Noam Chomsky - Work

you wrote in one of your essays but in addition society everyone would have the opportunity to find interesting work and each person would be permitted for this possible scope for his talents then you went on to ask what more would be required in particular extrinsic reward in the form of wealth and part only if we assume that applying one's talents and interesting and socially useful work is not rewarding in itself and I think that that line of reasoning is certainly one of the things that appeals to a lot of people but it still needs to be explained I think why the kind of work which people would find interesting and appealing or fulfilling to do would coincide at all closely with the kind of work which your needs to become if we're able to say anything likely than be living which people demand the values - well there's a certain amount of work that just has to be done if we were to maintain that standard of living it's an open question how owner is that work has to be let's recall that Science and Technology and intellect have not been devoted to examining that question or to overcoming the onerous and self-destructive character of the necessary work of society the reason is that it has always been assumed that there is a substantial body of wage slaves who will do it simply because otherwise they'll starve however if human intelligence is turned to the question of how to make the necessary work of society itself meaningful we don't know what the answer will be what my guess is that a fair amount of it can be made entirely tolerable it's a mistake to think that even back-breaking physical labor is necessarily owners many people I included do it for relaxation if it's under our own control part time and so on well this weekend for example I got it into my head to plant 34 trees and a meadow out behind the house for example in the state Conservation Commission which meant I had two big 34 holes in the sand well let's you know for me and what I do with my time mostly pretty hard work but I have to admit I enjoyed it I wouldn't have enjoyed it if I had work norms had an overseer if I'd been ordered to do at a certain moment and so on on the other hand if it's a task taken out of just interest time it can be done and I think that a good and that's without any technology without any you know without any thought given to how to design working sorry I put it to you but there may be a danger that this view of things is a rather romantic delusion and contained only by a small elite of people who happen like professors perhaps owners and so on to be in the very privileged situation of having jobs in terms of their pay to do what anyway they like to do that's why I began with a big if I say we first have to ask to what extent would be let's call it the necessary work of society mainly that work which is required to maintain the standard of living we want question first question is to what extent need this being onerous and undesirable that's an unknown question I think much less than it is today but let's assume there is some extent to which it remains owners well in that case the answer is quite simple that work simply has to be shared has to be equally shared among people capable of doing it and beyond that number Latvia wasn't on our okay will be a productive island setting all that is collecting the garbage and if it turns out that these are really tasks which people will find no soft fulfilment in incidentally I don't quite believe it as I watch people work craftsmen let's say automobile mechanics for example I think one often finds a good deal of pride in work I think kind of fact I think that that kind of pride and work well done and the in complicated work well done because it takes sought and intelligence to do it especially when one is also involved in management of the enterprise determination of how the work will be organized what it's for what its what the purposes of the work are what will happen to it and so on and thinking all of this can be satisfying rewarding activity which in fact requires skills and which the kind of skills that people will enjoy exercising however I am thinking hypothetically now suppose it turns out that there is some residue of work which really no one wants to do whatever that may be ok then I say that that residue of work must be equally earth and beyond that people will be free to exercise their talents as they see fit my pretension professor that if that residue were very large as some people would say it was like a cabbage revenge the work involved in producing 90% of what we all want to consume then the organization of sharing it on the basis that everybody a little bit a little bit of all the nasty jobs would become wildly inefficient social even the nasty job you have to be trained to do and equipped to be and that the efficiency of the home economy would suffer and therefore the standard living which exclaims would be produced well one thing not at what and I think this is really quite hypothetical because I don't believe that the figures or anything like that as I say it seems to me that if human intelligence were devoted to asking how technology can design to fit be designed to fit the needs of the human producer instead of conversely that is now we ask how the human being with his special properties can be fitted into a technological system designed for other ends and we production for profit my feeling is that if that we're done we resign but the really unwanted work is far smaller than you suggest but whatever it is let's say whatever amount it is notice that we have two alternatives one alternative is to have it equally shared the other is to design social institutions so that some group of people will be simply compelled do that work on pain of starvation those are the two alternatives well not given those not composed to it but they might agree to do it vocally because they were paid to do it in the length which they felt maybe bookbub well but see I'm assuming that everyone essentially gets to essentially equal remuneration don't forget that we're not talking about a society now where the perhaps you are where the people who are do the owners work are paid substantially more than the people who do the work that they do on choice quite the opposite at the way our society works the way any class society works the people who do the unwanted work are the ones who are paid least that is that work is done and we put it out of our minds because it's assumed that there will be a massive class of people who cannot whose only to control only one factor of production mainly their labor and have to sell it and they'll have to do that work there's nothing else to do and they'll be paid very little for it now one can imagine so let's accept the correction what's imagine three kinds of society one the current one in which the undesired work is given to wage slaves that's the current system system let's imagine a second system in which the undesired work after the best efforts to make it meaningful the undesired work is shared and let's imagine a third system where the undesired work receives high extra pay so that individuals voluntarily choose to do it well it seems to me that neither of the two latter systems are consistent with vaguely speaking anarchist principles I myself would argue for the second rather than the third but either of the two is quite remote from any present social organization or any tendency in contemporary social organization let me put development to in the another way it seems to me that there is a fundamental choice however one is guided it as to whether you will organize work for the satisfaction that gives the people to do it or whether you get organizers on the basis of the value of what is produced - the people are going to use or consume what is produced and that a society which is it were was organized on the basis of giving a word of the maximum opportunity to fulfill their hobbies which is essentially the work for what trick it finds it - logical combination here in a monastery where as it were the kind of work which is done is namely prayer is work for the self enrichment of the work and where nothing is produced which is very useful anybody and you live either the most undeserving very waxy stuff so there are some factual assumptions here and I disagree with you with other factual assumptions my feeling is with part of what makes work meaningful is that it is it does have use that its product who have use work the work of the craftsmen is in part meaningful to that craftsmen because of the intelligence and skill that he puts into it but also in part because the work is useful and I might say the things true the scientists I mean the fact that the kind of work you do may lead to something else that's what needed they contribute to something else that's very important quite apart from the elegance and beauty of what you may achieve and I think that that covers every field of human endeavor furthermore I think that if we look at a good part of human history you will find the people to a substantial extent did get some degree of satisfaction often a lot of satisfaction from the productive and creative work that they were doing and I think that the chances for that are enormous were enhanced by industrialization why precisely because much of the most meaningless drudgery can be taken over by change which means that the scope for really creative human work is substantially enlarged now you speak of work truly undertaken as hobby but I don't believe that I think work freely undertaken can be useful meaningful work done well also you pose a dilemma which many people pose between the desire for satisfaction work and the desire to create things of value this community but it's not so obvious but that's a dilemma that that's contradiction it's by no means clear in fact I think it's false that contributing to the enhancement of pleasure and satisfaction work is inversely proportional to contributing to the value investor a possible but it might be unrelated I mean take some very simple things like selling ice creams on the beach on a public holiday it's a it's a service to society and I think people want the ice cream person hot on the other hand it's hard to see in what sense there is a good either across from these joy or a great sense of social virtual mobility in performing that touch y-yes I must say at all aunt asked if they were not rewarded for asking some very Kuryakin ice cream vendors you all know rightly ideal of money and I haven't liked the idea that they're giving children ice cream which seems to me a perfectly reasonable way to spend ones time as compared with thousands of other occupations that I can imagine recall that a person has an occupation and seems to me that most of the occupations that exist especially the ones that involve what are called service that is relations beginning beings have an intrinsic satisfaction and reward associated with them mainly in the dealings with the human beings that are involved that's teaching and true as ice-cream vending I agree that ice creams ending doesn't require the commitment of intelligence that teaching does and maybe for that reason it will be a less desire to occupation but if so it will have to be shared however what I'm saying is that we are characteristic assumption that pleasure and work pride and work is either unrelated to or negatively related to the value of the output that's an assumption which is related to a particular stage of social history namely capitalism in which human beings are tools of production is by no means necessarily true for example you know I filled the field if you look at interviews with workers on assembly lines for example that have been done over and over again by people do industrial psychology you find that one of the things that complain about over and over again is the fact that their work simply can't be well done the fact that the assembly line goes through so fast that they cannot do their work properly their pride and craftsmanship is itself to mean it let let me just mention another well I just have to look recently studies longevity Journal of gerontology I know I was reading that and it tried to trace the factors that you could use to predict longevity length of life and you know cigarette smoking drinking genetic factors everything would look that turned out to the fact that it was the highest predicted and a successful predictor with job satisfaction not if you have not you live long people who are satisfied with your jobs now what leads to job satisfaction it I think that makes the deal sense you know because that's where you spend your life and that's where your creative activities are now what leads to job satisfaction well I think many things lead to it and the knowledge that you're doing something useful to the community is an important part of it which many people feel I mean many people feel and many people are satisfied with their work are people who feel that what they're doing is important to do they can be teachers they can be doctors they can be scientists they can be craftsmen they can be farmers I mean I think the feeling that what you're doing is important is worth doing you know contributes to those with whom you had social bonds that's a very significant factor in in one's personal satisfaction and over and above that there's the pride in undersell fulfillment that comes from a job well done from simply taking your skills and putting them deuce I don't see any reason why that should be why that should in any way harm in fact I just think that that would enhance the value of what's produced but let's imagine skill that at some level it does harm well okay at that point to society the community has to decide how to make compromises each individual is both the producer and consumer after all and that means that each individual has to join in those socially determined compromises if in fact there are compromises and again I feel that the nature of the compromise is much exaggerated because of the distorting prism of the a really courses and softest trim personally destructive

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

Views: 129,894

Rating: 4.9505448 out of 5

Keywords: work, creativity, anarchism, libertarian socialism, chomsky, noam chomsky, wage slavery, human creativity, political philosophy, philosophy, anarchist communism, capitalism, worker, politics, workers' self management

Id: bcBLCBxq1k8

Length: 14min 0sec (840 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/uncommoncriminal]

I like this interview a lot, he goes into more detail about what he imagines an anarchist society might look like than I've seen him do in other interviews. Here's the whole thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_x0Y3FqkEI

And a transcript: https://chomsky.info/19760725/

[u/Aphreditto]

This has always been one of my favorite Chomsky videos!