This is, I think, the last bit of the interview meme.
1. What kinds of non-alienated labor do you regularly engage in? (And is the liturgical meaning of "avodah" relevant in this context?)
Ufff. I am thinking about this, and I am still thinking about this.
OK, let’s take a quick stab at defining the term, although I don’t expect to succeed. As I understand it, Marx viewed certain kinds of labor as alienating if, essentially, the laborer didn’t feel part of the labor, part of the product of the labor. For Karl Marx, this (inevitably) turns on the means of production; if the worker does not control the means of production, he will be alienated from the process and the product. I can’t see things that way, in part because I live in a service society (well, the parts of it I actually experience are heavily weighted to service). To discuss the labor of a college professor, for instance, as either alienating or non-alienating, I would have to take the focus off the means of production (does it matter who owns the laptop, the projector, the chalk, the photocopier, the web server?) and focus on ... well, the experience of alienation. For Mr. Marx, alienation is not, essentially, experiential but objective and structural. For me to understand the subject usefully, I have to part ways with him on that. Alienated labor is, to put it briefly, labor that you would be perfectly happy if somebody else did.
Unfortunately, if alienation is experiential, it’s very difficult to talk about it with anything like precision. Cooking lunch may be alienating, while cooking dinner is not. Cooking on the grill may be non-alienating, while cooking in the oven is alienating. Cooking for your wife may be non-alienating, but cooking for your son may be alienating. And the reverse the next day. And since we don’t think about ourselves regularly in those terms (and if we did, doing so would influence our experience), surveying ourselves for what is alienating and what isn’t runs the risk of being so vague as to be useless.
That said, as with categories generally, there is plenty that is solidly in one or the other, and even if the edges are blurry, there is much to be learned by looking at the things that aren’t in the blurry section. So leaving aside certain household chores which verge on alienation, what non-alienating labor do I regularly engage in?
First and foremost, I suppose, is the raising of my Perfect Non-Reader, which requires an extraordinary amount of work, and which I take ... almost as much pleasure in doing as I wish I took. I do less than I ought to do of the work that I would take joy in actually doing (hitting fly balls, reading and talking about books, teaching Torah), in part because I am so often tired of the work that is simply necessary (picking up after, disciplining, transporting). Being tired of something is not exactly the same as being alienated from it, but it isn’t exactly different, either. Other than that ... um ... I used to blog, and I used to blog about political rhetoric. I am hoping to do so again, but I can’t claim to have done a good deal of that of late. I read, I read a lot, and I on occasion make recommendations or analyses. I was able, recently, to make such recommendations to a local library, which was lovely.
Twice in the last year, I acted in local community theater plays. This was non-alienated labor in the most absolute sense, that is, not only did I contribute my labor freely for the good of the whole, but the reward of my labor was the labor itself. Well, and applause, which is lovely. But (f’r’ex) I discovered late in the run of the show that in the last scene between the Marquise and the Vicomte, the Vicomte’s voice was rising in pitch as the Marquise’s’s’ was lowering, both indicating extreme anger, until my pitch was substantially higher than that of the actress playing opposite, which had a very nice (if almost certainly undetectable) effect on the power play dynamic we were depicting. That was lovely, that discovery, and having discovered it I am richer by (a) the connoisseurship to look out for similar techniques in other performances, and (2) a trick to bring out if I ever act again in a similar scene.
Now. As to avodah, or “service from the heart”. I suspect that part of the depression from which I have lately been suffering (and I use the word lightly, in the sense of a temporarily depressed emotional state, rather than in any clinical or physiological sense) (and I use the word suffering lightly as well, as I can’t honestly claim to have suffered much from it) may well derive from my own alienation from the work. That is, the problem is not so much that the work that I do is alienated from me (as a Marxist would have it) as that I feel, vaguely, that there is work that I am not doing, and that I am not only obligated to do but would enjoy doing—joy is, I think, the wrong connotation, really. No, the thing about it is that I would be a part of what I did, that the doing of the thing itself would be a part of my own doing. Is this avodah? Is it service from the heart? I’ve already made one term impossibly vague, I don’t want to declare that any non-alienated labor is a kind of prayer. That can only be done by declaring that prayer tautologically includes any celebration of the world, any activity that is done with heart and soul. And although I would say that successful prayer and non-alienated labor share that attribute of mindfulness and (if you will) soulfulness, still they are not the same thing.
When, for a year or so, I was preparing Torah discussions for services, the overlap was clearer. I was doing it as a (kind of) avodah, and it was certainly non-alienated labor. But is the non-alienated labor I currently seek necessarily shul-related? I don’t think so. It would be nice, I think. On the other hand, it would be nice to be paid for some non-alienated labor (although I can’t think what that would be or why someone would pay me to do it).
I’ll add another task of non-alienated labor, which is preparation to move residences. I describe it as non-alienated not only because I am not being paid for it, which is scarcely dispositive, but because I want to move, and I think (or at least hopefully believe) that moving will in itself provide me with the opportunity I’m looking for, in addition of course to bringing me somewhere where there are synagogues.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
And since we don’t think about ourselves regularly in those terms (and if we did, doing so would influence our experience), surveying ourselves for what is alienating and what isn’t runs the risk of being so vague as to be useless.
Marx would argue that we should regularly think about our labor as alienating or non-alienating precisely because it will change our experience of the labor and our vision of a different possibility. He saw an opportunity for change in the society through focusing discontent, an opportunity which seems removed here and now.
Lower-paid workers in our society have it pretty lousy, but are they likely to improve their lot if they think about their work as alienating? Perhaps a worker-focused political movement would gain sufficient strength to effect change, allowing lower-paid workers to increase both freedom and satisfaction by, I don’t know, paying them better, providing an actual safety net by untying our insurance system (health, life, retirement, disability) from employment, or giving them more control over the means of production. But it seems far more likely that the language of non-alienation will be used by large employers and the media to convince lower-paid workers that they already do share ownership of their work. We could call them “associates” and hold “team meetings”, for example. If the conditions of work are unlikely to improve, is it worth lowering people’s subjective experiences of their work by encouraging them to think about their work as alienating? It raises the question of whether alienation is an objective or a subjective state. Is work in fact alienating if the worker falsely feels non-alienated?
And then there are folks like us, who have the choice to change our work if we find it alienating. We represent a substantial portion of the population, which of course has a stabilizing effect on the society. As long as we hold out hope that another choice for work would be non-alienating, there is no need for us to try to change the system. We might choose to consider our work in those terms as a way to better self-understanding, but hardly as a means to revolution. With the amount of control that the professional classes have over their lives, would we be twisting Marx to think of our work as alienated or non-alienated?
I want this post of yours to spark discussion, because I think you raise many important ideas. We do have plentiful and important choices in both how we spend our time and how we choose to describe our experience of the labor we do. I’m personally struggling a lot this month with those choices in my life, and am unhappy trying to think too consciously about that struggle, but I believe this was too important a post to let pass with no response of any sort.