The Humiliation of Work

Imagine a farm with ten workers on it. To sustain themselves, each worker has to work 5 days per week. Now let’s say that through mechanical inventions, the efficiency of the farm has so increased that only two workers have to work on the farm to produce the same amount of sustenance. What would the workers do? Would they divide the amount of work amongst themselves, so that each would have to work only one day per week? Or would two workers do all the work and keep all of the food, while the other eight have to beg for scraps?

Although the former would make more sense to me, the latter is what’s being practiced all over the world today. Each worker’s effort should be appreciated, but instead he is considered to be lucky when he succeeds in finding work in the first place. Why? Are we in some sort of permanent crisis of production, such that everyone who doesn’t work deserves to starve? Or if this is not the case, why can’t we support the people whose work has been made superfluous by the very success of our production methods?

The answer is of course, because the wealth that our production creates flows not back into society, but into the accumulation of capital. This capital is then used to improve even more upon the production process, making it a vicious cycle. Workers are held hostage; if you refuse any command the bosses make, there are hundreds more workers outside waiting to take your place. This is where the true humiliation begins.

Not only do you have to work making money for someone else, you have to be thankful for the chance to do so. Not only do you have to be thankful to do so, you have to pretend to enjoy it, to convince your superiors that you are the right person for the job. Not only do you have to pretend to enjoy it, but you have to make sacrifices for it; working unpaid overtime to prove how dedicated you are to the success of your employer.

To protect themselves from this humiliation, some workers convince themselves that they really are dedicated, and that their sacrifices are appreciated, and that without them, the workplace would fall apart. This bubble is burst when they are replaced with a worker, maybe an intern, maybe an Indian, who will do their jobs for 2 cents less.