WORK ABOVE EVERYTHING

Work as an Idol

By Marcus Hammerschmitt

[This article published in the German-English cyber journal Telepolis, 3/7/2004 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.telepolis.de/r4/artikel/16/16721/1.html.]




We should all be glad that the work society as we know it is ending. However the work society cannot come to terms with its end.

When one hears all the political nonsense, one could think there is nothing more important than work.

The German Federal Labor Office, a state catering operation in the past, is transformed into a nationwide chips empire that torments its clients and allows only a prescribed smile on their faces and ever-shorter reaction times when supervision and penalties are involved. Surreal programs are announced with creative names like the shower shampoo on the bottom shelves of the drug supermarket. This nonsense is called Hartz reforms (1), job floater (2), PSA (3) and personal companies AG (4). The solution can be smeared right in one’s hair.

NONSTOP MOBILIZATION ON THE LABOR FRONT

New jobs are threatened whenever this is politically opportune (for example, before elections). The ”shirker,” “idler” and “work-shy” (5) are highlighted. Concepts that can only be called fascist like the compulsory obligation of unemployed and income support recipients for purely symbolic wages are discussed openly and partly practiced. Work above everything is the creed.

Why is this? Less and less work must be expended for the self-preservation of society. (Trans. note: German GDP increased 300% from 1950 to 2000 with 20% less workers). In this context, the nonstop mobilization on the labor front is certainly bizarre. The contradiction is clarified when one recognizes that a different rationality than self-preservation prevails here. Since the expenditure of human labor power is the only thing that actually creates value, labor is always valuable…With the state of technology, many more workers are available than are needed to supply all of us.

Something very different than valuing labor happens. To boost their profit, they continuously lower the price of labor power (“social reform,” “reducing non-wage labor costs,” “health reform,” Agenda 2010”) and in addition encourage work without paying for that [over-exploitation through unpaid overtime (6)], slave labor of illegally hired foreign workers [cf. In the Camp (7)], prison work (8), honorary posts [cf. Powered by Grandma and honorary posts (9), demanding unpaid work for “positional security” and so forth.

Some work more and more (whether legal, illicit, precarious, honorary or some other way) while others skim off profits to do whatever they want. Some do unpaid work in the call center (10) and others receive a settlement of 30 million euros (11).

THE GOSPEL OF WORK

All this happens while the number of necessary social workers decreases. The motor of this development is obviously not individual moral depravity as many parts of the anti-globalization milieu seem to believe (keywords: “greed,” “turbo-capitalism” and so forth). Lowering production costs, amassing profits, building market positions and playing along with globalization are the functioning principles of the whole system, more than the whim of an individual business. The gospel of work is in effect because this system now rests on the forced expenditure of labor power and the expropriation of its products.

Even those who have no work any more and will never receive work because their labor power is simply not needed for the desired value creation must work. Being unemployed or receiving income support in Germany has long been a full-time job. The proof must be constantly shown that one has a just claim to charity. Earning the subsistence level through thousands of applications, evidence and justifications, constantly facing the suspicion that one is a fraud is a stress comparable with the obligations of an engaged managed in a peak period.

Forced labor for this constantly growing sector of society is openly discussed. The pressure must be maintained at any price so the suspicion does not rise that a rational distribution of socially necessary work could occur in the present or expected degree of automation. This automation makes possible an unparalleled measure of leisure time and freedom for everyone – under the presupposition that the third world is no longer bled white. Grotesque but truer, capitalism at the start of the 21st century set out to realize the utopia of a life without work – and cannot face this fact – because of its own inner pressures.

Links

(1) http://www.labournet.de/diskussion/arbeit/realpolitik/modelle/hartz/roth-rede.html

(2) http://www.netzeitung.de/arbeitundberuf/derneuearbeitsmarkt/267657.html

(3) http://www.mobbing-net.de/forum/messages/1620.html

(4) http://www.teamarbeit-fuer-deutschland.de/servlet/PB/menu/1004831/index.html

(5) http://www.taz.de/pt/2001/04/27/a0116.nf/text

(6) http://www.mdr.de/umschau/archiv/153573.html

(7) http://www.telepolis.de/r4/artikel/14/14880/1.html

(8) http://www.iuscrim.mpg.de/forsch/krim/fischer.html

(9) http://www.telepolis.de/r4/artikel/16/16501/1.html

(10) http://sakemaki.blogger.de/stories/57959

(11) http://www.heute.t-online.de/ZDFheute/artikel/15/0,1367,WIRT-0-2034319,00.html

Telepolis Artikel-URL: http://www.telepolis.de/r4/artikel/16/16721/1.html