Work, By Any Other Name
The traditional political debate between the right and the left revolves around the ownership of the means of production, to put it in Marxist terms: that is, around the question of whether business enterprises should be privately run or made public property. I would put it this way: the most important thing is that man should be the measure of all structures, including economic structures; the most important thing is not to lose sight of personal relationships—the relationships between man
and his co-workers, between subordinates and their superiors, between man and his work, between this work and its consequences.
An economy that is totally nationalized and centralized, such as we’re familiar with in Czechoslovakia, has a catastrophic effect on all such relationships. An ever-deepening chasm opens up between man and the economic system. The company allegedly belongs to everyone, but in reality it belongs to no one. Having lost his personal relationship to his work, to his company, to the many decisions about the substance and the purpose of his work and its consequences, he loses interest in the work itself. All the natural motive forces of economic life, such as human inventiveness and enterprise, just payment for work done, market relations, competition, and so on, are scrapped.
All this is notoriously familiar. At the same time, I don’t believe that we can wave a magic wand and dispose of these problems by a change of ownership, or that all we need do to remedy the situation is bring back capitalism. The point is that capitalism, albeit on another level and not in such trivial forms, is struggling with the same problems. (Alienation, after all, was first described under capitalism.) It is well known, for instance, that enormous private multinational corporations are curiously like socialist states. With industrialization, centralization, specialization, monopolization, and finally with automation and computerization, the elements of depersonalization and the loss of meaning in work become more and more profound everywhere.
Western corporations work better than the Skoda plant, but that doesn’t alter the fact that many of these companies have lost their human dimension and turned man into a cog in their machinery, utterly separated from what, and for whom, that machinery is working, and what the impact of their products are on the world. From a certain point of view, the Western companies are worse than Skoda. Whereas Skoda merely grinds out the occasional obsolete nuclear reactor, capitalist corporations are flooding the world with ever more advanced products, while their employees have no influence over what their products do to the human soul and to human society. They have no say in whether they enslave or liberate mankind, whether they will save us from the apocalypse or bring the apocalypse closer. Such “Mega-machinery” is not constructed to the measure of man, and the fact that Western companies are capitalist, profit-oriented, and efficient while Skoda is socialist, money-losing, and inefficient, seems secondary.
The most important thing today is for economic units to maintain—or, rather, renew—their relationship with individuals, so that the work those people perform has human substance and meaning, so that people can see into the enterprise they work for, have a say in that, and assume responsibility for it. Such enterprises must have—I repeat—a human dimension; people must be able to work in them as people, as beings with a soul and a sense of responsibility, not as robots, regardless of how primitive or highly intelligent they may be. It isn’t easy to find an economic expression of this indicator, but I think it’s more important than all the other economic indicators we’ve managed to isolate so far.
But it’s not just man as worker that we’re concerned about; it’s the general meaning of his work. It’s important that man have a home on this earth, not just a dwelling place; it’s important that his world have an order, a culture, a style; it’s important that the landscape be respected and cultivated with sensitivity, even at the expense of growth in productivity; it’s important that the secret inventiveness of nature, its infinite variety, the inscrutable complexity of its interconnections, be honored; it’s important that cities and streets have their own face, their own atmosphere, their own style; it’s important that human life not be reduced to stereotypes of production and consumption, but that it be open to all possibilities; it’s important that people not be a herd, manipulated and standardized by the choice of consumer goods and consumer-television culture, whether this culture is offered to him by three giant competing capitalist networks or a single giant non-competitive socialist network. It is important, in short, that the superficial variety of one system, or the repulsive grayness of the other, not hide the same deep emptiness of life devoid of meaning.
Given this, I would tend to favor an economic system based on the maximum possible plurality of many decentralized, structurally varied, and preferably small enterprises that respect the specific nature of different localities and different traditions, and that resist the pressures of uniformity by maintaining a plurality of modes of ownership and economic decision-making, from private enterprises, through various types of cooperative and shareholding ventures, right up to state ownership. Nothing in this, of course, should be allowed, in its own area, to preclude the genesis of anything different. Any eventual central regulation of this variegated economic scene (and some degree of minimal regulation is essential) should be based on nothing more than a highly evolved sensitivity to what contributes to the general good of the human being, and what, on the contrary, limits and destroys it. The referee in such matters, of course, could not be a state bureaucracy but a democratically elected political body that relies on a continuing dialogue between public opinion and expert opinion.