Sharon Beder's previous book "Global Spin: The corporate assault on environmentalism", would be in the top handful of books which have influenced my thinking. Thus, when she released this book on work, I was an easy target.

Selling the Work Ethic asks questions about our society which seem forbidden in the mainstream media. Both the corporate media and our government-owned "public" media have an interest in keeping the capitalist growth machine grinding away. Human labour underpins corporate profits, both from its part in the production of goods and giving workers the ability to consume them. National budgets rely in a large part on the taxes paid by work and in winning elections politicians want to see good employment and economic growth numbers. 

Work is of course not just a conspiracy of the plutocracy. The material basis of our lives is underpinned by people rising each day and going to jobs that they are competent at.  The shared material well-being of a society is a result of many things, but primary among them is the productivity and ingenuity of the population. We tend to see work today as earning a wage in the employment of someone else, but this as the dominant mode of work is a fairly new phenomenon. As the book points out, most people in human history worked either for themselves or in smaller enterprises; indeed even today people underestimate the amount of employment by small businesses in modern economies. The alienation of the worker from the products of their labour that the global corporation and the production line so typify has had a profound effect on how we think about work; instead of seeing work as a way in which we contribute to the shared well-being of our society, we instead see it as a class struggle where we take a side and pit ourself against the other.

Class of course is a fundamental tool of understanding inequality in our world. The Communist Manifesto may have exaggerated when it said "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles", but it still pointed to an important and often neglected part of history. History often focuses on the struggles of kingdoms and empires moreso than the more important story of how the majority of people lived.  When one delves deeper into history, past the nobility and war, it is quite amazing how much class conflict there was; people have always struggled for their rights against often incredibly violent ruling sections of the population. The political evolution of the last few centuries has placed power into the collective hands of the people, and we see a very different ruling class as a result, but still the inequalities persist. While even a few generations ago "working class" was the self-identity of the vast majority of society, today they are now outnumbered by people who identify as "middle class", even if that is an aspirational identification.  How is a middle-class person's relationship with work and power different to the working class?  Reading some of the literature of the left, it is as if this shift has never happened. They still want people to rail against the bosses that middle-class workers might have a drink with after work and aspire to be, and to see themselves as pitted against the companies that reward them well, where they feel themselves to be a powerful and integral part.

As Karl Marx lay dying in 1883, a thinker of a very different kind, the father of modern Germany Otto von Bismarck was implementing the first state socialism in Prussia. The Iron Chancellor, as he was called, did not do so out of moral duty, but rather because he saw that having vast numbers of unhappy people made society less stable and government more precarious. Marx and Bismarck agreed on one thing, that social welfare made the lower classes less likely to revolt, which is why Marx generally opposed such moves and Bismarck implemented them. People lament that unions have lost much of their mass participation and relevance in today's societies, but this is undoubtedly related to the fact that work today, even for the lower classes, is less dangerous, better remunerated and less oppressive than it was in the recent past. In Australia where I live, unemployment benefits are a backup option when faced with work that one doesn't want to do. It is certainly not an ideal choice but a person can get basic housing, healthcare, food and a level of dignity without working. Right-wing politicians and industry bodies often oppose increases in welfare precisely because it alters the power balance in society; the higher the standard of living one can achieve without working, the higher the percentage of an employer's budget must be offered to tempt people to work.

Incentivising people to work is the basis of much of our economy.  We might see the marketing of consumer goods as in the interests of the companies selling them, but such marketing is in the interests of capitalism generally. People infected with the disease of consumerism, what some have called affluenza, are likely to be obedient and lifelong workers. I have met people who told me that their hobby is "shopping", which ignoring the environmental ignorance and philosophical emptiness of the statement, tells me that short of some economic windfall such people are likely to be chained to the machine of capitalism for their entire lives. So ingrained is the cycle of consumption and work that Beder talks about people who have no idea what to do without work, no conception of their identity. On the gates of the concentration camps, the Nazis cynically put the slogan, "Work sets you free". We would do well to understand this in the context of Sartre's comment that we are condemned to be free. I know someone who earns a higher salary than she needs and has most of her material needs "set for life". She asked to work 1 less day each fortnight to which her workplace agreed. For over a year now she has been struggling with what to do on her extra day off; almost as if it were a burden to her.  Many people have no conception of identity or freedom beyond work, what they might give to society other than obedience to someone else's vision. Aldous Huxley said that the ultimate form of slavery was one where the slaves loved their servitude and much of the relationship between work and consumerism in our modern world resembles this. Indeed if Huxley were alive today, he would see that many have taken on their slavery with such unquestioning conviction because they think they are free.

This might all be of philosophical or academic interest only. What do the people in the Matrix or Nozick's experience machine care that they are manipulated to perceive reality in a particular way?  Freedom sounds great when yelled in the movie "Braveheart", but how much do people really want it in amongst all the other potential goods in life, happiness, comfort, social status, self-esteem and so on?  The philosophers have always said the life of the mind, truth, depth of thought and peering into reality were the important things, but most people would happily trade such things for a bigger TV. This sounds trite, but preferencing easy positive experiences over often difficult abstract principles is profoundly sensible. Anyone who has tried to read many of the most famous academic philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger or Wittgenstein, would understand if many people found watching well-crafted entertainment more pleasurable, understandable and less demanding. Spending a life dedicated to philosophy is no inevitable road to success, happiness, social status, financial security and certainly not sexual fulfilment, as philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer have so memorably proved. 

Freedom of the mind might be the highest good but whether it is even attainable or not for most of us is open to conjecture; instead for now the material and social worlds are what primarily matter to the majority, and it is no coincidence these come together in our conception of work. This is why within a few moments of meeting someone they will ask what our occupation is, because they can infer much from this; how we spend our days, hints of our intelligence and worldview, the material and social place we occupy in society, and there is some evidence different personality types cluster into professions.  The question itself however can feel oppressive for people who don't like their work, identify with it, are disinterested in it, or don't work at all for a variety of reasons. Personally, I'd probably prefer to ask someone what they believe their duty to other people, animals and the environment is. There is also a political aspect to disliking the question, of all the things we might wish to know about someone, is how they participate in the economy really the most salient?  If as many people do, you see industrial capitalism as a life-devouring machine, asking people in what particular way they are helping drive it along, seems to miss the more important question of why they help drive it along. The sum product of the work humans do and the consumption that ensues from it is the key force behind the ecological apocalypse we are inflicted on life. If we look at our unconscious civilisation and its relationship with work, telling people that what they do might be unethical, even though they get status and are remunerated for it, can feel like unplugging someone from the Matrix. Maybe it would be fine to just leave people plugged in if we weren't all partly responsible for humanity driving a vehicle in which all life exists towards a wall at ever-increasing speed. Work consumes a huge amount of our life energy, to not ethically question what sort of world that energy is contributing to is almost to deny our own power and relevance.

The questions that Selling the Work Ethic is asking are of existential importance to our species. Why is our culture such a destructive machine? Why is it that when we see the negative effects our lifestyles are having on the world, we motor on regardless? Why are we working longer hours, not becoming any happier, and accepting an unequal society? Why do we not care about the extinction and oppression of other life caused by our consumption?  Selfishness and consumerism have been used to manipulate us into living isolated lifestyles that are not in our collective interests. Elites have always looked down on the common people as a potentially revolutionary mass that must be controlled. They have implanted the ways we judge ourselves and others for very specific outcomes, and to do this they have used religion, the education system, the media and other forms of propaganda. We might ask a simple question as evidence of this: when you see someone driving an expensive car, do you think of selfishness, attention seeking, environmental destruction and the preferencing of allowing wealthy people endless luxuries when many lack the basic necessities of life , or do you think of the person driving the car as a happy and successful person you would like to emulate. If it is the latter, you might just need to pull that tube out of your throat and mentally escape the Matrix. Wealth by itself is not a sign of morality, and in many cases it hints towards the opposite. The people who buy luxury cars are not all of those who can afford them, but the ones who need to demonstrate their wealth to others. 

Anyway, I have rambled more than introduced the book, so you should go and check it out, or ones like it. If you would like to know how this trick of societal manipulation has been accomplished, and why we ask someone upon meeting them what their job is, rather than what their hopes and dreams are, read this important book. Also look at topics such as Degrowth, steady-state economics, and doughnut economics.