Work is the most prominent feature of human life. So large a majority of human beings spend most of their lives at work that the few diseased and defective members of society who do not need scarcely be considered. As usual, the prominence and constant insistence on the facts about work have prevented our thinking much about it, and, when we did think, our mistaken basic concepts made us think wrong. Our general attitude toward work varies somewhat in accordance with race, place, and time, but is traceable, easily enough, to certain general root ideas.

One line of racial feeling on this subject has been most fully and ably treated by Veblen in his “Theory of the Leisure Class.” He shows how labour, being first performed by women and then by conquered opponents made slaves, was despised by the early mind, and how, further, the ability not to work, involving power to make others work for you, soon became an ingrained principle of pride; further, how the leisure class, an aborted part of the body politic, has preserved these errors of the early mind and added heavily to them by the increment of tradition and long association. This accounts satisfactorily enough for a large share of the popular feeling about work.

It is perhaps as part of this feeling that the ancient Hebrew religion, postulated by a people of pastoral ideals and Oriental temperament, takes the extreme ground that work is a curse, a punishment, visited upon man for his sins; and that Eden behind us or Heaven before us has its main attraction in ceaseless idleness.

This mischievous error, incorporated in so important a religion, and forced upon the human mind for so many centuries, has done incalculable harm. In vain have later and wiser religionists protested that “labour is prayer,” a divine curse is not to be whiffled away by any such pretty phrase as that. It is not enough to receive a new truth, you must discharge the old lie, if your mind is to work straight.

Our attitude toward Work rests also, however, upon other errors than these, the most fundamental of which are the Ego concept and the Pay concept. Under the first we relate our ideas and sentiments about work to the individual, in which position no understanding is possible; we might as well try to understand mastication in relation to a tooth. Under the second, we think only of the “reward of labour”; and have carried this absurdity to its logical height in classing the industries of the world under the phrase of “getting a living,” as if the maintenance of the worker were the object of the work. This again is as absurd as if we believed that chewing was done in order to maintain teeth.

When we accept the organic nature of society, the whole proposition changes, we then see all varieties of work to be social functions, performed in the interests of the whole; and that the maintenance of the individual normally depends, not on a reward for the value or amount of the work he does, but on the general health of the social body and his having proper access to its currents of nutrition. Yet even this perception will not wholly free us while we are still muddled by the pay theory, still holding that a man or a society only works in order to get something, and that, in justice, there must be a return for the effort expended.

This common assumption is accepted as basic by our political economists, and their further theories, systems, and alleged laws all rest on it. It is called the Want Theory. Fully and fairly stated the common definition of work, based on the want theory, is this: Work is an expenditure of energy by the individual in order to obtain the means to gratify a desire. This is almost universally believed. We accept it so fully that one of the steps taken by missionaries to arouse industrial energy in savages is to make them want things. As further manifestation of our belief in it we hold that if people were supplied with anything they did not work for, did not previously expend energy to get, they would, of course, cease to work. On this ground, honestly and logically held, every step toward free public provision for popular need has been opposed.

Before going further in discussion of our common errors, let us lay down the main thesis of this book, advanced as the true theory of work.

It is this: Work is an expenditure of energy by Society in the fulfilment of its organic functions. It is performed by highly specialised individuals under press of social energy, and is to them an end in itself, a condition of their existence and their highest joy and duty.

The difference between the two positions is best seen in studying organic action in lower forms. Consider, for instance, the action of the heart in our bodies. Here is a small muscular machine, which keeps up a violent and continuous activity for some seventy years. Why? and How? Why should this organ work so hard and so incessantly? My stomach gets some rest—my legs get more—but this member is always at work. What want does he gratify by it? Is he any better paid than leg or stomach?

If the heart were an individual, and were pulsating for pay, he might conceivably stop when he got what he wanted. “Why continue to beat?” he might naturally ask. “I have what I was beating for!” And if, further, you supplied this independent creature with all it wanted, free, it would quite naturally cease beating altogether.

But as an Organ, which is quite a different thing from an Individual, the heart does not act on any such basis. It has been slowly developed through long ages of physical evolution, to perform a function of no use to itself, but of primal use to the body to which it belongs, the body which made it, the body without which there would be no such thing as a heart. This function being so absolutely essential, the heart is fitted to beat steadily on from birth to death; when it ceases beating the body goes out of business altogether.

Now a separate animal the size of a heart could not keep up any such long-continued regular exercise, it could not furnish sufficient energy; but the large body which needs a heart can run one, it has a supply of energy on which all its organs draw. The work of a living organ is not at cost of its own energy, but of the energy of the entire organism. Society, as an organism, has a vast, a practically unlimited supply of energy, and the human being, as a member of that society, is supplied with it.

The discharge of this energy is so far from costing the individual anything that, on the contrary, any prevention of his normal work causes him acute suffering. And as in the physical body, each special organ, in order that it may devote its entire life to the physical service, is by the circulation of nutrition saved any necessity for caring for itself; so in the social body, each man, in order that he may devote his entire life to the social service, is similarly provided for by the distribution of economic products; our social nutrition.

Here we are at once met by existing beliefs, loud-voiced. “Men are not ‘organs,’ they are conscious individuals. Men are not—oh! palpably not—provided for by any such beneficial process of social distribution of nourishment; each man must take care of himself or starve!”

The individual consciousness of men is not denied, it is that, misconstrued, which has made these common social functions work so ill, and hurt so in the working. To that same individual consciousness this book is directed, urging reconsideration of the facts, readjustment of the industrial activities. But however conscious, men are none the less “organs,” their labours serve our common ends; not their own. It is not that each man has some exact analogue in physiological type, like the heart, but that each industry holds organic relations with all other industries, and that the use and purpose of each depend on the others. The need to be supplied is a social need, the growth to be attained is a social growth, of no more value to an individual, detached, than beating would be to a heart, detached. Work is an organic function, incontrovertibly.

As to the lack of social provision of nourishment, this again is but an error. The provision is there, the whole of society contributing to it; the circulation is there, our food and other goods flowing merrily across land and sea; but there is some trouble with the final distribution of this nourishment to the workers, which will be considered later. Admitting the imperfections, it remains true that the social circulation is now in action—the shoemaker of Massachusetts eating the beef of Nebraska, and the beef-raiser of Nebraska wearing the shoes of Massachusetts.

No man could work, which is a social function, if he had at the same time to “take care of himself,” which is an individual function. As a worker in society, he is taken care of, but he does not do it himself. To repeat our definition—normal human work is a discharge of social energy along lines of special development. The social organism lives in the fulfilment of its organic functions, that fulfilment is work; to work is to take part in the vital processes of Society, to be socially alive; not to work, not to take part in these vital processes, is to be one of three things: First, mere dead matter, Waste; second, a Parasite, active as a thief, passive as a pauper; or third, a Disease, of which in time Society must die.

With the waste products of society we are painfully familiar, the great army of defectives, people who cannot work, yet whom, as part of ourself, we must support, a drag upon the Social resources. The active parasite we know in his crude form, as the little thief, and are beginning to detect in his highly developed form as the big thief. The passive parasite we know also in his crude form as the idle poor, and are beginning to suspect in the idle rich. But the disease is still beyond our diagnosis, though many Societies have died of it, those morbid processes engendered by the presence in the social body of any matter not alive and healthily active.

These features of the abnormal working of Society come later. Let us now study the evolution of Work.

The Universe as we know it is occupied in transmitting energy. The amount seems inexhaustible and indestructible. It rolls on interminably, discharging warmth and light into blank spaces; and, whenever worlds have formed, getting tangled up in a thousand shapes and sputtering mightily as it finds its complicated way out through them.

A living creature has an elaborate system of receiving and discharging energy, more elaborate as the life-form grows higher.

Force in inorganic matter has a simple channel, varying the monotony by occasional explosions. Force in the vegetable world is freer and learns new tricks—building tall trees and flaming out in blossoms. Force in the animal kingdom has wider range; these life-forms can do more things. They have more ways to express energy, and more ways to receive it. With special senses tuned to catch various vibrations, they respond to light, heat, and sound, to touch, taste, and smell; their impressions are varied and their expressions equally so.

Here enters Consciousness, with its extremes of Pleasure and Pain; the director of action, but not its cause. This complex engine, receiving so many impressions, transmitting so many expressions, must feel, because it acts; must act, because it feels. An Action is a consciously directed expression of energy. A Sensation is a consciously recorded impression of energy. Both sensation and action, if normal, are pleasurable—the conscious transmission of energy is joy.

The pleasure in sensation increases in proportion to the extent and delicacy of the sensorium. The pleasure in action increases in proportion to the extent and delicacy of the executive mechanism. Pain, of course, is proportionate to pleasure at any stage; meaning only abnormal use of the same nerves, but the higher the development of the organism the greater its ability to avoid pain.

The course of evolution has been to develop more and more complicated instruments for the transmission of energy. Society, as the highest life-form, is the most exquisitely complex of all; it has a sensorium far larger, and more subtly sensitive, and an executive apparatus commensurate; it has a degree of consciousness highest of all, and a proportional capacity for joy and ability to avoid pain.

This social transmission of energy is Work. The forces of the universe flowing through humanity come in by all our highly cultivated powers of perception, and come out in our beautiful profusion of creative activities—in work. The conscious transmission of energy reaches in us a transcendent height of pleasure by virtue of our co-ordinate action. There is larger joy in “team-work” than in the individual play. The pleasure of dancing in companies, or the rhythmic motions of a drill, is not confined to those particular activities; but, in normal conditions, inheres in all smoothly co-operate exercise. The reasons why we do not feel it in those exercises we call work are not inherent, but purely associative; or else due to accompanying conditions of a painful nature.

Normal conditions of human work require, first, that the worker shall be well nourished physically and socially, well educated to his fullest height of ability, and well-placed in the work he likes best and does best—(these two being identical). A worker, so placed, is in no way overtaxing his own energy, but is merely giving expression to the social energy, and finds in that process an exhaustless joy. We are so used to consider work as a drain upon the strength of the individual—and indeed in our artificial conditions it so often is—that we may not at first appreciate the nature of this fund of social energy.

Let us observe its development, comparing the power at the disposal of a member of society with that of an individual animal. An individual animal is a mechanism adapted to the performance of certain activities, urged thereto by certain stimuli, and governed therein by certain instincts, and, perhaps, concepts. The activities of the animal are limited, of course, by his executive machinery; he has only the tools that grow on him.

These are ingenious and reasonably effective, but their development is slow, requiring many generations of heartless “elimination of the unfit” to gradually evolve the fit. If his claws are not good enough, he dies, those having somewhat better claws survive; slowly the claws improve. He cannot in one lifetime invent and manufacture better claws, but has to be tediously and expensively “selected,” the whole beast sacrificed to the defective claw.

Further, his excellence is checked by the interaction of parts,—all his tools being part of him, and modifying each other. The more things he can do, the less perfectly he does them; the more perfectly he does a thing, the fewer things he can do. The beaver, for instance, is a highly developed builder, but he cannot run well, or climb trees. Where you find the most perfect specialisation of an animal’s machinery to a particular function, you find the creature practically helpless otherwise—as the ant-eater. So we find the executive capacity of an individual animal limited, first, by his body and its slow methods of adaptation.

His stimuli are also limited. This small machine is kept going by its own supply of nervous energy, replenished by food, sleep, air, and water. It will run so long, and then must rest and be “fired up.” Special excitants of fear, pain, or unusual hunger may temporarily accelerate his activity, but he has then to rest the longer. His executive capacity is thus limited, second, by his small nervous energy and narrow range of stimulus.

It is further confined, thirdly, by the narrow circle of his instincts, desires, or ideas, if he has them. The governing impulse is simple race-preservation, mingled with the self-preserving instincts; egoism and familism cover his range of interests. Hope, fear, desire,—all are for self or family.

So we find in the individual animal, his efficiency is limited by (a) his personal mechanism, (b) his personal nerve force, and (c) his personal interests. For such an agent work—continuous expression of energy—would indeed be difficult. But now examine the position of the human being.

Man’s tools do not grow on him. He has been able to evolve improved tools without sacrificing a thousand slow generations to breed them. He adds to his executive ability, (a) the power of numbers, and of the “relay race” (wild dogs have this), (b) the power of division of labour, (ants and bees have this), (c) the tool, detachable and exchangeable.

In this comes at once an enormous saving of energy. Where the mole has to spend not only his immediate strength in digging, but his whole racial tendency in being modified to digging, the man with a spade can do far more work in proportion to his strength, and still be able to do other things. The executive efficiency of the man is multiplied, first, by association, again by division of labour, and again by the tool. The tool being not a personal adjunct like the claw, but a separate thing, usable by many, the efficiency is again increased by the exchange of tools. It is multiplied, fourth, by the development of the tool into the machine, and fifth, by the application to the machine of extra-personal power, of the forces of nature direct. Thus where one man alone as a separate naked animal could accomplish something equal to, say 5: as a member of society his efficiency is squared by association = 25; cubed by the division of labour = 125; raised to the fourth power by the tool = 625; to the fifth, by the machine = 3125; and to the sixth, by the use of natural forces = 15,625.

In view of even this much of our human efficiency, the exertion requisite for a human creature to do his share of our human work is so slight in proportion to our wealth of power that it is exquisitely absurd for us to speak of it as an expense of energy. Where an individual animal has to pour out his full stock of strength in hunting his prey, or, if graminivorous, in wandering over great areas after grass; man, collective, can produce and distribute food for a thousand by the specialised services of ten men with machinery. The executive efficiency of humanity is raised to such an enormous height that the spectacle of human beings still spending their personal energy at long hours of exhausting labour is an incredible paradox.

As far as power goes, one human being should be easily able to “pay for his keep” for life in a year’s work or less. But we are by no means done with the increase of efficiency. This five-times multiplied enginery of ours would still be comparatively futile, if the governing agent, man, had only the stimuli of the beast. The separate animal has his own supply of cerebral energy. It is something. It enables him to co-ordinate his forces, such as they are, and to undertake extreme exertion when he has to, such as it is. He maintains this energy by breathing, eating, and sleeping. Men can do these things too. Men, as separate animals, have each his own supply of cerebral energy. But Man has more.

Social energy is quite a different thing from individual energy. By as much as the dynamic force of an elephant is greater than that of the elephant’s bulk in monads, so is the dynamic force of a society greater than that of the mere sum of its individual constituents,—and more. Social energy has been accumulating in humanity from its birth. It is not only that co-ordinate action allows the transmission of wider waves of force than individual action, but that society in its organic function continually stores force in material products, and so establishes an ever enlarging magazine of power. This is where the social body so aids and furthers the action of the social soul. Each material object, so that it be a normal product, embodies and continually transmits the force that made it.

We are supplied, by virtue of our social relation, with a large complex brain area; the organ of social life. That great life we partake of in using the social body, in the immediately effective tools, utensils, and machines, and necessary material conveniences of life; but even more as we have access to the great social battery, the work of art. A human brain has not only the existent sum of social energy to draw on, but the stored energy of all the past.

The Artist, highly specialised receiver and transmitter, gathers immense waves of force, concentrates and embodies them, and those around and coming after have permanent access to the power that moved him. This is perhaps clearest in the art of literature; where the thought and feeling of all time stand bottled on our shelves, always feeding, never exhausted. In music and painting and sculpture—in all arts—we have forms of the same beautiful social process.

Thus the human brain receives as stimulus such floods of force, such soundless seas of force, that it is practically unlimited. The measure of social stimulus has yet to be found. It passed the using point long ago, and has never stopped growing. The human brain, rightly supplied with social stimulus, is so fed, so fired, so thrilled and filled with energy, that it suffers agony if denied free discharge. That free discharge is social service, the splendid variety and complexity of achievement in which all may find full exercise of this tremendous power, and in that exercise find pride, peace, and joy, express love, satisfy ambition, realise human life.

Thus with our endless multiplication of executive efficiency comes a similarly endless multiplication of stimulus—yet still we hear this prehistoric claim that a man will not exert himself—unless he has to! The point is, that he does have to—by virtue of being human; that it is not so much “exertion” as it is relief. To discharge an overpressure of energy is not “exertion” exactly.

Further yet: the beast, behind his little foot-power engine, with the force furnished by gobbled rabbit or patch of grass, had no governing scheme of life wherewith to direct his small activities, save the basic animal instincts of self-preservation and reproduction—egoism and familism. Man,—Citizen, Patriot, Hero,—man has for governing plan of action, the distinctive instincts of humanity,—the social. The animal will do much for its own life, the mother will do much for her own young; but man will do more for his City, his State, his Country, and his World.

This is not a sentimental claim for what he might do, but a plain historic reference to what he has done. Athenian, Roman, Carthaginian, Frenchman, German, or Englishman—latest of all, American. True, our recognition of social duty has been narrow; consisting principally in “dying for one’s country”; but that we have done with splendid heights of heroism, and no beast can do so much.

The bee and ant? Yes, of course, they too are social animals, of very high intelligence. And they, be it noted, have not this shameful fallacy that no one will exert himself “unless he has to,” unless he “wants” something. With much of the same collectivism, though sharply limited as we have seen by the predominant femininity, with much of the same specialisation, with a better developed sense of common interest than we have, the ant and bee are types of contented and ceaseless industry. Yet they have to do it all “by hand,” they have no extra-personal tools and machinery, they have no horse-power, wind- or water-power, steam power, or electric power. They have no great reservoir of energy in Literature and Art. And they have no wider scheme of life than a sublimated ultra-organised motherhood—everything else is subsidiary to that function.

If humanity were perfectly healthy; if our mechanical efficiency were rightly placed and fully used; if our social energy were accessible to all, and our social instincts freely developed, we should see each young human being coming eagerly forward to do his share of the world’s work, not under the action of personal desire—or fear of penalty—but simply to relieve the pressure! So irresistible is our growth in this direction that even under all our artificial hindrances, against the combined resistance of religion, tradition, superstition, habit, custom, education, and condition, still the normal child does want to work, tries to work, and in some cases bursts through the whole cordon of opposition and does the work he is made for, though it cost him his life.

We see this conspicuously in the latest and most highly specialised forms of work, as the arts, sciences, and most developed professions. Naturally the more delicately special an organ is the more imperative is its doing its own kind of work, and no other. So we have seen again and again the people we call “great,” they having more social energy at command than others, pushing forward over all obstacles to do their particular kind of work, not only without regard to the pay, which they did not get, but without regard to the punishment, which they did get. We have tried to account for this by assuming that the “desire” which actuated them was a desire for fame. We are so sure that it must be a desire of some sort! Why is it so difficult to admit the presence of radiating energy in a live creature? We can see it plainly enough in “mere matter.”

Radium does not necessarily want something because it so continually does something.

To feel a lack—to see a desired supply—to exert one’s energy to obtain the supply and so cease to lack, is a natural process of action, but not the only one. Organic action differs here from individual action.

The Teacher is an exquisitely developed social functionary, wholly a transmitter, using various arts and sciences to help him, but his own art involving the subtlest psychological skill. When this temperament is charged with most radical truths, when the teaching is a religion,—then we have the great souls who have appeared again and again in history, so charged with social energy that nothing, not difficulty, danger, death itself, could stop them. They would teach and they did teach, to the immense benefit of the society whose unconscious laws evolved them, whose conscious laws destroyed them. The scientific discoverer has too frequently shared the same fate; the inventor, the pioneer in any change, has a hard time. “The Push” in Society is a place of honour, but not an easy one.

Even in the more ordinary kinds of work we occasionally see the strong, clear urgency of a specialised worker toward his special work, and his pleasure in it; an urgency and a pleasure not related to honour or payment, but to the work itself. The reason we see less of the natural impulse to work in the main fields of labour is partly because we have piled our ignorant contempt most particularly on the kind of work we most needed, and partly because we have added to our contempt the heaviest practical difficulties by careful cutting off the general worker from his full share of social nutrition. The rank and file of humanity, as a result of our misconceptions about work, are so drained of nervous energy from generation to generation by being overtaxed in labour, and so defrauded of social nourishment by our system of “payment” based on those misconceptions, that it is marvellous indeed to see the work they do under these conditions, and not marvellous at all to see their steady tendency toward pauperism, criminalism, and all disease.

Of London it is stated that when the labourer from the country comes into the city to work, the second generation of his line is inferior in health, strength, and ability, the third generation much crippled and diseased, and there is no fourth.

Under social conditions like these it is not to be expected that we shall find much evidence of man’s natural desire to work, either general or special. As well look for willing industry in a hospital. On the contrary, it is to be expected that this body of people shall be unwilling and largely unable to work, that they shall seek continually to avoid work and as continually seek to enlarge their supply of social nourishment so cruelly cut off. It will take several generations of right living to reimburse this part of our social stock and bring them up to the level of social energy required to enjoy work. But when the swift recuperative forces of physiology have rebuilt the individual animal, and the far swifter forces of Sociology have refilled them with their share of our vast resources of strength and inspiration, and their share of the social interest, pride, and love which mark the fully human creature, then we shall find our assumption, “no man will exert himself unless to gratify desire,” to lack even its present justification.

There is no pain, no waste, no loss to normal work; it is a free discharge of abundant social energy, either unconscious or accompanied by sensations of keenest pleasure.

Let us consider this Want theory a little further.

A solitary animal cannot get his dinner without exerting himself. If he could, he would not exert himself. This we observe, and then, considering man as an animal like the others, we assume similarly: A man cannot get his dinner without exerting himself; if he could, he would not exert himself. Why we are so anxious to see to it that every man shall exert himself, a thing which evidently cannot concern the public if he is merely getting his own dinner, is a bit puzzling. But on perceiving that unless he exerts himself we do not get our dinner, our interest is excused.

Let us restate the proposition. Mankind cannot get its dinner without exerting itself. If it could, it would not exert itself.

Granted at once. If agriculture, manufacture, and commerce were not essential to social life, they would not have been evolved. But there is an immediate difference introduced in the “exertion” involved and its causes. Our social nutritive processes being complex and collective, require the elaborate activities of many individuals in lines which bear no relation whatever to their own dinners.

Social evolution, wiser and more practical than we, has met the necessities of the case by developing those organic tendencies in man which urge him to his social activities, and that always-increasing fund of social nutrition and social energy which enables him to do his work. The difference between an architect dreaming great buildings and eager to build them and an animal struggling for his food, is as the difference between the action of the heart and the action of a hungry fox. The fox exerts himself to supply his wants, the heart exerts itself as a functional activity it cannot help and without any reference to its wants.

Its wants are supplied, to be sure, but not in measured dole related to its activities. The exertions of the heart bear relation to the need of the organism to which it belongs, not to its own appetite. If you have to run, your heart works harder; it had no need of extra work, but you had, and, being an organ, it performed the work.

Man’s work is called for by the social demands. Society needs Commerce, and Commerce is developed. Society needs Art, and Art is developed. But man, being a self-conscious individual, had to be convinced from without as well as urged from within, else he stoutly refused to perform his social service. “Why should I,” he asks, “if it does not benefit me? A man works only to get something.” Before he had got even this far in formulating his objection to work, he was forced to it, as we have seen, by the slave system and effectually coerced. To meet this later attitude of refusal he was forced to it by the wage system, and effectually coerced as before. In the first case the anti-social results of that form of labour have led to its being discarded, and in the second case we are rapidly approaching the same conclusion. Social service performed under the persuasion of self-interest is accompanied by so many deleterious and anti-social phenomena that it is high time we adopted a wiser system.

When exertion is recognised as a racial necessity and a high individual pleasure, there is no longer any weight to the first clause of the Want theory. When it is shown that our desires are gratified by the exertion of others exclusively, there is no longer any weight to the second. And when it is shown that the required “exertion” is not an exertion at all, but a relief, a mere letting off of the social steam pressure, the Want theory begins to need a historian to explain it. The only really confusing element lies in the system of exchange now in use, the wage system, and will be taken up in the chapter on Distribution.