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The nature of work in crises and normality
If the sociologist, Max Weber, is to be believed, the success of the Western world is due to the Puritan need to justify their presence among the Elect by working hard without enjoying the resulting wealth or giving it to the needy. Following, presumably, the parable of the talents, these Protestant workers invested their money to make more money and thereby created the capitalist economy.
And thus one of the driving conceptions of American culture received a name, the Protestant work ethic. This tissue of ideology includes the notions of the dignity of work and the belief that one can defy figurative gravity through manipulating one’s footwear. These carry with them the temptation to blame anyone who does not succeed, to mark such people down as moral in addition to economic failures.
This way of seeing the world is all very well for those who find themselves in the higher tiers of society. It might be argued that labor lost any dignity when money was invented, and Karl Marx’s term, the alienation of labor, expresses the nature and effects of selling one’s work to others for pay, an estrangement from any sense of accomplishment or purpose. For millions of Americans, once again we are having drawn the contrast between the capitalist ethic and the reality of labor as COVID-19 is shutting down more and more of the country — with a potential for a…
