Most white collar workers are useless:
I’ve been fond of saying for a while now that one of our dirty economic secrets is how little actual work is done by the fairly well-paid, so-called white collar worker, myself included. IOZ talks about middle management, that layer of general ineptitude and uselessness one encounters virtually everywhere. But in my experience, large swaths of office workers have relatively little to do (whereas others, I am well aware, work very long hours indeed). Of course, this is because there is relatively little that really needs to be done. The jobs that most of us have are utterly unnecessary. But we have to be kept working, or at work, don’t we? Heaven forbid we have time to ourselves, without need to worry that someone is looking, and without need to worry that we’ll starve. Meanwhile, that work that is necessary (which is generally not found in an office) could easily be spread around, so that no one would be over-worked or under-compensated.
But surely office work must be necessary, as every civilisation seems to generate so much of it…
More to the point, that is one of the key points of socialism, isn’t it? The idea that “to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities”, to make a honest, fair division of labour benefiting everybody by sharing the fruits of our shared labour while nobody has to be over or underworked. In our current capitalist society surplus labour is of course turned into profit:
More generally – Tronti and the workerists argued – capitalist development is parasitic on workers’ intelligence and creativity, which they use in the refusal of work. You get the job done with half an hour to spare and sneak off for a fag; your employer cuts your working day by half an hour and cuts your pay accordingly. Result: profit. You do eight hours’ work in six hours; your employer increases your workload by 33%. Result: profit.
This looks to us like the normal, expected state of affairs because we’ve grown with it, never seeing the complexity of the system that makes this possible, let alone any alternative to it. Yet we did not always live this way, nor do we need to continue to do so.