Work
It follows that conscious human activity, or what we might call ‘work’, is equally definitive of human essence. However, the activity valued two and a half thousand years ago by the patrician elite of ancient Athens, was to be distinguished from necessary physical labour upon which human society as a whole depends. Such labour was performed by slaves or peasants, who were not recognised as sufficiently civilised, nor therefore, as fully human. The rise of industrial capitalism, it was supposed, portended the final end of slavery and of feudal serfdom, since productive labour power became a commodity to be voluntarily bought and sold under free market conditions. The dominant form of ‘work’ – both physical and intellectual – began to assume the form of wage labour. For Marx, all forms of work – whether materially productive or socially reproductive – entail human self-realisation, and the essence of work lies not in its exchange value, but in its dynamic capacity to fulfil the needs of the human species (Heller, 1974).
For Marx, all work encompasses the uniqueness of the human species’ metabolism with Nature. Work represents the human species’ symbiotic appropriation of natural resources and its manipulation of natural forces. He applied the term stoffvechsel (best translated as ‘social-ecological metabolism’) to define this fundamental condition of human existence (1887: 183–4). However, even in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, Marx recognised that certain human interactions with nature could have counterproductive consequences, and he foresaw that a ‘metabolic rift’ would be occasioned by the capitalist mode of production (see J. Foster, 1999). And wage labour as a distinctive form of work could be an alienated rather than a self-affirming activity. Most recently, in the late modern era, it has been suggested that the managerial ethos associated with even the best-rewarded employment can be corrosive of the human character (Sennett, 1998), while a great deal of employment – especially that which is organised informally – is poorly rewarded and chronically precarious (for example, Standing, 2011).
But the manner of human beings’ metabolism with Nature as opposed to that of other species is that it is socially, not naturally, organised and reproduced (see Box 2.1). We shall return to the subject of human sociality in a moment, but if we expand our understanding of work as human activity that lies beyond wage labour, it extends to the entire arena of social and cultural reproduction as well as to the realm of political engagement. It includes care work – which in turn includes care for children and for frail, sick or disabled adults; creative endeavour – including artistic expression, sporting and recreational activity undertaken for its own sake; all forms of study, learning and scholarly activity; engagement in voluntary and community activities as well as engagement in formal politics. Work is activity. It is quite simply what human beings do. It is the realisation of their species being and, whether or not it is materially productive, it is, potentially and in essence, the expression of human creativity.
Box 2.1: Bee and human societies compared
The fable of the bees
Bees and humans are alike in that both species appear to be ‘socially’ productive. The similarity struck a certain Dr Bernard Mandeville, who in 1705 wrote a poem, subsequently entitled The Fable of the Bees. The fable concerned a hive of bees which collectively decided more closely to emulate human behaviour, such that individual bees by pursuing their own selfish ends succeeded through relentless and unprincipled competition in incidentally meeting the needs of others. The result was an astoundingly efficient and productive hive. But then one day the bees were introduced to certain aspects of Christian teaching and Stoic philosophy, and they decided they should henceforth abandon self-interest and acquisitiveness and devote themselves to honest and peaceful living. The result was disastrous for the productivity of the hive, and the colony dissipated. The moral was that ‘greed is good’; a belief echoed later in the 18th century in the economic liberalism of Adam Smith and by many more recent neo-liberal ideologues.
The bee and the architect
A rather different thought occurred to Karl Marx who in his celebrated work Das Kapital reflected upon what it is that makes the productive activity of a human being distinctively human:
A bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. (1887: 178)
Marx was not commenting on the imaginary political economy of a beehive but demonstrating that the difference between bees and humans is that the latter have a conscious purpose to their work and, by implication, they have the capacity to change what they do. An architect, unlike any bee, might choose to make an octagonal as opposed to a hexagonal structure or to change the course of architectural history by constructing something radically new.
Are bees ‘social’?
Likening a bee colony to a human society is anthropomorphism. A bee colony is in some ways best understood as a single biological organism. It is natural, not social. A human society is an association of interdependent but autonomously conscious beings and is axiomatically social.
There is a complex division of labour among the bees within a colony, but this is a natural not a planned phenomenon. The colony is established around a single ‘queen’ or egg layer. There are male ‘drones’, which can fertilise queen bees (and will die having done so) but otherwise play no part in the life of a colony: redundant drones are expelled from the colony at the end of each season. The multitude of infertile female ‘worker’ bees are divided between ‘nurses’ (who care for the queen and the larvae) and ‘foragers’ (who go in search of pollen), but these roles are determined not by choice or command but by epigenetic tags. This is an arrangement that has evolved over millions of years and is unchanged even by human domestication. The individual worker bees that drive a hive’s production may exhibit genetically determined patterns of cooperative behaviour, but their functioning is not socially ordered, as in a human society.
Sociality
Aristotle, famously, defined the human being as a zöon politikon, a term usually translated as ‘political animal’, though, in historical and etymological contexts, it might also translate as ‘social animal’. Aristotle’s intention was to distinguish human sociality from animalistic herd or pack behaviours. Marx would later observe that ‘the human being is in the most literal sense a zöon politikon, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal that can only individuate itself in the midst of society (1857: 84). The concept of sociality elicited from Marx’s writing by Márkus (1978: 32–5) has two interconnected components, Gemeinwesen (alluding to the communal character of human life) and Gattungsleben (alluding to the generic socio-historic shaping of human life).
Human life has a communal character in the sense that the human individual is not, and can’t wholly be, the isolated irreducible atom of liberal social contract theory: she is an inherently vulnerable, interdependent creature (for example, Turner, 2006). It is not mere ingenuity, but socially organised care and collaboration that have allowed