Introduction to the New Edition John Bellamy Foster
Work, in today's society, is a mystery. No other realm of social existence is so obscured in mist, so zealously concealed from view (“no admittance except on business") by the prevailing ideology. Within so-called popular culture—the world of TV and films, commodities and advertising—consumption occupies center stage, while the more fundamental reality of work recedes into the background, seldom depicted in any detail, and then usually in romanticized forms. The harsh experiences of those forced to earn their living by endless conformity to boring machine-regulated routines, divorced from their own creative potential—all in the name of efficiency and profits—seem always just beyond the eye of the camera, forever out of sight.
In social science, the situation is hardly better. The dismal performance of legions of orthodox economists and sociologists in the area of work is testimony to the dominance of ideological imperatives within mainstream social science, despite its scientific pretensions. There is no other realm requiring as much concealment to permit the continued dominance of capitalist relations of production. What must remain impenetrable is not so much the stultifying character of modern working life: that is hard to deny in a time when the neologism “McJob" has entered the language to describe a form of employment experienced by millions. The secret is the prevailing social order's systematic tendency to create unsatisfying work.
Orthodox economists have consistently steered clear of issues of production and the organization of work, viewing these from the distant standpoint of the exigencies of the market (the buying and selling of“factors of production"). They almost never engage directly with the realm of production itself, in which capital and labor struggle over the control of working time and the appropriation of surplus productissues discretely left to those concerned with the everyday practical realities of business and management. As the heterodox economist Robert Heilbroner has written, “The actual social process of production—the flesh and blood act of work, the relationships of sub- and superordination by which work is organized and controlledare almost strangers to the conventional economist."
Sociologists, it is true, have analyzed occupational reality, looking for signs of alienation. But sociology, like economics, has usually been divorced from any real understanding of the way in which working life is objectively organized around the division of labor and profitability. All too often academic investigators have assumed that the essence of working life is to be discovered simply in the subjective responses of “scientifically selected samples" of workers to carefully constructed questionnaires. Even radical theorists, familiar with the results of such economic and sociological research but lacking direct experience of their own with the capitalist labor process, have frequently fallen prey to illusions generated in this way, as Paul Sweezy eloquently explains in his foreword to the present volume.
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