Friedrich Georg Jünger - The Delusion of the Saving of Labor

Those who place their hopes in the machine – and hope implies an anticipation of the future – ought to be aware that the hopes themselves must be of a technical kind, for one cannot expect from the machine something which lies outside its potentialities. They must distinguish the machine from the chimeras which have become associated with it and which have nothing to do with its purpose. There is, for instance, a wide-spread belief that the machine relieves man of work, that thereby he gains leisure and time for free activity. This belief in many cases is unshakable and unexamined. Where one comes across it, one senses that it is one of the props which uphold technical progress, justify it, and secure an optimistic view of the future. Obviously, a machine which does not profit man appeals to no one – optimism is needed in this connection also. But we are here dealing with an assertion, the validity of which has not been established, and constant repetition gives it no greater conviction. Leisure and free activity are not accessible to everybody, and they are conditions in no way connected with the machine. A man who is relieved of work is not thereby capable of leisure; a man who gains time does not thereby gain the capacity to spend this time in free activity, for leisure is not a mere doing-nothing, a state that can be defined negatively. Leisure, to be fruitful, presupposes a spiritual and mental life from which it draws its meaning and its worth. An otium sine dignitate ("leisure without dignity") is hollow, empty loafing. Nor is leisure, as many seem to think, a mere intermission in work for a limited time – no, by definition it is unlimited and indivisible, and from it originates all meaningful work. Leisure is the prerequisite of every free thought, every free activity. And this is why only the few are capable of it, since the many, when they have gained time, only kill it. Not everyone is born for free activity, or else the world would not be what it is. Thus, even if the machine did relieve man of work, this would be no guarantee that man would profit by the time gained and use it intelligently. The unemployed worker who does not have this capacity goes to pieces; because he does not know what to do with the empty time that befalls him. Not only does he have no use for it – it even harms him. He loses heart; he thinks himself degraded because he no longer fulfills his function. He has neither strength nor urge for free activity, and since he has gained nothing but empty time, he is barred from all leisure and that abundance of free activity which stems from creative thought. No connection whatsoever exists between the reduction of work and leisure and free activity; as little, in fact, as an increase in the speed of locomotion implies a rise in morality, or the invention of telegraphy an increase in clear thinking. 

Still, it is not idle to ask whether the machine has raised or lowered the amount of work. This is a broad problem which can be related solely to the totality of technical and manual labor. We must also ignore the fact that work, by definition, is somehow without limit, that there is always more work than mankind can do. We must try to find the actual amount of working effort to which man is subject. Here we must not allow the legal rules and limitations of work hours to mislead us into hasty conclusions, for these legal limitations tell us nothing of the work actually accomplished, nor do they tell what further claims are made upon the worker by the technical organization outside of working hours. Many believe that in the past men used to work more, that is, longer and harder than today, and when we examine specific information on this point we shall find that this belief is often well founded in those instances where machine labor has displaced hand labor. 

But if we disregard details and consider the technical organization as a whole, we realize that there can be no question of a reduction of the total amount of work. Rather, technical progress has constantly increased the total amount of work, and this is why unemployment spreads so far whenever crises and disturbances upset the organization of machine labor. But why does no one calculate this increase of work? The man who looks at a single machine is caught in a naive illusion. There can be no doubt that a bottle-blowing machine produces incomparably more bottles than did the bottle blower who used to make them laboriously by hand. A power loom does incomparably more than did the weaver with his hand loom, and one single worker in a mill can attend to several machines at once. A threshing machine does the work more quickly and more smoothly than the peasant who beats his grain with a flail. But such comparisons are childish and an insult to intelligence. 

The bottle-making machine, the power loom, the threshing machine are only the end product of a vast technical process which encompasses an immense amount of work. One cannot compare the performance of a specialized machine with that of one craftsman, for the comparison is meaningless and futile. There is no machine product which does not involve the entire technical organization, no beer bottle and no suit which do not presuppose it. Consequently, there is no work process which can be treated as independent and isolated from this organization, as if it existed by itself like Robinson Crusoe upon his desert isle. 

No one has any doubt that the amount of work done by machines has grown. But how could it have grown without a corresponding increase in the amount of work done by men! For the human hand is the tool of tools, the tool that has created and now maintains the whole machine-tool arsenal. Never and nowhere does machine labor reduce the amount of manual labor, however large may be the number of workers tending machines. The machine replaces the worker only where the work can be done in a mechanical fashion. But the burden of which the worker is thus relieved does not vanish at the command of the technical magician. It is merely shifted to areas where work cannot be done mechanically. And, of course, this burden grows apace with the increase in the amount of mechanical work. No complicated calculations are needed to see this. It is sufficient to observe carefully the relation of the individual work process to the whole technical organization. This observation shows that every advance in mechanization brings with it an increase in manual labor. Those who are not convinced need only consider that our working methods are not restricted to one nation, or one continent. They strive to master all the nations of the earth, and the biggest share of hard and dirty work is piled upon the shoulders of people who have no part in the invention of the technical organization.