Labour, Nature and Dependence

Work, well-being and environment

Labour, Nature and Dependence

1. Well-being and labour: the limits of hedonic approaches

2. Aristotle and Marx: Labour, self-realisation and objectification

3. Eco-regulatory labour and the limits of the Aristotelian model

Well-being and labour

Theories of well-being

1. Modern welfarism: preference satisfaction

2. Hedonic theories: psychological state

3. Eudaimonic theories: objective state

Hedonic welfare: back to Bentham?

Well-being consists in the realisation of certain subjective states.

• ‘Hedonic psychology…is the study of what makes experiences and life pleasant and unpleasant. It is concerned with feelings of pleasure and pain, of interest and boredom, of joy and sorrow and of satisfaction and dissatisfaction.’ (Kahneman, Deiner and Shwarz, 1999, p.ix)

• Layard: ‘by happiness I mean feeling good – enjoying life and wanting the feeling to be maintained’ (Layard, 2005, p.12)

Life satisfaction and GDP

Hedonic welfare, consumption and work

• Income and happiness– Relative income– Absolute growth in income

• Hedonic treadmill – Hedonic adaptation– Positional goods

• Determinants of happiness: – familial and personal relationships; secure and

intrinsically worthwhile work; health; personal and political freedoms; the quality of wider social relationships.

Lane: Hedonism against Bentham

• ‘Aversion - not desire – is the only emotion which labour, taken by itself, is qualified to produce…ease, not labour, is the object. Love of labour is a contradiction in terms’ (Bentham)

• Lane: Bentham’s claims are empirically false. In surveys of activities that people say give them greatest pleasure: ‘the high rank given to “the actual work that you do” which was ranked right after family and socialising activities and well ahead of watching television, sports activities, going to the movies, gardening, reading and shopping’ (The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, p. 70)

• Markets fail insofar as they give priority to consumption over working activities (The Market Experience Part V).

The limits of hedonism• Adaptive preferences: ‘Our desires and pleasure-taking abilities

adjust to circumstances, especially to make life bearable in adverse situations… The deprived people tend to come to terms with their deprivation because of the sheer necessity of survival, and they may, as a result…adjust their desires and expectations to what they see as feasible.’ (Sen, 1999, pp. 62-3).

• Hedonic treadmills and aspiration treadmills.• The nature of well-being: Well-being is not just a matter of

subjective states (experience machine). • ‘human well-being may be thought to depend, not only on the sum

of moment-by-moment affective experiences… but also on other aspects of life, such as autonomy, freedom, achievement, and the development of deep interpersonal relationships, which cannot be decomposed into momentary affective experiences’ (Kahneman and Sugden, 2005, p.176).

Adaptive preferences, expectations and work

• ‘Strangely “there is virtually no association between the process benefits of work [enjoying working activities] and the intrinsic characteristics of the job as reflected in its occupational statues”’ (The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, p. 70)

• Limits of hedonic approaches based on reported life satisfaction in capturing the relation between work and well-being and hence with injustice in the distribution of good work.

U-shape relation

Figure 1e: Overall satisfaction, British Household Panel Survey 1998

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Figure 1f: Overall satisfaction, British Household Panel Survey 2004

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2. Aristotle and Marx

• Labour as the actualisation of characteristically human powers and capacities.

• In the object of labour the worker is able to contemplate in a public and objective form the actualisation of those powers.

Marx: objective state against Smith

In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou labour!  was Jehovah's curse on Adam. And this is labour for Smith, a  curse. 'Tranquillity' appears as the adequate state, as identical  with 'freedom' and 'happiness'. It seems quite far from Smith's mind  that the individual, 'in his normal state of health, strength,  activity, skill, facility', also needs a normal portion of work, and  of the suspension of tranquillity… Smith has no inkling whatever that this overcoming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity…as  self-realization, objectification of the subject, hence real  freedom, whose action is, precisely, labour. He is right, of course,  that, in its historic forms as slave-labour, serf-labour, and  wage-labour, labour always appears as repulsive, always as external  forced labour; and not-labour, by contrast, as 'freedom, and  happiness'. (Grundrisse 610ff )

Objectification

• In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt… Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature. (Comments on James Mill)

• 'The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of the species-life of man: for man produces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created.' (EPM)

Aristotle and Objectification

Why do benefactors love the beneficiaries more than they are loved in return?

• ‘The same is true with craftsmen: for each likes his own product more than it would like him if it acquired a soul…This, then, is what the case of the benefactor resembles: here the beneficiary is his product, and hence he like him more than the product likes his producer.’ (Nicomachean Ethics, Book 9, ch.7)

Relation to product

Active benevolence realizes human capacitiesThe cause of this is as follows:1. Being is choiceworthy and loveable for all.2. We are in so far as we are actualized, since we are in so

far as we live and act.3. The product is, in a way, the producer of his

actualization.4. Hence the producer is fond of the product, because he

loves his own being. And this is natural, since what he is potentially is what the product indicates in actualization. (Nicomachean Ethics, Book 9, ch.7)

3. Eco-regulatory labour and the limits of the Aristotelian model.

• Benton: Two forms of labour process

• Transformative

• Eco-regulatory

Transformative

• ‘Central to Marx’s abstract concept of the labour process, therefore is the notion of a raw material A undergoing a transformation to yield a use value. This transformation is the outcome of human labour that involves the utilisation of raw material B and the instruments of labour to achieve its purpose. The process involves both human intentional activity, and a range of distinct materials, substances, and other nonhuman beings and conditions….[T]he intentional structure of the labour process is, for Marx, a transformative one. It is plausible to suppose that Marx’s model is handicraft production.’

Eco-regulatory

• ‘In agricultural labour processes, by contrast with productive, transformative ones, human labour is not deployed to bring about an intended transformation in a raw material. It is, rather, primarily deployed to sustain or regulate the environmental conditions under which seed or stock animals grow and develop. There is a transformative moment in this labour processes, but the transformations are brought about by naturally given organic mechanism, not by the application of human labour. Agricultural and other ‘ecoregulatory’ labour processes thus share an intentional structure that is quite different from the productive, transformative labour processes’

Marx and labour

• Marx presents as universal what is just one particular form of the labour process.

• One consequence is that Marx fails to acknowledge certain natural limits to productive processes.

Labour process

• Underlying Marx’s account of labour as objectification is a transformative model of the labour process.

• How far is this account of the value of the labour process transferable to the eco-regulatory form of labour?

• What is lost on this account?

Aristotle on parental labour

• ‘A parent knows better what has come from him then the children know that they are from the parent; and the regards his children as his own more than the product regards the maker as its own…A parent loves his children as [he loves] himself. For what has come from him is a sort of other himself.’

Problems

• Independence and autonomy of child/beneficiary not recognised

• Narcissism:– ‘the producer is fond of the product, because

he loves his own being’ – ‘A parent loves his children as [he loves]

himself.’

What is wrong with Aristotle?

• The analogies are with the wrong kind of labour. • Child rearing if it resembles any kind of labour resembles

not craft labour but eco-regulatory labour. • It is about creating the conditions in which an

independent being can develop its potentialities. • Skills in creating and sustaining those conditions of the

forms of practical knowledge, the relationships and the excellence of character that they require.

• The resultant being is one that is the result of the development of its own potentialities.

Marx and nature

• Marx on the humanisation of nature.• Species narcissism in seeing the value of nature

principally as the arena for the objectification of human powers.

• ‘In fact, however, when the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange? What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of nature — those of his own nature as well as those of so-called “nature"?’ (Grundrisse)

Justice, recognition and eco-regulatory labour

• Environmental justice: the ill-distribution of environmental benefits and harms; failures of recognition.

• Social invisibility of forms of labour such as domestic labour and subsistence agriculture that fall outside the market realm.

• Within a market system forms of labour which have been central to sustaining human life and agricultural biodiversity tend to go unrecognised and unvalued (Martinez-Alier, 1997, 2002).

• Relative invisibility of forms of dependence on nature.

Well-being and the passive powers

• Aristotelian model of labour tends to focus on active powers of transformation of an external object.

• A defensible account of labour needs to more sensitive to the passive human powers to perceive, understand and powers and potentialities of the objects and create the conditions for their realisation.