Delphic Maxim 79: Work for what you can own
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
79. Work for what you can own
Years ago, during the particularly toxic years of the Gillard government in Australia, I remember the then Prime Minister giving a speech about ‘Labor values’. These speeches happen from time to time, when the leader of the day outlines their vision of the future, the purpose of the party, and put some narrative about their policy priorities. Probably the best articulated vision for the party was Chifley’s ‘light on the hill’ speech — but that’s for another time.
Anyway, Gillard mounted the argument that the party’s objective was to ensure that everyone had access to the dignity of work. At the time I thought it was a really thin view of the objectives of the ALP: quite narrowly targeted, and one that ignored the gamut of other issues — climate change, health care, public infrastructure — that a government might pull together to create a version of ‘the good society’. I still kind of hold that view: where, for example, does the ideal of ‘leisure’ come into it? Isn’t there a better vision of life than simply working? What about the pursuit of friendship, knowledge and happiness?
However there’s a kernel of truth in what she said, particularly for a party of labour which seeks to represent the interests of people whose time is activated in service of others (whatever mode that service takes). That truth is that we all must work, one way or another, for what we want in life.
In previous posts, we’ve explored the idea of contingency — the philosophical word for those chance events that just happen and over which we have no control. These can come in the form of black swans, which are stochastic and unpredictable boons that can make or break us. But outside of the realms of chance, it’s effort and work that gives us the most reward in life.
While Gillard was talking about the dignity of work in the context of employment, there are more ways in which we work with our time. So in a sense, working for what we own includes not only the work we do as points in a capitalist system — earning money to make ends meet, and perhaps to buy a few nice things on the side. It also includes the work we do for ourselves: things like gardening, maintaining friendship, hobbies, carpentry, and so on.
I think in a way this kind of work is even more dignified than the work we do for an employer, because it isn’t — to put it in Marxian terms — alienating. Marx uses the term alienation to describe the way people become separated from the products of their work (in his day, by factory labour — the products people produced would have to be purchased with the money they made from selling their labour, and it never quite covered the difference). The work we do for ourselves involves spending our labour — our time and energy — into a thing, and we are the beneficiaries of the fruits of our labour. If we spend our time gardening, we get to enjoy the smell of the flowers, the vegetables we can pick, and the joy that comes with time spent nurturing plants.
My friends and I have a writers festival in my lounge room each year. Over a period of months, we gather EOIs, prepare a talk complete with slides and an argument (and sometimes its at the last minute), and then we present it to a room full of people with a carefully curated programme and subject our ideas to critique. It’s a high concept way to spend time with friends, and it requires work and effort to deliver. But the payoff is enormous: it’s intellectually rewarding for participants and for the audience, and we get the chance to own what we worked for.
Today’s maxim reminds us that reward comes from effort. Work isn’t just about making a buck — even though that is the dominant understanding we have today. Work is also about the dignity and capability of producing something, of owning something, whether it be intellectual, spiritual, emotional or material.
