WORK.

Work as a unitary experience, set off in time and place from the rest of life, is a concept bound in the culture of wage labor (see especially Thompson, 1967, on disciplined promptness and time regulation accompanying factory work). Only when effort—physical and mental—is turned into a commodity sold to an employer who then monitors and controls it can we discern an abstract concept of "work." Other concepts stand outside of that context, such as "a work" being a finished product of a craftsperson or artist, or work divided into concrete activities of particular people—warrior, farmer, smith, and so on. The situation where productive activities blend into the overall flow of daily life especially challenges our commonsense notion of work. In the recent past of the Dobe Ju/'hoansi of Botswana, women, men, and children sporadically gathered plant foods and hunted small animals, interspersed with visiting, eating, and relaxing. Hunting large animals, performed by men, stood out from the rest of life because meat was desired and was the basis for much social interchange. But although the ethnographer Richard Lee could designate specific activities as "work" in his own cultural terms, and count the hours and minutes spent in them (surprisingly little time was needed to produce quite satisfactory subsistence), no clear concept equivalent to abstract work emerged from the Ju/'hoansi themselves.

Many cultures do distinguish activities requiring disciplined effort and focus to produce a concrete result, however. Among farmer-fishermen living by Lake Titicaca, Benjamin Orlove found that the general word work (Spanish trabajo or Quechua llank'ay ) was used only in conjunction with a specific activity. This demanded concentrated effort, often physical but sometimes mental, and produced a tangible product, so that fishing was "work" while repairing nets while sitting, chatting, and relaxing was not. The richest study of work embedded in culture is Bronislaw Malinowski's ethnographic classic, Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935), which focuses on the rituals of birth, growth, and death and the magical control over chance that envelop South Pacific farming and fishing. Although there is a long tradition of considering labor to be the defining human characteristic (e.g., Karl Marx, discussed below), when looking across cultures we see instead a pattern of alternation between disciplined routine and vibrant, expressive release. Both qualities, then, must be part of our understanding of humanity.

Another methodological concern in studying work is that upper-class intellectuals have produced most of the texts. There are two serious problems with writing a history of the idea of work based solely on these authors, who may or may not have personally experienced or carefully observed nonintellectual labor. First, they represent the interests, perspectives, and biases of their social origin and position. Second, they often take the articulate words of intellectuals to be the sole or characteristic voice of their era or place. But these authoritative sources do not necessarily represent the full range of ideas within a complex and unequal society, even if they do influence the notions of others. Thus in a society dominated by men, we often hear little about women's ideas of work; in a society of landowners, artisans, and slaves, we often hear little from the latter two groups. How are we to rectify this? We should locate and listen to working people's voices as directly as possible, through novels and diaries (e.g., Levi), or at least such voices mediated by careful and sympathetic observers (e.g., Mintz; Nash). And we should be imaginative in uncovering evidence about the conceptual lives of nonintellectuals, paying attention to folklore, jokes, inscriptions on products, and so on.

Pre-Capitalist Civilizations: The Incas, India,
and Classical Greece and Rome

Getting beyond the articulate voices of intellectuals is especially a problem for understanding civilizations before the era of widespread printing and literacy. However, cross-cultural comparison allows us to highlight similarities and differences. This article compares concepts of work from three widely separated world regions: the Inca empire of the Andes before the Spanish conquest, the Indian subcontinent (South Asia) before British colonialism, and the Greek and Roman world before the Christian era. In the Andes, archaeological evidence from the epoch before the Incas shows that large public works (walls, temples, canals) were constructed by multiple communities each working on its own small, essentially equivalent segment. There was no division of labor by task, but rather by community. Similarly, in the Inca period, people paid the principal taxes to the state not in the form of money or goods but as collective labor service, as communities or segments of communities (e.g., all young men of an area would serve as imperial message runners). Conceptually, this labor service took the form of reciprocity between unequal social ranks, from village to regional lord to emperor; for example, harvesting the lands of the emperor and his official religion, the cult of the sun, was reciprocated by extensive gifts of cloth and corn beer. In the late empire, however, what had started as a system of independent agricultural communities giving tribute to the state was radically transformed with new forms of labor that were disarticulated from the local community, and turned into permanent labor forces at the service of the Inca aristocracy.

In South Asia, we see a similar pattern of unequal reciprocity. Under the jajmani system, local caste groups owed a variety of work services and products to each other, from tanning to weaving to conducting rituals. Indeed, it is plausibly speculated that castes originated as hereditary occupations. At the level of ideas, work was not thought of as a unitary subject performed by a free (if socially grounded) individual; instead, group productive roles existed, marked by highly unequal but also reciprocal qualities of ritual purity, such as the work of tanners—conceived as polluting—which inter-locked with the putatively pure work of Brahmin priests. Clearly, this was an ideology that explains and endorses inequality, though it also allowed space for change (as local castes maneuvered for changed work roles with improved ritual rank) and resistance (as groups dropped out of the system by conversion to egalitarian religions like Buddhism or Islam).

We notice a pattern in these precapitalist class societies in which the idea of work was differentiated into concrete products or tasks associated with specific collective groups, in turn synthesized into a functioning economy through unequal exchanges, mystified as mutual and reciprocal in nature. Though group membership was envisioned in various ways, cultural, linguistic, religious, and so forth, it was often the case that groups consisted of or were identified with a specific kind of work, and that such work carried denigrating or exalting qualities.

With this in mind, we can better situate Greek and Roman ideas about work, which constitute in part the roots of the Western intellectual tradition. The early Greek oral traditions of Homer and Hesiod idealize the work of the farmer, as do early Roman stories about Cincinnatus, the patriotic farmer-general. These "farmers," however, were owners of large estates and masters of extensive households in which women, slaves, and other subordinates labored, so these ideals highlight not hard work in general but the hands-on management of rural production. By contrast, classical Greek thought turned against work, especially for others (self-sufficient farming was still esteemed). The ideal in Plato (c. 428–348 or 347b.c.e.) and Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) was the man free of necessity, with leisure to engage in politics and contemplation. There was particular disdain for merchants, who made money by trade rather than production from the land, and for artisans, who crafted goods with their hands. The productive and reproductive work of women was largely ignored. The classic Roman authors, such as Cicero (106–43 b.c.e.), held roughly the same views. This constitutes a characteristic inversion of the social reality surrounding such authors: they lived in commercially vibrant cities whose wealth came from extensive long-distance trade in farm and handcraft products. The idle rich, with time for political and natural theory, drew income from this economy, while distinguishing themselves by denigrating its key actors: slaves, foreigners, and craftsmen.

Unlike the Inca and South Asian examples cited above, in the Greco-Roman case there seems to be no specific mandate to reciprocity (however unequal) between direct laborers and intellectual elites. Perhaps this difference is the result of the greater division of labor and differentiation of roles in the rich commercial Mediterranean, creating more conceptual separation between urban authors and direct producers. The brief glimpses we have of the idea-worlds of artisans differ significantly from the famous classical writers; numerous inscriptions on pottery express pride and status in well-made handcrafts. Also, there were in Rome collegia, large clubs of craftsmen, with a rich mythological and ceremonial life. Though inarticulate in the sense of bequeathing to us extended texts, these represent alternative views of work from the famous disdain of Plato or Aristotle.

European Ideas from the Late Roman Era
to the Industrial Revolution

Early Christianity turned away from Roman and Greek elite arrogance toward work. Jesus and the Apostles were peasant-craftsmen, and though early Christianity spread among wealthier urban populaces, there was in its communalism little room for denigration of merchants, slaves, and workers. St. Paul, a tentmaker, used the expression, "my fellow workers." St. Augustine (354–430) extolled work as a means of moral perfection and saw it as an expression of human genius, thereby glorifying God. This line of thought found practical expression in Christian monasticism, which prized hard, focused work—forest clearing, agriculture, manuscript illumination, and so forth. Monks did not value labor in itself, but insofar as it offered dedication and discipline to God, and supported the more important role of prayer. The church viewed non-monastic human work as being in the image of God's work, a generally favorable attitude to labor that would continue in Catholic thought to the present.

The medieval concept of "estates," much like the castes of India, organized society by collective work functions, duties, and rights—nobility, church, and peasantry/laborers—but relegated the direct producers of society to the lowest order. However, towns were different. They had merchants and moneylenders, the antecedents of capitalism, and also the craft guilds. Guilds embodied an ideal of gradually accumulated knowledge and dexterity, culminating in personal mastery of the entire production process, including control of the materials, tools, and markets for finished goods. This concept of control and mastery was manifested in group rules and rituals that marked guild members off from nonmembers.

The rise of Protestantism, in conjunction with growing commercialization in cities, transformed Western ideas about work. Martin Luther's (1483–1546) concepts reflected medieval social orders, in which everyone worked according to the trade in which they were born. However, he rejected the Catholic doctrine of higher and lower "callings" in favor of a singular, individualistic notion of "calling," a strong incentive to action. More importantly, John Calvin (1509–1564) forged a radically new vision of work. He saw success in life as a sign of God's predestined favor to the person. In a curious, but profound way, this doctrine that denied free will ended up strongly motivating labor and profit-making, since the individual cherished hard work and success as signs of heavenly election. Consistent with its roots in rising commercial centers, Calvinism also considered trade, profits, and finance as of equal value with direct production. This represents a distinct break with a long previous tradition of disdain for money-making in favor of farming.

Surveying this history, the great German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) argued that Protestantism stimulated the rise of European capitalism during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, but significant criticisms have emerged. First, Weber overstated the asceticism of early capitalists and underestimated the role of consumption as a stimulus to work and economic growth. Second, mercantile capitalism arose first in Catholic regions of northern Italy and southern Germany. Weber focused on a somewhat later period in its development. Likewise, a distinctive east Asian form of capitalism has taken hold in the twentieth century in a world region without deep Christian traditions (Japan, China, and Korea). It is debatably linked to Confucian and other east Asian worldviews that emphasize group orientation and profound feelings of duty (as opposed to Western individualism). Weber did, however, seem to catch a broadly applicable aspect of the thinking of rising capitalists, their breaking with agrarian traditionalism concerned with protecting inherited class privileges and old-fashioned luxuries. For intellectual history more generally, his work pioneered the exploration of ideas as causes and not just reflections of social change.

The concept that labor was the singular source of value in goods, the ultimate basis of wealth, now emerged in a context of rising landowner-capitalists dedicated to transforming traditional means of production. Unlike in later eras when this "labor theory of value" would serve to highlight conflict between workers and capitalists, the early version emphasized the new landlord's role, taking private property out of the shared state of nature by adding the specific element of organized effort. This also conformed to the European expropriation of world resources after Columbus—putting the assumed "state of nature" to work, including human populations in the slave trade, land in the plantation colonies, and silver and gold in the mines of the Americas. John Locke's (1632–1704) Two Treatises on Government epitomize this line of argument. It offered a truly radical turn of thought by finding value in secular human action rather than, as in the Middle Ages, from fixed social rank combined with God's awesome majesty. Instead, the image of God became like that of man: God the maker. This fascination with making was the inspiration of eighteenth-century French and British Enlightenment attention to mechanisms of all kinds, natural and artificial. Denis Diderot (1713–1784), the son of a prosperous knifemaker, included the mechanical arts in his encyclopedia of natural and philosophical knowledge and insisted on the worth of artisans and artisanry. With these ideas, and with the concurrent rise of global trade, putting out manufacturing of cloth, improved agriculture, and the like, we have set the stage for modern wage labor and capitalism.

The Capitalist Era

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, new theories of work under capitalism emerged.

Smith and Ricardo.

In 1776 the United States declared independence and Adam Smith (1723–1790) published The Wealth of Nations. Within the history of ideas, this is the year best suited to mark the full birth of capitalism, though as we saw above, the change had been long coming; and it was still to be a few decades before artificially powered factories began to diffuse outward from northern England and Scotland. Smith's view of work must be understood within his wider understanding of markets, since he saw markets as leading to the division of labor in detail, breaking production into a series of discrete operations, performed repetitively and with a focused perfection by different kinds and grades of workers. This concept, which was to become pervasive in capitalist practice, is exactly the opposite of the medieval notion of the unity of all stages of work in a craft. Smith was ambivalent about his vision of the trajectory of work, however, since he feared that this division of labor would dull the mind of the worker. (This worry is characteristic of Smith, who both forecast the power of markets and capitalism and explored moral sentiments that bind otherwise materialistic and competitive people.)

Smith accepted the labor theory of value, but it was propounded most emphatically by David Ricardo (1772–1823) around 1810. In the mid-nineteenth century, it was adopted by Karl Marx (1818–1883) and has been a mainstay of orthodox Marxism since then. The labor theory of value holds that as people make and reshape the raw materials of nature and transform them into objects of use ("use value"), their market values ("exchange value") come from the physical and mental effort in that work. It is, in part, a theory of price, but more widely it is a theory of the commonality in the values that each individual idiosyncratically attributes to objects. Clearly, a labor theory of value exalts work as a fundamental theme of human life. In Ricardo's hand, it highlighted the producing classes, capital and labor together, against the dead hand of rent-collecting landlords—in other words, it announced the birth of capitalism out of feudalism. In Marx's subsequent version, however, it valued workers against capitalists, the direct producers against the surplus-collecting owners of tools and resources ("means of production"), which are the congealed results of labors past. To Marx, this announced the future birth of communism out of capitalism. Neoclassical economists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries avoided the question of intersubjective value and transfer of value between classes altogether, narrowing their concern to how prices are set in particular markets. Other radical perspectives have looked to nonlabor theories of value, especially energy and other ecological-physical value sources. Flawed as it may be, however, the labor theory of value captures something of the relationship of past work (capital) to present work (laborers), which is both an existential necessity and the basis for unequal and exploitative power relations.

Karl Marx.

Marx offered a comprehensive, radical theory of work. In his labor-based worldview, human activity is central to making and transforming all aspects of life, including the concepts we use to understand it. It is important that we recognize that this is not a purely economic perspective, which is often assumed about Marx, but a much wider emphasis on the practice of life rather than the play of unworldly ideas. Likewise, his view of labor is wider than physical effort in factories, though Marx himself focused on this (then new) feature of capitalism. Rather, the term labor captures the full range of human capacities, as much mental and creative as physical and forceful.

This understood, we turn to alienation, Marx's central concern about work. At times we labor for ourselves, and though the product may be outside our bodies (e.g., my cleaned desk), we are not highly alienated from it. It is part of our being. At other times, we labor directly for others (e.g., a garden I plant for my wife), rendering a product that someone else will possess, use, and enjoy. But though the product is separated from us, it becomes part of a social bond, a nonalienated relation to another human being. However, under the condition of commodity production (making a good for anonymous sale), and even more importantly in wage labor under capitalism (working on a good that is owned by someone else, in a manner controlled by someone else), the result of our labors has no connection or relation to us. It is alienated. To take, for example, the division of labor in a bank, we will see that one worker will collect data, another sum it up, and a third give it a credit score, based on research by a fourth, fifth, and so on. No one worker has an organic relationship to the owner of the labor (the bank), the final product of labor (the mortgage), or the person who receives the product (the potential homeowner). Alienation is, in Marx, a matter of objective relationships, but it has subjective, felt implications—a sense that the product or the customer or the firm does not matter, that the individual has no control or commitment to work, that the whole goal of labor is vague or even unimaginable.

Within this broad framework, Marx launched a critical analysis of work under capitalism. If capitalists want to profit, labor has to render enough value to cover two funds. One is to pay workers enough to live, that is, to "reproduce" labor power. The other is for capitalists to hold the "surplus value." Marx thus saw unequal reward for work at the heart of capitalism; assuming the labor theory of value, work activity produces all the value, but the workers receive only part of it. The rest is captured by the owners of past labor, the means of production. If total value can be conceptually divided into the necessary payment to workers and surplus value, then capitalists who seek constantly to add to their invested capital (to "accumulate capital") have two basic strategies. One is to increase the total length of the working day, so that workers are paid for ten hours, say, enough to survive, but have to work for two hours beyond that. Marx called this absolute surplus value. The other is to make the workers' efforts during a given period of time more productive. More could be paid to workers, possibly, but the total product would increase even more quickly, rendering yet more surplus value. Obtaining this "relative surplus value" is, according to Marx, the main logic governing work under capitalism: not that work becomes more and more brutal, though sometimes it does, but that it becomes more and more dominated by the efficiency of production, especially via technology, the dead labor of the past used to speed up the live labor of the present.

Marx thus foresaw the ultimate polarization of capital and labor, leading to a revolution by the workers. Capital would accumulate more and more means of production, pushing relative surplus value ever more extremely, and workers would have more and more in common, as each would experience the same alienated and fractured labor. Both classes would become clearer in self-definition and self-understanding, and more openly in struggle between them, until a fundamental historical transformation (a "revolution") would usher in a new state of communism. Marx failed to think clearly about this future, being always focused on the immediate task of criticism and hostile to utopias, but he hints at a life of holistic, undivided labor, producing goods that were directly shared or exchanged in webs of immediate social relations. This recital indicates two major flaws in Marx's thought. Neither workers nor capitalists have become clearly defined and self-recognized classes across national or ethnic lines, though capitalists have come closer than Marx's preferred workers. And actual communism formed a series of dystopias, dedicated to the mass production of commodities in alienating factories with worker's labor unions and other self-expressions (e.g., religion) severely controlled or repressed by domineering political-economic masters: the worst of capitalism without the leavening of democracy and civil liberties. However, no worker, student, or activist in the modern world can ignore Marx's analysis of work, whether one seeks to defend or to transform capitalism.

Non-Marxist and Neo-Marxist Views of Work
under Capitalism

Marx looked to the future, embracing the development of work under capitalism as the necessary stage before communism. Other critics looked backward, drawing on (sometimes quite unrealistic) visions of medieval craft guilds or the mutualistic cooperation of the village community. Utopian socialists in the early nineteenth century, such as Charles Fourier (1772–1837) and the Scottish industrialist-turned-radical Robert Owen (1771–1858), sought the productivity of capitalism without alienation and inequality through communal mass production and the equal exchange of products between specialized craftspeople. The late-nineteenth-century artist, designer, and philosopher William Morris put forth an ideal of craft mastery against the division of labor and of creativity rooted in knowledge of the past. The gadfly economist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) explored related ideals about productive creativity and disciplined work, but instead of archaic crafts guilds, he envisioned as social carriers the combined figures of industrial engineers and workers. He turned a critical gaze against financiers, the accumulators and manipulators of money, who he regarded as the parasites (the "leisure class") of otherwise productive capitalism.

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), a French sociologist-anthropologist who worked at the beginning of the twentieth century, offered perhaps the most perceptive defense of work under capitalism in The Division of Labor in Society. In traditional societies, people did pretty much the same work, so they bonded with each other from their sameness ("mechanical solidarity"). But with the advance of the detailed division of labor, people no longer do the same work. Instead, their mutual interdependence creates a new, "organic" solidarity—unity from difference. This denied Marx's postulate of ultimately polarized classes. Durkheim's work is especially important in that he recognizes and confronts some of capitalism's most troubling developments, such as division and inequality (he was, we should note, a vigorous reformer who favored socialism). But his solution represents a mystical hope. Why should the division of labor result in solidarity and not worsening alienation and increasing fractionation of work?

The troubling qualities of contemporary, alienating work sparked two important mid-to late-twentieth-century statements affirming its underlying value. Catholic social teaching, as expressed in Pope John Paul II's Laborem exercens (On Human Work ), views work as a distinguishing feature of humankind. Through work, people come to understand their role in and obligation to a society, and to humanity as a whole. Likewise, work is a crucial source of self-respect and identity. This both establishes ideals of what work can be and provides a basis for critical evaluation of work in capitalism and socialism, where people become the objects rather than the subjects of work. Laborem exercens values labor over capital, though it accepts a subordinated role for capitalism. Hannah Arendt also sees work as crucial to the human condition, but she distinguishes between labor and work in an interesting fashion. Labor is the instrumental use of the body to make things that will be consumed and will not last long; work is the use of the mind and the hands to create things that will endure, the world of art and artifacts that surround and enrich human lives. She criticizes contemporary economics for blurring these two categories, for sacrificing the enduring monuments of work in favor of impermanent, mass-produced consumer goods. Insightful as this temporal perspective is, it seems biased toward artists and intellectuals and dismisses the creativity and necessity of daily chores, particularly those associated with women.

In 1974 Harry Braverman refocused the debate over work around the perspective of Marx. He argued that capitalists do not just buy labor power but seek to control the performance of work itself. Work may be considered to have two components, mental and physical (often called manual). To capture control over work is to take its mental side, the skills, knowledge, and initiative, away from the worker and put it in the hands of the employer. This is done through observation and redesign of physical motions (time-motion engineering), by building work skills into technologies and production layouts, and by bureaucratically controlled reward systems. Debate has raged over his reading of work history; for example, some technologies remove existing skills but introduce new skills. Nor are workers ever completely deskilled; even highly controlled and designed workplaces require subtle tricks and informal group cooperation. But after Braverman, we can no longer view new technology or management reform as simply neutral, as always means of greater efficiency and saving of effort; the forces behind such changes bear critical scrutiny.

In summary, writers of the last two centuries have viewed capitalist work with great ambivalence. From Smith, through Marx, to Arendt and Braverman, there is a sense that capitalism provides us a bounty of goods, but at the cost of controlled, subdivided, unchallenging, and unimaginative labors that do not tap the richness of human creative capacity. Ethnographers of workplaces generally agree with these views, but note that workers often find a sense of play and accomplishment in their jobs. Some bit of humanity peeks through.

The Social Sciences and Work: Key Ideas

Feminism has contributed the social sciences' most important insight about work: that is, work often performed by males, wage work or work outside the household, has been assumed to be the only kind of work, while work often performed by women, such as childcare or gardening, is left invisible or dismissed as mere chores and hobbies (this can be extended to activities of many men, such as tinkering with cars). To think of women's labor as work means to think not only of producing objects but also reproducing (renewing) the conditions of daily life. It means widening our ideas about what work is, for example in Arlie Hochschild's studies of emotional and nurturing care as work. And it challenges everyday language, such as "going out to work" and identifying a person by their paid occupation.

We thus need to keep open minds about what sorts of activities constitute work. The world of work is more diverse than stereotypical images of factories or heavy physical labor. Bureaucrats, for example, engage in "thought-work," the partly rationalized mass production of mental and verbal operations required to classify and regulate other people. Work thus involves tremendously varied experiences and ideas about those experiences, even within wage labor. Different workplaces and occupations have their own subcultural norms and symbols; the so-called "informal" workplace organization of friendship, collaboration, and factionalism often differs from the official organizational chart of power and authority. Participant-observation in workplaces has shown that informal organization surrounding minutely differentiated tasks and pay rates interdigitates with inequalities brought from the wider world, including gender, race, and ethnic background. Workplace friction, then, both reflects and exacerbates wider societal conflicts. The concept of "segmentation" aims to summarize such patterns of inequality of work and employment conditions. It highlights, in particular, the differences between jobs with specific entry requirements (e.g., educational credentials), relative stability, ascending careers, generous fringe benefits, and so on, and jobs that come and go, with few entry requirements, little future, low pay, and poor or no benefits. Working people holding the latter jobs are much more vulnerable to recurrent unemployment, giving rise to patterns of persistent rural and inner-city poverty that we perceive as "social problems."

Social scientists have also debated whether and how work has changed in recent history. Three key phases emerge from this literature. In Taylorism, named after management consultant Frederick Taylor (most active in the 1890s), management controls virtually every motion of workers through a combination of minute subdivision of tasks, detailed instructions, and monetary incentives for rapid and efficient performance. In Fordism, named after automobile manufacturer Henry Ford (most active in the 1910s and 1920s), relatively high rates of pay joined high-speed, high-pressure jobs; its broader social effect was a high-production, high-consumption, joint corporate/labor union economy characteristic of privileged segments of the Western economy from the 1940s to the 1970s. Post-Fordism, also termed flexible production, or Japanese-style management, has emerged since the 1980s. This is a contradictory concept. On the one hand, hierarchies of control are supposedly flattened and cooperative groups promoted. On the other hand, unions are dismissed as old-fashioned, even attacked and broken, workers are treated as "flexible," that is, easy to hire and fire, and corporate culture and human relations are deftly manipulated by management.

A debate has emerged in the literature about post-Fordism over whether, with computers and other advanced technologies, the tedious, Taylorist and Fordist jobs of the past will disappear. The social theorist André Gorz argues that the immense productive capacity of the modern economy makes possible vastly reduced effort, a life of leisure, self-cultivation, or voluntary and avocational work. In abstract terms, Gorz's argument makes sense and is an appealing ideal. Yet in post-Fordist conditions, the demands of work (both in terms of sheer time spent at work and people's tendency to take work "home" via computer, cell phone, etc.) have actually increased (Schor). This debate poses the question of whether the modernist image of labor as factory work and analyses, such as Marx's, that apply to it, are relevant to contemporary (flexible or postmodern) capitalism. Contemporary capitalism involves corporate and governmental entities of enormous size, complexly distributed working processes, rapidity of movement and information transfer, and finely tuned systems of psychological control. Some authors feel that this constitutes a networked capitalism characterized by loose, relaxed relationships, flexibility, and constant change. Others portray systems of power in which external surveillance becomes included as part of the individual's own watchful self. There is a strange mixture of giddy futurism and hopeless surrender in postmodern perspectives. Though often presented as arguments against Marx, these visions extend his notion of alienated labor to the point where the commoditization of the person as worker and consumer has completely colonized the self. The main difference is that they abandon his hope of a revolutionary break with alienation. Yet we should question whether such corporate forms really have eliminated all competing notions of human creativity and self-directed discipline. Likewise, the predicted end of the factory is incorrect and Western-centric; the mind-numbing mass production of everyday goods has shifted to newly developing countries such as China, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Brazil, and others. Though not simply replicas of the past, such places do in their own way re-create the "dark Satanic mills" of William Blake's early industrial Britain.

See also Capitalism ; Economics ; Marxism ; Poverty ; Wealth .

bibliography

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Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

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Josiah McC. Heyman