Under the biopolitical state, work can be understood as an antimony of state control that produces docile yet productive subjects ripe for biopolitical control.

Work is often understood and experienced as a field of individual agency and as a sign of and a path to self-reliance. The Protestant work ethic family support. Waged work thus became seen as the sine qua non of self reliance. By this account, the ‘‘free’’ labor market provides the institutional setting—‘‘a very Eden of the innate rights of man’’—in which individuals can seize control of their own fate; individuals meet in this realm as buyers and sellers of a commodity, labor power, and ‘‘contract as free persons, who are equal before the law’’ (Marx 1976, 280). Of course, the progress of industrialization posed many challenges to the claim that waged work was best characterized as a state of independence rather than dependence. And yet, as Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon argue, it was in this period that waged labor became increasingly synonymous with independence. Whereas individual—or, more precisely household—independence had been a status that only property ownership could confer, over the course of the in dustrial period it became increasingly identified with wage-earning. Indeed, whereas working-class activists had previously decried waged labor as a form of ‘‘wage slavery,’’ they now claimed ‘‘a new form of manly independence within it’’ (Fraser xx1 Gxxordon 1994, 315–16). x

As Weber points out, the work ethic—and this remains consistent over the course of its historical transformations—is an individualizing discourse. The individual’s economic of a collective becomes the duty of every individual; thus, refracted through the lens of Puritan ethics, ‘‘St. Paul’s ‘He who will not work shall not eat,’ ’’ once understood to be relevant to the community as a whole, now ‘‘holds unconditionally for everyone’’ (1958, 159). That is, moral responsibility now lies with the individual rather than the community, and rich and poor alike ‘‘shall not eat without working’’ (159–60). This becomes even more applicable over the course of the industrial era, once waged work becomes normative; and it is especially true in the postindustrial period as the breadwinner norm becomes increasingly universal, an expectation not just of household heads but of every adult citizen. With fewer instances of ‘‘legitimate’’ economic or political dependence, ‘‘whatever dependency remains, therefore, can be interpreted as the fault of individuals’’ (Fraser and Gordon 1994, 325). Independence becomes less a matter of the types of relationships one finds oneself subject to and more a quality of one’s character (332). ‘‘Postindustrial dependency’’ thus becomes at once increasingly illegitimate and ‘‘increasingly individualized’’ (325).

As an individualizing discourse, the work ethic serves the timehonored ideological function of rationalizing exploitation and legitimating inequality. That all work is good work, that all work is equally desirable and inherently useful is, as William Morris once noted, ‘‘a convenient belief to those who live on the labour of others’’ (1999, 128). The Protestant ethic also ‘‘legalized the exploitation of this specific willingness to work,’’ Weber observes, insofar as it ‘‘interpreted the employer’s business activity as a calling’’ (1958, 178). From the perspective of the work ethic, governments are seen to protect the welfare of citizens by defending their right to work, while employers are not so much extracting surplus value as they are meeting the concrete needs of their employees for work. Just as the Protestant ethic gave the bourgeois businessperson ‘‘the comforting assurance that the unequal distribution of the goods of this world was a special dispensation of Divine Providence’’ (177), the work ethic offers in all periods a powerful rationale for economic inequality (see Beder 2000, 48; Bauman 1998, 65). Comparable to the way that the ‘‘unwillingness to work is symptomatic of the lack of grace’’ (Weber 1958, 159), today the morally suspect state of poverty can be attributed to the lack of individual effort and discipline. After all, ‘‘God’’—today we could add the market—‘‘helps those who help themselves’’ (115). As an individualizing discourse, the work ethic eschews institutional support for what is supposed to be an individual responsibility and obscures the structural processes that limit his or her field of opportunity.∞≤

But the work ethic serves more than simply the classic ideological function of passing of the values and interests of one class as the values and interests of all. It also serves a more disciplinary function: beyond manufacturing common meanings, it constructs docile subjects. The work ethic thus possesses not just an epistemological force but an effectiveness that is properly ontological. Indeed, what is essential about the work ethic, as Weber originally described it, was what it could do: deliver workers to their exploitation, not just by manufacturing subjects’ consent to capitalist exploitation, but by constituting both exploiting and exploitable subjects. By Weber’s account, the subjectification function of the ethic is crucial. More than an ideology, the new discourse of work is a disciplinary mechanism that constructs subjects as productive individuals.∞≥ The impact of the Protestant ethic was comparable to monastic existence insofar as this worldly asceticism sought ‘‘methodical control over the whole man’’ (119; emphasis added). It was and remains, in this sense, a biopolitical force, one that renders populations at once productive and governable, increasing their capacities together with their docility. As Foucault once described the production of disciplinary individuality, ‘‘discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)’’; it produces ‘‘both a productive body and a subjected body’’ (1979, 138, 26). The individuated subject is both more useful and more manageable; ‘‘the individual is not, in other words, power’s opposite number; the individual is one of power’s first effects’’ (Foucault 2003, 30).

The Protestant ethic was so effective because it was not merely imposed on the individual from the outside, by the state or by the church. We ‘‘must take account,’’ Weber remarks, ‘‘of the great divergence between the results of the authoritarian moral discipline of the Established Churches and the corresponding discipline in the sects [generally more typical of Protestant communities] which rested on voluntary submission’’ (1958, 152; emphasis added). For example, the Calvinistic state churches may have ‘‘enforced a particular type of external conformity, but in some cases weakened the subjective motives of rational conduct’’ as well as that ‘‘liberation of individual powers’’ that was the focus of Weber’s interest. Rather than enforcing conformity, the Protestant ethic is effective to the extent that it is internalized by the individual. The effect, moreover, is not just to shape the individual’s beliefs and values but to promote the individual’s constitution in relation to and identification with productivist norms. The ethic is advice not just about how to behave but also about who to be; it takes aim not just at consciousness but also at the energies and capacities of the body, and the objects and aims of its desires. The ethic’s mandate is not merely to induce a set of beliefs or instigate a series of acts but also to produce a self that strives continually toward those beliefs and acts. This involves the cultivation of habits, the internalization of routines, the incitement of desires, and the adjustment of hopes, all to guarantee a subject’s adequacy to the lifetime demands of work.

So on the one hand, work is conceived in this discourse as a field of individuation and independence. On the other hand, of course, the wage relation is a hierarchical one, which requires individuals to submit to command and control. This antinomy—that work and its ethical discourse produce both independence and dependence, captured by Weber in that strange self-discipline he struggles to account for—renders the wage relation always potentially unstable. The ideal of independence can always serve as a critical standard against which the organization of the labor process and the conduct of its managers can be assessed, and a demand around which workers can organize for reforms. In fact, the ideal of individual independence has been invoked over the course of US history to inform struggles against everything from wage slavery to bureaucratic unionism. Even the hard-won reforms of the Fordist period— the laws governing wages and hours, and social wage provisions that offered new opportunities for many workers to advance into the middle class and mitigate their immediate dependence on the whims of employers—were accompanied by new concerns about the state of independence that they secured. The critique of the iconic ‘‘organization man’’ of high Fordism and the standardized individuality of the 1950s called into question the quality of the freedom that such progress entailed. And although new forms of white-collar employment were seen to afford new autonomy for some workers, by the early 1950s, critics like C. Wright Mills were calling into question whether this new middle-class worker—as ‘‘the servant of decision, the assistant of authority, the minion of management’’—had achieved or relinquished his or her individual independence (1951, 80). These critiques in turn helped to inform the struggles against worker alienation of the 1960s and 1970s and the consequent reorganization of work and its management under post-Fordism.

But the precariousness that the antinomy generates is not only due to the static contradiction between the ideal of autonomy and the reality of submission, or because of the conflicting interests of capital, which demands dependence, and workers, who clamor for independence. A deeper source of conflict stems from the fact that capital needs individuals whose control poses ongoing problems. Even Taylorism, that science of management with its utopia of the assembly line, recognized that workers are more valuable as individuals. That is, the Taylorist organization of work processes in the industrial factory was not just about homogenizing a mass workforce and standardizing its output; it was also promoted by its early boosters as a method that attended to the specificity of each job and the monitoring and measurement of each individual worker (see Rodgers 1978, 56). Indeed, much of management theory and practice is focused on precisely this task: managing capital’s dependence upon independence, engineering profitable modes of individuality. Again the example of Taylorism proves instructive. Although Taylor is usually remembered as the architect of a labor process typically thought not to depend on the subjectivity of workers, but to concentrate instead on organizing the work process down to its last detail so that employers can be less concerned about their voluntary compliance and enthusiastic participation, even he sought to fashion productive subjectivities. As Leslie Salzinger notes in her reading of Taylor’s account of his success in raising the productivity of the iron worker Schmidt, this was accomplished in part by asking Schmidt over and over again if he was a ‘‘high priced man,’’ using this interpellation as a way to motivate Schmidt to work faster and to accept Taylor’s detailed control over his work. ‘‘Taylor creates the very subject he ostensibly recognizes,’’ Salzinger writes, ‘‘giving him a power over Schmidt that goes beyond that of controlling his behavior to that of defining Schmidt’s self’’ (2003, 17).

The dependence on independence and the tensions it produces intensify under the conditions of post-Taylorist production. I will develop this point in more detail later in the chapter. Here I will just note that even more than in industrial production, profits in the service- and knowledge-based economy depend increasingly on simultaneously activating and controlling, on releasing and harnessing, the creative, communicative, affective, and emotional capacities of workers. ‘‘As it is no longer possible to confine subjectivity merely to tasks of execution,’’ Maurizio Lazzarato observes, ‘‘it becomes necessary for the subject’s competence in the areas of management, communication, and creativity to be made compatible with the conditions of ‘production for production’s sake.’ ’’ The task of fashioning productive forms of subjectivity, workers who are simultaneously self-directed and manageable, poses an ongoing puzzle for capitalist—and particularly post-Fordist—management techniques: ‘‘Thus the slogan ‘become subjects,’ ’’ Lazzarato continues, ‘‘far from eliminating the antagonism between hierarchy and cooperation, between autonomy and command, actually re-poses the antagonism at a higher level, because it both mobilizes and clashes with the very personality of the individual worker’’ (1996, 135). The individual autonomy and independence that work is supposed to, and to some degree must, enable thus coexists uneasily with the subjection and dependence that it nonetheless secures (see also Gorz 1999, 38–39).