Invisible Hands and Iron Fists - Fear, Progress and Work at the End of the Century. Angela Mitropoulos [Overland, 157. December, 1999 pp. 4-12]

Over the last fifteen years in Australia, the workplace has been thoroughly and miserably transformed. With the biggest growth in employment recorded in casual and part-time work, with the proportion of those working over 60 hours a week registering the most dramatic increase relative to other hours worked amongst full time workers, the eight-hour day no longer warrants the appellation of 'standard hours'. [1] Overwork, casual work, outwork, temporary work, part-time work and unemployment are now the conventional experiences of working classes in Australia and other OECD countries. This has breached the usual divide between the employed and the unemployed that distinguished a prior formula of workforce motivation and discipline. At the same time, those who are unemployed are seen as easy targets for labour conscription and the castigating idiom of 'mutual obligation'. Thus, the fear of losing one's job is no longer simply fear of impoverishment, but also the prospect, if one is under 34, of being bound to work for an income level and under conditions that cannot legally be negotiated. Young people are being prepared to expect subsistence wages no less than to assume the overt threat of starvation as a normal feature of one's work life.

It does not take much to realise that the grim immediacy of this for the vast portion of the workforce urges the acquiescence of the entire workforce, as fear becomes a discernible innovation in enterprise bargaining, contract negotiations and, not least, in the ways that panic and anxiety are embraced in the composition of political constituencies. Fear, the kind of fear that stifles the demand for better and makes us anticipate only variations of distress, is of course the belief that one cannot possibly hope for progress, which operates as a kind of dissipation of hope itself.

This fear has a paradoxical basis: it would not be so generalised were it not for the ways in which understandings of progress have been fashioned as the belief that things get better over time—the conviction that progress is measured by clock and calendar. The bond between progress and linear time is no whim, however. This was the usual corollary of the assembly line, the career, and adult lives spent more or less in one occupation. As the assembly-line marked time as both linear movement and the painstaking collection of parts toward a final, determined whole, so too this doctrine identifies progress as a conveyor belt moving resolutely toward promised satisfaction. Officially, at the core of this notion, is the virtuous contract of the work ethic of early capitalism rendered time-bound: work hard and life will be better in the future.

The remaking of work has not been widely grasped as the moment for a new interpretation of progress, a different imagining of the possibilities for a radically different and better future. It has not been seen as the occasion on which to ask whether or not progress ever came to pass in these simplified and calendrical terms, whether the post-WWII period was indeed one of progress for most people, or whether present misery is perhaps a consequence of those post-war circumstances. What has occurred instead, has been an attempt to locate explanations for the collapse of this particular narrative of progress in ways that do not query that very rendition of capitalist progress and which, in the most dogged of ways, seeks to insure it against disrepute.

Progress, thereby transformed from a demand that things be better into a philosophy that over time they will, easily finds itself menaced (or perhaps tempted) by chronicles of a strict decline, resolving down into a panicky compulsion to ledger blame for those (or that) perceived as a barrier to forward motion, toward the contracted goal. Once progress is figured as sequential and cumulative, then the lack of progress tends to be presented either as an unequivocal reversal (degeneracy) or, more intensely, as the result of obstacles deemed external (the fly in the ointment, the scapegoat, the malingerer).

De-generation, insecurity and incomes

Such narratives, even when they begin by recognising the frightful nature of recent changes to work, function not so much as critique but as a nostalgia for times past. This is from Richard Sennett's, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of the New Capitalism:

Enrico had spent twenty years by the time we first met cleaning toilets and mopping floors . . . He did so without complaining . . . What had most struck me about Enrico and his generation was how linear time was in their lives: year after year of working in jobs which seldom varied from day to day. Along that line of time, achievement was cumulative. [2]

Corrosion begins with, and is confined by, a comparison between Enrico and his son, Rico, a computer programmer—biography recast as allegory. For Sennett, transformations to work have damaged that which he associates with 'good character': loyalty, traditional authority, moral development and, not least, the work ethic. There is little doubt that there has been an aggravation of competition between workers, that mistrust and separation permeate the workplace. Nevertheless, this does not seem to be Sennett's preoccupation. Corrosion implies not only that there has been a generational decline, nor that the life of the son is worse than that of the father (since Rico is by most standards of living much better off than his father), but that the character of the son is impaired, and that of his children likely to be more so. One might ask whether Sennett thought this was the case because (unlike the requisitioned gratitude of the immigrant father) Enrico complains all the time—about his work and prospects for the future in particular. The mortgaging of the present to some promised future no longer functions to bind Rico to his employers and his work.

From whose perspective, then, is this supposed decline in 'character' a problem? For Sennett, the constant movement of workers—around different jobs, companies and places—makes it impossible to develop a sense of loyalty and commitment. To be sure, many workers are horrified by the ease with they are disposable. Where Sennett, out of a fondness for his chosen narrative of progress and decline, sidesteps precisely what is before him, is here, in an inability to see that Rico might well complain about his financial insecurity, but he has no desire at all to return to what he sees as the deliberately mind-numbing routine of his father's work. Instead of offering an explanation and critique of why these changes to work have been important for capitalism, Sennett is rather more concerned to compare the present to the past, in a move which makes the future possible only as a idealised version of the past or present, which obliterates any imagining of the future as radically different to either.

Yet the changes to work, even the discontinuous nature of work, would not inspire fear were it not for the threat, especially in the US where Rico lives, of being without any income at all. Poverty is the problem, not unemployment or discontinuous work. And so, instead of calling for a return to a mythical time of 'full employment'—mythical, since it was always premised on the unpaid domestic work of women—or a return to full-time, life-long drudgery, Beck argues for "decoupling of income entitlements from paid work and from the labour market [that] would, in Zygmunt Bauman's words, remove 'the awesome fly of insecurity from the sweet ointment of freedom'", in short, a universal basic income. [3]

In Corrosion, the predicament is viewed not so much the effects of late capitalism on workers but rather as the impact of such changes on that obliging theme of orthodox sociologists: 'social cohesion'. If the 'social bond' furnished by the post-WWII era was premised on the trade between the promise of future reward and a pledge to commit to a lifetime of work, then the collapse of financial security entails serious risks for capital itself. In the pre-WWII period, absenteeism, breaches of company security and sabotage were common ways in which employee 'disloyalty' manifested itself in a climate of restraints on more open sorts of industrial conflict like strikes. Sennett appears as something of a risk analyst for capitalism, locating the ways in which the new organisation of work makes for discontented, disloyal workers who increasingly see little reason to work other than for an income. Here, then, the handling and channelling of discontent becomes an obligatory accompaniment of any government which seeks to place limits on increases in wages and social incomes, or which, to put it another way, that seeks to head off the arrangement of a working class politics around the relative proportions of incomes and profits.

Malingerers, parasites and final solutions

There are numerous versions of the blameworthy. Sometimes it is enough to impute to individuals the liability for systemic failure, as Tony Abbott, Minister for Employment, sought to do with the robust motif of the "job snob". "Long term unemployment has tended to breed a sub-culture of the job snob, that's to say someone who wants a job but only on his or her own terms", he said. [4] Not far from the surface of this declaration was the claim that unemployment is caused by 'too high wages', as if wages and life in capitalism bear no relation worth dwelling on, or at least not long enough to recall that people are not the same as merchandise unable to find a buyer because of a 'too high price'—jaunty attempts to make it so aside.

And who can doubt that these imagined individuals are routinely young, and young males in particular. That Abbott could hardly believe such a fantasy of causation is beside the point. He believes that others will believe it because they have a historically inscribed faith in a narrative of progress lashes out against officially-prescribed others and 'outsiders' at the first sign of its own inadequacy. Given the age demographics and voting-age laws of Australia, the political pitch is more often than not a wink to those over 50, raised on the historical association of line production, rising incomes, and—as it was touted—the triumphal progress of post-war capitalism. Not surprisingly, then, young people are a potent figure for visions of risk, the attribution of responsibility or (what is the other side of the same coin) as endless potential victims who must be under constant supervision and control lest they hang around in malls without spending money, walk the streets after dark, or look at nakedness on a computer screen.

Other, ever more vague, conspiratorial and belligerent figures can be summoned to bear the projected weight of general fright. Obviously, we could cite the emergence of One Nation and its impressive array of evils: the 'ethnic lobby', the 'Aboriginal industry', 'overpopulation', 'world government' . . . Less obviously to some, we might notice a reassertion of the ALP's historic preoccupation with immigrants as the source of peril. From the ALP's commitment to the 'white Australia policy' at the beginning of this century, to their recent excitement over an imaginary invasion of the coastline, there seems little interruption to a discourse which seeks to make 'outsiders' the repository for alarm over—and liable for the experience of—depressed working conditions and incomes. But then, it was of course the ALP Government that began the 'belt-tightening' drive under Bob Hawke, that introduced enterprise bargaining, which saw real wages fall and unions become an appendage of Treasury policy. Faced with the choice between censuring the ALP and implicating those effortlessly cast as 'alien', you can guess what was electorally advantageous. During the lead up to the 1998 elections, media commentators and politicians assembled to denounce the prospect of a 'race election'. No one remarked that we had already had two such elections in recent times. The 1993 election was the climax of a contest between the Liberals and the ALP over who was tougher on refugees and in immigrant law, culminating in the introduction by the ALP of highly restrictive conditions on immigration and refugee applications, including the abrogation of the rule of law in refugee matters. By the campaign of 1996, the Coalition was promising a boost in the restrictions and extending the range of 'outsiders' in what was to prove a fertile acrimony against 'political correctness', 'black armband history' and the 'multicultural lobby'. That prominent members of the ALP have been actively seeking the explicit adoption of such comprehensive resentments, including of course their own special attachment to 'law and order' campaigns, indicates just how seductive this strategy is in the assembly of 'the national interest'.

Strikingly close to the terminology of One Nation, much of the left characterises this moment as a period of globalisation and deregulation—as if danger issues from the world 'out there' and the disintegration of authority, usually defined as national. Nothing could be more deceptive. The ability of global money to enforce austerity has indeed been sharpened and 'flexible' production systems have been extended. But global money has been with us for as long as the Australian nation has. Likewise, the Australian economy has always been overwhelmingly export-oriented. What has changed is not the territorial reach of money and trade, but the laws relating to the movements of people. Since the end of WWII, there are more not less constraints. Australia's refugee detention camps being the most shameful example of the recent rush to contain people, to criminalise them simply for passing across borders. Ironically, at the same time, governments declare the merits of free markets.

Domestically, industrial laws are also more regulated from the perspective of workers, strictly designating what can and cannot be a correct industrial claim, the terms under which workers can take action, and so on. According to the Australian Centre for Industrial Relations and Training:

The last ten to fifteen years has been associated with a substantial external re-regulation of industrial relations in Australia designed to enhance the internal power and discretion of employers in their interactions with employees and, where relevant, unions. Invisible hands, so it seems, need to be transformed into iron fists if they are to achieve their ostensible 'purpose'. [5]

So, the orchestration of a seeming consensus of opinion over how to perceive late capitalism includes putative 'solutions' which bear little relation to what is actually occurring. Thus, if globalisation is the problem, then more nationalism would seem to be the solution; if we are experiencing the collapse of authority, then authority should be re-asserted; if unproductiveness is the problem, then forced labour is the solution… A fully processed politics, a total and totalitarian politics, which irresistibly imposes particular 'solutions' the moment one concedes the characterisation of 'the problem'.

Work, slavery and citizenship

The methods used to obliterate prior foundations of working class solidarity, organisation and incomes (casualisation, individual contracts, temp agencies, part-time work, austerity budgets, etc) have contradictory effects. They do carry through, in limited form, the compliance of workers but this acquiescence is achieved at the real cost of enthusiasm. To a society that likes to imagine itself as egalitarian and democratic, composed therefore of citizens accorded human rights, political spin must find a way of re-building a stable constituency for the policies of sado-monetarism. That is, not only must scapegoats be foreshadowed in the midst of policy announcements (such as the 'job snob', the 'illegal immigrant'), but the 'work ethic' must be observed as the essential debt of citizenship and indeed humanity. For us, work is seen as a requirement of citizenship in marked contrast to the distinction between work and citizenship in Ancient Greece, where to be a citizen was to be not a slave. Work today draws the political border of the nation—those defined as 'us'. That this is so can be seen by the experiences of those regarded as non-citizens, as unable to appeal to those rights associated with citizenship (access to the law, the presumption of innocence, protection from coercion, equal treatment before the law, political participation, et cetera).

The necessary fiction of wage labour as free labour does not quite seem as necessary these days. Perhaps it never really was in capitalism. Open coercion was always sanctioned by defining those who were coerced as unable to correctly internalise and experience as their own a duty to work, to work hard and work efficiently. Command thus had to be present as an external and often-brute force alongside the judgement that those who were coerced were less than human. This judgement was always a result rather than a premise of coerced labour; a decision which nonetheless had to display itself as assumption in order to persist in the midst of such apparently universal declarations that 'all are born equal'. Slavery could therefore be seen as an attribute of 'blackness', defined as laziness, apathy, et cetera—in short, as an aversion to work. Here is how the German National Socialist bureaucracy in Poland anticipated the concentration camps:

Overpopulation . . . defined relatively and by its proportion to insufficient productivity and underemployment, . . . to the inadequate utilisation of the available labour force [as well as] the additional factor of 'mentality' explained why the labour force in the General Government was 'less efficient that the German one' since it 'generally lacked what was natural to the German worker, namely the motivation to organise his own work with the purpose of attaining the highest labour efficiency possible. [6]

Since WWII—since, that is, the collapse of the 'white Australia policy'—immigrants have been allowed entry into Australia conditional upon their being available for the labour market. The unwritten pledge of allegiance is in fact, 'I will work or I will make others work', as every immigrant has known and as is clearly stated in immigration law. Those outside the workforce for any lengthy period have more recently been subject to the conscripted labour scheme of work-for-the-dole. That this is intimately tied to racism, and is thereby a kind of echo and generalisation of the ancient division between slaves and citizens, is evident in the commencement of work-for-the-dole schemes in Australia. Work-for-the-dole is not a recent policy. It has been operating in Australia since 1977, when the Fraser Government introduced it for indigenous communities, under the name of the Community Development Employment Program. That few noticed this previous form of work-for-the-dole suggests that those most marginal are often the initial and easiest targets of social engineering. What this policy declared was that the unemployment rates of indigenous people were a result of their inability to work unless forced to do so.

The UN Declaration of Human Rights states that no one shall be subject to forced labour. Australia was one of the first signatories to that document. As the promissory note of a buoyant capitalism, the liberal idea of human rights falters on the constitutive and devastating premise of really-existing capitalism: the compulsion to work as an endless injunction to produce more and more for no other reason than to be able to produce still more. Production—organised a means to make profit in order to secure the future means to make more profits—has little regard for either the pleasures or necessities of life unless they too can become a means to a means. Since, on a global scale, the work time it now takes to reproduce our lives is remarkably shorter than the time we spend pushing out profits for others, the command to 'be a productive member of the community' (an oxymoronic phrase if there ever was one) looks increasingly like a political dictate parading as social necessity. Whilst food production between 1990 and 1997 increased per capita by around 25 per cent, the income gap between the bottom and top fifths of the world went from 30 to 1 in 1960, to 60 to 1 in 1990, and up to 74 to 1 in 1997. Around one in six people now live below subsistence. Could there be any sharper evidence that productivity, organised as a means to profit, has little to do with necessity?

At the end of the century, submission to boundless work and overwork (as the very meaning of capital) is candidly disclosed as the prerequisite of any appeal to human rights, indicating just how flimsy those rights are, and how flagrantly the universality of those rights are eclipsed by the core requisites of capital. Perhaps this is why, for the first time in the history of capitalism, capitalism itself and in its totality was the target of global protest action. On June 18th of this year, the first day of the G8 Summit in Cologne, hundreds of thousands participated in a series of demonstrations on a range of issues—including global debt, workfare/work-for-the-dole schemes, border laws, environmental destruction, anti-union laws, the arms trade, poverty, agribusiness—but with one, unmistakable culprit in sight. June 18th was the world-wide 'Carnival Against Capitalism' : in London, Barcelona, Seoul, Melbourne, Sydney, Harare, New York, Buenos Aires, Nigeria, Dhaka, Tel Aviv, Stockholm, Rome, Zagreb, Toronto, Montevideo, Moscow, Prague, Mexico City, Berlin, Valencia, Edinburgh, Cologne, Oregon, Los Angeles, Indonesia . . . [8] The J18 actions signalled the re-appearance of the demand that life be better, a refusal of the pall of nostalgia, diminished expectations and fear. A glimpse of a new century and a new enthusiasm.

Notes

1. Australian Centre for Industrial Relations and Training, Australia at Work: Just Managing, Sydney: Prentice-Hall, 1998.
2. R. Sennett, The Corrosion of Capitalism: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, New York: Norton, 1998.
3. Ulrich Beck, "Goodbye to all that wage slavery", New Statesman, March 5, 1999
4. Australian Associated Press, May 20 1999.
5. ACCIRT, Ibid.
6. Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim, "The Economics of the Final Solution", Common Sense, 11, Winter 1991.
7. 1999 UN Human Development Report, available at http://www.undp.org/hdro/report.html
8. On the J18 actions, see http://www.j18.org

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