This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
The funny thing about asking, who watches the watchers? is that people seem to take that as license to not watch anything. But I’ll give you an answer that’s less glib than the question.
Overwork is arguably the biggest cause of political disengagement. When you’re working two jobs and barely scraping by, you don’t have time or energy to understand what’s really going on. If you read the entire essay, Russel also points out that overwork pushes people to passive forms of leisure—he was writing a hundred-odd years ago, so he talked about the cinema and the radio. But the passivity of engagement with the world is much broader than that; it also causes passive engagement with world affairs, i.e., news as entertainment.
It should be all of us watching the watchers, but we don’t have time or energy.
As for your first two questions, you’re effectively conceding that industrial work is slavery.
OK, let’s suppose that all governments are oppressive and all work is slavery. How do we stop being slaves to our work and stop being oppressed by our governments?
The Marxist-Leninist real world examples have only switched out one kind of slavery/oppression for another. I am not asking who watches the watchers as any kind of excuse or glibness. It is an honest question
You should read the full essay. Bertrand Russell was not a socialist, and he doesn’t speak kindly of the USSR—or of the czar for that matter.
The basic problem is that the morality of work is so heavily ingrained that, even when progress is made, it pales in comparison to the magnitude of the problem. The Soviets had to propagandize people on the nobility of work to get their Five-Year Plans to fruition, and that’s a bell that isn’t easy to unring. Which meant that the Soviet system was still one of overwork and exhaustion, just with different structuring.
At the same time, we shouldn’t believe US propaganda that labor organization is ineffective—it’s tremendously effective. They want us to believe it doesn’t work precisely because it does work. And you echoed some of this propaganda, that “everything devolves to labor representatives” line. Even that devolution was not really caused by the unions themselves, but by the federal government, FBI infiltration and Pinkerton murder and so forth.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries followed a sort of oscillation: oligarchs push workers too far, workers push back and score some modest concessions, this makes workers complacent, oligarchs regroup and claw back the concessions they made before and start pushing too hard. We do seem to be getting back into the labor activism phase of this, which is good at least.
As a final point, the US government is not very oppressive. Its problem is that it’s an enabler of other forms of oppression. Most of the heinous things it’s done domestically have been done in the name of enabling private sector oppression.