Correct definitions of work

[Ilya Shambat]

Many people speak in favor of hard work; but they don’t appear to understand what hard work means. There are many things that are hard work that people think not to be hard work. We see this especially with social services and arts. As a poet and an ex-husband of a social worker I have this to say: Both of these things are work. They take effort. They take time. They also serve an important function for one’s country.

Really, what is the correct definition of work? Pol Pot thought that only the farmers and the laborers worked and everyone else was a parasite, so he killed of everyone who was not a farmer or a laborer and herded the rest into labor camps. The farmers and laborers did not achieve liberty, peace and justice from that policy. They lived in hideous, horrible, murderous totalitarian arrangements where women were used as baby factories and children were being sent to the mine fields to blow up the mines. None of what was promised was delivered to the people. In the end even Communists had had it with Pol Pot and drove him out.

I had a girlfriend from the other side of town. She was under the impression that the people from whom she had come owned work. When I was speaking positively about international trade she said that I did not like working people. Yet I was working, and she was not working. Everyone in my family was working, but not all in her family did. It is wrong for these people to equate their interest with the interest of the workers. American computer programmers and Peruvian laborers work as hard as they do. There is no “working class” or “propertied class” in America. Most wealthy Americans had to work at it. As an Australian businessman once said on the Internet, “managers have been proles, proles haven’t been managers.” A person who is truly in favor of the working people would consider the interests of all working people – both the people in one’s own country who’ve risen toward higher positions through work and the working people living elsewhere. The Chinese and the Hindus work harder than folks in Portland; and a person interested in making things better for the working people will consider their interests as working people and not limit that interest to workers in one’s own country.

When I was at a Rainbow gathering, a young man was going on about how “well brother, work goes on all the time.” He meant of course his practice of meditation and Zen. There was once an article claiming that people who pray a lot are bums. That is completely wrong. The advice from Augustine to Christian believers is, “Pray as if everything depended on God, work as if everything depended on you.” The problems that we have are sometimes an act of God but more often an act of people. We need to apply both modalities toward solving both.

Many people believe that the work that they do is important, and in many cases they are correct. It however is not the only important line of work in the world. And this results in various forms of wrongdoing. Many engineers think they are the only sane and rational people in the world and that everyone else is stupid, lazy or insane. Many businessmen think that they are the only winners in the world and that everyone else is a loser. Many construction workers think that they are the only real workers and that everyone else is a parasite. Many doctors think that they are better than everyone else because they have finished medical school. Many people in technical fields think that they own progress and intellect and that people in people fields are a bunch of quacks, in the same way as lawyers and salesmen think that technical knowledge is worthless and that people in them are negative ninnies. The truth is that all of the above, and more, are necessary, and that people working in such fields as art and social work need to be treated with respect by engineers, lawyers, construction workers and all other contributors to the economy.

The potential for success in any field is going to be opposed by people who do not consider the field to be valid. It becomes imperative to confront such situations. It is valid to see your work as meaningful; it is also valid to see as meaningful work the people in other fields. Pol Pot’s definition of a working person is wrong, as is the claim by some in America that they are the working classes and nobody else is.

As for “the propertied class” exploiting “the working class,” in America there is no such thing. The people who own companies in America either built the companies they owned themselves or rose through corporate hierarchy. In both cases they start out at the level of the worker, and in neither case is there a rigid class distinction.

All of the above require one another, and it is important that they treat one another right.