Ascholia/Scholē

A response to Geese Magazine

By L. Luria

When I was writing the OGAS article I had in mind the analogous type in contemporary Western society who fits the bill for being our ‘Gosplan bureaucrat’. Initially I wanted to write a brief section on how a certain element of anti-AI Marxists, usually people who do clerical or managerial work, seem to unwittingly repeat the same errors – although of course in a far less decisive way – as the reactionaries at Gosplan and the Soviet Communist Party in the late 60s. Little did I know, the preeminent Geese Magazine had, only a couple days ago, published an article from somebody of exactly this social position, making exactly these arguments! This will be somewhat more informal because I want to get it out today, so forgive me if it reads a little rushed (I would also recommend reading the article first before reading this response any further).

Right off the bat, the author calls it a “misconception” and “an egregious distortion of basic Marxist philosophy” to assert that Communism means the pursuit of the end of labour. In order to prove this the author links to Capital Vol. I, Part III, Ch. 7: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value. Reading back over this Chapter to see if I’ve been completely wrong and somehow missed something so crucial to Marx’s project, unfortunately (for the author) the closest thing to the human being achieving “self-realisation through labour” for Marx is in his overall treatment of the purposive, imaginative, teleological activity which forms the determinate quality of human beings as opposed to animals, that “what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” Marx states his intent at the start of the chapter to “consider the labour-process independently of the particular form it assumes under given social conditions,” however this abstraction (as explained by Engels in a footnote to this section) is erected specifically to demonstrate how human work is only granted its meaningful social form through specific productive relations, that capital turns ‘mere work’ into labour.

Marx calling work an “everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence” that is “independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase,” which is, I assume, what the author wanted us to take note of by linking to this chapter, doesn’t support their assertion that “Marx believed that under the proper circumstances, human beings find fulfillment and self-realization through labor—not outside of it,” the implication from their writing here being that only through labour can humanity have the capacity to ‘realise’ itself. The author continues: “When we are able to independently or collaboratively direct the process of our own work and reap the benefits it yields, labor gives us pride, identity, and purpose. It fosters a sense of community and belonging.” Again, you would be hard pressed to find in Marx anything directly regarding “pride, dignity, and purpose” as part of his project, nor as a property emergent to labour itself, nor that the emancipation of labour-as-such from capital is the point of Communist politics. While the existence of drudgery and toil certainly affords an ethical-moral route into Communism for many people, this doesn’t account for Marx’s actual critique of labour under conditions of capitalist exploitation, nor does it necessarily lead to a defence of work, especially when put up against Marx’s very clear statements regarding the reduction of the working day, the separation of the distinction between physical and intellectual work, the end of the division of labour, and the supersession of labour/capital altogether by the general intellect.

In Part VII, Chapter 48 of Capital Vol. III Marx states that the objective ends of the conscious pursuit of political and economic development are towards realising “human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom”, for which the “shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.” If we were to read the passage from Critique of the Gotha Programme about labour becoming ‘life's prime want’ (which is usually brought up in arguments about this kind of thing to defend the ‘labourist’ position) and look at it in the context of human energy as an “end in itself” we can open a broader and more complete picture of what Marx understood to be the trajectory of the Communist society, to which he grants no moralistic ascription for how labour ought to be performed. The only prescription Marx offers at all is that the working day has to be shortened and that human energy has to become an end in itself; evidently these two points rise over and above other considerations for Marx, or at the very least grant a far better picture of what he considered his project to be rather than the secondary polemical taglines about “dignity.” In other places, such as in The German Ideology where Marx goes into what labour might look like in Communism, he talks about hunting, fishing, and cattle rearing.

The author goes on to write that labour “helps us to develop creatively, intellectually, and even spiritually. Labor—if I may partake of the masses' favorite opiate—is what gives us our souls.” If we take for granted that the author is making reference to the soul in a metaphysically serious way, then this ascription of the soul’s content as tied to labour is actually rather interesting, given that it completely reverses the standard understanding of the soul as Western societies have inherited it. Faculty psychology defines the soul as the principle that organises a living thing into the kind of thing it is, determined by faculties, the highest of which being (for Aristotle through to Aquinas and further on) nous, the intellect; it could be said that labour works to erect the necessary ‘framework conditions’ for the incubation and maintenance of the soul, but even from this very charitable interpretation of the author’s language it would still have to be in the moment of an absence of labour where the soul can be known in its fullness. As far back as Aristotle the means for contemplation, wherein the intellect is put to work, occur in the negation of labour: “Ascholoumetha gar hina scholazōmen” (we are un-leisured in order to be at leisure); ascholia, labour, is the negative, the privation of scholē, leisure. The whole apparatus of the soul therefore grounds leisure over labour, and labour even without the fetters of capitalist relations of production is always necessarily for the sake of something else, while the soul’s act is always necessarily for its own sake.

If you think I’m harping too much on this soul thing, I would ask you to think about what the author meant by making reference to the soul in the first place. What relationship does specifically ‘the soul’ – which they could just as easily call ‘mind’ in contemporary language – have to their analysis? Or perhaps it’s an excuse to get an ‘opiate of the people’ reference in there to add more Marxist gloss to an otherwise theoretically scant article. Either way, I’ve gotten this far with it now, so if we’re taking reference to the soul seriously then the corresponding ambition of the class-for-itself, the conscious working-class, would surely be for dismantling the frame of ascholia, un-leisure, which suppresses the soul, consolidates and reproduces the class beyond the bounds of its own spiritual, contemplative self-interest, permits them free time wherein the intellect can be put to work. Freedom in the Marxist sense can't be understood in terms of a subjective existential condition by which one “feels free”, but as an actual concrete negation of a tangible enframing of human behaviour (as a side note, and without making too much recourse to etymology games, it would be useful here to note that the Greek scholē becomes the Latin schola, the root of the English term ‘school’, ‘scholar, and so on; Western society at its origin holds to an identity between leisure, contemplation, the development and revelation of the intellect, and so on – all being the basic properties which Communism seeks to emancipate and universalise against the tendency of consolidating these properties into the hands of a social minority, and what Marx is perhaps implying when he refers to the general intellect in the Grundrisse).

Going back to the author’s central theme of ‘the dignity of labour’, such slogans and rhetorical postures invariably presuppose in some or another way the continuity of presently existing forms of labour as the ultimate horizon for personal and social meaning. The author eventually shows their hand towards the end of the article:

“It would be bad enough if generative AI corrupted only archetypally creative professions, but the soul of the humble bureaucratic functionary is no safer. This is an issue of deep concern for me; my professional experience is almost exclusively cashiering and standard nine-to-five office jobs involving journal entries, tax documents, filing systems, databases, and spreadsheets. The possibility of being replaced by AI hangs over my head like the sword of Damocles.

“My rational self-interest in maintaining job security aside, I like my work and do not want it taken away. The tasks I perform can be frustrating and exhausting, and a machine might indeed be able to perform them more efficiently than I can. But the honing of critical thinking, problem-solving, and organizational skills cannot be rushed.”

The author’s account of their own bureaucratic work constitutes an intellectual defence of the reproduction of a wholly indeterminate social element against that which might dissolve it and, therefore, move the wheel of history forward, upset the presently existing balance of social forces, and clarify where in the complex of contemporary political economy the productive and determinate social elements really exist. If, per Lenin, we hold that administrative ‘labour’ doesn’t imply any essential specialism, being “functions any literate worker could perform”, then automation, which is now viable through LLMs, is surely the most logical and socialistic option: under a socialist government, especially one which might intend on instituting a comprehensive economic planning regime, the speed by which clerical work can be done should obviously be accelerated and the costs incurred by clerical work should obviously be lowered as much as possible. The idea that socialism exists as a jobs program for managers is maybe the most perverse malformation of the Communist project I’ve ever encountered. Lenin’s argument in The State and Revolution was that capitalism had already sufficiently simplified administration to basic operations of registration, filing, and checking so elementary that the state could be run effectively by all in turn, that the separate caste of officials could be dissolved into the population; the author demands the opposite, to preserve a monopoly of expertise, by refusing to permit their specialism to be rendered transparent and common.

The reason that a broad anti-work tendency has gained significant traction amongst Marxists, clearly to the chagrin of the author, is not only because there’s very clear precedent across Marx’s writing, but also because, given contemporary circumstances, it isn’t a major intellectual leap to recognise that should society eradicate the vast excesses of superfluous labour hours which make up the lion’s share of labour time spent in western economies today, converting superfluous labour hours into free time, wealth would cease to be defined as command over the surplus labour of others and become instead disposable time for every individual and for society as a whole. As Jehu has consistently pointed out, in the long postwar boom the hours worked and the output extracted from those hours multiplied several times over without any commensurate gain reaching those who did the work, with the surplus then accumulating as idle capital that the state then had to absorb through deficit, armament, interest, and so on, forming the whole apparatus of unproductive labour, an apparatus which serves merely to redistribute that which already exists rather than actively ‘produce’ in any sense familiar to Marx or to the classical political economists. Evidently, this apparatus is one to which our author, the self-confessed bureaucrat, belongs.

The author doesn't defend their clerical work because of any social wealth produced – which, of course, they couldn’t, because there is none – but instead from their purported ability to provide regulatory checks on the power of capital: “A world without human bureaucrats is a world in which capital can operate totally unchecked by human oversight… Human beings who work within institutions instinctively try to improve them for the simple, self-interested reason that it will make their jobs easier.” If the author can get away with this kind of anecdotal fluff, then I’ll just briefly note that a friend of mine used to work in a charity doing homeless outreach, for which they would regularly have to interface with local government bureaucrats. From what I've been told, given the manner by which the emergency housing system works in Britain, genuinely homeless people – including mothers of small children – have been left destitute for periods of months going on years because of the negligence of local government bureaucrats, even though there were clear methods by which only a rather small amount of work could be done to help mitigate these people’s horrendous conditions. It absolutely doesn’t hold that clerical workers ‘instinctively’ improve the functioning of a given system just by the fact of their being there. For a grander example, see my last article on OGAS.

In any case, going back to the author: given their full-throated defence of already existing forms of labour, this further uncritical defence of the preexisting institutions of bureaucracy sufficiently completes the picture of the ‘Marxism’ we’re being offered here. When Communism does eventually reveal itself in the west, if the author would like, I’m sure a kind of ‘work simulator’ could be provided so they could spend all the free time afforded by the new system so as to busy themselves with rudimentary administrative tasks that, by their account, provide tremendous joy and satisfaction. The end of labour is very clearly what Marx was talking about, and what we ought to be pursuing if we take our politics seriously. Even if AI proves incapable, for whatever reason, of assisting in this development, this doesn’t negate the fact that the reduction of labour time spent is our ambition. Ultimately, for Communists, the question as to what humanity will become after the end of labour is irrelevant at our present strategic juncture. Regarding the author, arguments to prolong labour beyond its point of any necessary social determination is only defensible if this ‘labour’ refers to wholly subjective and personally gratifying activities, but to conceptually defend the category of post-revolutionary labour as needing to hold some essential identity with labour as it is today, or as it has been in the epoch of capitalism-proper, ultimately reads as a fear of the unknown, fear of the full revolutionary import of Communism and the ways in which reality will be reconstituted. It is a dreadful attitude, and should be put to rest amongst Marxists forever.