How to be an ethical professional worker

What can liberty mean in a world where almost everyone is a worker? Marx posed this question without really answering it, his political theory owing more to notions of popular sovereignty introduced by Rousseau and the French Revolution, and to vague notions of democracy based on subordinating political questions to the social ones of class and class struggle. This would eventually by seen by various thinkers inside and outside the Marxist tradition as a theoretical problem needing to be addressed. The eventual fate of “Communism” in 1989 was partly the result of this failure.

A totalitarian society is one with little real liberty because, whatever is said on paper and enforceable in law courts for those to whom they are very accessible, state and society tend to become identified. (And, similarly perhaps, desire and duty, which Hegel reproached Kant for separating.) And most people believe things that are ideological: rooted less in fact and thought than in what enables them at the level of identity and styles of thinking and feeling to comfortably reproduce the dominant social norms and values.

What happens, and what should happen, in this context with the figure of the worker? Or of the professional, which is, literally the aristocracy (the term means rule of the “best”) or talent, merit, and achievement, the figure that became dominant in the 20th century in both “socialist” and “Western” capitalist countries?

Professionalism is not an elite status tied to the occupation. This is how there can be professional janitors, sex workers, housewives, or anything else. Professionalism rather confers status on the worker as worker under the figure of excellence. Excellence is, everyone knows, doing what you do, or your job, and doing it rightly and well. This also means it is doing what you are told. We all know what it looks like to do a job and try to do it with excellence, as we at least know this from professional sports, which are simply about that. Now, if everyone is like a baseball team player, the society fictioned as this great team where everyone does their part, will not be, whatever else it is, very democratic. You are not supposed to argue with the umpire. (Anyone remember John McEnroe, the Queens-bred tennis player who would often do just that? Most people would just say he had a bad attitude. Few would distinguish the content of his complaints that is their possible truth from the apparent fact of bad, and, let’s admit, disobedient attitudes ).

When workers are organized, professional associations and the norms proper to them often conflict with what might be those of a union properly so called, with the open embrace of antagonisms a activist labor movement, like a democracy, requires, and that an association of workers collaborating with capital in management precludes. In that, the dominant professionalism used to be called, indeed, a labor aristocracy.

What about professional workers whose job includes enforcement, and who, a priori, may or may not believe that what they do is just? Many are the occupations where this or might be true: Police, security guards, social workers, lawyers, doctors, debt collectors, sales people, customer service reps, receptionists and secretaries, teachers, hospital nurses, journalists, film industry professionals…Basically, anyone whose job involves dealing with other people, either internally to the company or with the public. The source of the problem is that they intelligent, creative, and well-intentioned individuals dealing with others who are these things also, but according to norms and rules that are those of the bosses. They are enforcers of capitalism and the capitalist state. Whose downsides we know well.

There are two possible attitudes, according to whether or not the worker more or less fully identifies him- or her-self with what they are expected to do. The conscientious worker is the one who is able, and knows he is, to dis-identify with the apparatus of management and governance.

The one who identifies fully with it will tend to believe that some form of humanism or kindness and courtesy, etc., generally tends to change things, and immediately. (How can I be oppressing you or involved in perpetrating injustice, when I am here, looking at you, and, as you can see, I am just a human being treating you like one, as, like everyone, I love and honor the Gods and am a respecter of persons?) Ironically, this is because he thinks of himself qua worker as like a transparent tool, whose purposes if good cannot be opposed to or by those of their own bosses. At least absent a certain kind of dialectic, which is perhaps what saved Marxist Hegelians in their own minds in situations of alienation or exploitation and the command that goes with it that they would will to make good on. For in the dialectic most things people say and do and want are both right and wrong: there is some claim in what they do that a critic whose point of view is outside theirs will ignore at some peril). The other possibility is to be able to recognize situations of discrepancy and when the situation actually calls for actions at some distance from what the bosses expect of him. (The supposed dialectical fact of the partial rightness of the claims of those in power is a contingent possibility and not a necessary given.) In short, a more rigorous professionalism itself enables him to rise above its narrower form. Workers’ autonomy and democracy would facilitate this.

I said recently to a social worker employed by a government agency that I believe a conscientious person in her position will take the attitude that they are employed by a system that is largely unjust to do things that are often unjust. And who will then generally resist that.

When Hannah Arendt published her account of the Nazi war criminal in Eichmann in Jerusalem, she created what really is a literary figure and so one of historical possibility. A figure as powerful as Macbeth, Iago, and Richard III, or as Melville’s Ahab, no less than men like the Noah Cross of the film “Chinatown,” by Holocaust survivor Roman Polanski (Cross avows that in the right circumstances a man, generally, can do almost anything; morality’s elevator has no basement). That recent scholars appear to have refuted her core claims about Eichmann the man, this sounds like the refutation of the idea involved for many in our ad hominem intellectual culture. But actually something larger is at stake: What do we say about people, including ourselves perhaps, who blindly obey authority, often thinking they have no choice? Arendt argued that this is the “evil” that comes not from an evil will, passion, desire, or mere bad habits, but from not thinking at all. What thinking is, is an interesting philosophical question; the legacy of the tradition Arendt was part of, that of German philosophy from Kant to Heidegger, suggests that thinking is more than just the functional, operational, technical, performative, strategic and tactical, effectual, efficient, etc., and obedient processing (and representation) of information, or knowledge. (Facts are fetishes of functionaries and will in no wise save us from the failure to think).

What is thinking then? Maybe it is what enables beings who use language to wonder and doubt, or problematize. Maybe it is the gesture of mind and language that refuses the automatic authority of the given. This was true in the two founding moments of philosophical modernity. or (a suitable definition) contemporaneity with the demands of the present time, those of Socrates and Descartes.

Problematization is creating a problem out of a situation so that it can be solved or more clearly thought and understand. One reason for the centrality, which may actually be increasing, of the arts in our time lies in a need for problems and not mere situations (which one theoretically already knows how to respond to). Thinking is not solving problems but creating them.

The worker who is an adult is as skeptical, as is the radical or the philosopher about the demands of the given tasks that are given because authorized by those in command. The realization of this could make much work difficult in a way, and much governance difficult in another. A society that is intrinsically difficult to govern is called democracy.

Until then, most people will do what is expected of them, and if they are employees, their company’s bosses and their own labor unions will act in concert to try to guarantee their “right” to “do their job.” Your “rights” are what authorities permit you to have, even grudgingly, or what they tell you to do.