Work: An Unpaid History
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Our modern world runs on pay-by-the-irregular-heartbeat courier apps, “consulting,” and financial instruments that will bankrupt pensions if a certain species of bird doesn’t go extinct. But it wasn’t always like this. To understand how mind-numbingly stupid your job is now, you must first understand the history of the labor economy.
ANCIENT TIMES
After humans stopped hunting and gathering for themselves and their immediate families, they started to realize complex needs beyond mere subsistence and rudimentary horniness. Homes needed to be built. Swords needed to be forged. Fucked-up condoms made out of animal bladders that people in the past liked, because they felt natural, needed to be sewn. These ancient occupations were usually centered around necessities, with a smaller portion of jobs devoted to the desires of the wealthy. If you were lucky, you could have been Julius Caesar’s foreskin cleaner, King Leonidas’s slave trainer, or Hammurabi’s coder.
THE MIDDLE AGES
After the fall of the Roman Empire, there were some career opportunities in literature and science in places like the Islamic world, the Byzantine Empire, and East Asia. But LinkedIn was hundreds of years away, so people in northern Europe and the scattered remains of the western Roman Empire couldn’t relocate to take part in the challenging team-based solutions that made up the burgeoning industries of the East. Instead, they toiled away, creating new, stupid wolf gods for the tribes of the region to worship; bashing rocks into other rocks to create new, exciting shapes; and graffitiing vulgar complaints on abandoned Roman aqueducts in a precursor to the modern Internet comment section.
As civilized kingdoms consolidated their power in Europe, the Saxons, Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Megagoths, and other assorted tribespeople started to take on even more specialized occupations. For some, that meant translating the Bible into new languages. For others, that meant heaving dead bodies directly into water reservoirs and blaming subsequent deaths on Jewish magic.
But for 99 percent of humanity, this meant being a landless peasant. Serfdom was a full-time job doing backbreaking agricultural labor for a local liege lord, who in turn offered you physical protection from such threats as Saracens, Vikings, and forest berries that turned you gay if you ate them. In fact, until the invention of capitalism, serfdom was the most efficient economic system. It meant full employment and short commutes, as peasants would be helpfully reminded through light dismemberment that they weren’t allowed to wander more than ten furlongs away from the hovel where they were born. They spent their entire lives toiling, then died having never found out their last names.
In our modern information economy, we might find this absurd—the idea of a job that requires you to be responsive to your boss’s whims at all hours of the week for little to no compensation, forced to adopt officially acceptable political and religious views under threat of termination, and made to live in tiny, dilapidated quarters with total strangers. Indeed, if you’re reading this book in your service job’s dark, gas-lit breakroom or for a media internship that expects you to blog about how problematic our show is, you’re probably wondering how feudal society could have been so backward. But remember that medieval rulers didn’t have the benefit of the scientific field of economics that we enjoy today and were thus forced to rely on the augury of court wizards, whose analyses of entrails led them to recommend that a lower tithe rate would spur job growth and ward off the birth of two-headed cattle.
In fourteenth-century England, however, one man rejected the wisdom of the wizards and decided to wander off the road to serfdom. This plucky lowborn, Wat Tyler, led a peasant revolt, spurred on by the words of radical priest John Ball: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” This insistence that it was against God and the notion of equality for the landed aristocracy to exploit the labor of those born into servitude was one of the earliest recorded organized harassment campaigns. The insurgents captured London and sacked several government palaces before the situation was resolved when Tyler and Ball were captured by Richard II’s men and mutilated to death, convincing the peasants to return home and agitate for incremental change by working within the system.
THE RENAISSANCE
Yes, streets were still paved with human shit, kings were still chosen based on who had the most first cousins for ancestors, and people still thought the devil tricked them into being horny, but the concept of work was starting to resemble its modern incarnation. It took a plague that nearly ended civilization and a series of pointless wars over who was more Catholic, but distinctly nontorturous jobs were beginning to spring up.
Take the day of a typical merchant:
6:00 A.M.: Drink a nice breakfast beverage made of ale, oats, mud, and eggs.
7:00 A.M.: Check up on your daughters to see which one will command the highest market price when she reaches the marrying age of eight.
9:00 A.M.: Trudge your way through the bog-like streets to your establishment, where your perfectly smooth workboy is toiling away at your inventory of leather condoms and selling spices from the Far East that are too spicy for white people, such as salt, and Big Marco Polo–brand pantaloons.
12:30 P.M.: A bird carrying a message from your mistress informs you that your bastard son has inherited your cleft chin.
12:45 P.M.: Outraged, you scream at your smooth workboy to nonspecifically “work harder,” ride your horse to the countryside, barge into your mistress’s inn, and examine your illegitimate son for facial similarities.
2:00 P.M.: Drink your brunch mead and then make your way back to town.
4:00 P.M.: Arrive back at your establishment and inform the workboy that you’re going to meet God.
5:30 P.M.: Trudge home, defeated, and find out three of your seventeen legitimate children have died.
Despite the honor with which such men conducted themselves, there was still a stratosphere of upper-middle-class professions above them. Unlike in today’s childproofed, safety-padded world, where it’s seen as “cool” to go to the doctor instead of dying of one of several diarrhea-related illnesses, the coolest thing you could be in the Middle Ages was a really tough guy. If you weren’t lucky enough to be born a lord, duke, or prince but were absolutely amazing at murdering serfs, you could still be a knight. Knights were the Special-Ops guys of this time, in that they loved gear and functioned as tools for moneyed carriers of syphilis. People thought that was insanely badass, for some reason. Whether it was those storied knights of England, the samurai of Nippon, or the Varangian Guards of Byzantium, every culture at this time had a venerated warrior class. Quite rightfully, no one in those days respected actors or scribes or anyone who could read, so the elite warriors were the real celebrities. But just like the democracy of YouTube now makes celebrity attainable for anyone who can perform cruel and bizarre pranks, the earth was about to open up for the 5 percent of people who didst whatever it tooketh.
As the major nations began expanding their colonial properties, trade between states and continents grew immeasurably. It wasn’t a rising tide that lifted all boats, but it was a chance to get ahead for people who would do absolutely anything to anybody for a quick buck. If a seafaring sociopath could avoid dying of a funny disease like syphilis or a severe vitamin deficiency, being murdered by his crew, or drowning while attempting to make love to a mermaid, he had the opportunity to return to his homeland for his high school reunion and brag that he’d enslaved thousands, killed millions more through disease, and earned his weight in gold. If one had a genetic susceptibility to diarrhea, there was always the fallback position of intermediary for goods plundered from faraway lands.
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
While the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries belonged to slave brokers and codpiece merchants, they were about to get some company. Technological advances in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that were supposed to ease the workload of the poor ended up ramping up their exploitation by makin
g every hour of labor even more ruthlessly efficient. The average peasant may have been illiterate and convinced that his erections controlled the tides, but he knew enough to understand that toiling away in a Dark Satanic Mill sucked ass, so he avoided it. Luckily, the budding capitalist and landowning classes had a foolproof method for creating a motivated, agile workforce: enclosure. That’s where you go to a piece of land that had been used for common grazing and foraging for generations, throw a fence around it, and say, “This is mine now.” Deprived of their means of subsistence, peasants flocked to cities and filled factory floors, working endlessly to pay for food and lodging that just a few years earlier had been theirs by birthright. This process of dispossession and exploitation was repeated much more brutally for slaves in North America. The lower you were in the labor economy, the more your bosses could squeeze out of you and suck the marrow.
But for the burgeoning middle class and above, life couldn’t be better. The wonders of factories, railways, and overall more efficient technology allowed them to acquire wealth while doing very little, and at a greater pace than had ever been seen before. Around this time, the culture of the upper middle class was created. These lucky folks who achieved a decent income needed to differentiate themselves from their mud-drinking forebears, and they did it with the dullest cultural affectations and lamest hobbies possible. They formed a scene that differed from that of the gentry, who entertained themselves with bum fights, “racism orgies,” and pederasty.
So, the petite bourgeoisie started eating curiously wet cheeses, seeing plays to make sure they were bad, and babbling endlessly about university wait lists. These things remain the cornerstones of the global upper middle class to this day. Trends such as dog therapy and making one’s own bead jewelry may come and go, but the most boring people you know today can trace their intellectual lineage to these middle managers of yore. But if one wasn’t incredibly rich, solidly well off, or poor enough to be killed with zero recourse, one had to take a different path. Yes, the lower middle class was relegated to the dumbest occupations yet seen.
After industrialization, a typical lower-middle-class job would be to ride a boat around the world, find rare species of birds, and kill them with your bare hands. The less wanderlust-filled of this type could also slot into occupations like flagpole dancer, iron-lung feces remover, and child catcher. Only the last job is recognizable in today’s economy, as it merged with plantation overseer to become what is now known as “police officer.” In the later 1800s, these demeaning lower-middle-class jobs dovetailed nicely with colonialism. Colonialism had always existed, but the aforementioned technological and supply-chain advances allowed foreign wealth and labor extraction by rich powers to happen at a previously unimaginable clip. This necessitated a massive presence of officers and their support staff, who were often former bird annihilators and accordion cleaners.
Or, perhaps you were a British colonial officer in India. As an upper-middle-class striver, your true talent came from what you learned by socializing in boarding school. To wit: you may have been charged with overseeing slave labor, working out logistics for mineral interests, and meting out punishment to your colonial subjects, but you actually collected the bulk of your income by looking the other way when your bosses would, say, have a bunch of children pee on their backs while they masturbated. If the colonial underlings were discreet and helpful, they would be rewarded with class mobility.
Today, we can trace accountants, small-business owners, and even the very minor gentry to those imperialist helping hands who could keep a secret a century or two ago. Their descendants don’t usually have to witness such rampant murder or sexual psychosis firsthand, however, but instead they must relegate their approval of it. Like many things, the personal touch is lost as time goes on.
THE MODERN AGE
If two features of the premodern world were blaming Jews for plagues and writing long, boring posts, they were about to merge in a new and horrifying way. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries featured inconceivably destructive wars, catastrophic economic depressions, and crushing austerity in the face of horrors that seemed to interrupt one another before the first cataclysm had even reached its climax.
With every boom comes a bust, and the modern economy had its fair share. In the olden days, you could lose your job if the species you were skinning went extinct, or you could die because your boss made you drink mercury as part of a science experiment. Once capitalism was in full swing, workers were subject to volatile business cycles, rapid extinction of entire industries, speculation that fucked up the markets, and financialization that frequently cratered the economy and wiped out everyone except for those at the top.
While this may be hard to imagine now in the age of perfect markets, this system chewed up the working class and spit them out, jobless and penniless, while the barons above them profited off the carnage. This new era of industrialization barreled along with more booms and busts than ever before, not to mention the ongoing droughts and famines. In the early twentieth century, the draconian punishment doled out to the losers of World War I combined with the rampant, unregulated vampirism of the upper class led to a global economic calamity that ended up reshaping the world—fascism, Hitler, dance marathons, Fanta, all that stuff.
Finally, as 9/11 fell on December 7, 1941, America entered World War II, and wouldn’t you know it, the US actually recovered from the Depression. It turned out that with state control of production and jobs for all, a nation could spend its way out of misery. Of course, this proof of concept of planned economies was instead interpreted as a reason to constantly go to war. Postwar jobs seemed to have been informed by this fact. As the country setting the terms for how the world would look, America could impose a slightly subtler imperialism on the globe than could its Euro-cousins of old. Now those who previously wrote boring screeds on Jews could write about how it was necessary to launch ICBMs at Jamaica to show Cuba we could take a dump on them if we really wanted to.
With the world at America’s fingertips, the middle class experienced great upward mobility, buttressed by New Deal and wartime planned-economic policies. A typical workday during the Cold War:
9:00 A.M.: Head into the office.
10:00 A.M.: Tell the only woman who works in your division some weird line like “Your tits could set the sun, Janice,” and then have her fired for not acknowledging your cool remark.
11:00 A.M.: Drink seven martinis at a prelunch meeting.
11:30 A.M.: Fall asleep while on the phone with a big account.
11:45 A.M.: Piss yourself.
12:00 P.M.: Drive home to get new pants.
1:00 P.M.: Get distracted because you keep thinking about how hot your mistress’s new beehive hairdo is.
1:30 P.M.: Get a five-star hotel room downtown for thirty-five cents.
2:00 P.M.: Have unsatisfying sex during which you don’t finish because you’re shitfaced.
10:00 P.M.: Drive home to find your wife already passed out on Valium.
10:30 P.M.: Try to tuck your kids in with a bedtime story but end up in tears as you tell a weird tale from your childhood about how your mom made you wear a sailor outfit until you were twelve and your uncles hit you on your ass with parade batons to “de-sissify” you.
11:00 P.M.: Fall asleep under the coffee table.
9:00 A.M., Next Day: Show up to work in the exact same clothes you wore yesterday and get a promotion to VP of Big Accounts, because it turns out you and your boss’s boss served in the same Navy unit during the war. You now make a handsome salary of $2,500 a year ($1.7 million in 2018 money).
Not a bad deal, if you were white and male and aged twenty-five to eighty-five. But everything must come to an end. As the West deindustrialized and production moved to places where factories could still kill a bunch of people, blue-collar workers began making less and less as their wages were adjusted for changes in the Consumer Price Index. Loads of manufacturing processes were automated, resulting in few
er and fewer decent-paying jobs for the working class that supported the lifestyles of heroic, alcoholic, predatory middle managers. Ignoring the contradictions of capital and labor suddenly wasn’t so easy.
That was, until someone had a revolutionary idea: What if a bunch of numbers were displayed on a computer, arbitrarily assigned value, and traded back and forth?
As American manufacturing and commerce shriveled and died, the finance industry slammed a needle full of adrenaline into the puffy chest of the capitalist class. Before the late 1970s, if you wanted to do cocaine, perpetrate sex crimes, and generally make the world worse, you had to work in film or TV production, and that industry had an incredibly high barrier of entry. In finance, however, you could rule the eighties and be as evil as you wanted to be, so long as you abandoned most of your friends and principles, attended an elite university, and were willing to jack off onto a skeleton or whatever people do to get into a Harvard dining club.
Imaginary money exploded everywhere as the Right took a hatchet to hard-won pension programs and worker protections. With rivers of cheap cash flowing like Bawls at a LAN party, new, even dumber jobs could now be created. Before, one may have been a mechanic or worked in an auto plant. But with loose, runny capital spraying everywhere, made-up professions like “marketing director” and “creative consultant” sprang up. Blue-collar wages lagged far behind CPI adjusted for inflation, but a college degree and adequate connections still allowed you to take a job you loved, if you loved truly stupid shit.
The Chapo Guide to Revolution Page 20