What They Mean by "Recovery"

First, as I've been writing for the past few years on this day, Happy International Workers Day! This is a day to spend a minute or two remind ourselves that while we work to live, we should not necessarily live to work.  There's a fundamental difference between the two points of view.

Two forms of life on this planet live to work: insects and bacteria. Neither are good role models for human activity.

People work to live.  We do things with our hands, our feet, our brains to provide for ourselves and families in terms of acquiring food to eat, water to drink, shelter within to live, play, love, sleep. This is normal.  Working is normal.  Some of us look forward to working at one job more than another but deep down we know that in a finite universe nothing is free and we are supposed to  earn our keep somehow. The only segment of human society you'll likely encounter resistance to this idea from is the very rich, who need to answer the question, "Who is supposed to do your share of the work and why should they?" The rest of us understand that it's natural to work.

For all that, as Fred Clark, Joe Bageant and others have pointed out, there's no section of any daily newspaper published anywhere with a section called "Labor". Not even one called  "Work." Yet most of them have "Business" sections. Which is technically correct, but when was the last time you said "I need to go to business," or "I can't go out tonight, I'm handling the late shift at business?" How about "Don't call me Sir, I business for a living"? No, you don't hear it because what we do is work. We do not "business." Even those of us who believe in the power of business to make life on this pale blue dot a bit easier, happier, and healthier for ourselves and others, do not "go to business."

Business in the classical sense means "the act of buying and selling." (The first 3 entries in Dictionary.com identify this meaning.) Work, on the other hand, means physical action, to exert oneself in the act of creating something, or a place of employment. To make the distinction as simple as possible, work built the world, while business paid for it.

The reason we work to live is because work, until fairly recently, had limits.  Until we started using machines to make other machines to make more stuff, faster and in greater quantity than was previously possible, work had real limits. A field, for example, can only be worked so many hours in a given day subject to daylight and the limits of the human body. Ever plant rice in a paddy? If you're doing it manually, it's intense, muscle straining, back-breaking work that you do hunched over with rice shoots carried in one hand, knee deep in up to a foot of water, ankle deep in thick mud for hours at a time. You have to take each shoot and bury the roots under several inches of mud just a few inches away from it's neighbor. There's a reason the older generation of rice farmers in the Far East are all shaped like capital Ls. A more accessible test of endurance might be just clearing out a one-acre plot of land with a hoe. If you haven't tried it, you should. Blisters, dust, and aching muscles are instructive.

But then came the industrial revolution and factories replaced individual workshops.  Work-related skills became less focused on total product creation and more on creating a small portion of the product on an assembly line. The good news is that the system worked. A great deal of new stuff was made by a smaller fraction of the total population than ever before, and these things could be sold for a lot less than before. And life--material comfort, at any rate--did indeed improve for millions. The bad news is that the system needed two things to be invariably true for it to operate: low-cost energy and materials, and unlimited markets. As sensible people understand, neither of these are givens any longer. Capitalism was born in an era of cheap raw materials, nearly free energy, and expensive labor. Today we have exactly the opposite problem. Labor costs can be mitigated to some extent, but with energy and raw materials becoming more difficult to pull out of the ground and in lesser amounts when it's acquired (therefore growing more expensive), mass production just isn't going to work that well any more. This would be true even if markets really were unlimited, and as any salesman who has dealt with the problem of market saturation and overbought customers can tell you, there are no unlimited markets. Not really.

Just on a whim I typed '''U.S.' AND 'economy' AND 'recovery'" into Google and came up with 48 million results.  Replacing the word "recovery" with "depression" got 20 million hits and replacing it with "recession" returned 17 million.  So if this amazingly unscientific survey of the web suggests anything it might imply that people are pretty interested in recovering from this global economic mess that we find ourselves in.  But "recover" is a tricky word, usually used to refer to going from a bad situation to a good one (or at least a better one). It implies that the problems you're currently working through are temporary and limited. It implies that the current unfortunate situation is not normal.

Unfortunately, that is not the case any more. The system we were using to provide for our physical (and to some extent emotional and spiritual) comfort is running up against a reality that no longer exists. So, we have a decision to make, governments, businesses and individuals, all of us. We have to decide what recovering actually means.

That's not a simple question to ask anyone, especially anyone who's never given much thought to the invisible (and incredibly complicated) network of labor, transport and work (and business) that's made our current condition possible over the past century. It still needs to be asked. It should be thought about long and hard and you should do so in private, with the TV or radio,  Internet and cell phone turned off, and preferably unplugged. It is a personal thing to imagine in a private setting.

I can imagine three broad ways this will pan out. First, we do nothing--to choose by not choosing. That's the default setting on human psychology, as repetition breeds habit, habit breeds familiarity, and we are drawn to the familiar. We'll keep borrowing money we don't have to spend it on things we don't need and keep wondering why things are so rotten while we continue to elect politicians who may give us hope but refuse to give honest answers to real concerns.  

Another possibility is we junk the whole system and invent something genuinely new. Being new it would have to be more fair/honest/just than what we have in place now. Unfortunately, I have no idea likely it would be that we could rewrite the habits of several generations, but it's something to think about.

A third possibility is to voluntarily downsize our lives, which means downsizing our expectations from life.  Most of what we expect from our lives, or families, friends, employers, neighbors, and strangers alike has been sold to us like a bill of goods by a very complex and extremely effective marketing industry. They push a button and we jump. This process is nearly unconscious in the American mind, so it will be a royal pain to learn to resist these messages, but I can only see benefit to us personally and socially if we try it. What happens afterward will likely make us less comfortable than we are used to being, but at least it will be more honest.

Happy International Workers Day.

Comments

[Daniel Frater]

The difference between being a victim of the mephistophlean consumer-industrial complex and not is distinguishing between what one truly needs and what one is artificially encouraged to want. It's difficult, but a dab of introspection'll do ya, if you let it. Lots of people don't "jump" like Jack Russell terriers in response to the latest commercials.

You know how long it took for me to get an ipod? Years. And it was an MP3 player, not an ipod. (And yeah, I lost it, but I'm not in a hurry to procure a new one, because, being the father of twins I have no time to exercise anyway, or the energy to choose life, as Deuteronomy instructs us to). I had to be practically beaten into getting a cellphone and I always choose the cheapest, lamest, no-frills model (always a Nokia!)after inevitably loosing or breaking the current one. Got no Blackberry, don't have a Facebook or MySPace page, don't Twitter or Gasp or Yodel or whatever the hell the current STar Trek inspired personal communication device is, and my .22 is going to be a used piece of crap from Ready Freddie's Pawn Shop and Survialist Boutique. Hell, I'd even make my own clothes if I could. But I can't. I'm too tired.

Recovery, indeed.

[Jonathan Frater]

RS says: I agree, not everyone falls for the trick, but my point was that enough people do for it to be worth it to those making the real money. At least, enough people did fall for it until they ran out of money and found they couldn't charge anything more to their credit cards. Things may slow down a bit from that major change in the next few years.