Calls to open up the country so that people can get back to work are eerily reminiscent of the 1973 Norrmalmstorg robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, after which the hostages famously refused to testify in court against their captors, giving birth to the term “Stockholm Syndrome.” The movement to reopen the country in the midst of a global pandemic is indicative of the Stockholm Syndrome like attitude that the modern commodity subject has towards work in general, in which work is glorified, or at least viewed positively, despite the obvious negative effects it has on people and their environment. I call this condition “Chicago Syndrome.”[1]
Implying that work holds our lives hostage is not just a metaphor, it is an accurate description of a real process. Not only are we compelled to spend 40 hours or more working each week, but the character of work is such that a certain amount of time each week must be spent recovering from work. Not to mention the time we spend getting to and from work, or the work-like time we spend on the internet generating data for companies like Google and Facebook, who make their money selling our data to advertisers. Extending the comparison even further, wages seem to be nothing more than the ransom we are paid for our time and effort at work.
But besides the structural compulsion to spend so much of our time working, what else warrants this comparison of working to being held hostage at gunpoint? What made the Norrmalsmstorg robbery so remarkable was the fact that the hostages developed sympathetic feelings for their captors, who, to the outside observer, represented an obvious threat to their wellbeing. So how does work threaten our wellbeing?
This question has been discussed at length by various authors, most notably Karl Marx, but also Moishe Postone and Robert Kurz. I will not go into this in detail, but a few observations should suffice to prove my point.
First of all, work has been, and continues to be, a pretty dangerous activity in itself, especially in industrial settings where people are working in close proximity to high powered machines. Stories of workers being killed or dismembered in factories come from a not so distant past, and the situation has improved only slightly, despite some countries developing work safety standards. A simple google search would tell you that workplace deaths are still very common today.
Then there’s the fact that work’s repetitive character dulls our minds and bodies, effectively turning us into machines that perform the same task over and over again. While a university professor might scoff at this notion and insist that “every day brings new challenges,” I would simply argue that not only does their type of work (work that can be somewhat varied) represent a small percentage of all the work done globally, but that even their job is subject to becoming monotonous and repetitive, although this may not be as clear as it is in the case of a factory worker who sews the same thread on the same type of shirt for eight hours a day.
The last negative impact that I will briefly mention here is the environmental one, which might be the most serious threat to our well-being of them all. We face a situation in which it is impossible to adequately address the problems of environmental degradation and climate change without seriously disrupting the global economy by decreasing resource usage. This is related to the structural imperative for infinite growth inherent to capitalism. Without this constant growth, capitalism would break down, and the people that rely on it to survive would be up shit creek without a paddle, to say the very least. Every time we go in to work, we are contributing to the destruction of our environment. Nevertheless, we must to do this in order to sustain ourselves in capitalism. This extends to global society as a whole.
This brings me to my final point, which is an attempt to explain the fundamental reason why work is viewed so positively despite its obvious negative consequences. It seems to me that this stems from the ideological construction of work as something that is transhistorical or natural. While it is true that humans have always had to expend energy in order to sustain themselves, work as a concept is an abstraction specific to capitalist modernity (see Robert Kurz, The Substance of Capital). Nevertheless, the prevailing notion is that work is something that has always existed.
As a result, people equate work with the activities that humans have always done in order to sustain themselves. From this perspective, work is just something that “has to be done,” no matter what the consequences are on an individual or planetary level. That is why today you see hundreds of thousands of people in the US willing to put their lives, and others lives, in danger in order to go back to work. They have a serious case of Chicago Syndrome, and the only cure is creating a way of sustaining human life that doesn’t involve work.
[1] This name is somewhat arbitrary. I chose it because Chicago was a center for manufacturing crucial to the development of capitalism in America. It also plays on the infamous “Chicago School” of economists who provided the ideological basis for the kind of market fundamentalism that proudly presupposes the sort of attitude I am attempting to describe.
Oliver Blackwell 