#946 Elizabeth Anderson: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Decent. I'm your host as always, Ricardo Lobs and the MG by Doctor Elizabeth Anderson. She is mcshay professor of Public Philosophy, John Dewey, distinguished University professor and Arthur F Feral professor at the University of Michigan. Her latest book and the book we're talking about today. He hijacked how neoliberalism turned the work ethic against workers and how workers can take it back. So, Doctor Anderson, welcome to the show. It's a big pleasure to everyone.

00:34 Elizabeth Anderson: It's great to be here.

00:36 Ricardo Lopes: So let's start perhaps uh all the way back at the origins of the work ethic or at least the work ethic that we're talking here about today. So, uh what are the origins of the protestant work ethic? And what is it exactly?

00:56 Elizabeth Anderson: So the work ethic was invented by Puritan ministers in England uh starting in the late 16th century, but it reached its sort of peak of theory in the 17th century. Uh The Puritans were Calvinists, so they're very stern, they were the killjoys of the reformation, not no pleasure here. So that, that basically what they said was because under Calvinism, everyone is predestined by God to be either saved or damned. Everyone is desperate to know whether they're saved and to gain assurance that they are saved. The parents had said you can't look into your heart, right? To tell whether you really have faith that Jesus is your savior. Because we're so we have such a strong motive to deceive ourselves about the quality of our faith that we can't rely just what we desperately wanted to be true. So the only way you could tell it through your behavior and you have to work like crazy. Well, why would work be a sign of f it's because work. God commands all human beings to work to promote the welfare of our fellow human beings. That is what we're placed here on earth to do. God has given us all these natural resources, the earth itself to enable us to help our fellow human beings on earth and conscientiously working very hard and using those natural resources that God gave us to help our fellow human beings. That's why we're here and to pursue God's commands faithfully is the sign that you really have faith in God. Right? So you have to work really hard. You can't waste any resources. You're not allowed to waste time either, right? No idleness here. You're supposed to save up your earnings. You can't just waste them on frivolities and luxuries and things like that. Uh You have to use every penny to promote the real welfare of our fellow human beings and not, you know, frivolous junk.

03:41 Ricardo Lopes: But do you have any idea how exactly these, I mean, let's call it an ideology for the time being. We'll come back to that question later on. But, or how this ideology developed, I mean, did it have something to do with, for example, the advent of capitalism because it suited capitalism as, uh, a sort of econo uh new economic uh structure or was it something about the, I don't know, the psychological traits of people who like this kind of ideology, the Calvinist specifically or was it just something that was already part of the culture from which Calvinists stemmed? And I mean, these are just three hypotheses it could be.

04:30 Elizabeth Anderson: So I agree with Max Weber who wrote the original scholarly study of the Protestant work ethic. It's called the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. And what we said is the Protestant ethic. The work ethic predates modern capitalism as we know it in the 17th century. It wasn't yet on the scene. So he reads the puritans and I agree with him as fundamentally theologically oriented. Ok. It's really all about God and God's commands for human beings and hope for salvation and things like that. Um And what Baber said was despite the fact that their aims were Godly and oth otherworldly because it promoted an ethic of disciplined labor. It set the stage for capitalism, modern capitalism as we know it, that is capitalism that's based on highly disciplined, highly organized wage labor and enduring uh workers to the drudgery of the industrial revolution. It kind of, it, it kind of set the stage to enable the industrial revolution to leap forward. But that didn't happen until the 18th century.

05:50 Ricardo Lopes: And is there any relationship between the work ethic and utilitarianism? And if so, what would it be?

05:59 Elizabeth Anderson: Absolutely. So the puritans invented utilitarianism. There's a wonderful Puritan theologian Richard Baxter who still studied today in seminaries, by the way, uh he formulated the first real statement of what is known today as act utilitarianism. He said, give it a choice between promoting a greater or a lesser good. You have a strict duty to promote the greater good. And keep in mind that one of the axioms of uh the church of England, which was theologically Calvinist is that there's no such thing as super Arrogation of doing anything beyond the call of duty right now. You have to maximize the good, right and you're slipping, it's, it's simple to do anything short of that. And you can see some of the same moral rigor is among utilitarians today. If you look at, say somebody like Peter singer, even though undoubtedly he's made immense amounts of money on his books and lectures and so forth. But he lives a very frugal life just as those Calvinist thought he should. And, and he's, and he's dedicated most of his income to charity, which is exactly what Baxter said should be done with all that wealth you're accumulating from all that hard work you're doing.

07:30 Ricardo Lopes: So, perhaps some of these, uh, I mean, original work ethicists would be into things like effective altruism if they were alive.

07:42 Elizabeth Anderson: Baxter was already there. And what's remarkable is Baxter actually has a wonderful, uh claim that exactly parallels an argument that Peter Singer in, in advocating for altruism, uh effective altruism made back at, I can't remember 1980 something. Uh, SINGER'S analogy was, well, suppose you see a drowning child in a pond, shouldn't you ruin your business suit and your nice shoes and weighed in there to rescue the child from death even though it's gonna cost you your nice clothing. And Baxter essentially said the same thing in his Christian directory, his comprehensive guide to a Christian living in which he said you should give up the fancy clothing of your wife and Children and not obtain for them anything more than plain clothing so that you can dedicate that money to save the poor.

08:47 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. So I, I mean, uh one very interesting thing here is that, of course, uh today, there's uh at least one general idea that is that we tend to associate the work ethic with conservatism and the political, right? Mostly. But since we're also going to go through some of the intellectual history, intellectual background here over the course of the last few centuries. Is there or has there been a progressive slash uh left wing version of the work ethic?

09:27 Elizabeth Anderson: Yes. So that's exactly the key arguments of my book is that, yes, there was a conservative work ethic and Max Weber characterized it accurately. It's nose to the grindstone for the workers to the maximum profit of the capitalist. That's the regime we're living under now. We call it neoliberalism, but it's basically just the modern work ethic. But the, the key discovery I've made is that Faber was only half, right? That if you go back to the puritans, you can actually see traces of a much more progressive and uplifting story about workers. The point of the work ethic on earth, not just to help our fellow human beings, but also to exalt the status of workers. They're doing God's work. In other words, what puritans are saying is, it's not just the preachers or the priests who are doing God's work, every worker is doing God's work. And so they have to be honored on that account. And what does that honoring amount to? Well, you had to pay fair and living wages. Workers are entitled to a free choice of occupation. You can't just force them to work at something you want them to do. Uh So they have a certain amount of autonomy. You're not allowed to just boss them around tyrannically. You have to treat your employees with love and care and concern, provide safe working conditions. And it's, it's that what I call the progressive or pro worker work ethic that got developed through the 18th century, a among the political economists competing with or arguing with the conservative political economists who had this very harsh view that they wanted to impose on ordinary workers. Uh And so I read the history of classical political economy from Locke and Smith on right through Marx. Uh AND Edward Bernstein an unknown hero, social democracy. Uh THAT whole history, I read as an argument between the conservative and the progressive work ethic advocates. And once you see, once you read the text in light of the work ethic, it all falls into place and makes sense. Yes.

12:06 Ricardo Lopes: OK. So going a few centuries back, uh one of the most prominent figures whose work you explore in the book is John Locke. So what does John Locke have to do with the work ethic? I mean, what did he have to say about it?

12:27 Elizabeth Anderson: Yeah. So keep in mind that Locke is writing only a couple of decades after the end of the English Civil War. And Richard Baxter actually marched with the parliamentary army against the king. He was a chaplain to the army. OK. So we know whose side he was on. And Locke basically famously advanced a labor theory of property. So in the state of nature, the only way to get a just claim to property is to work it, right? You have to be growing something on it, making it productive. It's a very calvinist idea, right? And then you, you get to own that property in virtue of the fact that you're, that you're basically enacting God's will and helping your fellow human beings by, right, making the earth productive, be fruitful and multiply, right? That's God's command. And um he advanced this ethic, I argue uh to justify uh the constitutional claims of the Levelers who uh advanced a very radical uh constitutional agenda during the English Civil war. They wanted to abolish uh the privileges of the Lords abolish the House of Lords, put everyone on common law. So keep in mind when we talk about common law today, we assume that everybody is subject to common law. But back in those days, the Lords had their own set of laws that they passed in the House of Lords that were just for themselves, right? And they could not be tried by commoners. They were tried by peers, peers, of course, were fellow members of the House of Lords, right? And so they had all these privileges and, and commoners couldn't sue them. They were totally unaccountable. Like you couldn't trust a contract between a lord and yourself if you were a commoner because the Lord could just like take whatever you made like a tailor might be, make some fine dresses and suits and so forth and then not pay you and the tailor would be out all of that money and cut it to the Lord, right? So the Levelers and then Locke argued for equality under the law. Very important. You don't have different classes of people where one has special privileges over the other. And also for the primacy of parliament, right. Parliament makes the laws, not the king and the king can't even veto those laws, right. And so lacks constitutional proposals are the Levelers. So the Levelers were explicitly arguing on behalf of the common ordinary welcome against the lords who were oppressing them. And of course, the king who was taxing them and doing other awful things.

15:40 Ricardo Lopes: And one of the things you explore in the book is the initial intellectual developments that led to conservatives hijacking the concept of the work ethic and turning it against the workers. And of course, we don't have of course time uh to go through every single one of these figures, like for example, Priestly Malthus Burke and others. But could you tell us perhaps uh in a summarized way what these intellectual developments were and how exactly did they turn the work ethic against the workers?

16:21 Elizabeth Anderson: Yes. So just keep in mind that what happens during the industrial revolution is a split between what I call a conservative work ethic, which is basically the property owners or the capitalist work ethic and the uh progressive work ethic, which is a work ethic advanced by uh and on behalf of workers. Now, if you look at the original work ethic. What it does is it unites the rights and the duties of workers. Workers have to work really hard, but then they're entitled to reap the fruits of their labor, right? You get the benefits for performing the duties here on earth, not just waiting for the next life. Um But during the industrial revolution and the way the puritans could make that unity possible is that their model workers were manual workers who also had property claims. The yeoman farmer either owned his own plot of land or had a long, very long lease on it. Uh The merchant uh owns his own shop but was also manually crafting manufactured items like shoes and so forth. Um So the rights and duties were naturally unified in the 17th century in the typical or model puritan worker. Uh But by the industrial revolution, you see a radical split where workers become wage laborers with no property at all or no claims on property income, a capital income. Uh BECAUSE the machines are too big and expensive for them to own capitalists on those things, the factories and so forth, right? The workers are impoverished and similar things happened in agriculture too, which is very important. The workers lost access to land, they could no longer lease their own land. The the the big landlords basically gobbled it all up often by force of parliament just forced sales. Um So the workers are impoverished now and have only their wages to rely on in order to survive. So and, and so you have to, because the work ethic is the dominant conceptual scheme, but a normative scheme in England at the time, everybody had to fit their preferred mode of social organization within the terms of the work ethic because that was just the dominant ideology. So, although the workers work ethic, I think has a natural unity to it. Uh WHERE the rights and duties go hand in hand, the capitalists had to explain how they get all the, all the benefits of the work ethic, right? The workers get all the duties, right? And so the way they did this to move quite quickly through, uh the basic theory was of the Conservatives that poor workers would not willingly work hard. Uh EXCEPT if they were forced to under conditions of poverty and precarity. OK. And so to make them do their duty to work hard, right? You have to stick them in those positions. But also perhaps to give them some promise that if they do work hard and save and practice these other work ethic virtues, then maybe they could become rich, at least they'll have a shot at that. So, and what that means then that the key problem for the Conservatives is that there was a poor law in England. It's basically a national run welfare system under which the deeply impoverished could claim some handouts from the government typically in cash that they could use to survive. And of course, that comes right from the effective altruism part of the puritans only they thought it was a strict duty to give so you can tax people to do it. It's not voluntary, right. You have to be an effective altruist. So it's ok to tax you to do that. So, but they hated the poor law because they imagined it turns out falsely that it gave an outlet for lazy idlers to live off the public fisk rather than working hard. Ok. Now, this is completely false, but that's what they imagined. And so we have a variety of schemes then to somehow eliminate or radically change the work ethic to make sure that lazy people can't just live off our hard earned tax dollars. Ok. So Priestley's idea is you abolish the poor law and you enroll workers in a forced savings plan where they had to save for any possible accidents in their retirement, out of their own wages. Ok. Um Benson's thought, well, we, we can't have people just get cash without having to work in return and we can't leave them at their liberty because, you know, if they're poor, they're probably doing shady things. So we have to uh put them all in a panopticon, a prison panopticon and force them to work in return for their food and, you know, room board dress and so forth under humiliating and totalitarian conditions. Moth is thought let's gradually phase out the core loss, you announce it in advance. So people have plenty of time to prepare. Right. And, and then, you know, I then that will force people to be prudent to save, to delay child rearing to childbearing until they can afford it to delay marriage until they can afford Children and so forth. Right. And then we won't need, we won't need the poor law anymore because it will force people to be prudent and adopt the work ethic virtues, you know, working hard saving prudence. Looking ahead, not having, you know, more kids than you can afford and so forth. Haley is arguing against envy of the of, of the better off. He says, look, you workers, you think you have it so hard. But in reality, it's the lords who have life really hard because they're wringing their hands all the time on how they can find adequate positions for their 2nd, 3rd and 4th born sons under the laws of inheritance. At the time, the firstborn son would inherit everything. And so the fathers then had right, this desperate scramble to find positions that were, you know, had enough dignity to them for uh the lower born sons, the later born sons, so that they wouldn't fall into a catastrophe. And then Burke and Whateley uh Burke advance the idea that workers are entitled to nothing more than exactly what the market gives them. Ok? So if they starve under the market level wage. Well, that's too bad. Right. There shouldn't be any poor law to supplement that. Right. So, keep Burke here and Malthus are very close together. Um, AND lately invented European imperialism, the ideology of European imperialism on biblical grounds. So, he was a theologian and lately believed that, uh, uh God had already given the gifts of agriculture to human beings after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. And so if you come across a people who are backward and don't even have, you know, agriculture and herding and uh uh you know, working advanced metallurgy and this kind of stuff, then it must have been that they've slipped back due to their idleness. And consequently, it's the, it's, it's, you know, the burden of the civilized, the most civilized that is the Europeans to lift them up by ruling over them, right? And that's really right, the white man's burden is coming straight out of Whateley,

25:27 Ricardo Lopes: a another burden by the way, another burden because earlier, for example, you mentioned the fact that the capitalists, the business owners and all of that, the factory owners have that burden of trying to distribute things through among their 2nd, 3rd and 4th son and whatever.

25:50 Elizabeth Anderson: Exactly.

25:53 Ricardo Lopes: So, so yeah, so, uh ok, so perhaps uh there's many things there that interestingly enough ring a lot of different bells because they start to sound very curiously close to uh neo liberalism.

26:10 Elizabeth Anderson: But we'll get,

26:12 Ricardo Lopes: but, but we'll get there. We'll get. Ok. So there are two other specific, uh, I guess, standards, I guess we could call them of the work ethic and more specifically the conservative work ethic that I would like to ask you about and the progressive version of it, we're going to get into it in just a bit. But, uh, what about, uh, the, what about independence and personal responsibility? I mean, when exactly were those two aspects of the work ethic introduced? And what role do they play there? Exactly.

26:50 Elizabeth Anderson: Yes. So independence and personal responsibility are terms that are introduced in the late 18th century with the rise of the conservative work ethic. Uh AND independence basically means not receiving uh means tested welfare benefits from the state. That's all it means because of course, it can't mean for the Conservatives getting money that you haven't earned by working for it since they're all recipients of capital income. And indeed the inventor of this idea of independence priestly conceded that the rich by which he meant the landlords and other recipients of passive capital income, fairly dependent, their own standard of living matter of stigmatizing, receipt of means tested welfare benefits. The idea of personal responsibility I think is ambiguous because it means two things. One thing that it means is you have to bear the costs and benefits of the consequences of your own conduct where those costs and benefits are determined by the market. And so responsibility in this sense is just who's gonna bear the costs. Uh But then there's another sense of personal responsibility, which is the assumption that if you are bearing a lot of costs like you are very poor, it must be because you were in some sense, irresponsible, not prudent, not obeying the dictates of the work ethic, not working hard enough, having too many kids before you're able to afford to raise them things like that. And so that notion of personal responsibility as the opposite of irresponsibility is a way to blame the poor for their misfortunes.

29:11 Ricardo Lopes: So before we get into the progressive version of the work ethic and some of the biggest names associated with it, uh Let's talk here a little bit about some of the political applications that the conservative work ethic first had. So for example, in the book, you go through things like the English welfare reform, the Irish Poor law, the Irish famine policy. Could you tell us a little bit about that? I mean, I, in what ways did the conservative work ethic? Uh I mean, from uh that was I guess originally a philosophy in what ways did it translate into actual policy?

29:56 Elizabeth Anderson: Uh What I argue is that a prime implication of the conservative work ethic is an extreme skepticism and very stinting attitude towards public welfare benefits for the poor. Uh THAT the poor are just trying to be lazy and lie in a hammock while they consume taxpayer funding there's a a punitive attitude towards anyone who falls into a condition of neediness. And that leads to an inclination for some kind of imprisonment of the poor and subjection to forced labor. So you have the invention of the workhouse, which already it sort of existed in the 17th century but not, they were considered houses of correction and they were temporary lodgings where somebody who is say, begging on the streets without a permit might be said to be whipped and then, you know, sent on their way. Uh BUT workhouses in the, in the 18th century, it become a serious matter where you could even be consigned for life once you were destitute and they were designed to be incredibly punitive and harsh. And in the late 18th century, the welfare roles are increasing and they continue to increase in the early 19th century. Malthusian panic erupts. There's this idea that the poor are just breeding like rabbits and they're going to overwhelm everyone and and just ask for, you know, more and more and eat up all the rents. That was the great worry that the landlords because taxation to support the poor law was on uh land, right? It would be the landowners who ultimately bore that cost. And they were worried that all the rents would just be eaten up with welfare tax payments. So they became very punitive as a means of deterring uh the poor from even applying for benefits and punishing them if they were allowed. And so the workhouses were basically prisons. People lost all civil rights. They were subjected to more demeaning conditions even than criminals. So for instance, criminals would get a spoon. Right. But they, but, but the people in the poor houses had to eat with their hands. Oh my God, deliberately humiliating. Right. And that's a deterrence. And it's also a test of whether they're really needy because no one would ever accept these conditions if they could have any other way of scrounging a living. So in uh 1832 in England, uh parliament passes a welfare reform in which they declare that everyone who claims aid has to enter a workhouse as a condition of getting it. This was never realistic because workhouses were way more expensive then uh just giving cash handouts to people who stayed in their cottages. Um And of course, there was always outrage at the extreme cruelty of the workhouses. So they were very unpopular. Uh And, and so welfare policy gyrates between the hyper punitive and the lower cost because the landlords also didn't want to pay higher taxes. You never really had a stable regime. They keep on going back and forth on that. Uh And then in Ireland, the situation was somewhat different because there the uh the conservative work ethic people in parliament thought that the Irish landlords as well as the Irish peasants were exceptionally lazy, lacked industrious industriousness, they lacked frugality they would just be spendthrifts and waste all their rents on high living. These were stereotypes and the English thought that they had perfected modern agriculture by adopting a capitalist system of agriculture. And so their project for welfare reform in Ireland was basically to force the landlords to bear the costs of welfare uh for the poor in order to force them to get more efficient and productive on their estates. And the capitalist model would eliminate the peasantry instead of peasants, each farming their own plot of land to farm their own food. They would be reduced to wage laborers, landless and effectively destitute to make them work harder because they're desperate every day to find a means to provide for themselves and their families. So they're really gonna work hard. That was the theory. Uh And, and so they imposed on Ireland some requirements to create a poor law which hadn't really been in existence before, mainly to burden the landlords and force them to get more productive and efficient by adopting a capitalist system. And then when the Irish famine struck, that was due to a potato blight. Uh AND potatoes were the main uh crop that fed a very high percentage of the Irish, especially in the rural areas. Uh People started starving and welfare policy. Famine relief policy was run from the Treasury Department in London. And uh people in parliament thought that this was a wonderful opportunity to clear the estates of all those lazy peasants who could simply before they would be able to plant a quarter acre with potatoes and feed a large family on that tiny little plot and potatoes pretty much grow with very little tending, tending. So, uh, they didn't, they weren't working as hard, right. Um And so, uh, and so the conservative work ethic advocates saw the famine as a wonderful opportunity to clear the estates of peasants. Hopefully they go elsewhere if they didn't starve. And indeed millions went to the United States, Canada, Australia where wherever they could manage, many, you know, many others died. And this was uh our path to forcing a capitalist system of agriculture on Ireland. At least that was the thought and consequently famine relief, although it was practiced was extremely stingy and many devices were invented to uh reduce the peasants to absolute destitution and to make it almost impossible for them to get aid.

37:39 Ricardo Lopes: And so on the other hand, what were the main ideas of people like Adam Smith, David Ricardo and the other Ricard and socialists that can be classified as a progressive work ethic. And what are some of the main ways in which it differs from uh the conservative version of the work ethic.

38:06 Elizabeth Anderson: Yeah. So um just recall that in the late 18th century, the work ethic splits between a pro worker and a pro uh uh capitalist version. Conservatives give us the pro capitalist version. Uh But then the people I call progressives because they all believe in progress. Uh And they have a certain view of what it takes to get progress. Um They're, they're on the pro worker side. And so that includes Adam Smith to a certain degree, David Ricardo, some of ambiguous figure, but there was a group of so called Ricard and socialists who took some of Ricardo's ideas to their logical conclusion. Uh John Stuart Mill and ultimately, even Karl Marx are on the pro worker or progressive side. The critical difference that the progressives have with the uh conservatives is in their attitudes towards poor workers. The conservatives thought workers, poor workers would quit as soon as they got enough to survive, they would quit working. The progressives all thought, look, if you, if you pay them decently, they'll be and give them a reasonable prospect of improving their lot in life, that will be an incentive for them to work harder. So you have a split between uh the incentives that we assume the poor have. Right? One thinks to make them work hard, they have to be in a situation of poverty and precarity. And the other side says, no, give them realistic prospects for improving their condition and they will work as hard as you want them to work. But also there's another fundamental difference in attitude towards the poor. And here the poor of course, were the vast majority of workers. The middle class was still very, very, very tiny Yeah. Uh, A and, and that just has to do with, um, whether you trust the poor to use their freedom wisely. So, the conservatives were forever wringing their hands over the imprudence. They imagined the poor had that they're having reckless sex and having too many babies and so forth. But, uh, for the progressives, how people behave is fundamentally a feature of the incentives that they face and you could arrange positive incentives in such a way that people will both work hard and be prudent in other ways. They'll save money, they'll do, they'll practice all of the work ethic virtues if you give them positive opportunities. Uh And, and so you can trust workers to promote the, their self interest and the interests of their families under a properly organized uh system of social institutions, especially property arrangements.

41:27 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Uh You know, one before we go on one of the reasons why I was laughing a little bit when you mentioned the ideas that some of the more conservative people have about the poor and the destitute and particularly them having more Children than they should uh in, in their mind. Of course, uh uh is that I I it sounds really close to some of the ideas that we heard and still here, unfortunately, from the eugenicists, for example, because I mean, it's always this idea that, oh my God, poor people, uh the low IQ people, for example, in the 20th century. And now people talk about a lot about IQ, for example, low IQ people are having so much chil, uh, so many Children. Uh, AND, uh, it's, uh, a disaster and stuff like that. Uh, I mean, it's, it's always, it, I, I laugh because these ideas are not as original as probably many, many people might think.

42:38 Elizabeth Anderson: Oh, absolutely. I mean, when it comes to welfare policy, arguments in, uh, the United States and to a great extent, also in uh uh the UK Conservatives haven't thought a new thought about welfare policy since Malthus, they continue to repeat the same uh uh denigrating and suspicious ideas about the poor, regardless of enormous amounts of counter evidence against their assumptions. So now we have literally hundreds of experiments of a basic income where you just hand poor people cash on a monthly basis and see how they do. And overwhelmingly, they're not just lying back and quitting work, but rather they're using that money to improve their condition precisely as uh Adam Smith thought they would, you know, they're going out there, they're using the money to uh you know, get more education, maybe to start a business. Uh BASICALLY there that it gives them a longer time horizon with which they can plan because they don't just have to concentrate exclusively on finding their next meal. And that longer time horizon enables them to plan for bigger things like investing in their own skills uh or just taking on bigger projects than is possible if you're practically on the edge of starvation all the time.

44:19 Ricardo Lopes: Uh So, uh let me ask you about Marx specifically because of course, he's a huge figure in the 19th century and in economics more largely so, uh how did these ideas about an, an alienated work tied to his progressive work ethic?

44:41 Elizabeth Anderson: Yeah. So this is one of my mo my favorite discoveries in reading the text. Uh Marx, of course, was uh educated at a Christian Academy in Germany uh uh as a minor. Uh AND in his abature, this is his uh graduation final examination. Uh He was assigned to write on the topic of a young man's choice of vocation. That is how does a young man decide what his calling will be. And in his examination essay, he exactly reproduces uh Robert Sanderson's criteria for finding one's calling. Sanderson was 1/17 century puritan preacher and he uh wrote a very famous sermon that was reprinted many, many times in including deep into the 19th century in which he laid out his criteria, right? And, and they were, you have to choose something that will positively benefit uh other people, not just yourself uh that you will personally find fulfilling because it exercises skills that you enjoy practicing. Uh AND um that, you know, conforms, you're able to deploy those skills effectively, right? So you had education in those skills and essentially in his final exam marks reproduces all of those criteria. Uh It adds that there's also an expectation of recognition from the recipients of your services. They'll appreciate what you did, right? That you're showing how you care about their welfare and doing a conscientious job for them and they reciprocate by honoring what you're doing for them. And that idea became Marx's idea of un alienated labor. I mean, step by step. So you can see in a beautiful way how the puritan notion of the calling leads directly to Marx's ideal of un alienated labor. Really, the puritans had already figured it out. Uh And then of course, his critique of capitalism in the 1844 manuscripts is essentially, well, we're not, workers aren't getting anything like those conditions, right? They're consigned to drudgery, boring repetitive tasks that are, you know, mechanized, they're reduced to drudges, nobody appreciates what they're doing. They're bored out of their minds. Their work is deskilled. Uh And I, I hasten to add that on these points. Marx and Smith were in agreement. Both of them agreed that industrial labor in the factories was horrible for the worker. That is their daily experience of work was absolutely awful. Uh And both lamented this fact as did Jon Stewart Mill. So they're all the progressives are united on their values about what, what, what a good job would look like. They all agree and they're all taking their cues historically. I mean, they're all descended from the Puritan tradition of what a good calling would be like,

48:35 Ricardo Lopes: and by the way, I guess that it's safe to say that even today, uh, this sort of an alienated work, it is still true. At least to a great extent for people who work what we could call essential jobs. There is the jobs that keep society and the ideas that people tend to have about, uh, those workers, the kind of work they do and the low status they have in society are still more or less the same. Right? And, and I'm, I mean, I'm commenting, I'm commenting that just because, uh sometimes times we hear people saying that, oh, the, the bad days of exploitative work in capitalism for people who worked in very bad e extremely bad conditions in factories and elsewhere. Uh They're, they're gone. They, they, they, they occurred in the 19th century. They're not here anymore. But I, I mean, I guess that's not exactly true. Right.

49:45 Elizabeth Anderson: It's not true. Although it is the case that automation has massively reduced the uh percentage of workers in the rich countries for being on assembly lines. However, if you look at the global economy, sweatshop manufacturing is all over the world and those conditions are, you know, not distinguishable from those in the 19th century, uh they're using higher tech, but it's equally drudgery. It's dangerous, it's dirty, it's unhealthy. Right. It's awful growing and it pays horribly and it's not, you know, it's very unsafe all the things that Marx complained about, not just in the 1844 manuscripts but throughout Capitol.

50:36 Ricardo Lopes: So in more recent times, in the 20th century, specifically with the rise of social democracy in what ways did it encapsulate a progressive work ethic?

50:52 Elizabeth Anderson: Yes. So I read social democracy as it was originally uh imagined uh by Edward Bernstein, who was uh intellectual leader in Germany's Social Democratic Party as a kind of combination of the progressive work ethic because it puts them all together in a package, stressing the importance of decom modifying labor, that is not just reducing workers to whatever they can get in competitive markets controlled by capitalists. Uh ENABLING people to uh you know, get decent wages, safe working conditions, you, you regulate the factories, uh but also a rich body of benefits that don't depend on working. So social welfare benefits, paid vacations, um access to education that you don't have to pay for out of pocket um medical care, other kinds of social insurance. Um All of these ideas are I think are coming out of the progressive work ethic and going back actually to the puritan idea that the economy and the division of labor exists to advance everyone's welfare. And it doesn't exist in order to manifest externally some presumed hierarchy of virtue among workers. And it also is based the, the social democracy is a very freedom oriented uh system. It wants to give people lots of free time so that they could choose to use on their own judgment rather than working from dawn to dusk at somebody o somebody else's direction,

52:57 Ricardo Lopes: right? And in what ways does that tie to historically speaking, the origins of social insurance? And what role does that play in the sort of history that you are exploring in the book?

53:13 Elizabeth Anderson: Yeah. So social insurance is really interesting because uh it was the idea of social insurance uh was invented by uh Kor and during the French revolution and Tom Payne, the great American revolutionary who also played a minor role in the French revolution. Uh Payne and Conor say actually knew each other. Uh AND Payne traveled to uh uh Paris um during the revolution and uh escaped with his head. I'm like kind of said he was executed by the Jacobins. Uh But these ideas were in the air and the great contribution that um Tom Payne made was to show demonstrate its feasibility. That is what he was postulating was based on uh British data treasury receipts. Basically that if you just tax inheritances, uh you could pay a perfectly fine social insurance package that would include uh retirement benefits for people, too old to work. Uh DISABILITY benefits, uh survivors benefits for orphans and widows that it wouldn't take much of a tax on inheritances to give every poor person uh you know, adequate insurance against destitution. And that could then replace the poor laws. It would be a universal benefit for everyone. So you wouldn't have to means test uh uh benefits. Uh AND you would um get them on a non stigmatized basis because everyone would get them. It wasn't a sign of shame or stigma if you received it since everyone was entitled to this. And he argued on strictly lacking grounds that the landlords owed a rent to everyone else because once they enclosed the land, they deprived other people of access to it, even though the lackey deception of course, is that the earth started off owned in common by everyone, right? And so the landlords owed to the rest of society, the value of production that could be credited to unimproved land. Uh And that's with the tax with yields. Uh AND he proved it was perfectly feasible to abolish poverty uh by implementing this social insurance system. And also he thought the inheritance tax would be enough to give every young person starting out in life a basic grant, a capital grant, just a lump sum of money which they could use to purchase tools or an education or whatever they need, start off in life at, at a higher wage, right? So that they wouldn't fall into poverty in the first place,

56:29 Ricardo Lopes: right? And so finally getting into the subtitle of your book, what is neoliberalism? What characterizes it exactly? And how was it influenced by the conservative work ethic?

56:49 Elizabeth Anderson: So my argument is that neoliberalism, I'm just defining this as a set of policies. First off, just a set of policies that systematically favor capitalists over workers. And there's a lot of them, uh, that includes, um, low marginal tax rates on supersized income, favorable tax treatment of capital income. Uh, THE insistence that, uh, employers have a monopoly over the direction of their companies with workers not having any voice. Uh, A set of global free trade agreements that forbid states from regulating businesses in ways that might reduce their profits. Right? There's a whole set of policies like this that all skew in favor of capital. Oh, and extreme hostility to labor unions, right? Workers should get a voice. They should just rely on what the market gives them and hostility, of course, to welfare payments or any access to income other than work for ordinary people. Um So you put that all together, right? And that's neoliberalism today. And the critical issue is neoliberalism is packaged to uh contemporary people on the theory that, well, it's about free markets and all the freedom you can have on the market as a consumer or as a worker or as a business owner. But in reality, it's really a theory of shrinking the size of the state and state capacity because neoliberalism also thinks all those lazy bureaucrats, they can't do anything efficiently. So government services should be outsourced to private, for profit corporations here in the United States that's been carried to a significant extent. We have private for profit prisons, just as Bentham advocated, we have uh private for profit schools even in elementary grades. Uh RIGHT, they might be tax funded, but it's really a private entrepreneur who is organizing the school and running it for profit. Um So that's neoliberalism. And my argument is that neoliberalism just is the latest version of the conservative work ethic. It's like let the capitalists roll and design property and markets and other institutions in their favor, uh hostility to state capacity or any state benefits. Um BECAUSE the workers should be in a state of precarity and right under the ideology of personal responsibility and not being dependent. Right. Uh That's going back to priestly. It's all the same. And what I'm doing then is showing that our contemporary neoliberalism, it's just a rewarmed fru of the conservative work ethic. And we should recognize that fact. It's about capitalist ruling.

1:00:16 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. And I guess that people need to stop complaining because if they are not rich yet, it's just because they're not working hard enough.

1:00:28 Elizabeth Anderson: Right. Right. I mean, that's the theory.

1:00:33 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. And so how does welfare policy operate within neo liberal capitalism?

1:00:42 Elizabeth Anderson: Yeah. And this is like the great contrast between the social democracies and the model of welfare policy that we see exemplified most strongly in the United States, but to a certain degree in Britain as well, at least under Tory governments. And the, the, the basic idea is you, you have a general hostility towards universal benefits. So, in the United States, the Democratic Party has been trying since around 1948 to get universal health care and inch by inch. It's been a massive struggle. We still don't quite have it. Obamacare made a major step towards universal health care. But in fact, there are still many millions of Americans who have inadequate or unaffordable health insurance or none at all. Right, because they just can't afford it. Um And that's right that you could see that coming out of the hostility to welfare programs that we see in pre priestly and Malthus. Um uh AND, and so I see the United States as really the conservative work ethic on steroids under neoliberalism, things have to be means tested. There's very, it's very stingy, welfare benefits, very mean spirited, lots of arbitrary obstacles in front of getting them a deep impatience with people who are on benefits for too long, arbitrary cut off dates. That was the welfare reform that Clinton enacted in 1996. It's all the same.

1:02:28 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Uh And particularly when it comes to business ethics in neoliberalism. How does a conservative work ethic translate into it? Exactly. And particularly with this sort of shareholder version of capitalism.

1:02:48 Elizabeth Anderson: Yeah. So, um in the immediate post war era, the United States had a brief era of stakeholder capitalism and that meant that corporations and uh the, the heads of corporations thought that it was their duty to serve all of the stakeholders in the firm, you had high rates of unionization. And so even nonunion jobs had to keep up with those wages that were set in the unionized uh, factories. Uh, AND CEO S would take pride in the fact that they had so many well paid workers, but there were other CEO S who opposed that and had a more conservative view of things and thought that, well, you know, a business is not a charity, businesses should be run strictly for the owners that is the shareholders. And our sole duty is to maximize profits. That's what the economist Milton Friedman said. Uh And that theory took off uh with the rise of neo liberal ideology starting in the 19 seventies, it really took off with the election of Ronald Reagan who pressed the liberal policy. Uh And of course, labor unions had been in decline again since around 1948 actually. Uh uh THE post war era, a major anti union bill was passed, uh called the Taft Hartley bill, uh which Truman vetoed, but he was overwritten. Truman called it a slave labor bill. He thought it would destroy labor unions and it took some decades. But in fact, labor union rates now in the private sector are around 6% down from around a third of workers uh in the private sector. Uh AT their peak, there's a big difference in bargaining power if you don't have a labor union. And, and if you don't have high labor density, labor union density. So workers have been falling back and capitalists have been massively enlarging their profits. Now, what the puritans, you know said is that it's fine to make money, but you're not allowed to make money in predatory and exploitative ways. And they listed some of those ways. One of them is their very stern anti monopolists and they didn't care whether the monopoly was established by the state, a state grant, a monopoly or whether it was achieved through various kinds of private sector, business tactics. It was wrong. You're not allowed to exploit other people by charging monopoly prices or monopoly prices on labor. That is if you're the only employer say in a factory town, you can drive wages down because those workers have no other choice. They didn't like either and they didn't like uh you know, exploiting renters. That was also bad just hiking the rents because you could uh and they also oppose making huge profits based on zero sum financial speculation. In all the neo liberal economies, we see a financialization happening where banks are uh taking a larger and larger share of profits as they are uh as they, it's, they are playing more and more purely speculative zero sum games. We saw what happened with the height of speculation in 2007 and eight. It basically drove the world economy into recession for years. Um The ps didn't understand macroeconomics but they did understand that if you just are playing a lot of zero sum games, you're just profiting at other people's expense, you're not adding value, you're not promoting human welfare. So they were very sternly opposed to making mon money that way. But that's actually the chief source of profits. If you add up monopoly profits and profits from speculation, that's basically most of the profits that corporations are making now in the global economy. So their business models would be condemned by the puritans and they're also condemned by social democracy.

1:07:23 Ricardo Lopes: So this sort of neo liberal version of the conservative work ethic is the work ethic that is dominant in the world uh today.

1:07:36 Elizabeth Anderson: Right? I think that's correct. Yes. Um It, it's because the global rules of uh trade have been written in a neo liberal uh uh with a neo liberal orientation. So they prevent countries who have signed on to the World Trade Organization from taking measures that would reduce the profits of foreign investors uh because of, you know, taxation or regulation or minimum wages or any of the other techniques that social democracies use to improve the lot of ordinary workers.

1:08:19 Ricardo Lopes: So my final question will be then, uh what can and should we do about it then? WW how can we deal? Uh I mean, how can we go or try to go beyond the current state of affairs with neoliberalism, this newer version of the conservative work ethic and perhaps strive for uh to uh I mean, try to get into a more progressive version of it.

1:08:55 Elizabeth Anderson: Well, so I, I am working from the premise that some idea about the work ethic still has a deep hold certainly in the United States and the other uh countries uh that were uh orig originally settled by the English. So that would include Australia, New Zealand and so forth. Um THAT work ethic values still exists. It's, it's in the discourse. And so one of the big contributions of my book is I wanna say, look, there really is a positive side to the work ethic and it makes a certain amount of sense. These are genuine virtues. They're not the only virtues, of course. And one of the chief uh benefits of social democracy is that it gives us room to develop other values, other virtues besides the work ethic virtues. But it's still the case that social democracy does depend on uh people working. There's nothing wrong with expecting reciprocity from one another. Um As the parents insisted, that meant that even the rich should be working. And that means positively promoting human welfare and not just collecting income passively or engaging in predatory business methods, but really positively helping other people through disciplined work. Um Anyone who's able to do that, I think should be expected to do their share. And the social democracies depend on that because if people aren't working, you can't raise taxes needed to find a generous welfare state. So you see uh actually a stress in these, in these countries on high labor force participation uh and mechanisms such as uh state paid um preschools to make that possible for women to participate at high rates as well. Um So what I want to argue is, look, we, we can't really escape the work ethic. I think uh it's deeply embedded in these cultures. Uh BUT we can turn it around and use it in favor of workers uh rather than use it against them. And so the chief contribution of my book is to unearth the what I call the progressive work ethic and shows that it animated a large number of thinkers from the 19th century through the glory days of social democracy. I think today that social democracy still remains the most successful model we've ever had of a more equal and fair society, although it's fallen on hard times. And I think what we need to do is re envision social democracy and reinvigorate it by uh re revising social democratic policies for the 21st century. But again, that, that does involve acknowledging, you know, some of the values of the work ethic. Of course, we've abandoned for a long time, including the conservatives have abandoned the killjoy aspects that the parents had like no pleasure in this world, right? We've abandoned some of the original values and rightly so, but others I think are worth, are worth building on in a way that would actually be helpful to workers.

1:12:32 Ricardo Lopes: Great. So the book is again hijacked how neoliberalism termed the work ethic against workers and how workers can take it back. I'm leaving a link to it in the description box of the interview. And uh Doctor Anderson, apart from the book, would you like to tell people where they can find you when your work on the internet?

1:12:53 Elizabeth Anderson: Well, uh you can go to my website and uh uh you know, I, I have a complete listing of all of my publications, a lot of them online, even if they're ever, a lot of people have posted, including myself and I, I do have some things that I'm free to post on academia.edu and Research Gate. There are some articles you could pick up or you could request articles from me if they're still uh under re restriction restrictions on uh wider distribution and, and you can write to me privately and I'll send a copy at most anything except for whole books so that I'm not allowed to just send PDF s of old books around those you have to buy.

1:13:47 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. Ok, great. So I'm also adding that to the description of the interview and thank you so much again for taking the time to come on the show. It's been a real pleasure to talk to you.

1:13:58 Elizabeth Anderson: Oh, it's fine. Thanks for inviting me.

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