[The Working Sovereign: Labor and Democratic Citizenship by Axel Honneth (Polity, 2024; x + 214 pp.)]
Axel Honneth is one of the leading members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Marxism, and, as you would expect, his central theme is an assault on capitalism. But his assault is not of the usual Marxist sort, in that it does not call for the overthrow of capitalism by a proletarian revolution. The problem that troubles him is the hierarchical nature of working-class jobs, which he argues is inconsistent with democracy. As he puts it:
One of the major deficiencies of almost all theories of democracy is that they persistently ignore the fact that most members of their beloved sovereign people are workers. We suppose rather fancifully that citizens keep themselves busy by engaging in political debate; in reality, however, the situation is quite different. Most people spend day after day and many hours a day, in paid or unpaid work. Because of the subordination, underpayment and strain that work entails, workers find it almost impossible even to imagine playing the role of an autonomous participant in the process of democratic will formation. . . The blind spot in democratic theory is, in fact, an inability to acknowledge something that precedes democratic theory, and yet finds its way into every nook and cranny of the theory’s object: the social division of labor of modern capitalism. By allotting very different positions to different individuals, the division of labor determines the extent to which each person can influence the processes of democratic will-formation.
(“Will-formation” is evidently a word Honneth likes.)
There is an obvious objection to this argument, which Honneth is aware of but does not adequately address. If workers want less hierarchical jobs, aren’t they free to start cooperatives in which, as owners, they are not subordinate to their capitalist employers? Honneth’s response is that the pressures of the capitalist system to maximize profits force cooperatives to emulate their rivals by hiring workers in subordinate and less desirable jobs:
When a business is based on a belief in the idea of democratic self-administration, it confronts all the problems that typically arise from the tension between moral intentions and the capitalist profit motive. . . These structural problems have affected cooperatives operating within a capitalist framework from the very beginning. Today, they face the additional problem posed by intensified competition in a global market for labor and goods.
Workers, if Honneth is right, are stuck in terrible jobs. But who says that these jobs are terrible? Is it the workers or is it Honneth and like-minded leftwing intellectuals who speak for them? In a stunning admission, Honneth acknowledges that “there is no straightforward empirical answer to the question of whether the working population endorse the social conditions of their labor.” Well, if they do object, won’t they show this by either leaving or complaining? Honneth doesn’t find this decisive: “A common assumption is that one can speak of resistance among employees only if large groups of workers withdraw their labor or publicly express their discontent—exit or voice, as Albert O. Hirschman famously summed it up about half a century ago.” This assumption, though, can be questioned:
The most striking feature of expressions of discontent with the current world of work is their individualistic, often defeatist and mostly purely negative character. . . Compared with the situation two or three decades ago, practices of resistance have clearly shifted more toward small-scale sporadic acts of civil disobedience, defiant sabotage, mockery of superiors, and time-wasting.
Honneth does not tell us how extensive these activities are, and it hardly seems likely that most employees engage in sabotage and civil disobedience, though I would not at all be surprised if many people make fun of their bosses. I feel like saying to him, “That’s life, Herr Professor Doktor Honneth.” We are left with the conclusion that his view that employees hate their jobs rests on fantasy.
There is an additional point, well-brought out by Robert Nozick,
It often has been noted that fragmentation of tasks, rote activity, and detailed specification of activity which leaves little room for the exercise of independent initiative are not problems special to capitalist modes of production: it seems to go with an industrial society.
They are not peculiar to capitalism.
Nozick makes another observation that, with his characteristic depth, strikes at the heart of Honneth’s claim about work under capitalism:
The issue of meaningful and satisfying work is often merged with discussions of self-esteem… it is said that apart from the intrinsic desirability of such kinds of work and productivity, performing other sorts of work deadens individuals and leads them to be less fulfilled persons in all areas of their lives. Normative sociology, the study of what the causes of problems ought to be, greatly fascinates all of us. . . If people ought to do meaningful work, if that’s what we want people to be like, and if via some story we can tie the absence of such work (which is bad) to another bad thing (lack of initiative generally, passive leisure activities and so on), then we happily leap to the conclusion that the second evil is caused by the first.
Honneth—who is to the highest degree possible a practitioner of normative sociology—calls for the state to impose an extensive list of measures designed to get us as close as present economic conditions allow to achieve meaningful work. I won’t go into the details of the program here, but Honneth fails to address another key question: what if workers don’t want these measures because they impede efficiency? What if workers prefer higher pay in “bad” conditions to lower pay in “good” conditions?
Honneth would probably respond that workers’ acceptance of the bad conditions is not voluntary: under capitalism, employers have greater “bargaining power” than the hapless workers, who must either accept what they are offered or face privation. He assumes, in other words, that employers hold substantial monopsony power. But, although he has diligently combed the literature of political science, philosophy, and sociology, he does not cite any studies in the extensive economic literature on the topic, which for the most part though not entirely denies the monopsony thesis. (Murray Rothbard has presented a brilliant theoretical discussion of monopsony in Chapter 10 of Man, Economy, and State.) Indeed, Honneth mentions only one economist sympathetic to the free market, Tyler Cowen, in the whole book.
The Working Sovereign may well be, if you will forgive me, an Honneth effort, but that does not make up for its bad arguments.
