Work
In capitalism, "work" is reconceived as an abstract so that capitalists can be seen as putting more work into the economic system than workers. Obama made a mistake in ideology when he said that the wealthy did not build public goods in the US. In capitalism, they did. He was of course howled down by even his allies.It's important to understand that capitalists do not merely think that some work has more value than others. They also think that you *do more* if you gain more wealth. So they cannot understand concepts such as the equal hour or social value of work.
This is the theory of deserts in the neoliberal conception. In the liberal view, work can only be worth more if it has more value, and, because liberals pretend not to have an ideology that supports wealth and privilege, that value cannot be set arbitarily by the wealthy and privileged. So the work must actually *be* more, have more content.
So most people recognise that this is absurd: Jeff Bezos does not work a thousand times harder than a garbo, after all. But they do not recognise that it's simply a natural outcome of the theory of deserts that they insist is correct because they are affluent.
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What I am saying, in a nutshell, is that the capitalist ideological statement: if you work hard, you will succeed is not driven by the fact that hard work is valued. It isn't. Hard work is largely scorned. Most affluent people who claim to "work hard" simply work for long hours, which is not the same thing. Anyone who has cleaned their bathroom properly can understand what hard work is. In fact, working at a checkout and not going crazy is harder work than attending meetings or making spreadsheets. But wealthy people are supposed to have worked hard for their wealth. So in fact you need the said ideological statement to make that true.
posted by Dr Zen @ 8:28 am
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