Next tuesday in Vancouver I will be launching an action research
performance titled, "a fixed amount of work", which will explore the myth
of economic growth as a common purpose uniting investors and workers in
the harmoniously infinite creation and sharing of jobs and profits (that
is to say, creation of jobs and sharing of profits).
What I'm going to do is go out on the streets wearing a sandwich board
featuring a bank ad from a 1946 Fortune magazine promoting a "deferred
profit-sharing plan". I've printed up a leaflet to hand out, but my main
method will be to engage passers-by in conversations about work and life.
In _Sharing the work, Sparing the planet_, Anders Hayden has
excellently framed the dilemma about shorter work time and
productivism. If we simply insert the promise of productivity gains from
shorter work time into the conventional wisdom (left as well as
mainstream) of economic growth as a unifying goal, then what we could end
up with is a "popular front" for promoting ecological destruction.
Excuse me for thinking in diagrams, but the productivist dilemma can be
illustrated by a series of graphs showing units of output and units of
labour input (hours of work). Economists can only look at one thing at a
time and thus rely on the restriction of *ceteris paribus* -- all other
things being held constant.
Presumably, economics is concerned with efficiency (the allocation and
utilization of scarce resources to satisfy potentially limitless
needs) not simply gross quantity of stuff. Thus, the *ceteris paribus*
ideal of economic growth would be to increase output while holding input
constant. An alternative way to increase efficiency would be to hold
output constant (a fixed amount of work) while decreasing input. The
latter is the famous 'lump of labor' assumption that shorter work time
advocates are falsly accused of making.
In fact, though, the reduction of working time specifies no *a priori*
restriction on either input or output. The economists who make the lump of
labor claim are merely shadow-boxing with the contradictory implications
of their own *ceteris paribus* abstractions. This confusion is compounded
by the ambiguity of "work", which variously refers to output, input or
some combination.
I think it is possible, even necessary, to be in favour of productivity
while being opposed to productivism. I'll go a step further and say, that
at its most extreme -- which is to say the currently dominant ideology of
neo-liberalism -- productivism turns against efficiency and relies on the
ever more profligate destruction of scarce resources to satisfy fewer and
fewer human needs.
What I propose, then, is nothing less than the rehabilitation of the
phrase "a fixed amount of work" from its gutter career as a smear tactic
of the cancerous growth peddlers. In this recycling of the phrase, the
sense of "fixed" shifts from the economists' ceteris paribus assumption of
being held *constant* to the declared suspicion that the amount of
employment available is being *rigged* by central bank interest rate
policies to a call for *repairing* the dangerously broken relationship
between work, life and the environment.
Rather than being an *a priori* assumption of work-sharing advocates, the
fixed amount of work to be done offers a vision of steady-state
sufficiency as a humane alternative to the exponential piling up of waste.
Tom Walker
