Capitolism Essay, Research Paper

The official working week is being reduced to 35 hours a week. In

most countries in the world, it is limited to 45 hours a week. The trend

during the last century seems to be unequivocal : less work, more

play.

Yet, what may be true for blue collar workers or state employees is

not necessarily so for white collar members of the liberal professions.

It is not rare for these people lawyers, accountants, consultants,

managers, academics to put in 80 hour weeks. The phenomenon is

so widespread and its social consequences so damaging that it

acquired the unflattering nickname workaholism, a combination of the

words work and alcoholism . Family life is disrupted, intellectual

horizons narrow, the consequences to the workaholic s health are

severe : fat, lack of exercise, stress take their toll. Classified as

alpha types, workaholics suffer three times as many heart attacks

as their peers.

But what are the social and economic roots of this phenomenon ?

Put succinctly, it is the result of the blurring borders and differences

between work and leisure. The distinction between these two types

of time the one dedicated to labour and the one spent in the pursuit

of one s interests was so clear for thousands of years that its

gradual disappearance is one of the most important and profound

social changes in human history.

A host of other shifts in the character of the work and domestic

environments of humans converged to produce this momentous

change.

Arguably the most important was the increase in labour mobility and

the fluid nature of the very concept of work and the workplace. The

transitions from agricultural to industrial, then to the services and now

to the information and knowledge societies, each, in turn, increased

the mobility of the workforce. A farmer is the least mobile. His means

of production are fixed, his produce was mostly consumed locally

because of lack of proper refrigeration, preservation and

transportation methods. A marginal group of people became

nomad-traders. This group exploded in size with the advent of the

industrial revolution. True, the bulk of the workforce was still immobile

and affixed to the production floor. But raw materials and the finished

products travelled long distances to faraway markets. Professional

services were needed and the professional manager, the lawyer, the

accountant, the consultant, the trader, the broker all emerged as

both the parasites of the production processes and the indispensable

oil on its cogs.

Then came the services industry. Its protagonists were no longer

geographically dependent. They rendered their services to a host of

employers in a variety of ways and geographically spread. This trend

accelerated today, at the beginning of the information and knowledge

revolution. Knowledge is not locale-bound. It is easily transferable

across boundaries. Its ephemeral quality gives it a-temporal and

non-spatial qualities. The location of the participants in the economic

interactions of this new age are geographically transparent.

These trends converged with an increase of mobility of people, goods

and data (voice, visual, textual and other). The twin revolutions of

transportation and of telecommunications really reduced the world to

a global village. Phenomena like commuting to work and multinationals

were first made possible. Facsimile messages, electronic mail, other

modem data transfers, the Internet broke not only physical barriers

but also temporal ones. Today, virtual offices are not only spatially

virtual but also temporally so. This means that workers can

collaborate not only across continents but also across time zones.

They can leave their work for someone else to continue in an

electronic mailbox, for instance.

These last technological advances precipitated the fragmentation of

the very concepts of work and workplace . No longer the three

Aristotelian dramatic unities. Work could be carried out in different

places, not simultaneously, by workers who worked part time

whenever it suited them best, Flexitime and work from home replaced

commuting as the preferred venue (much moreso in the Anglo-Saxon

countries, but they have always been the pioneering harbingers of

change). This fitted squarely into the social fragmentation which

characterizes today s world : the disintegration of previously cohesive

social structures, such as the nuclear (not to mention the extended)

family. This was all neatly wrapped in the ideology of individualism

which was presented as a private case of capitalism and liberalism.

People were encouraged to feel and behave as distinct, autonomous

units. The perception of individuals as islands replaced the former

perception of humans as cells in an organism.

This trend was coupled with and enhanced by the unprecedented

successive annual rises in productivity and increases in world trade.

These trends were brought about by new management techniques,

new production technology, innovative inventory control methods,

automatization, robotization, plant modernization, telecommunications

(which facilitates more efficient transfers of information), even new

design concepts. But productivity gains made humans redundant. No

amount of retraining could cope with the incredible rate of

technological change. The more technologically advanced the country

the higher its structural unemployment (attributable to changes in

the very structure of the market) went.

In Western Europe, it shot up from 5-6% of the workforce to 9% in

one decade. One way to manage this flood of ejected humans was to

cut the workweek. Another was to support a large population of

unemployed. The third, more tacit, way was to legitimize leisure time.

Whereas the Jewish and Protestant work ethics condemned idleness in

the past they now started encouraging people to self fulfil , pursue

habits and non-work related interests and express the whole of their

personality.

This served to blur the historical differences between work and

leisure. They were both commended now by the mores of our time.

Work became less and less structured and rigid formerly, the main

feature of leisure time. Work could be pursued and to an ever

growing extent, was pursued from home. The territorial separation

between work-place and home turf was essentially eliminated. The

emotional leap was only a question of time. Historically, people went

to work because they had to and all the rest was designated

pleasure . Now, both were pleasure or torture or mixture. Some

people began to enjoy their work so much that it fulfilled for them the

functions normally reserved to leisure time. They are the workaholics.

Others continued to hate work but felt disoriented in the new,

leisure enriched environment. They were not qualified or trained to

deal with excess time, lack of framework, no clear instructions what

to do, when, with whom and to what.

Socialization processes and socialization agents (the State, parents,

educators, employers) were not geared nor did they regard it as

being their responsibility to train the populace to cope with free

time and with the baffling and dazzling variety of options.

Economies and markets can be classified using many criteria. Not the

least of them is the work-leisure axis. Those societies and economies

that maintain the old distinction between (hated) work and

(liberating) leisure are doomed to perish or, at best, radically lag

behind. This is because they will not have developed a class of

workaholics big enough to move the economy ahead.

And this is the Big Lesson : it takes workaholics to create, maintain

and expand capitalism. As opposed to common beliefs (held by the

uninitiated) people, mostly, do not engage in business because they

are looking for money (the classic profit motive). They do what they

do because they like the Game of Business, its twists and turns, the

brainstorming, the battle of brains, subjugating markets, the ups and

downs, the excitement. All this has nothing to do with pure money. It

has everything to do with psychology. True, the meter by which

success is measured in the world of money is money but very fast it

is transformed into an abstract meter, akin to the monopoly money. It

is a symbol of shrewdness, wit, foresight and insight.

Workaholics identify business with pleasure. They are the embodiment

of the pleasure principle. They make up the class of the

entrepreneurs, the managers, the businessmen. They are the movers,

the shakers, the pushers, the energy. Without them, we have

socialist economies, where everything belongs to everyone and,

actually to none. In these economies of collective ownership people

go to work because they have to, they try to avoid it, to sabotage

the workplace, they harbour negative feelings. Slowly, they wither

and die (professionally) because no one can live long in hatred and

deceit. Joy is an essential ingredient.

And this is the true meaning of capitalism : the abolition of work and

leisure and the pursuit of both with the same zeal and satisfaction.

Above all, the (increasing) liberty to do it whenever, wherever, with

whomever you choose. Unless and until the Homo East Europeansis

changes his set of mind there will be no real transition. Because

transition happens in the human mind much before it takes form in

reality. It is no use to dictate, to legislate, to finance, to cajole, to

offer the human being must change first. It was Marx (a devout

non-capitalist) who said : it is consciousness that determines reality.

How right was he. Witness the USA and witness the miserable failure

of communism.