Work

At the time the question of what work was became immensely controversial. 

But at the same time as work under capitalism offered less opportunity for self-fulfilment, a gimcrack alternative -call it consumption of consumer goods, call it shopping was being born. If we couldn’t realise ourselves through the self-actualising process of work, perhaps we could do it through shopping? That was the possibility, as we will see in the next chapter, that Benjamin’s friend Bertolt Brecht explored in his and Kurt Weill’s opera Mahoganny. Capitalist society, then, seemed to be at a pivotal moment during the late 1920s and 1930s in terms of how human beings might fulfil themselves and realise their potentialities. Writers as varied as D. H. Lawrence and Simone Weill meditated on what work could and should mean in an era When it seemed to be, increasingly, a brain-numbing, spirit-crushing, soul-destroying nightmare, and the only alternative to the Marxist cogito (I work therefore I am) was the consumerist one (I shop therefore I am). 

Marx’s concept of work was to prove particularly controversial for the Frankfurt School. His suggestion was that man and woman need to work to flourish and achieve dignity. Even in a communist paradise, we must work. On the face of it, what Benjamin wrote in ‘Hashish in Marseille’ and One-Way Street about work was in line with this Marxist orthodoxy that humans defined themselves through work; the problem was that the increasingly mechanised, routine and exploitative nature of work under capitalism thwarted any possibility of fulfilment. 

But scepticism about humans defining and liberating themselves through work was to become a hallmark of critical theory as it evolved from the 1930s onwards. The Frankfurt School has been called neo-Marxist, but in this area at least it might more accurately be called anti-Marxist. Indeed, the man who would take the Frankfurt School on a new intellectual trajectory in the 19303 baulked at this Marxist perspective. Max Horkheimer wrote in Dammerung, a book of aphorisms published not long after Benjamin’s description of his drug-fuelled ramble around Marseilles: ‘To make labour into a transcendent category of human activity is an ascetic ideology. . .Because socialists hold to this general concept, they make themselves into carriers of capitalist propaganda." For Horkheimer, who when Dammerung was published was the director of the Frankfurt school and its primary intellectual influence, Marx fetishised labour as a category.
If that was true, then Marx was following in a venerable tradition in German thought, As Erich Fromm wrote in his 1961 book Marx’s Concept of Man, Spinoza, Hegel and Goethe all held that, as he put it, 

man is alive only inasmuch as he is productive, inasmuch as he grasps the world outside of himself in the act of expressing his own specific human powers, and of grasping the world with these powers. Inasmuch as man is not productive, inasmuch as he is receptive and passive, he is nothing, he is dead. In this productive process, man realises his own essence, he returns to his own essence, which in theological language is nothing other than his return to God.

Hegel wrote in The Phenomenology of Spirit that the productive man makes the world his own by grasping it productively, by ‘translating itself from the night of possibility into the day of actuality’. The work of unravelling the thread, similarly, helps lead one from the cave to the daylight to actualise oneself, rather than being like the deluded prisoners in Plato’s cave or the Niebelungen of Wagner’s Ring Cycle mining for gold in an endless subterranean night. Under Horkheimer, the Frankfurt School rebelled against this orthodox German view of the value of work and in particular against the Marxist credo that we fulfil ourselves through labour. For the likes of Horkheimer and Adorno, if not for Fromm who remained more faithful to Marx than his colleagues, labour is not the basic category of human realisation. 

Indeed, when Horkheimer read Marx’s recently published Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in the early 1930s, in which this orthodoxy about work is expressed, he detected in it something that made him queasy. Even Benjamin, who eulogised creative productive labour, found a presentiment of the Nazi jackboot in it. The vulgar Marxist conception of labour, he wrote, ‘already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism. . .The new conception of labour amounts to the exploitation or nature wmch \n‘th naive complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat?“ That wasn‘t the kind of creative productive labour that he eulogised in One-Way Street or ‘Hashish in Marseille’; it was just the socialist flip side of the capitalist coin. This queasiness before the ruination of nature in what Benjamin called vulgar Marxist thought was to become an increasing concern of the Frankfurt School. Indeed, as late as 1969, Adorno told an interviewer that Marx wanted to convert the world into a gigantic workhouse. 

Perhaps, though, that’s unfair. Read sympathetically, Marx’s notion of productive humans didn’t entail the ruination of nature, but rather the mastery, through creative work, of oneself. And yet the Frankfurt School repeatedly disavowed this aspect of their Marxist heritage. Two decades after Horkheimer accused Marx of fetishising labour, Herbert Marcuse elaborated the accusation in his 1955 book Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud. Marcuse used the stand-in of Marx’s favourite cultural hero Prometheus for a coded attack: ‘Prometheus is the culture-hero of toil, productivity and progress through repression: he wrote, ‘the trickster and (suffering) rebel against the gods, who creates culture at the price of perpetual pain. He symbolises productiveness, the unceasing effort to master life . . . Prometheus is the archetypal hero of the performance principle.’

The performance principle was a special version of Freud’s reality principle, whereby one repressed one’s pleasures in order to function better in civilisation. But there were other principles, and other heroes, Marcuse suggested. Against Prometheus, he pitted different Greek heroes Orpheus, Narcissus and Dionysius: ‘they stand for a very different reality . . . Theirs is the image of joy and fulfilment, the voice that does not command but sings, the deed that is peace and that ends the labour of conquest: the liberty from time that unites man with god, man with nature . . . the redemption of pleasure, the halt of time, the absorption of death: silence, sleep, night, paradise the Nirvana principle not as death but life.“1 Marcuse’s utopian suggestion contradicted not just the German philosophical tradition that embraced Hegel, Marx and Schopenhauer, but also Freud. It was Freud who posited the Nirvana principle as an innate psychic drive or death instinct that aims to end life’s inevitable tension. We all yearn to leave the treadmill of labour, perhaps, but our fate as humans is to remain on it until we die: Thanatos and Eros are, for Freud, contrary to one another. Marcuse refused to accept that. 

But were Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse right to suggest that Marx fetishised labour? It could be argued that he fetishised not labour but human development, and it is precisely that fetish that Fromm, in Marx’s Concept of Man, shares and that Marcuse seeks to overcome through, somehow, realising the Nirvana principle in life. Indeed, the very idea of a communist society is one that, for Marx, involves the ‘withering away’ of the state since it is no longer necessary; in fact its continued existence would hamper the free development of the productive forces of society. But that society, as Hannah Arendt argued, was one of individuals freely fulfilling themselves: this doesn’t sound like a communist society premised on solidarity and shared activities, but a prelapsarian paradise wherein material needs are satisfied. 

What then is the paradise to which Marx thought proletarian revolution paves the way? The American Marxist critic Marshall Berman argued: ‘Marx wants to embrace Prometheus and Orpheus: he considers communism worth fighting for because for the first time in history it could enable men to have both. He might also argue that it is only against a background of Promethean striving that Orphic rapture gains moral or psychic value: “luxe, calme et volupté” by themselves are merely boring, as Baudelaire knew well.’ And who would want a revolution if it resulted only in an eternity of boredom? But that seems precisely the boring paradise Marcuse invoked in Bros and Civilisation when he suggested that the Nirvana principle can be realised in human lives. More charitably, perhaps, we can interpret Marcuse as arguing for a work-life balance by means of shortening the working day to give opportunity for, if not Orphic rapture, then the redemption of pleasure and the halt of time. 

Marx’s suggestion, nonetheless, was that to be free involves being free to do work that is not alienating, by means of which one becomes what he thought was increasingly unlikely under capitalism. The French philosopher Simone Weil argued that there must be more to human liberation than this in her essay Oppression and Liberty, published the same year Horkheimer published Dammerung in which he attacked Marx's conception of labour.
For Simone Weil, human relations must not be conflated with labour and work: the latter are merely instrumental, since they involve relations of a subject to an object. For her, human interactions need to 
be revolutionised as much as productive forces and productive relations if humans are truly to be free. Weils thoughts were to prove important to one later Frankfurt School thinker, Jurgen Habermas, who wrote: ‘Liberation from hunger and misery does not necessarily converge with liberation from servitude and degradation; there is no automatic developmental relation between labour and interaction.’ That distinction between work and interaction runs through Habermas’s monumental 1981 book The Theory of Communicative Action, in which he systematically argues for liberation from servitude and degradation not through revolutionising productive labour, but through interaction. 

Axel Honneth, Who was to succeed Habermas as director of the Institute, argued that the degradation of work in Taylorite production processes prompted the Frankfurt School thinkers to abandon the Marxist notion of work as self-fulfllment. But they replaced it with something else: arguably, rather than making a fetish of industrial labour, one might expect the Frankfurt School to fetishise communication which could be construed not as an alternative but as the form of productive labour to which they were temperamentally suited.