The Ideology of Work

P. D. Anthony

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415264631
• eBook ISBN: 9781317833925
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences.
This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press.
Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1972 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

Part I

Foundations of an Ideology

1. Work as Slavery

The greatest contrast with our own attitude to work comes from the classical roots of our society. We know that a great part of our intellectual equipment, the basic fabric of our culture, comes from classical Greece. But Athenian ideas of work are probably more remote than any in the history of Europe from a contemporary attitude; they are not only remote in time but they represent values that are, in some measure, the reverse of our own. We are going to begin here not because of an established contemporary relevance, but because the Athenian outlook is a construct of attitudes of a particular type, a type that contrasts with our own and has had little influence in the economic history of Europe. It is a type, however, which may deserve re-examination at the present time.

Work was not taken seriously in classical Greece, it ‘was not assigned the moral value which it has gained from twenty centuries of Christianity, and from the birth of the Labour movement’. Mossé (1969: 25) quotes one of the earliest examples of the Greek's contempt for some kinds of work in Xenophon ‘to be sure, the illiberal arts … are spoken against, and are, naturally enough, held in utter disdain in our states. For they spoil the bodies of the workmen and the foremen, forcing them to sit still and live indoors, and in some cases to spend the day at the fire. The softening of the body involves a serious weakening of the mind’.

Let us begin with Plato and Aristotle. Some elements in Plato's thought are deceptively near to a modern economic view. He recognizes, he may even have invented, the notion of the division of labour, first by the division of the people in a community into rich and poor, and second by the division among them of different kinds of work. The division into rich and poor, he says, is a constant source of conflict in a community. In The Republic he argues that this conflict can only be avoided by (and that it therefore warrants) the abolition of private property or, at least, the avoidance of extremes of poverty and wealth existing in a society at the same time.

One of the functions of the state in The Republic is to facilitate the exchange of goods and services between individuals. ‘What the state takes cognisance of is the mutual exchange, and what it tries to arrange is the most adequate satisfaction of needs and the most harmonious interchange of services. Men figure in such a system as the performers of a needed task and their social importance depends upon the value of the work they do’ (Sabine 1951: 55). Plato saw that the advantages of the specialization of labour were because the aptitudes of men differ and because their skills are improved by application to work for which they have special aptitude.

So far we have a rudimentary exposition of a theory that would be approved by Adam Smith and by any contemporary industrial training officer. Plato is distinguished by the relative value that he attaches to work in the community. There are three essential activities in his state: the provision of necessary services, the protection of the state, and the government of the state. The first is to be undertaken by workers, the second and third by two classes of ‘guardians’, or by guardians and a philosopher-king. Plato's educational system was devoted to the production of a guardian class. Work, the production of goods and services, was not regarded as of any great importance and neither was the education of workers. It could hardly be otherwise; the purpose in The Republic, was, after all, an examination of the ideal, the good, and the beautiful.

The distinction between social functions and their values emerges even more clearly in The Laws. Plato here re-admits private property along with the family (he was not the only commentator on society to see these institutions as inseparable) but, more relevant to our purpose, he decides that citizens of the state are to be prevented from engaging in industry or trade, from pursuing a craft, or promoting a business. It would not be possible to conceive of a clearer illustration of the distance separating us from Plato in this respect than to consider his recommendation that these commercial activities, among the most highly rewarded in our own society, should be limited to resident immigrants in his. Sabine describes his attitude thus: ‘Agriculture is the special function of slaves, trade and industry of freemen who are not citizens, all political functions are the prerogative of citizens … What he arrives at is a state in which citizenship is frankly restricted to a class of privileged persons who can afford to turn over their private business — the sordid job of earning a living — to slaves and foreigners’ (Sabine 1951: 81).

This inversion of our own values, or perhaps we should put it the other way about, our inversion of classical values, is shown still more clearly in Aristotle, more particularly in the Politics. To begin with, Aristotle's discussion is even more exclusively preoccupied with the content of a liberal education for rulers ‘and shows, far more than Plato's an actual contempt for the useful’ (Sabine 1951: 95). Aristotle regarded work not only as inferior but as debased and debasing: ‘in the best governed states … none of them [citizens] should be permitted to exercise any mechanic employment or follow merchandise as being capable and destructive to virtue; neither should they be husbandman, that they may be at leisure to improve in virtue and perform the duty they owe to the state’ (Politics: 1328b).

Aristotle has no doubt about private property or about the virtue that seems to be attached to wealth and, by contrast the vice associated with the lack of it. ‘It is also necessary that the landed property should belong to these men; for it is necessary that the citizens should be rich and these are the men proper for citizens, for no mechanic ought to be admitted to the rights of a citizen, nor any other sort of people whose employment is not entirely noble, honourable and virtuous’ (Politics: 1329b).

Work, as Aristotle sees it, gets in the way of the more proper pursuits of a citizen, not only wasting his time in inferior activities but corrupting him and making his pursuit of virtue more difficult. Aristotle's advice is concerned more with what should be than with the actual state of affairs that existed in his way. It is probable that most Athenian citizens were tradesmen, artisans, or farmers, engaged in those very activities of which Aristotle so strongly disapproved in citizens. But their occupations were indeed interruptions of what Aristotle considered to be superior activities ‘… their political activities had to take place in such time as they could spare from their private occupations. It is true that Aristotle deplored this fact and thought it would be desirable to have all normal work done by slaves, in order that citizens might have the leisure to devote themselves to politics … Aristotle was not describing what existed but was proposing a change for the improvement of politics’ (Sabine 1951: 18).

This ‘contempt for the useful’ characterized Aristotle's outlook also to the commercial aspects of work and his view was to become very influential. It grew out of the distinction he made between proper and improper usage ‘it is not therefore proper for any man of honour, or any citizen, or anyone who engages in public affairs, to learn these servile employments without they have occasion to them for their own use’ (Politics: 1277b). This idea of use was developed specifically into a critical view of the charging of interest and of usury, and this application was to achieve great significance in late scholastic teaching and thence in the mediaeval attitude to commerce. Bertrand Russell (1946: 209) paraphrases Aristotle's view in this way:

‘There are two uses of a thing, one proper, the other improper; a shoe, for instance, may be worn, which is the proper use. It follows that there is something degraded about a shoemaker who must exchange his shoes in order to live. Retail trade, we are told, is not a natural part of the art of getting wealth. The natural way to get wealth is by skilful management of home and land … Wealth derived from trade is justly hated, because it is unnatural. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase an interest … Of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.’

The proper and improper use of a thing distinguished, more precisely, between what the Greeks regarded as proper and improper work. To work for oneself was praiseworthy, even for a soldier and a gentleman to engage in what we would regard as menial manual labour was perfectly honourable. It was not the nature of the task which was significant, it was rather the purpose of the task:

‘In order to understand the contempt attached to manual labour two … factors must be taken into consideration. First the ties of dependence which were created by labour, and secondly, the growth of a slave economy … to work for another man in return for a wage of any kind is degrading … for the ancients, there is really no difference between the artisan who sells his own products and the workman who hires out his services. Both work to satisfy the needs of others, not their own. They depend upon others for their livelihood. For that reason they are no longer free.’ (Mossé 1969: 27, 28).

Arendt (1958): 31) writes that, in Greece ‘a poor free man preferred the insecurity of a daily-changing labour market to regular assured work, which, because it restricted his freedom to do as he pleased every day, was already felt to be servitude (douleia), and even harsh, painful labour was preferred to the easy life of many household slaves’. Work as such was not despised by the Athenian because, when carried out upon one's land, it was a natural and necessary activity. Zimmern (1915: 270) specifically refutes

‘the false idea that the Greeks of the great age regarded manual labour as degrading … In truth they honoured manual work far more than we do … But they insisted, rather from instinct than from policy, on the duty of moderation, and objected, as artists do, against doing any more work than they needed when the joy had gone out of it. Above all they objected to all monotonous activity, to occupations which involved sitting for long periods in cramped and unhealthy postures … It was these occupations, those of our respectable clerks and secretaries of all grades, rather than our rough-clad artisans, which they regarded as “menial”.’

Work was not despised, because it was natural and it was necessary and because it could contribute to use, beauty, and happiness, but it was subordinated to these ends; an Athenian would have thought it absurd to regard it as an end in itself. All work seems to have been regarded in much the same light; doctors, and sculptors, and schoolmasters were all paid ‘like masons and joiners and private soldiers, at the customary standard rate’ although they worked for wages only rarely and when their city needed them for some public work; generally to work for wages would put the craftsman in the position of the slave whereas his ‘aim in life was very different: to preserve his full personal liberty and freedom of action, to work when he felt inclined and when his duties as a citizen permitted him … to participate in the government, to take his seat in the courts, to join in the games and festivals, to break off his work when his friends called … — all of them things which were incompatible with a contract at a fixed rate’ (quoted by Zimmern 1915: 270).

Aristotle systematized and, therefore, exaggerated what was probably the ordinary Athenian view. Aristotle was quite clear that ‘the aim of the state … is to produce cultivated gentlemen — men who combine the aristocratic mentality with love of learning and the arts’ (Russell 1946: 216). The principle of specialized production, recognized by Plato, has in a sense been exchanged by Aristotle for the principle of specialized corruption. While Plato saw that a degree of productive specialization was required by the unequal distribution of abilities and by the need for the development of skill, Aristotle substituted the single end of the production of gentlemen. He argued that, because work was corrupting, the continued existence of cultured citizens required the corruption of a special class of producers; slaves and foreigners. There are, thus, two strands in his doctrine: that leisure is more valuable than work and that the existence of a leisured class was incompatible with the general spread of education and leisure. Aristotle wanted the citizens to become aristocrats but their existence was to depend upon slaves.

It was not only the classical economy but also the classical ideology of work which depended on slaves. Aristotle's attitude to slavery is straightforward: ‘A slave is an animated instrument’ (Politics: 1253b). This was not the most callous view of slavery that was to be put forward in the ancient world but, for Athens, it was probably once again an exaggerated abstraction. In Athens it was not uncommon for free men and slaves to undertake the same work side by side for much the same wages. In the Athenian household slaves were often on close terms with their masters and were treated with humane consideration. But generally, the close association of free man and slave in the same work did not point to the latter's advantage, rather the reverse. ‘When the free man and the slave shared the same toil, the tendency was for them both to incur the same contempt’ (Mossé 1969: 29). The dependence of Athenian and Roman society upon slaves did not honour them in the eyes of their superiors, and certainly invoked no feeling of gratitude or debt towards them. We have become used to paying a certain respect to workers upon whose efforts our economic structure may rest, but in a society in which economic values were subordinated to cultural and political ends, to be at the bottom of the economic structure was to be at the bottom of the dung heap.

Slavery was an integral part of the ancient world but the employment of slaves was probably much more extensive and widely organized in the Roman Empire than it had been in the Greek city states. To begin with the condition of the slaves seems to have been moderately good, but it deteriorated. Roman works on estate management advised the employment of slaves in moderate numbers (comparable with their earlier employment on Greek farms) and with due consideration; out of both humanity and the self-interest of the landowner. Small-scale cultivation or business no doubt depended on and promoted some degree of personal relationship between slaveowner and slave. But the economies of scale and extensive landowning changed this: ‘The economy of the Latifundia was quite different’ as it developed in the South of Italy, in Sardinia, Sicily, and North Africa (Mossé 1969: 64). Large-scale grain production from estates of hundreds of acres owned by aristocratic or imperial absentee landlords who owned hundreds or thousands of slaves changed conditions for the worse.

‘There was no longer any question of considering them as human beings, of treating them with a compassionate but strict justice, nor was there any question of encouraging them to hope for freedom in return for loyal service. They were many and therefore to be feared. They had to be treated as a vanquished foe if they were to be forced into obedience. At the same time, the fact that it was very easy to procure them and that their cost was extremely low had the effect of positively depriving them of any personal value. They were cattle and were treated as such. Chains and branding irons were commonplace, as were the most deplorable corporal punishments — torture and crucifixion. The harshness with which they were treated accounts for the great slave revolts which broke out in Sicily and in the south of Italy in the second century BC.’ (Mossé 1969: 68)

If slaves continued to be regarded as animated instruments the fact of their animation could become bothersome (as it has often been throughout the history of employment). It could, at worst, lead to revolution; the Empire lived in almost perpetual fear of its own overthrow by the vast mass of the slave population which it had created. At best the slaves' ‘animation’ meant that they had to be treated with a consideration which was not necessary towards tools or even animals. But the difference of treatment did not always work to the slaves' advantage. Cato the Elder, a comparatively humane authority in these matters, believed that slaves were to be treated like animals, although because the ox was not so good at taking care of itself it needed to be tended more carefully than the slave. In Cato's view ‘the best principle of management is to treat both slaves and animals well enough to give them the strength to work hard’ (Grant 1960: 112). This principal of management was stated in a form more recognizable to us in contemporary terms by Varro (116 – 27 BC) who ‘looked upon slaves as articulate implements — differing from their voiceless counterparts such as a pitchfork in that they need psychological study and sensible, unbrutal handling’ (Grant 1960: 115).

Changes, for better or worse, in the conditions of slaves, depended in part on the manner of and the potential for their economic exploitation. Work begins to be taken seriously as slavery declines:

‘it is significant that the glorification of labour (in the poems of Hesiod or of Virgil and in certain writings of such Fathers of the Church as St Basil of Caesarea) and laws against idleness … only occurred either at a time when slavery was still in its very first stages, or when it was declining, when the scarcity of labour of any kind and the rise in prices put a premium on free and individual labour, thereby creating suitable conditions for an anti-slavery ideology to develop and for a partial rehabilitation of the idea of work.’ (Mossé 1969: 29)

An ideology of work is redundant when the labour force can be conscripted and coerced at will. In conditions of a freer labour market an ideology has to be developed in order to recruit labour and then in order to motivate it by persuading it that its tasks are necessary or noble. In conditions of a free market and a chronic shortage of labour, the manufacture and communication of an ideology of work becomes a central preoccupation of society. We shall argue later that the process reaches its highest development in advanced capitalism and in state socialism.

It has also been suggested that non-economic developments contributed to the end of slavery. One, rather metaphysical, explanation is that the breakdown of the city state accompanied by the growth of the vast Alexandrian and Roman empires so dwarfed the individual as a political entity that the compensating development of reassuring religions was inevitable; assurance of importance after death was necessary to make up for man's palpable insignificance before it. The individual, it has been said, was driven within himself to ‘claim his own unsharable inner life as the origins from which all other values grow. In other words he could set up the claim of an inherent right, the right to have his own personality respected’ (Sabine 1951: 131).

Equality, previously a claim confined to members of a privileged elite of citizens, began to be thought of, if not actually shared, by all men — citizens, foreigners, and slaves. This development depended upon the conception of a law beyond the law, some universal system of law greater than the law of the state and against which the law of the state could be compared. In this process of development ‘the twin conceptions of the rights of man and of a universally binding rule of justice and humanity were built solidly into the moral consciousness of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Organizational Behaviour
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Foundations of an Ideology
• Part II The Radical Reaction
• Part III The Integration of Work
• Part IV The New Radical Reaction
• Notes
• References
• Authors Index
• Subject Index