Centrality and Historicity of Work in Marx’s Thought: Some Reflections from a Post-Marxian Point of View

1. Introduction

For Marx, the relationship of human being to work is an experience that goes well beyond our contemporary era, even if it was in modern times, at the moment when capitalism spread to dominate the world, that this relationship could finally appear with all its ramifications for the human condition. Indeed, from a philosophical point of view, we can find in Marx a general notion of work, valid for all periods of human history and, thus, valid regardless of the means of production or the forms under which collective labor and the individual mobilization of laborers and their social integration present themselves.

Certainly, anthropological research has shown that the human condition is not limited to this existential structure, especially in terms of what constitutes work—sexual desire, the relationship with the divine and, yet more fundamentally, anguish in the face of death, are all transhistorical fundamentals that different human societies have organized into institutions, according to their specific social imaginary (Castoriadis 1997). What Marx puts forward is that work is not an existential structure among others and like others but, as we show, occupies a place apart in the unfolding of the human condition in the social historical world. By existential structure, we mean, in the field of phenomenological ontology (Axelos 1976; Henry 1983; Papaïōannou 1983; Haarscher 1980; Lukacs 1991), all forms by which a world opens up to human beings. Of course, this terminology is not Marx’s, but for us, according to the interpretative approach we adopt in this article, ¹ only a phenomenological reading of Marx can reveal all the power of his analysis of work and of our modern experience of it.

In this radical perspective (that is to say, one that goes to the root), work is not reducible to the simple instrumental activity applied to an already given world but is indeed the constitution of the world itself. And this structure is deployed concretely in sociohistorical reality according to three dimensions: (1) work considered from the point of view of production, what we propose to call work as production (that is to say, the technical and economic dimension of work, with its own pathology that is exploitation); (2) work considered from the point of view of subjectivation, of the construction of human identity, what we propose to call work as subjectivation (the anthropological dimension of work, with its own pathology that is alienation); and (3) work considered from the point of view of social integration, as the support for social integration, what we propose to call work as integration (the sociopolitical dimension of work with its own issue that is emancipation).

On the basis of these conceptual distinctions, this article defends the following thesis. While we owe Marx much in understanding these dimensions, the least that one could say is that he did not truly explore the dimension of work as integration in wage societies, as he was captive to a radical view that made a complete break with capitalism the necessary condition for the emancipation of labor force and, thus, he was unable to conceive that, using institutional consolidation of the salary relationship, employment could lead to a recognized and rewarding status.

2. Work as Production: General Form and Its Modern Pathology

Envisaging work as production is, first and foremost, examining it from the technical angle of an institutionalized process of interaction between human beings and their environment that translates into a continuous provision of material means allowing for the satisfaction of needs. ² Marx was the first, and in radical fashion, to track what the dynamic of production entailed in the deployment of the economic dimension at the heart of the world of human existence. Commenting on Marx’s ontology of work (Marx 1975), Kōstas Papaïōannou (1983) explains that work as production does not consist merely of the simple external relationship to a natural world, which is nonhuman, in which the human species wisely takes its place, but in the opening and deployment of a truly human world, always already human:

Nature as it presents itself immediately, that is either as natural objectivity, or as human subjectivity, in short nature seized objectively as well as subjectively does not exist immediately in a manner appropriate for the human essence: mediation, the suppression of this immediacy, the negation of this inadequacy will be the endeavor of work. . .. The world produced by work is the only real world for man, since all that is real and valuable, all which produces and recognizes human existence, arises, and is coordinated in it and starting from it. . .. Here work is fully realized, because all of nature there becomes the object of technical domination, the inorganic body of man. (Papaïōannou 1983: 89–91, my translation)

At the core of the productive process can be found technology, the progressive invention and manipulation of tools, the development of increasingly complex mechanical systems, and the increasingly collective and organized character of all of these processes, all mobilizing at its heart one of the dimensions of instrumental rationality, that is, the search for efficiency through the saving of time (Bidet 2007). Furthermore, for Marx, this first general aspect does not arise from a simple technical development that would unfold progressively and in linear and cumulative fashion over history. It is always envisaged from a social and historical perspective, especially with the help of the concept of the mode of production (Abelès 1985). The latter is defined as the combination, always historically determined, of a certain new technique of productive forces and of a particular configuration of social relationships of production. By productive forces, we must understand all that comprises the labor process, that is, the objects, the means (notably labor power, the levels of qualification, and the state of technologies), and, of course, the results of the labor process. By “the relations of production,” we mean the type of social relationships that structure interindividual relations at the time of production, essentially property relationships. The decisive questions at this level of analysis are the following. Who owns the means and objects of production? Who owns the product of the process of production? What is the social status of the labor force mobilized in the process of production? For Marx, the mode of production constitutes the infrastructure of all social formation, the ideological superstructure (politics, religion, etc.) having only a secondary impact, essentially linked to social reproduction. While one may enumerate, throughout history, various modes of production, such as, for example, the ancient mode of production, the feudal mode of production, the Asian mode of production, and the capitalist mode of production, their common feature is that they all constitute so many forms of exploitation of the labor force of social groups controlled by dominant social groups (Balibar 1977). Each with their own form of exploitation, these different modes of production foster a situation of alienation that always serves to deprive labor of the greatest number of fulfilling possibilities.

Doubtless, our view of work as production is biased by the capitalist context in which we inevitably understand it and which overdetermines its intrinsically instrumental dimension. What Marx showed very well is that the capitalist system deploys a specific and historically unprecedented form of production and, therefore, of exploitation. In this form, production extricates itself from the rest of society and sets about being valued according to its own instrumental reasoning. The issue is no longer the production of wealth considered socially useful by a given human community (with the eventual possibility of exploitation of a group, of appropriation by one group of the collective surplus labor), and thus contained by the finite ontological regime that characterizes the qualitatively determined needs of a given society. Henceforth, production becomes in itself its own end and, therefore, has no further need of a goal. It aims for wealth in general, the general idea of wealth or even wealth in the abstract. As the French philosopher Gérard Granel (1993) stresses, this pathology of work as production supposes an event, “commercial production,” which brings about the junction of the infinity of work-as-production (the instrumental logic) and the infinity of abstract wealth (the commercial logic), thus triggering the acceleration of their respective infinities in a common reciprocal infinitization in the form of the “work as wealth” which nourishes capitalist exploitation. ³

Let us summarize this first point, since its problematization then gives rise to two other historical dimensions of work. Work as production concerns the technical-objective dimension of work and places it once more in the economic domain that we find once again, whether explicitly or not, in every society. Regardless of specific historical forms, every society needs to produce resources, goods, or services, necessary to individual and collective life. While there is the potential danger that must be contained that the production may also be the occasion for a headlong productivist rush, also driven by the desire for wealth, this is not inevitable. Reflecting on what each could consider an emancipated society, Marx does not see it without an economic dimension but, to the extent that humanity manages to domesticate production, he sees this dimension in human existence reduced over time, as he stressed when he presented his communist utopia:

The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power, accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. (Marx 1991: 958–59)

In short, work is economic, but it is important to add that it is not merely economic. So, let us explore its other correlative dimensions.

3. Work as a Process of Subjectivation

By work as subjectivation, we are seeking to designate the relationship of human being to work in as much as he or she is engaged in a relationship with itself. Thus is work envisaged no longer simply as a relationship external to its object—work as production—but rather as a relationship internal to the subject. Marx’s unique perspective is not so much the discovery of work as subjectivation—in a certain way, Marx is returning to and developing Hegel’s perspective on this point. Instead, it relates to the developing of tension between work as production and work as subjectivation and to how this tension is at the heart of Marx’s project of social emancipation.

From Aristotle to Arendt (1958), practical philosophy has traditionally distinguished the “vita contemplativa” from the “vita activa,” which is the concern of human beings. Within this, a number of specifically human activities—associated with various processes of subjectification—may be noted, including especially poïetic activities (the production of material conditions of individual and collective life), cultural activities (the construction of meaning and values), cognitive activities (knowledge of the world), religious activities (the development of a relationship with death and eventually with the sacred, with the divine, and with transcendence), and political activity (the collective organization of public matters within a common world with a view to living together), not to mention playful, sexual, or warlike activities. Certainly, these activities did not all appear simultaneously and in a completely developed fashion at the start of the process of hominization, even if one could reasonably suppose that the activities of production of living conditions are first and have been the occasion of the creation or development of other activities that were subsequently autonomized, becoming ends in themselves (Freyssenet 1995). Again, obviously, once stabilized in their generic structure (i.e., that by which they characterize a type of human, as opposed to a type of animal), the first forms of human life in society were not necessarily explicit about each of these activities and their development in the global imagination was not clearly set out, as became apparent later in various types of civilization, expressed in significant forms (books, paintings, monuments, etc.). Certainly, in the end, these activities were not always seen as equally meaningful in different historical periods. In other words, they were not always the key expression of a process of subjectification and of a process of social integration. Yet, for all that, we would not be able to conceive of a form of social human life without, in one way or another, the copresence, the connection and the hierarchization socially instituted by these types of activity.

In these conditions, how did certain human societies come to place explicitly in the center of the subjective construction and, we stress this later, of the social connection, a particular activity, the activity of work, this remains problematic. To become central in a given society, this notion of work as subjectivation must at least already exist as such in this society. Now, ethnological research has shown that in numerous tribal societies, what we recognize as labor was explicitly lacking in the collective imagination (Chamoux 1994). Certainly, objectively, we find work there, if by that we mean simply work as production, that is, labor in the sense of human effort, conducted with technical intelligence and instrumental reason, and applied to a subject (which might already have been familiar), in order to produce use values, or useful objects, that is, with a view to the reproduction of living conditions and the production of a human world within the ecosphere. Yet the practices concerned cannot be subsumed under any homogeneous and socially explicit notion in which the functions of subjectivation—or of individual identity—and social integration would also play a part (Gorz 1989). The latter are subsumed under other activities; thus, what is fundamentally the experience of work for the human condition is rendered socially invisible and overlooked.

When the time comes in human history for work to be constituted as such in the collective imagination, it has to be said that it has only been done in a partial and stigmatized way. This was the case in ancient Greece, where social recognition was essentially based on the exercise of citizenship, provided that citizens could free themselves from the necessities of life through slavery. We know that ancient Greece considered labor something fundamentally servile; only politics, the arts, the games, and philosophy were in themselves judged worthy of man (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1985; Castoriadis 1997). The Greek model supposes that the necessary servile part of work rests on the shoulders of the greatest number (of slaves, women, or strangers) while a minority (of citizens, in fact landowners) could fully develop their humanity in freely devoting themselves to higher activities. ⁴ How can we account for our modern experience of labor, especially in as much as it differs radically from that of the ancients? The essentialization of the activity of work developed in stages (Méda 1995) and expanded greatly in the eighteenth century, up to its explanation in what we consider to be its culmination, Marx’s philosophy of work. Work is no longer merely experienced as the ascendency of necessity (the servile labor of antiquity) or the mark of suffering (Christian original sin). It is no longer simply distinguished from animal activity by technical intelligence. Despite the historicity of its forms and the heterogeneity of its characteristics, henceforth it encompasses an edifying dimension for humanity, that the philosophies of labor—in particular, those of Hegel and, above all, of Marx—register and conceptualize:

[Man knows how to] produce in accordance with the laws of beauty. It is, therefore, in his fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being. Such production is his active species-life. Through it, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of the species-life of man. (Marx 1975: 330)

It is Marx who delved most deeply into the understanding of this subjectifying dimension of work, which we have proposed to call work as subjectification, and which has given rise to a whole tradition of philosophical anthropology (e.g., and in different perspectives: Kojève 1980; Henry 1983; Haarscher 1980; and Lukacs 1991). For Marx, work is not simply transformation of nature by man to respond to the necessary satisfaction of his needs, which is at play in work as production; it is also transformation of human himself. Through work, human accepts the inherent necessity of his finite condition, but makes this the opportunity to go further in a permanent construction of himself that he or she seeks to have recognized by others. This generic figure—around a triptych: construction of the self, self-expression, and recognition by others—presents itself as the paradigm of meaning that all work activities assume, regardless of the social forms in which they are carried out and experienced. Therefore, the question is not so much the emancipation of work to find fulfillment solely in other forms of activity, but rather the emancipation of work from multiple forms of alienation that encumber the human truth of which it is essentially and universally the bearer. The process of liberation in work and by work has structured the sociopolitical organization of our societies for two centuries, yet—and this is doubtless what escaped Marx—while dealing with the exigencies of capitalist development and its own notion of productive labor.

4. Work as a Process of Social Integration: Beyond Marx

Obviously, this historical dimension, work as integration, has proven difficult to understand since Marx. If, in principle, we see the expression of the potentialities of this work value in all forms of work, yet, all forms of work are not recognized as equally socially valid. As André Gorz (1989) emphasizes, we come to progressively distinguish these forms of labor carried out in a private context, such as domestic labor (furthermore rendered invisible by masculine domination), from those of a more general monetary expression, which are part of the functioning of the economic system as a whole. Only these forms of labor, which political economy and its Marxist critique theorize as social work or abstract work, constitute what we hereafter commonly refer to as work in the current meaning of the term. In two centuries and from the viewpoint of the worker, “work” has come to designate principally this general activity, functionally specialized and remunerated in accordance with its utility in the social system, in short, professional labor, principally envisaged in its salaried form. Henceforth, social integration stems from a twofold process. To its fundamental basis of primary integration of the family or community type can be added societal integration, brought about by professional work that, for Gorz, constitutes the bedrock of genuine citizenship. For him, as long as the functioning of the social system, its production and reproduction, require work, however reduced the time it occupies in the life of each individual, work will be indispensable to full citizenship. Like the right to participate in the production of the functioning of society and to acquire rights and powers over it, the right to work must be understood as a political right.

From a Marxist perspective, this sociopolitical integration of work in a capitalist society, which was humanized in the form of a wage society (Castel 2002), is problematic. Speaking simply of a work society and of the social centrality of work in general is certainly far from being conceptually satisfactory. This would be allowing us to believe that we can have an anthropological discourse on reality that would be without social, historical, and institutional substance. What can Marx, so enlightening on work as production and work as subjectification, permit us to understand about work as integration? And, in turn, what is there in Marx, for reasons intrinsic to his thinking, which is not comprehensible in this work society that has produced a form of social integration through the institutionalization of work value?

We must begin with the Marxist issue of work as production and its tension with respect to work as subjectification. The economic order of our societies is dominated by the capitalist mode of production, under historical forms that, however much they differ in terms or productive forces (Taylorism, Fordism, post-Fordism, the e-economy, etc. [Rifkin 1995]), change nothing of the profound nature of the design of social relationships of production (promotion of capital through the exploitation of living labor). This domination is particularly characterized by a definition of social work understood principally as productive work for capital (Berthoud 1974). From this perspective, this social construction that we designate as the centrality of work only exists in dealing with the exigencies connected to the capital/labor power balance and only manifests itself stemming from the dominant form of employment, that is, salaried work. In this context of the centrality of work under capitalist domination, having nothing but one’s workforce to sell to survive is not in itself a viable situation and, on the contrary, signals the worker’s intrinsic socioeconomic fragility. As studies of the historical sociology of the wage system have described so well (Castel 2002), since the initial workers’ victories of the nineteenth century but especially during the twentieth century, the world of labor’s stand against capitalist reasoning has gone through the consolidation of the status of wage earners, which, as a result of social struggles, has progressively transformed our work societies into wage societies.

Yet, from a Marxist perspective, these substantial changes remain changes in degree within the wage system, and not changes in the nature of the mode of production and the status of the work received there. In a society dominated by the capitalist mode of production, labor—directly (salaried work) or indirectly (work from public services, domestic labor or freelance work, or autonomous activities)—never exists for itself or outside of an overall subsumption under the logic of the promotion and accumulation of capital. In this sense, Marxist concepts profoundly connect work and politics. This is certainly not a matter of affirming that work becomes an object for political action, as if work and politics were confronting each other in the manner of two social practices, distinct and external. Instead, it is a question of maintaining, more profoundly, that work is intrinsically a political relationship (a relationship of humans with humans) as much as an instrumental relationship (a relationship of humans with things) or, if one prefers, in the language of Aristotle’s practical philosophy, praxis as much as poièsis. In the concept of labor force, Marxist phenomenology notes two interrelated dimensions. On one hand, there is living labor, that is, labor in the sense of the general notion, labor as affirmative human activity, of creation and cooperation. Labor power is here manifest as an autonomous subject participating in a common world and acting in this world. On the other hand, there is capital/labor, that is, labor as submission to the logic of the promotion of capital. Labor power is reduced to functioning as a factor in production, starting with a reduction to the status of merchandise.

From a Marxist point of view, therefore, it is always dependent only on the logic of capital and its increasing technicality that today one finds the formulation of the collection of sociopolitical questions with respect to work, that is, this dimension that we characterize as work as integration. Of course, freeing oneself from such shackles does not consist of assuming the viewpoint of work as if it were something that could be isolated and immediately offered a position outside of capitalism. Certainly, for Marx, this externality could be considered as stemming from general anthropology and, from the perspective of communism, a social utopia organizing the relationships of work freed of any class oppression and with a view to the integral thriving of workers. Yet, in any particular capitalist situation, this externality can only concretely be understood in the immanent political tension that runs through and structures any capital/work relationship. While, in capitalism, work is inevitably integrated into the functioning of the system of valorization and accumulation, the forms of this integration are not all equivalent; social struggles have produced some forms of partial liberation (social conquests based on class compromise) within which work has been able to gain recognition for its specific mode of existence. We might reproach Marx for ensconcing himself in a sort of all (communist emancipation) or nothing (capitalist oppression) reasoning and, as a result, for not anticipating the emancipatory potential of transformations of the wage-earning relationship. Yet, we can give him credit for having positioned the question of the sociopolitical integration of the laborer within an ineluctable tension and showing us that, ultimately, the victories of the working world are always political. From the point of view of the capital/work relationship, there cannot be irreversible, irrevocable social benefits but only changing situations under which work manages to tear itself, a bit more or a bit less, from the reasoning of its functional reduction. If we remain with a Marxist perspective, this capital/work relationship remains fundamentally an antagonistic and asymmetrical relationship, generating exploitation and, thus, alienation and, as a result, making only partial emancipation possible. One cannot expect any reconciliation in this matter, and even less hope for any so-called end of history (Fukuyama 1992). The fact remains that, at the very heart of the wage relationship, it is only by institutionalizing its intrinsic political dimension—and not by repressing it or making it invisible—that room for maneuver can be opened up to improve the situation of workers.

5. Conclusion

While, for Marx, the communist utopia remains the only horizon from which human emancipation can be radically considered, in our view, his philosophy of work still has something decisive to contribute to current debates on the place and importance of work in our “wage-based societies” (Castel 2002), that is, in societies which, without breaking radically with capitalist oppression, have considerably changed its effects on both exploitation and alienation. At this level, the issue is to not throw out the baby (the social criticism of capitalism, the hope for an opening up of and by work) with the bathwater (the utopia of a transparent society without heteronomy, not to mention the monstrosities that were and remain the historical experiences of “real socialism”). For us, it is a matter of not settling into the comfortable reasoning of all or nothing: either capitalism where there is, ultimately, only exploitation and alienation; or communism, a sine qua non of complete emancipation, and nothing—or so little (two centuries of social victories notwithstanding!)—between the two. We could—better still, we must—discuss a particular point here and there from the Marxist perspective, but although we retain the conviction that our social horizon will remain dominated by capitalism, Marxist thought about work will constitute an invaluable resource for examining the present and subverting it, that is to say, on a permanent basis, reinjecting all the richness of the possible into the misery of the present.