Aren't We All Essential?: Work and Essence in the Times of COVID-19

If you had asked me three months ago whether a government under Donald Trump would pass a version of universal basic income, I’d have told you to dream on. Yet here we are, living a nightmare that has somehow made the unthinkable thinkable. As the number of unemployed in the U.S. has climbed to 30 million, we’re living in a dark mirror of the post-work futures imagined by some on the political left. COVID-19 has cast the world of labor in a strange light. The response to the virus has divided the U.S. into essential and non-essential workers, categories frightening in their contrasts, whose border feels simultaneously porous and absolute. Are art workers essential? Can essential jobs be automated out of existence? Who wants to think of their work as non-essential? 

Since the twentieth century, some of the left, especially those with technocratic tendencies, have aspired to a world that minimizes essential work. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes imagined that his grandchildren would be working 15-hour work weeks. In 1958, William Galbraith predicted that the U.S. as an “affluent society” could drastically shorten working hours. In the 1990s, the New Left in the U.S. and Britain advanced “economic opportunity” as the aspiration to join the knowledge economy (as programmers, office workers, artists) free from the essential work of material sustenance. Contemporary thinkers like Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek hoped to “invent the future” by automating away essential work. Yet as COVID-19 has shown, essential workers are still here and still essential. The leftist vision of freedom as freedom from essential work is showing its limitations.

For those who have the option of working from home, those who, like many thinkers of the post-work left, skew white and wealthy, the orders to shelter in place have been hardly liberatory. Some knowledge workers are furloughed. Others are lucky enough to cling to a paycheck and health insurance. But even those who have a salary or unemployment benefits can find puttering around the house dissatisfying. Some of us have wanted to be useful and have gotten involved with mutual aid networks and other volunteer opportunities. Even if we aren’t essential, we want to feel essential. Our frustration separation from the material infrastructure that supports our existence is blatantly clear. Freedom from work doesn’t feel particularly freeing. 

The divide between essential and non-essential work reveals the insufficiencies of both sides of the divide. Essential workers encounter a continued demand for their labor, and many have put themselves at risk of infection each day. This work is heroic, but it is also the result of a public failure to adapt our workplaces to the demands of the health crisis. The burden of essential work (and of the novel coronavirus) has fallen disproportionately on black and brown members of our society. As always, public health disparities manifest across classed and racialized lines. As non-essential workers struggle to find meaning in the ghostly, Zoom-filled versions of their former jobs, we comfort ourselves with the knowledge that we’re more secure than essential workers. That comfort doesn’t make our quarantined existences any more satisfying.

On its face, the divide between essential and non-essential work seems to map onto a divide that Marx identified in Capital 150 years ago. Marx divided human activity into the “realm of necessity” and the “realm of freedom.” The realm of necessity describes the sphere of activity necessary to sustain human life: securing food, shelter, clothing, care for dependents, and other basic needs. The realm of freedom, meanwhile, encompasses activities that exceed necessities and that we experience as freedom: making art, talking with friends, reading critical theory, taking walks. According to Marx, a system of wage labor alienates us from both the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. Workers secure their livelihoods not through direct labor on the materials of their food, shelter, etc. but through materials meant to ensure profit. They receive their livelihoods indirectly as wages. Meanwhile, wage labor exerts demands on time that prevent workers from experiencing the realm of freedom as anything other than recovery from the demands of wage labor. Freedom becomes reduced to leisure. It’s merely the freedom from work. 

In the time of COVID-19, we associate jobs themselves with these two sectors of activity. Some are the essential workers that support food, shelter, and health for the rest of society. Others are non-essential ones that have seemingly freer and more flexible work without a visible impact during a health crisis. Again, the New Left ideology of “development” imagines the journey from essential work into non-essential work as one of liberation. Jobs in the knowledge economy or in office work are themselves status symbols indicating freedom from necessity. Yet both these forms of labor can be alienating. Essential work is often underpaid, precarious, and exploitative, while non-essential work can be so divided from visible impact that it produces crises of meaning.

Anthropologist David Graeber describes this distinction as one between “shit jobs”—jobs characterized by overwork and low pay—and “bullshit jobs”—jobs characterized by medium or high pay and a lack of meaningful contribution to the world. There are non-essential jobs that aren’t bullshit. Artists and non-profit work can meaningfully contribute to our society, but even work these jobs come with the bullshit of grant applications, side hustles, and the bureaucratic red tape of an undersubsidized system. Bullshit labor can contaminate work that might otherwise be experienced as freedom. As Graeber argues, the divide between shit jobs and bullshit jobs generates mutual resentment. Essential workers resent non-essential workers paid highly to futz around in offices and ivory towers (although essential workers might aspire to non-essential workers’ level of financial security). Non-essential workers resent essential workers for doing meaningful, impactful work and thereby justify paying them little (the meaning that essential workers get from the work itself is allegedly the pay). 

COVID-19 suggests that neither position is a liberating one and that part of the function of a socially just economy is to build bridges between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. In his insightful exploration of socialism and spirituality, philosopher Martin Hägglund suggests that spiritual freedom entails the capacity to negotiate between one’s realm of freedom and one’s realm of necessity. If we labor in the realm of necessity in ways in keeping with worker dignity and the provision for the common good, then essential labor might itself be an experience of freedom and fulfillment. If we labor in less visibly material ways associated with the realm of freedom (teaching, writing, making art) in ways that reflect our commitments to the value of time and of social justice, then non-essential work might not be as burdened by professional requirements that distract from the work itself. Freedom might entail the freedom to work in ways that matter to us.

According to Hägglund, a socialist politics of freedom entails democratizing the means of production in the realms of both freedom and necessity. Redistribution of material profits within a capitalist system (as is the case with universal basic income or unemployment benefits) is not enough. Redistribution of profits—however meager it may seem at the individual level—during the times of COVID-19 is monumental in amount when considered on the whole. Yet it might reinforce a world of undignified labor. The redistribution in our current moment is not coming from income and capital gains taxes, since we have little of that this year. It is coming from debt, a commitment to future labor on behalf of all of us. Government spending collectively indebts us to make up for the current deficit. Most moratoria on evictions nevertheless will require tenants to pay for the months of rent during the COVID crisis in which they were unable to pay. The extraction of profit from material labor remains the basis even for the lenient and generous social provisions in the time of novel coronavirus. Alienation still characterizes labor in a social democracy, Hägglund argues. By contrast, a just economy entails democratic decision-making around how we labor and how the material economy sustains us.

Some of the most promising activist of the COVID-19 era has been precisely around reshaping the means of production, and reforms around our production processes have been far more contested than measures to redistribute income. Consider, for example, the President’s hesitancy to use his emergency powers to command manufacturers to produce ventilators, masks, and other necessary components of our health infrastructure in combatting the virus. In the absence of political or corporate leadership, General Electric Workers staged protests in late March demanding that the company produce more ventilators instead of laying off non-essential jobs in the production of turbines and jet engines. Workers demanded essential, non-alienated labor to serve the needs of the health system and attempt to redirect the means of production to socially useful ends. This May Day, workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, Target, and Instacart are staging strikes around worker compensation and safe working conditions for their socially necessary labor. They are trying to exert greater control over an infrastructure usually meant for profit. Consider the nationwide protests aimed at cancelling—not merely delaying—rent payments during the COVID crisis. These protests imagine housing as a right rather than as a source for material extraction. The activism of the COVID era is pointing beyond the redistribution of profit and toward a system that redistributes wealth and material safety.

If we imagine the point of universal basic income, it is not to redistribute profits or to free half of us from work altogether. Rather, it is to allow us the freedom to withdraw from the labor force until we can more democratically relate to the material conditions around us. In fact, part of activism in the time of COVID is promoting the freedom to work on projects meaningful to us that have been foreclosed by both capitalism and the public health crisis. Greaber argues that a basic tenet of leftwing movements must be a right to meaningful work. Hägglund writes that a socially just economy would combat alienation in both essential and non-essential labor: “the distinction between the realm of freedom and the realm of necessity does not have to be a distinction between free and alienated labor.” Removing alienation in non-essential work would mean finding its essence and connecting to what makes less visibly material work (like art and education) entirely necessary. Many non-essential workers are seeking ways to perform essential, non-alienated work—sewing masks, volunteering at food banks, checking on neighbors through mutual aid societies. Yet one of the challenges of the public health crisis is that working in proximity to others creates conditions for possible infection. The feeling of worker solidarity that comes with proximity is frustratingly elusive. Alienation is rampant. When the immediate public health risks subside, I imagine many might hope to get involved in collective projects to rebuild our world. They will embrace the freedom to work toward purposes other than profit.

As left movements imagine where to go next in a world beyond COVID-19 and into a world radically transformed by it, the hope cannot be merely for redistribution of profit extracted from lands and peoples. Right now, that is essentially what we are getting in the form of universal basic income and unemployment benefits. Yet most of us cannot use that support to live meaningful lives. Taking advantage of this moment and its aftermath means remaking our labor conditions to reflect our values and commitments. This remaking may certainly involve automation—keeping some work over Zoom and having machines do some hazardous jobs—and it might also entail deciding which work is worth doing in person. Care work, health work, farm work, etc. might be sources of pleasure if done under reasonable conditions without the pressures of extractive economies. 

We deserve the power to define the essential infrastructure that sustains our lives—making it a green infrastructure and one distributed equally across historically classed and racialized geographic lines. In the time of recession, a Green New Deal that centers necessary and meaningful work can help ensure material and spiritual sustenance for an injured world. As the novel coronavirus crisis shows, life is a precious thing, and our economy might be remade to help us make the most of it.