Work

For the opposition between Davos and Porto Alegre to really be in operation, one should be able to say that the dividing line between these two worlds is drawn, in one way or another, in a redefinition of human work, and notably of the rights that the access to work, permanent or precarious, grants to a social class whose name is yet to be defined since the exhaustion of the term ‘proletariat’. The apprehension of work, of the estimation of its social value as well as the emphasis on an ontological quality, distinguishes the fashionable visitors at Davos from the demonstrative gathering at Porto Alegre to the point of reconfiguring the opposition inherited from the first three industrial revolutions. Two new ideological entities are starting to revive the process of work.

The first relies on the self-regulation of a market that is able to establish an economic and social power ratio, founded not on conflict, nor even on competition, but on a delegation of power modelled on representative democracy. Property has become, in its expression, a concept as vague as that of work. Except amongst slightly elderly commentators of Locke or Hobbes work has ceased to justify property, as it has lost all contact with History and its subject. Thus work is stripped of its own rationality, which made it continually push the border between necessity and freedom. According to the tenants of Helvetian postliberalism, it has at last reached the rank of merchandise stripped of intrinsic value and commanded by private interest to achieve recognition, monetary or symbolic, from the community. At this point, work appears to already to be wiped out in its product, accomplished in a consumption which does not confer on it any specific right except that to keep its subject potential unsatiated, which means to make it participate in a more or less conscious manner in a public condemnation which, through the game of the media, itself feeds the power of the market’s self-regulation.

The second entity, whose incomplete division finds itself in these ‘sad tropics’, the existence of which was kept out of our sight for some time by the worry of unemployment, links itself to a social humanism founded essentially on the idea of equity. Even Nature, ecology oblige, has become a determining factor in contracts to pass with the centuries to come, work having to be reinvested with the wisdom of moderation in which it is reinvigorated as the founding intelligibility of the world society. On the streets of Porto Alegre, work appears effectively as a value that must be preserved, be this in its exploitation. As a brute force which carries in it access to an objective conscience of the world, work discovered a reasonable ideal in a salaried job which constitutes the main part in this social conflict with which one needs to be connected in order to escape the sterile conquest of power and to rediscover the virtues of direct democracy. The post-socialism of Rio Grande Do Sul resituates conflict in the workplace, which, failing to restore what Proudhon used to call an “idea of the self”, nevertheless allows it to keep at a reasonable distance worry for the real and passion for the ideal.

There is, clearly, in such an opposition something that resists the reality of the simple fact that this dual analysis appears to work too well not to be straight out of the fiction section. To pretend that Davos and Porto Alegre could have the same theorisation of the world (in the sense of a setting) would be totally misplaced, inadequate, ready to introduce enough confusion to justify, once again, slavery. Nonetheless the very interest of this debate resides precisely in its fictional character, this quasi-dialectical reconfiguration of work which helps us break with the usual movement of time and leads us to think about a possible requalification of the subject of emancipation outside of its social or economic realm.