Techne versus Praxis

Contemporary technology has not only forced a reconsideration of the relationship between human society, its mega-technology, and nature; it is also reshaping the nature and the future of human work. The replacement of entire categories of workers by machines cannot fail to have a profound effect on employment, and “technological unemployment” is a serious concern in most developed countries. The history of work is the history of humanity itself. Since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, human beings have had to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow and the fatigue of their bodies—at least those who did not belong to the idle minorities spared from that fate, living off the surplus produced by the vast majority of workers. Until the Industrial Revolution, most of the population was rural and labored under various forms of subordination to landowners, producing food for all. Other workers, who produced tools and other necessities, were artisans typically organized into guilds: carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths, masons, and similar trades.

It is a curious fact that these two historical forms of labor—the farmer and the artisan—have remained in the popular imagination as paradigmatic figures of noble and dignified work, far more than later forms that still exist, such as the industrial worker or proletarian. In our time, the romantic glorification of these figures can perhaps be summed up in the image of the gardener, the artisan of the land. Yet that image also signals marginalization, because the gardener occupies no central place in the contemporary economic process and functions rather as a servant to the affluent class.

By contrast, the image associated with the proletarian is that of alienated labor: the worker, for a wage, performs a mechanical function within a production process he does not control, producing goods he will likely be unable to purchase because of his impoverished condition. This proletariat rebelled against its status, first under the influence of Enlightenment thinkers and later following advocates of socialism and social justice. In the mid-nineteenth century, the labor movement emerged from this class, fighting unchecked exploitation; this struggle provided the empirical basis for the theoretical developments of Marx and Marxism, which sought to define not only an objective but also a method to achieve it. Through a struggle that was sometimes violent, the working class secured many rights, including the incorporation of the very concept of social justice into modern society’s value system.

There is no intention here to summarize the history of that struggle, which spanned part of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. Unfortunately, when Marxism came to power, it transformed the promised emancipation of the working class into a totalitarian dictatorship that fulfilled none of its promises. Beyond this historical trajectory, technological and industrial development progressively reduced the numerical prominence of the industrial proletariat, much as earlier transformations had affected rural labor. Today, a large share of employment lies in the tertiary sector, the so-called services. The problem now posed is the real possibility that human labor may cease to be a vital necessity, since within a few decades almost all tasks traditionally performed by humans could be carried out by machines. This issue has two dimensions. One is social: humanity’s future will depend on finding a relatively uniform way to distribute the wealth produced by machines, ensuring a minimum income for all, even as access to an increasingly restricted labor market declines. This is also a condition for the system’s own viability; otherwise, there will be no solvent market to absorb the abundant output of an ever more automated industry.

Today, the negative aspects of this supposed liberation from work are beginning to appear: unemployment and its sequelae of marginalization, loss of self-worth, and growing violence, particularly among young people who struggle to find a social position offering a future worth striving for. In this context, it is especially tragic and indefensible that alongside high levels of adult unemployment and underemployment, millions of children in many countries are forced to work under conditions as inhumane as those of industrial-era Europe, despite universal official recognition of the “Rights of the Child.” The unrecognized and unpaid labor of women remains another unresolved issue. Once these negative aspects of the current distribution of wealth are addressed, another problem—existential in nature and potentially even more serious—will come fully into view: what will humans do when they no longer need to devote most of their time to earning a living? Humanity will then face a wholly new situation, for which the Western tradition offers no useful proposal. At the same time, the forms of work that do persist will be the most creative and intellectually demanding, requiring the full development of human capacities—forms of activity now carried out by those at the forefront of scientific, technological, and artistic progress.