate income and are supposedly unpayable. This ignorance gives rise to a number of problems, because work that is not gainful employment is just as necessary to society as gainful employment.

What is work?

Today’s Western “working society” is still essentially structured on the assumption of a “normal working relationship” in which men pursue gainful employment while women’s work is located in the family and in voluntary social work, supplemented at most by female “additional income.” This understanding of work is based on the gender-specific division of labor modeled on the bourgeois nuclear family that emerged in the mid-19th century. Even working men from the lower classes pushed for this family model, even though it never worked for working-class households because the “breadwinner’s” earnings were usually not enough to feed the family.

The part of human labor that is still and repeatedly referred to as the “residual sphere,” the work necessary for the so-called reproduction of the human workforce, remains in most publications on ideas about work today mostly private, unpaid, supposedly unpayable, and in any case invisible. People who perform work outside of paid wage labor have never been counted among those who perform social work, as a look at the history of women’s work proves. Of course, the positioning of women in kitchens and nurseries cannot be understood without their own contribution, and the mere assertion that housework is just as productive as the work done in large factories to increase surplus value does not (yet) change the gender-based hierarchical attributions or the fact that those who perform this work cannot live off its proceeds.

The insistence on an understanding of work as productive labor is based not least on Marx’s account in the first volume of Capital. According to this, the labor process forms the general basis of the metabolism between humans and nature. Under capitalist conditions, work serves exclusively to produce use values as exchange values. It is based on the interaction of many wage-earning individuals. According to Marx’s theory, the material basis of life is created through the totality of different work activities.

According to Marx, work is a planned activity aimed at an economic goal, for which mental and physical powers are used. It is aimed at the production of a social product and is thus a means of satisfying human needs. According to Marx, the unpaid work necessary for human reproduction takes place outside of gainful employment and does not belong to wage labor; it is therefore non-work and thus not work. According to Marx’s theory, it is “ purposeless activity.” Marx also recognized that “purposeless activities” or “work without coercion,” as he also calls it, can be “damned serious,” i.e., hard work.

However, he apparently understands this to mean artistic activities rather than housework, as the following quote makes clear: “Truly free work, e.g., composing, is at the same time deadly serious, the most intense effort.” It can hardly be disputed that this effort also applies to artistic work that is not subject to wage labor. But is housework “work without coercion”?

Criteria for an expanded concept of work

What is needed is a feminist critique of science that criticizes the traditional concept of work and exposes it as completely false. Simply expanding the concept of work to include reproductive work or care activities is not enough. The critique of work in capitalist conditions goes beyond the demand for the inclusion of all currently unpaid work in the wage form, as was the case, for example, in the housework debate of the women’s movement in the 1970s. Ultimately, it is a critique of the wage form of even currently paid work and of the dependence of mere existence on paid wages. This critique must be gender-specific and class-specific at the same time, and it must also cover the content of all areas of work and include the distinction between dispositive factors (planning, instruction, organization) and executive factors in all areas of work. It must also criticize the orientation toward lifelong full-time work (for men) as well as the orientation toward lifelong care work (for women). In addition to problematizing inhumane, externally determined working conditions in production work, we must also problematize the communicationless nature of work in kitchens and nurseries, which, like many forms of “own work,” subsistence work, and other non-market-mediated care work, is defined by dead capital, just like work in large and small factories. It is not more humane simply because it is supposedly unpayable.

The starting point for the following considerations is that socially necessary and useful activities are performed both in the area of (currently) paid work and in the area of (currently) unpaid work; conversely, activities that do not meet these criteria occur in both areas. If the distinction between productive and reproductive work is to be maintained (for the time being), “productive work” would be understood as instrumentally bound, goal-oriented, socially useful activity in production and services.

Activities beyond wage labor (or other gainful employment that secures income) that are necessary for the preservation of human labor and human life would then be “reproductive work.” According to this definition, however, the reproductive sphere does not refer to a “realm of freedom” that is opposed to the “realm of necessity.” The work performed there is diverse in structure and always complementary to the production process. By decoupling it from the direct influence of the capitalist exploitation process, time structures, forms of work, and psychological-emotional relationships become possible without which the ability of individuals to live and work could not be maintained or created. Production and reproduction work can be associated with hardship, but it can also provide satisfaction, pleasure, and self-affirmation.

This “expanded” concept of work encompasses all forms of gainful and reproductive work. It also includes those activities that Hannah Arendt divides into “working” and ‘acting’ in “The Human Condition,” “making” and “acting,” i.e., activities to ensure the survival of the species and of life itself, the production of an artificial world of things “that opposes our fleeting existence with permanence and duration” (= making), and actions that “serve to establish and maintain political communities.” Every activity has a formative and culture-shaping impact on our circumstances, albeit not all with equal weight, but none without significance. According to this definition, work is both paid gainful employment—which in turn can be subdivided into precarious gainful employment, part-time work, work covered by collective agreements, and self-employment—as well as housework and care work, child-rearing, care work for the elderly, sick, and disabled, unpaid consumer work, subsistence work, voluntary political and cultural work, civic engagement, “voluntary” unpaid social work, and unpaid work in self-help groups. However, a concept of work that refers to the analysis of the entire spectrum of work, regardless of remuneration, must also take into account different places of work: In addition to industrial companies, small and medium-sized enterprises, administrations, and projects and businesses in the alternative economy, these include institutions in the social and health sectors, welfare organizations, associations and federations that organize civic engagement and volunteer work, social movement projects, and, of course, families or other residential and living communities in which housework and care work are organized. Such a concept of work requires a broader concept of economy that includes gainful employment, community, supply, subsistence, and household economies, as well as artistic work, which often cuts across these areas of work, and considers them to be of equal importance. It is about a concept of economy that establishes the connection between reproduction and production and overcomes the separation between economic and (seemingly) non-economic spheres and their gender-specific distribution. Only through a comprehensive concept of work will it be possible to reevaluate and redistribute “all work.” Ultimately, the aim is to distribute all socially necessary work that is (currently) paid and (currently) unpaid in a more just and equitable manner. Ultimately, the aim is to abolish alienated labor and promote “personality-enhancing work” in all areas of work, as well as the participation of men and women in all aspects of life. The goal would be a society in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” as Marx and Engels wrote in 1848 in The Communist Manifesto.

Gisela Notz, social scientist and historian, lives and works in Berlin.

This text appeared in Bildpunkt. Zeitschrift der IG Bildende Kunst (Vienna), No. 48, Winter 2018/19, “pay the artist now!”