The period 1500–1650 was, as we know, characterized by huge transformations. Gradually, the modern world system started to extend across the globe, and the influence of market forces increased. That had a major impact on a wide range of societal forms and cultures and as a result in many cases different work ethics clashed and formed hybrid combinations. In other cases, traditional work ethics remained almost unaffected or new work ethics came into being during many-sided confrontations.
Much has been written about some aspects of those developments, especially the rise of a capitalist Wirtschaftsethik, with Max Weber's famous hypothesis regarding the “Protestant ethic” in particular leading to an enormous amount of literature.Footnote 1 Seen from the point of view of social history, this immense literature has two important shortcomings. First, much of it deals with the views of certain theologians and religious leaders in the period, without asking what the impact of their views was on the societies of their time. Second, if attention is paid to the social impact of ideas, then that research is generally focused more on entrepreneurs and much less on the lower classes.
In this preliminary contribution I will be reflecting on the scope offered by an alternative mode of interpretation, one that attempts to determine more emphatically the relations experienced by the labouring poor in the context of their work. First though, I will endeavour to describe a number of the key concepts (“work”, “attitude”) before critically discussing the various sources which might give us an insight into attitudes to work. I will conclude by discussing the interpretative difficulties and present a few substantive hypotheses.
Concepts
The first question we need to ask ourselves is of course what do we mean by “work”? Interestingly, there are linguistic indications to suggest that work was originally associated with womanhood. Evans has pointed to “female associations of the English word labo[u]r and the French travailler. The Greek techne included all manual skills: the verb, tikto, means ‘to bring forth into the world’ and is used of the woman in the sense of ‘to bring forth.’ Its general sense is to ‘create’ or ‘produce’.”Footnote 2 In addition, there was probably an association with suffering (a woman's labour pains). From there, the past two or three centuries have seen a demarcation emerging between work and other human activities, for example leisure. Prior to that there was no strict dividing line, and indeed the division between work and non-work remains contested and is subject to continuous change.Footnote 3
Discussions of answers to the question “What is work?” have been raging for decades. Many of the definitions proffered limit themselves to situations in which money plays a role. Nels Anderson, for example, talks about the “time given to a job for which one is paid”.Footnote 4 Such a description is not particularly helpful for our project, unless we wish to assume that unpaid work is not work. Other scholars have proposed broader definitions. Margaret Mead, for instance, has described work as “activity that is purposeful and directed towards ends that lie outside that activity”, in contrast to “play”, an “activity which is self-rewarding”.Footnote 5
A very simple definition could perhaps be: work is the purposive production of useful objects or services.Footnote 6 There are two elements here that should be emphasized. Work is a purposive activity (“premeditated”), and work creates objects or services that are useful to some people.Footnote 7 Usefulness is, of course, subjective: some people may find extremely useless what others consider to be very useful. Warfare, for example, is – apart from other things – a kind of labour process, but many people do not regard it as a useful activity – generally depending on the war that is being fought and the side those people are on. Work might also take the form of providing symbolic services: exorcism performed by a shaman is work, as is the hearing of confession done by a Catholic priest.
Work can be distinguished from non-work and from anti-work. Here non-work means recovery from work through, for instance, relaxation or sleeping. Anti-work covers all playful activities that cost a lot of energy but are not meant to produce useful objects or services. %.
Naturally, those three components cannot always be distinguished neatly as they overlap to some extent; nor are they clearly separated in time. During work time workers sometimes do things other than work, such as playing, sleeping, or relaxing. Cottage labourers, modern teleworkers, and many self-employed people working from home combine different activities.
The boundaries between those three types of activity are therefore vague and continue to be contested. That can be seen in the Eigensinn shown by workers during their work.Footnote 8 At the same time, there is not necessarily a sharp distinction between leisure activities and work: “Many hobbies and leisure pursuits are utilitarian activities which, though in themselves a source of interest and satisfaction, are undertaken initially for economic reasons. There is no clear line of demarcation between gardening or house-painting done from necessity and done from choice.”Footnote 9
When we ascribe these categories to reality, it is obviously important to distinguish between our own classifications and the classifications applied by the people we are studying. For example, in numerous societies men (and, often women) believe that many things done by women are not work at all – while we, basing ourselves on a certain definition of work, would certainly consider those female activities to be work.
The second question is: “Why do people work?” Here I would distinguish three kinds of work incentive: coercion; compensation, and commitment.Footnote 10 Coercion includes threats with or without the application of force, including incarceration, tormenting, mutilation, sale (of slaves), dismissal (of wage workers), or even death. Commitment is based on persuasion and sometimes joy, on workers being convinced that what they are doing is useful, important, and honorific. Compensation encompasses all material and non-material rewards, including wages and food rations.
The three work incentives never occur in isolation but always in constantly changing combinations and, again, their mutual boundaries cannot always be drawn sharply. A university professor, for instance, will work because it gives her or him status, but also because the job is paid handsomely.
Furthermore, we should recognize that during the various phases of a work relationship the combination of incentives can change. “The incentive to take up a particular kind of work or even to work at all has a logic distinct from incentives to working well.”Footnote 11
The third question then is: “What do we mean by attitudes to work?” An attitude could be described as: “a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor”.Footnote 12 Incentive structures and attitudes to work are closely related. The core concept here is that of internalization: if at time t 1 an individual must be induced to work by external compensation or coercion and at time t 2 does so on their own initiative, then he or she can be said to have internalized those external incentives. Internalization is thus a psychological process that converts external incentives (coercion, compensation) either entirely or partly into internal incentives (commitment).Footnote 13
Consistent with that, David Landes has made a distinction between “time-discipline” and “time-obedience”, or punctuality coming “from within” or “from without”.Footnote 14 In relation to chattel slaves in the antebellum American South, Mark Smith has defined that difference as follows:
[…] time-obedience refers to a respect for mechanical time among workers that, unlike time-discipline, was not internalized, but was rather enforced by time-conscious planters, either with the threat or the use of violence or with the constant repetition of mechanically defined time through sound, as with the chiming of clock-regulated bells.Footnote 15
How such internalization occurs is an issue that lies beyond the scope of this article.
Attitudes to work relate primarily to the duration, intensity, and quality of the work. The Pakistani sociologist, Shahid Alam, has proposed a slightly more extensive taxonomy, distinguishing three elements that, when combined, characterize an attitude to work (work ethic). First, effort propensity: this dimension covers work–leisure choices. Effort propensity is larger when the time devoted to work is larger too. Second, social efficiency, which covers socially acquired attributes that determine the effectiveness with which work or leisure activities are performed. The aspects involved are dexterity, perfectionism, consistency, and discipline. And third, social rationality: this dimension indicates in what measure labour relations and other social relations are characterized by such factors as trust, honesty, orderliness, discipline, courtesy, and foresight.Footnote 16
Many types of factor can play roles in analysing attitudes to work. First and foremost, we must know, of course, whether we are dealing with an ego-perspective or an alter-perspective. In the case of an ego-perspective, we shall be considering what individuals or groups think about themselves; in the case of an alter-perspective we shall be considering the views of individuals or groups about other individuals or groups. Within the ego-perspective, we can identify two levels, which, following Anthony Giddens, we could term practical consciousness and discursive consciousness. Practical consciousness is what people think when they actually do something, while discursive consciousness is what people say when they talk about what they do. Those two levels are not necessarily congruent. People may, for instance, say that they are orderly and efficient, while their actual behaviour reveals that they are not. Practical consciousness is much more difficult to study than discursive consciousness, since it is easier to find out what people say than what they actually do.
Related to that is a second distinction, between general and specific attitudes. People can regard “work” in an abstract sense as meaningful while at the same time loathing certain forms of work. In almost all societies, gender differentiation has resulted in some tasks being carried out principally or exclusively by men, or principally or exclusively by women.Footnote 17 Further, many sources create the impression that women have to work harder than men and have less power than men. For instance, Jean Barbot writes about Senegal around 1700 that the men “do not care to exert themselves greatly, either in body or mind”, while most women
[…] work at weaving cloths from cotton, or mats from straw or rushes […]. Wives and daughters also look after the house. They pound millet and make bread from it. They attend to the cooking. They fetch water from the river or the nearest supply. They feed their infants. Finally, they have to be responsible for keeping going all night a fire which burns near where their husband sleeps.Footnote 18
And François Valentijn noted that in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), “the men here are mostly lords and the women generally in the Indies mostly slaves of the men”.Footnote 19
Moreover, different specializations within a given social division of labour are perceived differently. In Senegal, Barbot writes, “they occupy themselves either in tilling the fields or sowing them, because this occupation is the most honoured after that of soldiering. Those who make fishing-nets, and the potters, the fishermen, the weavers and the weapon-makers, are considered mere mechanics.”Footnote 20 In contrast, in Scandinavia, according to Bishop Olaus Magnus, referring to a slightly earlier period, “men generally hold smiths in extraordinary esteem, whether blacksmiths, founders, or metal-turners”.Footnote 21 A similar differentiation can be found for various other types of labour relation. While today wage labour is preferred by many to other available forms of work, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England it was regarded as very lowly because it was associated with a completely uncertain existence, and entailed no rights.Footnote 22
A third aspect is that attitudes to work may be individual or group-based. Implicitly, contemporary Western researchers are often inclined to assume that relations and behaviours are based broadly on perceptions of individual self-interest. However, in the West as well as in many other societies work is often interpreted as a fundamental social activity which individuals engage in not only for themselves but also for others (compare the English servant/service or the German Diener/Dienst). Thomas Smith, a scholar of Japan, has observed that:
The language of Tokugawa agriculture was rich in vocabulary expressing work in a context of obligation to others. Suke was labour given by a dependent to a protector in return and gratitude for benefits such as the loan of land, animals and a house. Yui was an equal exchange of like labour such as mutual help in transplanting rice. […]. It is difficult to find any word that suggests work in a social context without carrying a sense of obligation to others.
After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, this limitation of vocabulary became an inconvenience. None of the words mentioned could properly be used for factory employment, which in both theory and law was held by the new westernizing government to result from a contract freely entered into by autonomous and equal parties. So foreign to social experience was this notion, however, that no satisfactory general term for worker was found until the 1930s.Footnote 23
Sources
How can we identify what attitudes to work existed between 1500 and 1650? We can sometimes discover sources through which “the subaltern speaks”, to quote Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, but such sources are not numerous. One example is the traditional songs sung by people performing labour.Footnote 24 It is likely that, in many parts of the world, a great deal of singing took place during work. In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, or What You Will (c.1601), Duke Orsino says:
O, fellow! come, the song we had last night.
Mark it, Cesario; it is old and plain;
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids that weave their threads with bones,
Do use to chant it; (Act 2, Scene 4, 42–46)
Such work songs encouraged not only a willingness to work, they could also facilitate the synchronization of activity, as in construction work, or in hoisting and lowering the sails of a ship, or planting rice in long rows.Footnote 25 In the case of Chinese earth-pounding songs, the singing was designed to encourage perseverance, because the longer the workers pounded the earth the stronger the walls would be.Footnote 26
Another potential direct source is the collective fantasies of another, better, life, as expressed in stories about Cockaigne and similar constructs – in all utopias we encounter a society without sorrow. Referring to European narratives of the kind, Piero Camporesi spoke of:
[…] the idea of eradicating barons and dukes, rejecting the parasitic and suffocating logic of the rich classes, the dream of the naked body carefree in its innocence, the yearning for physical health and the struggle for victory over disease, famine and cold, and freedom from the brutality of forced and inhuman labour.Footnote 27
That kind of utopia is not typically European, however, and we can find it in a tributary society such as China, where the origins of such stories date back even further.Footnote 28
Proverbs passed down through the ages can be used too, though it is particularly difficult to interpret them correctly since they are generally extremely short. Consider, for example, the following traditional proverbs from sub-Saharan Africa:
“You cannot kill game by looking at it.”
“Laziness lends assistance to fatigue.”
“A lazy man looks for light employment.”
“The sieve never sifts meal by itself.”Footnote 29
It is not easy to draw conclusions about attitudes to work from such proverbs, other than that work inevitably involves effort.
Naturally, this list of possible sources could be expanded.Footnote 30 But the difficulty with all these sources, which directly reflect what people thought four centuries ago, is that they are seldom transmitted to us in a pure form; usually “they are narrative in form and go through mutations and interpolations in being handed down through generations”.Footnote 31 Such sources therefore constitute only “soft evidence” – unlike archaeological material or authentic texts.Footnote 32
The reports of contemporaries from elsewhere, usually written by the elite including travellers and missionaries, form a second type of source. We have a large number of travel narratives for our period, varying from Richard Hakluyt (1589) to Samuel Purchas (1625).Footnote 33 Some of the travel narratives are reflective, but by far the most are, as Ter Ellingson has put it, “unphilosophical”; they “describe without reflecting much on the significance of what they see, particularly on the meanings of similarities and differences in the ways of life of human communities”.Footnote 34 Such sources may be used only with the utmost caution, because often they are partly projections and sometimes contain imaginative fabrications – a problem to which I will return shortly.
One might expect reports to be more reliable the longer the observer had lived in the society about which he or she was writing – one reason why reports written by captives, diplomats, and missionaries, who stayed for many years, would seem worthy of special attention. In the case of the Scottish missionary Thomas Cullen Young (1880–1955), for example, it has been noted that the “objectivity” of his writings on the Tumbuka-Kamanga peoples “increased the longer he spent in Malawi. Initially he suffered from one strong prejudice: he was affronted by the apparent lack of a work ethic.” Later he would change his position and “refute the notion that Africans are lazy, stressing hard work within the village context, and showing that laziness is a serious offence in traditional values”.Footnote 35
Third, there is a miscellany of official texts, including reports on local relations and on the regulation of work. Naturally, such texts were a feature only of societies with literate bureaucracies. Insofar as it relates to the work process and work relations, legislation offers an initial point of access; it tells us something not only about the economy and culture, but also about what the labouring population was expected to do and what they apparently sometimes or frequently did not do.Footnote 36 The descriptive inventories of local relations are another variant. For the Spanish-speaking world we have, for example, Juan López de Valesca's Geografía y descripción de las Indias (1574) and Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa, Compendio y descripción de las Indias Occidentales (c.1628) – two large-scale surveys, one of which covers not only the entire Spanish-American continent but also the Philippines and the Moluccas.Footnote 37
Fourth, studies from later periods can be used heuristically. In societies in which slave labour was widespread the major slave owners and their families generally looked down on menial labour. Ancient Greece and the American South are classic examples of that, and the same attitude can be found in other societies too. Mary Kingsley, who travelled through the French Congo during the 1890s, wrote, for example, about the Igalwa, who lived on Lambaréné Island:
The Igalwa is truly great at sitting, the men pursuing a policy of masterly inactivity, broken occasionally by leisurely netting a fishing net, the end of the netting hitched up on the roof thatch, and not held by a stirrup. The ladies are employed in the manufacture of articles pertaining to a higher culture […] – the most gorgeous bed-quilts and pillow-cases – made of patchwork […]. On the island they […] laze their lives away like lotus-eaters. Their slaves work their large plantations, and bring up to them magnificent yams, ready prepared agooma, sweet-potatoes, papaw, &c., not forgetting that delicacy Odeaka cheese.Footnote 38
And about the Californios, the Spanish-speaking inhabitants who dominated California before it was acquired by the United States, observers wrote unanimously that they “were lazy and lacked all semblance of personal enterprise or willingness to work” – that they had all the heavy work done by Native Americans, who received a nominal wage in return for their labour but who were, effectively, a kind of slave.Footnote 39 Such a pattern leads one to presume that in other societies too in which unfree labour played an important role the elite shared similar attitudes to labour, though it should be noted that often this negative work ethic in slave societies was much less evident among free groups of poor and the less affluent.Footnote 40 Based on other historical experiences, there is every reason to suppose therefore that this type of work ethic was prevalent among large slave owners in the period 1500–1650 too.
Problems of interpretation
Work processes are always embedded in wider social relations. Attitudes to work reflect not only labour relations in a narrow sense, but also the society in which those labour relations are situated. The anthropologist Maurice Godelier, who studied this issue thirty years ago, noted rightly that “what we in the West today call ‘working,’ ‘worker,’ and ‘work’ may be expected to have many different representations in other societies”.Footnote 41 Furthermore, attitudes to work depend on social status and change over time. Shashi Upadhyay has perceptibly observed then that:
Even within a given society, the meaning of work may change over time, and the various groups or classes too may view work differently. Thus it is possible that capitalists, artisans and the proletariat may have different notions of work. In fact, even within a class, different attitudes towards work are likely to exist. Attitudes regarding work vary depending on whether the country is at war or at peace, whether work is to be found easily or with difficulty, whether the worker is a supervisor or a labourer, whether he is the employer or an employee, and finally depending on the nature and amount of wages. There is no essential and universal meaning attached to “work”, nor one that transcends time, space, class or status.Footnote 42
It is precisely because of that variation and fluidity that historians are repeatedly tempted to be led astray by two different types of error. The first is that of projection: we tend to see what we want to see. Often, the images we form of a different society say more about ourselves than about that other society.Footnote 43 Europeans in the nineteenth century believed, for example, that East Asians were decadent: “At a time when the industrial nations of the West were strong and social ideologies such as Calvinism and social-Darwinism exuded a sense of direction and determination, the lesser races, it was held, were backward and would remain so because they were indisposed to work.” When, after 1868, Japan embarked on a programme of modernization, European observers were therefore sceptical since the Japanese lacked “the requisite powers not only of industry but also of perseverance”.Footnote 44 It is extraordinarily difficult to determine how work was thought of in other societies 500 years ago. Reading the reports written by Europeans, one is quickly struck by the impression that most inhabitants of South America, Africa, or Asia were extraordinarily lazy. Indolence was a complaint made repeatedly against them.
The second type of error is that of false generalization. We often tend to assume that observations we have made in a number of cases apply more generally in time and place, without there actually being a solid empirical basis for that assumption. One good example of such a generalization is E.P. Thompson's theory of “task-orientation”. Drawing on the English situation, Thompson argued that the task-orientation of pre-industrial workers (peasants, for example) was characterized by three features: their work rhythm was determined by the “observed necessity” of the natural environment; they made no clear distinction between “work” and “life” (i.e. social intercourse); and their attitude to work was, to modern eyes, “wasteful and lacking in urgency”.Footnote 45 That generalization has been convincingly refuted, however, based on studies of agricultural producers in late Tokugawa Japan. Owing in part to the pressure of a growing population density, peasants were forced to plan their crops in advance, to coordinate a variety of activities over longer periods, and to keep records.Footnote 46
There would seem to be just three approaches, preferably used in combination, to counteract the dangers of projection and false generalization. First, being extremely critical in how one uses the sources. Second, engaging in critical self-reflection, acknowledging and addressing one's prejudices as much as possible. And third, by considering the contextual explanation of observations made. One example might suffice here to clarify what I mean. In the past it was often said about the Maoris that they had “never been capable of performing consistent labour in one field for any great length of time”. The Maoris were said to have a “volatile temperament”, which led them “to work in bursts of energy, but is not conductive to life in a steady and settled occupation”. That contrasted with the European, “who is able to concentrate on one task and complete it without needing constant change of surroundings”.Footnote 47
The New Zealand anthropologist Raymond Firth has rightly pointed out that such claims are decontextualized value judgements. He does not doubt that, by European standards, the Maoris showed a “lack of steady application and failure to concentrate on work”, but, he argues, this so-called limitation was related less to “innate mental endowment” than to “definite social circumstances”. To support his claim, Firth adduced a number of arguments. First, the standard of comfort among the Maoris differed from that of the Europeans: “The native does not ask for all our civilized products, he is content with the satisfaction of his needs for food, clothing and shelter, with the addition of a few subsidiary pleasures.” And thus the Maori “does not feel impelled to put in extra labour to secure articles for which he has no real desire”; his “erratic habits of labour and his periods of inactivity […] are the result – in part at least – of this lack of conformity to our scheme of civilized wants”.
Second, there was a clear reason for the volatility that characterized their work (“a somewhat haphazard succession of employments, never pausing long with one, unable to concentrate but always seeking change”):
In a society where there was no great division of labour or specialization of employments, where each man carried on work in a number of fields, there was scope for the principle of variety in occupation to come into play. When the craftsman was tired or bored with his job, he turned to another, and so was able to work with renewed zest. The beneficial effects of a diversion of attention when the interest flags are well known in psychology. By following this principle the Maori revealed, not a sheer inability to do consistent work, but an appreciation of the element of flexibility in his economic system.
By so explaining Maori attitudes to work, Firth made it possible on the one hand to avoid essentialistic projections and on the other to recognize the limits of generalizations,Footnote 48 since a number of important hypotheses are implicitly concealed in Firth's explanation, for example that volatile labour patterns are less likely in a society with more complex internal divisions of labour, and that attitudes to labour will change once people become tempted by the appeal of modern consumer society. His analysis also reveals how notions of time can differ so much in different societies. Having grown up, as we have, with concepts of continuous and objective time, we find it difficult to understand other time schemes.Footnote 49
Some concluding hypotheses
Mindful of the above, I will conclude by formulating a few extremely tentative ideas regarding attitudes to labour around the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In doing so, I will be drawing on a very limited number of sources in just a few languages, and applying a degree of deduction. Here, I will briefly characterize four “types” that prevailed at the same time. Naturally, this list is by no means complete; nor does it describe an evolutionary pattern.
The first type are hunter-gatherers. Nowadays, they are limited to the most desolate and inhospitable areas of the world – the Arctic regions, and deserts; nonetheless, most scholars have argued that they need relatively little time to provide themselves with the things they need. A systematic overview in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers has summarized the results of anthropological research as follows:
Typically, “immediate return” hunter-gatherers, those with the simplest technology such as the Hadza and !Kung, spend only three or four hours per day occupied with what we could call economic activities. These activities include hunting a large number of animal species and gathering a large variety of plant material. […] Hunting and gathering is integrated with rituals, socialization, and artistic expression. The idea that earning a living is drudgery whose only purpose is to make it possible for us to live our “real” lives is not present in hunter-gatherer cultures.Footnote 50
Given that, one can understand why Marshall Sahlins termed the society of immediate-return hunter-gatherers “the original affluent society”.Footnote 51 If his assessment is correct, we can expect hunter-gatherers who lived 400–500 years ago and who had at that time a much more varied living environment to have been less focused on labour than are their contemporaries today.Footnote 52
A second type can be found among sedentary groups without leaders and hierarchies (so-called acephalous societies) with a low population density. One presumes they work more hours a day, especially the women, but the labour process retains its autonomous character. The Iatmul in Papua New Guinea (East Sepik Province) around 1930 had a subsistence economy dominated by women, who supplied approximately 80 per cent of food products. In addition to catching fish daily, they produced fish traps, nets, bags, and baskets, cared for the younger children, and prepared meals. The men were primarily artisans. They built houses, carved canoes and paddles, and made weapons and some of the work tools. Their woodcarvings were highly artistic. Men and women gardened together. Heteronomy was absent:
Whether a task is to be done or not, where it is to be done, how long it may take, how large the group is to be, and whether particular persons are to take part are matters to be decided by the individuals concerned in accordance with the situation at the moment. No one is entitled to dictate the tempo at which a job is done, or when the work must be finished; every working individual determines this himself. Communal decisions of short-term validity are reached in loose cooperation with other members of the group and in direct relation to technical necessities or personal needs. Work may be interrupted by intervals of relaxation, joking, or ritual, as desired.Footnote 53
It would seem reasonable to suppose that such relations, with their corresponding attitudes to work, existed several centuries earlier under similar conditions.
Pre-capitalist small peasants in relatively densely populated areas are a third type. They generally lived in constant fear of not having enough to eat – especially if they were required to pay a tribute to a landowner or lord. They developed what James C. Scott has termed a “subsistence ethic”:
This ethic […] was a consequence of living so close to the margin. A bad crop would not only mean short rations; the price of eating might be the humiliation of an onerous dependence or the sale of some land or livestock which reduced the odds of achieving an adequate subsistence the following year. The peasant family's problem, put starkly, was to produce enough rice to feed the household, buy a few necessities such as salt and cloth, and meet the irreducible claims of outsiders. The amount of rice a family could produce was partly in the hands of fate, but the local tradition of seed varieties, planting techniques, and timing was designed over centuries of trial and error to produce the most stable and reliable yield possible under the circumstances. These were the technical arrangements evolved by the peasantry to iron out the “ripples that might drown a man.” Many social arrangements served the same purpose. Patterns of reciprocity, forced generosity, communal land, and work-sharing helped to even out the inevitable troughs in a family's resources which might otherwise have thrown them below subsistence.Footnote 54
Based on the principle of safety first, such a subsistence ethic is generally associated with considerable labour input.
Because labor is often the only factor of production the peasant possesses in relative abundance, he [sic] may have to move into labor-absorbing activities with extremely low returns until subsistence demands are met. This may mean switching crops or techniques of cultivation (for example, switching from broadcasting to transplanting rice) or filling the slack agricultural season with petty crafts, trades, or marketing which return very little but are virtually the only outlets for surplus labor.Footnote 55
The subsistence ethic thus implies a work ethic that is related to the ecological, demographic, and economic relationships in which such farmers live and work.
Finally, I would include commodified labour relations under capitalism, including chattel slavery, share-cropping, and wage labour.Footnote 56 All those forms of labour share the same characteristic, namely that they create abstract value. Because output is intended for the market, labour processes are not directly focused on the needs of producers, but on those of consumers, who may or may not be anonymous. In that sense, all capitalist labour is alienated.Footnote 57 At the same time, I suspect though that Max Weber's “spirit of capitalism” has remained a marginal phenomenon.Footnote 58 In practice, alienated attitudes to work can vary considerably, from shirking to excessive zealousness, from deference to recalcitrance – often in combinations, too. The exploration of all these disparate attitudes and the contexts within which they emerged is a fascinating challenge for further research.
