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Title: Stamping Out Ownlife Author: Kevin Carson Date: May 11, 2006 Language: en Topics: education, work Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/05/stamping-out-ownlife.html
The novelist, Nigel Balchin, was once invited to address a conference on
“incentives” in industry. He remarked that “Industrial psychologists
must stop messing about with tricky and ingenious bonus schemes and find
out why a man, after a hard day’s work, went home and enjoyed digging in
his garden.”
But don’t we already know why? He enjoys going home and digging in his
garden because he is free from foremen, managers and bosses. He is free
from the monotony and slavery of doing the same thing day in and day
out, and is in control of the whole job from start to finish. He is free
to decide for himself how and when to set about it. He is responsible to
himself and not to somebody else. He is working because he wants to and
not because he has to. He is doing his own thing. He is his own man.
--Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action
It’s amazing how much continuity there is between the behaviors demanded
of students by the publik skools, and of employees by their employers.
Sunni Maravillosa, in a post on unschooling, quotes a critic:
“It is not suited either to all kids or all parents,” said Tom Hatch, a
professor at Columbia University Teachers College in New York City. “It
requires students with considerable curiosity and independence, who come
up with and get interested in questions and can sustain some interest in
them.”
She comments:
To simplify the idea further, today’s American educational system is
largely geared to spit out white-collar cogs for the corporate and
bureaucratic machines. How can someone attempt to just estimate how many
of those unhappy cogs would have been much better served by going to a
trade school, but didn’t even consider that possibility because of a
lack of knowledge about their existence or because such careers tend to
be looked down upon?
I have yet to see a child with anything close to normal intelligence,
who hasn’t yet had his or her natural inclination to explore beaten to
death, who doesn’t have considerable curiosity and independence. Yet
when a mechanically-inclined school student takes apart a piece of
equipment to see how it works instead of completing his math sheet along
with the rest of the class, will that initiative be rewarded? Of course
not! Most formal schooling pounds out curiosity and independence, which
they must if all students are going to fit neatly into their little
curricular boxes.
As Paul Goodman wrote somewhere, one of the first lessons a schoolchild
learns is that whatever independent interest or project he pursues is
only a “hobby,” to be patronizingly tolerated by those in authority so
long as it doesn’t interfere with his “real” learning--but to be
instantly put away in favor of the important tasks assigned him by the
teacher, the boss, or whatever other authority figure has assumed the
right to determine the ends of his existence.
F. Gruel, in a comment to Maravillosa’s post, vividly recaptured a
feeling most of us remember all too well:
I spent 13 years in government school (including kindergarten.) At third
grade I had a severe dislike of my school situation. It seemed so
foreign. Summer break was always a great experience. Runnin’ around,
doin’ “stuff”.
When school started it was horrible. Just seeing all the, otherwise
intriguing, “school supplies” at Target made me depressed. Even getting
“school clothes” irritated me. Why couldn’t I wear the same shit I’ve
been wearing all summer?
But most of us don’t have to remember back that far to relive the
feeling. The sense of dread, of impending loss of freedom, experienced
by F. Gruel at the prospect of another school year, is the same dread
felt by most sane people at the loss of control experienced every time
we step through the front door of our workplace. The prison doors are
about to clang shut.
The transition from self-directed work to work under a boss was
especially violent for those experiencing it for the first time, during
the early days of the factory system. J.L. and Barbara Hammond, in The
Town Labourer, wrote:
In the modern world most people have to adapt themselves to some kind of
discipline, and to observe other’ people’s timetables, ...or work under
other people’s orders, but we have to remember that the population that
was flung into the brutal rhythm of the factory had earned its living in
relative freedom, and that the discipline of the early factory was
particularly savage.... No economist of the day, in estimating the gains
or losses of factory employment, ever allowed for the strain and
violence that a man suffered in his feelings when he passed from a life
in which he could smoke or eat, or dig or sleep as he pleased, to one in
which somebody turned the key on him, and for fourteen hours he had not
even the right to whistle. It was like entering the airless and
laughterless life of a prison.
The state public education systems in the United States were set up
mainly to transform a largely self-employed population, used to working
under their own direction, into “human resources” who would willingly
take orders from a boss. The habits of cheerfully obeying teacher, of
lining up on command, of eating and pissing at the sound of a bell, were
precisely the habits required of factory workers.
Since then, the emphasis has changed somewhat. Now the schools inculate
the habits of bureaucratic toadyism that are desired in a white collar
worker. But the principle is basically the same.
The adult who goes to work is infantilized: transformed into a bigger
version of the school child whose advancement and success depend
entirely on pleasing the teacher, on sucking up to authority figures in
general. An anonymous GM worker expressed it beautifully in this poem,
reproduced by Tom Peters in In Search of Excellence:
Going to work, like going to school, means substituting someone else’s
priorities and judgement for your own.
Ken Blanchard, in his foreword to Fish!, has expressed dismay at what he
called the “TGIF mentality.” He wondered what we could accomplish if we
put 100% of ourselves into our work, instead of bringing only 60% of
ourselves to work and leaving the rest out in our cars waiting to go
home.
That’s one thing he got right. We leave a lot of ourselves behind when
we go to work. We leave our values, our independent judgment, and our
personal priorities at the door, and become a tool in someone else’s
hand.
For people like Blanchard in the world of work, as for educrats in the
world of skool, the atavistic persistence of ownlife is something to be
overcome through new and better forms of human resource engineering.
They are mightily offended by what Elizabeth Anderson called the
separation of work from home.
However arbitrary and abusive the boss may have been on the factory
floor, when work was over the workers could at least escape his tyranny
(unless they lived in a factory town, where one’s boss was also one’s
landlord and regulator of their lives through their leases). Again, in
the early phase of industrialization, this was small comfort, given that
nearly every waking hour was spent at work. But as workers gained the
right to a shortened workday--due to legislation as well as economic
growth--the separation of work from home made a big difference to
workers’ liberty from their employers’ wills.
As long as wage labor has existed, the whole point of it has been a
devil’s bargain in which one sells one’s life in order to live; a shift
at work is a chunk of your life that you cut off and sell, so you can
have the money to support yourself in your real life--the part you have
control over. In return for the worker’s submission to the bosses’
authority on the job, he received sovereignty over the rest of his life
in the “real world” outside of work. Under the terms of this Taylorist
bargain, the worker surrendered his sense of craftsmanship and control
over his own work in return for the right to express his “real”
personality through consumption, in the part of his life that still
belonged to him.
This fundamental distinction, one of the basic qualities that makes us
human, is reflected in the saying that “every Englishman’s home is his
castle,” and the widespread libertarian understanding that property is
the basis of freedom. “There, I take orders from you; here, in my
domain, I control my life.”
Is it really that hard for Blanchard to understand? What sane person
wouldn’t prefer a world in which the priorities he follows are his own?
In which he has real control--not in the artificial Fish! philosophy
sense of controlling how he reacts to situations imposed on him by
others, or “choosing his attitude,” but of actually controlling what he
does, and when and how he does it, without taking orders from someone
else. What sane person wouldn’t regard his private life as his real
life, and his job merely as a means for serving that end?
The Taylorist bargain is no longer good enough for our overlords. It’s
not enough that we take their orders and do our jobs willingly while
we’re at work. The fact that a part of us looks forward to leaving the
prison and reentering our private domains, rejoining the 40% of
ourselves that we leave in our cars at work, means that our minds don’t
completely belong to Big Brother.
It’s significant that HR Nazis are so enamored of the Myers-Briggs
personality test. As Barbara Ehrenreich suggested in a recent interview,
it’s probably to weed out the introverts. An introvert is someone who
finds continued dealings with others to be a drain on his energy, and
needs time alone in his own space, in a world under his own control, to
recharge. So the distinction between work and ownlife (Blanchard’s
much-lamented “TGIF mentality”) is built into the basic structure of the
introvert’s personality, even more so than with people in general. Work
is a period of time that belongs to somebody else, to be endured until
it is over, so one may get back to the business of living his real life.
For such a person, the modern trend of increasing intrusion of work into
the sphere of private life is especially galling. The eroding and
increasingly permeable boundary between work and home, with the
possibility that work might erupt into one’s private life at any moment
with the ringing of a cell-phone or the beeping of a pager, is simply
intolerable.
In other words, introversion is simply a more intense experession of the
same characteristic that the HR Nazis want to stamp out in all of us.
What they hope for is the same thing desired by the Party in Orwell’s
1984: a new, inhuman breed of human being who no longer distinguishes
between private and public life, between mine and thine. Like the Party,
they want to stamp out the last vestiges of ownlife and create a New Man
who is happy to think of “home” as a shelf where he’s stored when he’s
not doing something important, until he can again be “of service.”
Blanchard, while he’s wishing away the TGIF mentality, might as well
wish for a new kind of school child who doesn’t dread the beginning of
the five-day sentence on Monday morning, or the first day of school in
September. If Blanchard and his ilk succeed, through some combination of
conditioning, electrodes, and pharmacology, in creating a worker who
doesn’t look forward to getting out from under his boss so he can go
home and dig in his own garden, they will have succeeded in stamping out
the last vestiges of ownlife; more imporantly, they will have succeeded
in remaking humanity in the Party’s image. What Blanchard and his ilk
desire is a hive of human worker bees.