Work isn’t working

By Matt Bolton

The five Tory MPs who co-authored Britannia Unchained – a book arguing that an 'idle' Britain needs to 'rediscover the lost virtue of hard graft' in order to salvage the economy – may be hypocrites, enjoying the five week Parliamentary recess as they are, but at least they are honest. There is no 'compassionate conservatism' beating around the bush here: this is the true voice of capital, raw and unadulterated. 'Work harder, work longer, get less – only work will set you free' is the message. This 'Britannia' is one straining at the 'red tape' leash in order to race to the bottom, desperate to compete with China and the Asian economies via cuts in wages and the further dismantling of the welfare state.  But in truth, this argument has little to do with economics: this is wholly political, pure ideology. The view of work held by these MPs, and by the right wing press, has actually very little to do with how capitalism operates now, or how it has worked for the past 30 years. It is an anachronism, a hangover from a long-gone time – and, strangely, it is a defunct vision shared by the majority of the liberal and socialist left.

The position of work in our society has shifted under our feet, even as it defines our subjectivity more than ever. Put simply, the work that most of us do everyday has very little to do with how the economy functions. Work, in the traditional sense of a workday and a wage, now finds itself as an economic externality to capitalism: as Marx puts it in the Grundrisse, human labour 'steps to the side' of the workings of capital.[1] From the standpoint of the worker, this is made clear by the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult to survive through work alone. The repression of wages since the reconstitution of capitalism in the 1970s (through the development of post-Fordist production methods) has meant that workers have had to resort to greater and greater levels of private debt via credit in order to maintain the standard of living necessary to reproduce their labour. The introduction of tax credits by 'Third Way' governments in the UK and US to top up wages is a tacit admission that work does not pay – as demonstrated by statistics showing that nearly a fifth of those receiving housing benefit in the UK are currently in work,[2] or that seven million people used payday loans or other forms of credit to cover their mortgage repayments in 2011.[3] Add to this the millions of temporary and 'precarious' workers on zero hour or casual contracts, as well as those forced to work for free via workfare schemes, and the link between work, the wage and economic survival becomes ever looser.