"The situation as the work moralist sees it."
PART TWO - WORK MORALITY AND THE COMMON CULTURAL INHERITANCE by Wilfred Price c.1990
In the old slave states and in
the feudal system, work, especially manual work, was looked down on. With the development of manufacturing and mercantilism,
however, work become more dignified. The
child of this economic change, the Protestant Church, especially the extreme
forms, the Calvinists and the Puritans, proclaimed the high morality of honest
toil for six days in the week. Hard work was encouraged and much of the
hostility in France against the Huguenots was due to the fact that they worked
on most of the saints’ days while the Catholics did not.
This morality was very convenient
when, in the Industrial Revolution, men had to switch from the creativity and
independence of handicraft to the child labour and the workhouse. Idleness was the great sin and vagrancy was
severely dealt with. This drudgery
offered little improvement on the slavery of old; fear of destitution took the
place of the whip. It is claimed that
any job that is imposed on one by fear of poverty, even if it were only one
hour per week, is slavery – wage slavery. Being compelled to have a job means
that you are tied to it, and can be controlled through it.
The Socialist Movement took over
the Work Ethic and made it the central point in its platform. The worker is the only person that matters;
only he is entitled to the wealth that is produced by him alone. The idle Rich is the villain of the piece and
fit only for outer darkness. Berbard
Shaw wrote on more than one occasion of the “criminality of idleness”.
Karl Marx proclaimed this
viewpoint in an extreme way. All incomes
not derived from direct labour, such as dividends, profit, interest, and rent,
were declared to be surplus value and a robbing of the worker. The banner of the class war was to be raised,
the non-working capitalist class to be overthrown, all capital to be
confiscated without compensation, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to be
set up. In measures for this in the
Manifesto of the Communist Party, No, 8 says, “Equal liability for all to
labour. Establishment of industrial armies,
especially for agriculture.” The Work
Ethic features also very strongly in Fascism and Nazism.
As would be expected, the trade
unions are all for it. Present circumstances
force them into a Luddite attitude. They
have a vested interest in overmanning and the doing of unnecessary work to
provide jobs. An example of this
attitude was shown some years ago. It
was required to get an electric cable under a wide road using a narrow culvert
with a cord attached which could then be used to pull the cable through. The workers concerned objected to this and,
as a result, the road had to be dug up to lay the cable.
This attitude is wasteful and is
as much sabotage as smashing property in a riot. When the Left accuses Capitalism of causing
unemployment and point to the apparent absence of it in the Soviet Union, it
could not be more misleading. The effect of the present financial system on
private enterprise is to produce an aggressive commercialism that makes for a
large amount of socially unnecessary work in mass selling and advertising as
well as the waste caused by built-in obsolescence.
In the late thirties at Hollesley
Bay in Suffolk there was a camp to which long term unemployed men had to go and
were given work by being made to dig holes and then fill them in again. This is nothing when compared to the vast
system of slave camps by which the Soviet Union solves its unemployment problem. No automation in these. It also adopts Hitler’s remedy by vast
armament production and maintaining a large conscript army. Nothing like the war game for making work!
Besides being a moral obligation,
compulsory toil is hailed as an aid to well-being. “Hard work never hurt anyone,” is a saying
regardless of the fact that hard work has killed millions. “The Devil finds mischief for idle hands to
do” is another which is wrong. It should
be “bored” not “idle” hands that are mischievous. Many people take to crime as an escape from
drudgery.
The conditions in ancient Rome
are used as an argument against full-time leisure. Actually what was there apart from the large
number of slaves was a populace that was destitute, living on hand-outs, and
demoralised by brutality under the Bread and Circuses policy. Contrast that with the happy and peaceful
lives for hundreds of years enjoyed by the leisured Pacific Polynesian
islanders until the white man came with his trade gin and made them work.
In his aforementioned article, Dr.
Chris Evans deals with this point thus:- “If the objection is raised that people
hardly know what to do with the leisure time they have at their disposal
already, then the rejoinder should be that people must learn to enjoy leisure,
sustained leisure, in the way that some people enjoy sustained work. Man is an active, creative being, born to
explore the universe around him and equipped with a fabulous brain to help him. There is no hint of a suggestion that his
genetic structure, his psychological needs and drives, or even his social
heritage demand that he spends a vast chunk of his life poring over figures in
a neon-lit office, driving a diesel engine through smoky streets, or watching a
million bottles a day pass him by on a conveyor belt. As we move towards the end of this century,
therefore, expect to find men throwing off the shackles of compulsory mindless
labour, and embracing the new intellectual riches which the computer will
provide.”
In answer finally to the morality
question and also to the notion, “You can’t have something for nothing”, it
should be remembered that the rays of the Sun, the source of all life on this
planet, come to us free of charge. From them we get wind and rain giving
power and moisture; the green-of-the-leaf uses these rays to provide lant life which
feeds the animal life including us, and fossil remains of plants and animals over
millions of years are stored in the earth giving coal and oil. Man, from the time when he used crude tools of
stone, wood and bone, and kindled fires to enable him to get his food and
protect himself, has over the ages acquired a vast reservoir of knowledge and
skill to produce a high standard of living with less and less need for human
labour. This treasure house of science,
technology, philosophy, and the arts, built up brick by brick by millions of
people dead and gone, (including many who were of the idle rich or patronised
by them) constitutes the Common Cultural Inheritance. We, who are alive as descendants of the
creators of this heritage, are entitled, each one of us, to a share in it by
right of birth. Surely then, if our
industry can be fully automated, we are each entitled to a leisure income.
Social Credit means that all will get the fruits of the Cultural Inheritance.
GREEN SWIPE WIND-UP
Next time: Part three - Human nature and the Origin of War
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