Work: Marxism and the Age of Machines

A 2014 Gallup poll found that less than a third of US employees reported feeling engaged at work. That’s a pretty crushing statistic, given the large proportion of adult life dedicated to what is — for a large majority — unsatisfactory and purposeless enterprise. Worryingly, millennials are the least engaged of all. They are “less likely than other generations to say they ‘have the opportunity to do what they do best’ at work,” leading to dissatisfaction and disengagement. As I, along with many of my friends, prepare to start our careers, this research is disheartening. I don’t want to fall into this apathetic majority, yet the data suggest that it is the most likely outcome.

Forgive the stereotypically anthropological reaction here, but my initial thought upon encountering this survey?¹ “Marx was right!” Let me explain.

Marx’s first proposed his theory of alienation (Entfremdung) in 1844. He hypothesised that as pre-industrial professions (agriculture, craftsmanship, etc) were replaced by the division and commoditisation of labour in the factory, workers were disconnected from their ‘species-essence’ (Gattungswesen) — the ability to engage in “reflective [self-directed] labour” that defines human existence. The worker “is depressed, therefore, both intellectually and physically, to the level of a machine, and from being a man becomes an abstract activity and a stomach.”² Alienation results — man disconnected from the product he produces, from his work as a whole, from himself and from his peers.

Given that Marx was writing about this in the mid–19th century, it seems safe to say that job dissatisfaction isn’t a new phenomenon. And for most, work today is far more pleasant than it was during Victorian times; the brutal conditions of the mills and mines have been transformed through legislative action in the intervening period. Despite this material improvement, though, the fundamental concept of labour as a commodity remains unaltered. I’m not a Marxist (in the revolutionary sense). I don’t think that this model is irreconcilable vis-á-vis meaningful employment. Marx’s theories are, however, useful when we consider two aspects of our current economic situation that affect job satisfaction on a broad scale:

1. In a ‘service-based’ economy, the threat of alienation may be even more acute than Marx theorised.

When discussing Entfremdung, my mind jumps to examples like Henry Ford’s production line as a prime site of critique. Workers are severed from ownership of the product — relegated to the position of bolt-tightener or panel-installer and valued only through an ability to tirelessly repeat the same task. For many it was soul-crushing work. Yet there was a ray of hope. In 1930 the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would enhance productivity to such an extent that, by the turn of the century, a 15 hour work week would be the norm. He was correct about the productivity gains; in today’s ‘advanced’ economies, Ford’s assembly line model has largely substituted human labour for automated processes (which I’ll get onto in a minute). Keynes’ vision of the consequences, though — the dramatically abbreviated work week — hasn’t materialised. While manufacturing has become less labour-intensive, a whole host of other roles (managerial, administrative, advisory) have been established to fill the void. As a proportion of total employment, ‘service’ jobs have risen from 25% to 75% in the US and other developed economies. Many of these are lampooned as the domain of the spreadsheet, the endless yet pointless meeting and the perpetual email exchange: aka (to David Graeber) the BS Job dedicated to controlling, measuring, and improving the act of creation.

Granted, I haven’t worked on the Model T assembly line, nor in a cubicle farm attending said pointless meetings (yet). But I have a feeling that the latter role — where the creation of the physical good has been delegated to a machine, but in which the management of that production remains in the human domain — is often even more alienating than the factory work originally critiqued by Marx. At least as a worker on the Model T assembly line, you could point to a car on the road and say, “I made a piece of that.” A very small piece, yet you still had (hopefully not literally) ‘skin in the game’. Today’s participants in the ‘knowledge economy’ operate not on the factory floor but in the office, at a level removed from the reality of the physical product. They can only point to the car on the road (more likely the computer on the desk) and say, “I punched in the number on the spreadsheet that represented that car: its components, its costs, its production efficiency, its sale.” In other words, they operate at a level of abstraction. Or, for those increasing number of workers engaged in serving businesses, they can only say, “I punched in a number which helped someone who then punched in another number that represented that car.” Disconnection squared. This distancing of the average office worker from the physical good only increases the sense of alienation from the purpose, meaning and ultimate value of their labour. Disengagement (both physical and metaphorical) becomes easier than ever.

2. The rise and threat of automation

My second point deals with the impending ‘second wave’ of automation in labour markets. According to a number of recent (semi-hysterical) reports, a significant proportion of jobs — especially those ‘BS’ administrative ones — are threatened by developments in computer technology, especially in the field of machine learning. A 2013 Oxford study (which formed the backbone of a recent Bank of America-Merrill Lynch report on the topic) found that almost half of current job categories, from telemarketing to legal research, were at significant risk of automation in the coming years. Millions of employees are at risk of falling prey to computers’ growing capacity to complete routine administrative tasks more quickly, accurately and cheaply than humans.

As the Economist observes, the jobs that will survive this ‘second wave’ are those where uniquely human capabilities (such as relationship-building, creativity and innovation) remain central.³ Ironically, the characteristics of these surviving roles can be compared to the pre-industrial forms of labour so romanticised by Marx — jobs where creativity and variety of labour fulfilled our Gattungswesen, our ‘species-essence’.

This brings us back to my concern with worker disengagement. In order to survive in a rapidly changing job market, workers need to be more engaged than ever. Only those who prove themselves capable of consistent innovation, collaboration and process improvement can justify their employment ahead of a machine that performs the rote tasks far better than any of us mere homo sapiens.

So far, I’ve argued that worker disengagement, while not a new problem, is increasingly relevant in a modern economy defined by the rise of ‘services’ and automation. Employee engagement and its effects — a desire to innovate, connect and to do — will be the differentiating factor between human labour and increasingly capable machines.

With this in mind, what can be done to improve engagement? Barry Schwartz⁴ asks what qualities make work satisfying; financial reward is clearly important, but not nearly all that matters⁵ :

We want work that is challenging and engaging, that enables us to exercise some discretion and control over what we do, and that provides us opportunities to learn and grow. We want to work with colleagues we respect and with supervisors who respect us. Most of all, we want work that is meaningful — that makes a difference to other people and thus ennobles us in at least some small way.

Research by anthropologist Sarah Green illustrates that even those who appear motivated exclusively by money may value their work in ways we don’t expect. Green interviewed a series of high-profile Private Equity partners in the UK about why they do what they do. PE is (in)famous for its scale of renumeration — 8 figure pay packets are not unusual. These men (and they are almost exclusively men), then, are ‘rolling in it’. When prompted to reflect on the scale of these riches, though, the partners reveal an attitude towards money not exclusively as an end in itself, but rather as a symbol of their success — an ability to generate huge returns on investment. They readily admit that their pay is ludicrously high, yet they treat their bank accounts not as a store of purchasing power, but rather as a sign of skill in a game where the points are tallied in Pounds. Fundamentally, Green suggests, they find their work satisfying not because of the pay packet, but because of the challenging environment, talented coworkers and continued steep learning curve.

According to Schwartz, another important factor is the sense that we are contributing to an external purpose. Essentially, we should be able to answer the question: why does our work matter? He cites a 2001 study by Yale School of Management professor Amy Wrzesniewski, who sought to understand how hospital custodians approached their work. She recorded example after example of individuals going far beyond their official job description to help patients. They weren’t seeking to simply clean floors or empty wastebaskets. Instead, they found meaning in contributing to the hospital’s overall mission of nursing people back to health, and found their own ways to contribute to this end.

Both examples support Schwartz’s hypothesis: employees are most engaged when they’re challenged, given opportunities to grow, asked to take autonomous action and contribute to a larger purpose. This all seems pretty obvious. Finding such workplaces is also easier than ever, given the growth of job-review sites like Glassdoor. As I’ve thought more about this topic, though, I think there’s a more fundamental point to be made:irrespective of the circumstances of employment, attitude makes all the difference when it comes to finding satisfaction in what you do. Work won’t be enjoyable all the time. Partners in private equity face the constant threat of termination should they fail to deliver adequate returns, and often quit preemptively due to this pressure. The daily routine of custodians certainly isn’t the most intellectually stimulating stuff, and not all of Wrzesniewski’s research subjects were satisfied in their jobs.

These examples remind me that external conditions are never enough to guarantee an answer in our internal quest for meaning; there remain unhappy individuals in even the best-run organisations. At the risk of devolving into a moralising faux-David Brooks, my own approach is that a positive attitude and a willingness to work hard — a determination to engage – are prerequisites to finding fulfilment.

In his magnum opus Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle posits that we develop a state of happiness (eudaimonia) through repeated virtuous practice – acting in pursuit of excellence (hexis). This is a gross oversimplification, but his point, as I understand it, is thus: one path to happiness in life is to become really good at something. The process isn’t easy, nor necessarily all that enjoyable, but that’s what makes it so valuable. Climbing a mountain isn’t much fun in and of itself, but it sure is great to reach the summit. That isn’t to say that getting really good at punching numbers into a spreadsheet represents an end in and of itself, but it does present an attendant set of possibilities: co-workers will ask you for help and senior employees will come to rely on you for analytical input. Relationships can be built, and new opportunities found. The mountain is slowly climbed as skills are developed in areas both old and new.

I want to conclude by returning to Marx’s ‘species-essence’. To avoid alienation, we want work that allows us to develop virtue (expertise) — that requires us to be creative, to take responsibility and to grow. With the right attitude, reflective labour allows us to fulfil our ‘species-essence’, and to flourish as a result. The key for companies is to allow room for individual initiative, to give people the chance to engage and find meaning in what they do. For employees, though, the more fundamental requirement is a determination to seize opportunities for fulfilment when they present themselves, and to create them when they don’t.