Belaboring the obvious

I find myself once again writing a Labor Day post, and it՚s basically the same one I write every year – not just on the date, but having almost the exact same thoughts. It՚s a little disconcerting, because it feels just like having original thoughts, yet they seem to run in these timeworn grooves. It՚s become a ritual in other words. Appreciating rituals is a probably a symptom of aging. In my youth they felt kind of meaningless but now they appear to be little islands of stability amidst the vast chaotic landscape of life.

It՚s not like it՚s a job or even a duty. Nobody asked me to do this, no monetary interest is contingent on me doing it. Nobody besides me defines the end product, or dictates the methods and tools. I don՚t expect anyone is waiting breathlessly for it. As a ritual it is its own justification.

For some reason labor fascinates me, or rather, the Marxist concept of labor fascinates me because it is such a topic of fascination for them; a powerful idea with quasi-religious overtones. To Marxists, labor is at the very core of human existence, but it has been corrupted, diverted, perverted by capitalism into its alienated form. Liberating humanity is basically identical to creating a world of unalienated labor.

What is it about labor that makes it so important? Here՚s what I came up with 7 years back:

Work in the abstract is an intriguing and irreducible combination of the spontaneous and the disciplined, the autonomous and the externally imposed. I think that's why the concept of labor is so fetishized by Marxists; it is something that must be done and yet there are so many different ways it can be done and so appears to be a potential fulcrum for harnessing economic forces and transforming society. Buddhist meditation (in so far as I understand it, which is not far) treats breathing in much the same way; it's a bodily function that can be completely automatic or the object of focused conscious attention or both at the same time, and thus is a fulcrum for reconciling the willed and the inevitable.

But most of our labor is alienated – misdirected to interests that are not ours.

Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the estrangement (Ger. Entfremdung) of people from aspects of their Gattungswesen ("species-essence") as a consequence of living in a society of stratified social classes. The alienation from the self is a consequence of being a mechanistic part of a social class, the condition of which estranges a person from their humanity. 

Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity, this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value… 

The Gattungswesen (species-essence), human nature of individuals is not discrete (separate and apart) from their activity as a worker; as such, species-essence also comprises all of innate human potential as a person. Conceptually, in the term "species-essence", the word "species" describes the intrinsic human mental essence that is characterized by a "plurality of interests" and "psychological dynamism", whereby every individual has the desire and the tendency to engage in the many activities that promote mutual human survival and psychological well-being, by means of emotional connections with other people, with society

If you leave off the creaky stuff about social class and substitute in the actual powers in our world, it makes sense – most people work for corporations (who own the means of production) and do tasks to serve the corporation, not themselves.

Except – the modern corporation, is adept at making employees feel and act as if their goals are identical to those of the organization. In tech this is rampant It seems almost comical to speak of a labor movement in Silicon Valley, where the workers are relatively well-paid and pampered, and most importantly don՚t think of themselves as a class with interests that differ from their bosses – after all, Mark Zuckerberg is just like everyone else, just smarter, and perhaps more ruthless or luckier. Occasionally this bucolic image of cooperation is shattered. But for the most part there is no class consciousness, everybody thinks of themselves as a potential owner.

And this state of affairs is definitely better in some ways than treating the capitalists as an alien class of predators – but it leaves the workers vulnerable to exploitation, with no tools to manage their interests. Because it is high-status to pretend to be doing your work for its own sake, rather than because you have been ordered to or for the sake of a paycheck, nobody wants to cop to having their labor alienated and their being exploited.

It՚s notable that the Bible envisions God himself as a worker, and one in need of rest or at least a pause:

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made. (Gen 2:1-3)

But back to labor. True labor is not mere drudgery, it is the active application of mind -- the highest of human capabilities, the part that is godlike -- to the concrete tasks of creating a world and living in it. It is the essence of authentic human intelligence. Unalienated labor is done, not because of external compulsion or for external reward, but because some individual thinks it needs doing and does it.

It seems like an almost impossible dream -- as if the world could be run on hobby projects. But maybe it can, and maybe that is the only way to have a habitable world. The industrial model sure hasn't produced a world people actually like, although it sure does make tons of stuff available cheaply.

Fake Labor Day Post

I missed my traditional Fake Labor Day post last year thanks to Burning Man, which seems somehow appropriate. Burning Man is many things, and one of those things is is a deliberate celebration of unalienated labor. The amount of effort that goes into the production of all the spectacle is truly astonishing, and it՚s all done for some reason other than the normal economic ones. Yet it certainly is a kind of work. If your work is your own you don't need a day off from it to celebrate yourself.

So what is labor? Making art is labor, so is mining coal or working as a cashier at Arby՚s, and maybe even writing these blog posts. It՚s a very expansive term, almost to the point that it is hard to say what human activity isn՚t labor. Lying on the couch watching TV? But even that involves some level of engagement, there is no such thing as purely passive ingestion of content.

Here՚s the best definition I can come up with off the top of my head: Labor is the focused application of intelligent action to a goal-directed task that engages with the world.

It՚s vaguely Marxist concept, I guess. I՚m not a scholar of such things and am not about to become one, I՚m just trying to tease out this sense I have that there is something about this conception of labor that is powerful and valuable. It՚s too bad that the philosophical ideas are so thorougly contaminated with the manifest failures that ensued when they have been put into political practice.

Marx viewed labor as one of the essential defining qualities of humanity, that which distinguishes humans from animals:

For labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. … 

The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity.

The word “labor” points to a certain view of the relationship between mind and world. Vaguely similar concepts from philosophy of mind like “embodiment” have a bit of a Marxist tinge to them, whether or not this is made explicit. All these ideas seem to be working against what might be called the Cartesian/computational default model of the mind, a symbol procesor in a box that only incidentally interacts with the outside world through narrow channels of perception and action.

Marxism has rather famously failed, and as far as I know all the efforts to reform AI and philosophy of mind through embodiied or situated approaches also failed. Perhaps they are all just completely wrong, but I actually don՚t think so. Their critiques were incisive, but their solutions were naive, half-baked, or perhaps just premature. It still seems to me that the way into the future requires both less alienating ways to organize human labor and better ways for computational systems to take on some of the real qualities that make human labor possible.

Labor Day Nonpost

Labor Day is a day when laborers are not supposed to labor. It is an artificial holiday, created explicitly to separate US labor from the international labor movement, which still celebrates on May 1. Since I am now a member of the blogging proletariat, this particular post is excusing itself from the task of making a point, and is going to ramble and drop links.

I Believe in America

Labor Day Is a Scam To Keep You Poor and Miserable Forever

Developers are the Autoworkers of our Generation (Hacker News discussion_)

Tech CEO autistically offers to automate someone’s job away

The discussion on that last one got me thinking…A good developer is constantly automating the boring parts of their job so they can focus on the more interesting parts. What is a compiler, or a continuous-integration server, but a way for developers to spend less time on repetitive tasks?

It is always striking to me how much software has improved in this respect, and how little. Yes, tools like Wordpress make it possible to set up a website in minutes, where it would have taken a month or so in the past. But the basic tasks of coding don’t seem any easier. Languages have not improved much in the 30+ years I have been doing this professionally, nor have editors or debugging tools (actually things have gotten quite a bit worse since the peak of powerful programming environments, the Lisp Machine, but that is a flame for another day). Revision control systems have improved, but not radically. You’d think we’d have systems that could go from intention to powerful software engine almost instantaneously by now, but no, it’s still an incredibly tedious process. Software seems stuck on a plateau, which is good news I guess for us developers, we just haven’t made ourselves as obsolete as we should have.

Of course the real money is in automating other people’s jobs. That is happening and I believe will accelerate in the next decade, which would cause labor unrest and a resurgence of Luddism if people had any guts, but mostly they don’t. Of course this has been happening for a long time:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. ... Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

– Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848) (and no, I am not a Marxist but I am very fond of this passage)

The developer/entrepeneur/VC nexus is like the Victorian bourgeois raised to the nth power. Move fast and break things! If the old labor and socialist movements were a response to the rise of industry and the destruction of traditional ways of life, well, we are still waiting for an adequate political solution to the social churn caused by software.

Mitigating the effects of accelerating technological change doesn't sound so hard in theory. I don’t have any trouble imagining what that response should be. The goal is to have a world where the creative entrepreneurial spirit can thrive, but without the side-effects of destroying people's lives.  How about for instance: a guaranteed minimal income; changing our model of education from its industrial model to one of continuous learning; greater wealth equality and more democratic workplace cultures? All good ideas, but with essentially no chance of happening given the currently broken political system.

As a software person I feel our field should have some social responsibility for these issues – given how much we are damaging people’s livelihoods, we should also be working on the fixes. However, we don’t really have the talent or inclination.

Perhaps that is changing. Software may be eating the world, but as it does it gets changed in turn. The more artists, activists, and other people who are not in the generic tech-nerd mold get involved with software, the better (and I say that as pretty much a generic tech-nerd myself). The more important software is, the more important it is that it reflect the full spectrum of human needs, desires, and abilities, not merely the narrow parts of that it currently serves.

Previously. Also there are some obvious links between this topic and my recent guest post on I/Thou, the explicating of which is left as an exercise for the reader.

Some work songs (Spotify link).

And I should add that I have almost no personal complaints about my current employment, at least, none that have to do with this post. I'm pretty firmly in the camp of eaters rather than eaten and hope to stay that way.

Solidarity forever, someday

Obligatory Labor Day post. Not too much to say today, except that being for "labor" these days seems like a sucker's game, since even the working classes for the most part can't be bothered. Solidarity is a wonderful thing, but there's a point past which it can't be salvaged and we seem to have blown past that sometime in the last 30 years or so.

I don't really believe that it's dead and replaced by the realm of total individual self-interest that was the dream of Ayn Rand and the reality of Wall Street. But the old banners -- of class, party, or ideology -- haven't held up. Something new will need to emerge, and it isn't quite there yet.

In the meantime, here's a nice instance of inter-generational continuity.

Labor and Discipline

I seem to have accidentally established a tradition of Labor Day posts. Therefore, I'm obligated to come up with one today, therefore, it starts to take on some of the less pleasant aspects of work. Not that I really mind, and not that there is actually anything forcing me to do it. In a way it's good to have my choices of what to write about slightly constrained, rather than wandering all over creation like I usually do.

One of the chief status markers in our world is enjoying work or at least appearing to. People who work at tasks they dislike for the sake of a paycheck are low-status; high-status people are supposed to be working for the sheer joy of it. This makes intuitive sense, because if you don't like your work then you need to have someone telling you what to do and thus are inherently lower status than your boss. But almost everyone answers to someone.

It may be that figuring out a working relationship between what one wants to do and what one is obligated to do is the key to life. Certainly religions work with this problem (see the recent post on submission, eg); so do political ideologies (what is libertarianism but a bogus answer to this question?). It was the foundation of Freud's theory of mind and later theories of moral development like Kohlberg's.

The issues come up in education and child rearing. I am, in theory, a great believer in self-direction in education, since it largely worked for me (or at least, it's how I learned whatever it is I know -- perhaps I'd have been better off with more externally imposed discipline, but there's no way to know). Schools always seemed like broken institutions since they are inherently designed to undermine whatever natural joy a student has in learning and replace it with a top-down authoritarian model. But people are different -- one of my kids, for example, is teaching himself music largely on his own; the other has had discipline and attention problems in school but (to my great and ongoing surprise) responds well to the extraordinarily strict discipline of his classical ballet instructor.

A large part of the process of becoming an adult is an ongoing process of learning to get oneself do certain things whether one wants to or not. It's always been problematical for me anyway, but I wonder how universal my experience is. Some people seem to manage without a struggle, others are happy to rely on the external discipline of a corporate hierarchy or similar authority system. Do hunter-gatherers have these problems? Do they work?

Work in the abstract is an intriguing and irreducible combination of the spontaneous and the disciplined, the autonomous and the externally imposed. I think that's why the concept of labor is so fetishized by Marxists; it is something that must be done and yet there are so many different ways it can be done and so appears to be a potential fulcrum for harnessing economic forces and transforming society. Buddhist meditation (in so far as I understand it, which is not far) treats breathing in much the same way; it's a bodily function that can be completely automatic or the object of focused conscious attention or both at the same time, and thus is a fulcrum for reconciling the willed and the inevitable.

Union Maid

I'm lazy today but I seem to have a tradition of having labor day posts, so I'm outsourcing this one to the Guthrie family.

And yeah, before people chime in to tell me how horrible unions are, let's remember who gave us the weekend, the eight-hour day, child labor laws, and work-safety laws. To be sure, they also did their part in contributing to the decadence of American industry.