Many thanks to Hannah for her beautiful post on George Eliot’s Silas Marner and the evacuation of moral purpose from the Protestant work ethic. That resonates with Hijacked, my latest book, which traces the history of the work ethic from 17th century Puritan theologians, through the economic theory and policy debates of the 18th and 19th centuries, to today. I argue that the work ethic split into two versions during the Industrial Revolution. One–the version Max Weber analyzed–expressed the ideological perspective and interests of capitalists, and ultimately led to what we call neoliberalism–or, in a less institutionally articulated form, a version of libertarianism. The other mostly forgotten version expressed the perspective and interests of workers, and ultimately led to social democracy.
Americans inherited the UK’s capitalist work ethic in colonial times, and (not for the first time) put it on steroids from the mid-1970s to today. Scratch an American libertarian, and most likely you’ll find a believer in the capitalist work ethic underneath. However much libertarians talk about universal freedom, at heart they are advancing a deeply authoritarian doctrine tied to capitalist rule. To see this, it’s helpful to relate current policy proposals to 19th century ones, when capitalist proponents of the work ethic were more open about their aims.
Congress is currently working on the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which gives big tax breaks to the rich. It will massively expand the deficit, which is something the GOP claims to care about. Maybe some of them are just a little nervous about the bond markets?
Anyway, spending cuts must be found to partially offset the tax cuts. So of course, they must be taken out of the hides of the poor. The GOP is trying to achieve this largely through a massive cut to Medicaid.
No, no, says House Speaker Johnson! Any loss of Medicaid eligibility will be entirely the voluntary choice of recipients! Because their loss will be due to their failure to meet the OBBB’s new work requirements. It’s just those lazy poor people who want to live off the public dole without contributing to society who will lose their health care. Given that massive savings are projected from this, Republicans are counting on Medicaid recipients “voluntarily” deciding that they would rather die of illness than work for a living. It’s an old slur. Advocates of slavery claimed that slaves were so lazy that if they were freed, they would quit work and let their dependents starve.
Previous experimentation with Medicaid work requirements in places like Arkansas shows that virtually all the targeted recipients are already working as hard as they are able, once we adjust for their relatively poor health. Loss of Medicaid, far from inducing greater work effort, increases unemployment by denying sick people the health care they need to restore their ability to work. Many recipients lose eligibility not because they are failing to work, but because they can’t meet the additional paperwork requirements and filing deadlines required to prove they are steadily working. Work requirements divert enormous sums from medical care into determining eligibility for recipients who are already working.
This is an old tactic of capitalist work ethic ideologues. The British Treasury used it to administer emergency food aid to Ireland during the Potato Famine. On the work ethic principle that “If a man will not work, neither shall he eat,” (2 Thessalonians 3:10) the government enacted a public works employment scheme–hard labor building roads–for starving men in 1846-7. But the wage wasn’t enough to pay for the increasing cost of food. As Irish workers’ ability to perform hard labor declined from lack of food, the Treasury attributed this to laziness and insisted on paying by the task rather than the day. The enormous expense and time devoted to documenting task completion at the requisite quality for each worker led to long delays in pay and further starvation. Local relief agents kept pleading with the Treasury to relax its work and documentation requirements, explaining how these demands were diverting funds needed to feed people, causing starvation, and not catching cheaters.
Their testimony fell on deaf ears. As I explain in Hijacked, the government viewed the famine as an opportunity, not a calamity. It designed relief policy for a much grander end than relieving the suffering of Irish peasants. Its real objective was to quickly revolutionize the 2-class Irish agricultural system (landlords, peasants) on the 3-class capitalist model (landlords, capitalist farmers, wage laborers) that England had taken 300 years to achieve. This model required the elimination of the peasantry–workers who enjoyed a measure of self-sufficiency because they grew their own food–to be replaced with a much smaller number of agricultural wage laborers.
The potato was so nutritious and yields were so high that an Irish peasant could support a large family on a quarter-acre plot. The work ethic-obsessed English condemned the potato as the “lazy crop” because so little work was needed to grow it. In their imagination, Irish peasants were slacking off the rest of the time, and lazy Irish landlords were colluding with them by renting out tiny plots. These work ethic ideologues conveniently overlooked the fact that the peasants had to pay the rents they owed by working the landlords’ farms. Irish peasants produced enormous agricultural surpluses that England imported to feed its population.
Never mind. Facts don’t matter! For the English also had their eyes trained on the property of those idle Irish landlords, which they thought should be in the hands of purportedly more enterprising English landlords. I’ll skip over the many additional grisly contortions of British welfare policy undertaken to clear the Irish estates of the peasantry and drive their owners into bankruptcy, so the English could buy them at fire-sale prices. Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, captured the spirit of the capitalist work ethic in recalling what economist and government advisor Nassau Senior had told him: that “he feared the famine in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good.”
Is there a similar grand scheme underlying the Republicans’ desire to drastically cut the welfare state? Something more than merely making the extremely rich even richer? I think so. Trump’s base is largely composed of Christian nationalists, who include people like Speaker Mike Johnson and Sen. Joni “We are all going to die” Ernst. Christian nationalists have always hated the welfare state, because they blame it for destroying the Christian patriarchal family, mainly by enabling women with children to support their families without relying on a husband. This, too, was an obsession of 18th and 19th century Christian advocates of the capitalist work ethic. More generally, on that ethic’s presumption that work ethic virtues (industry, frugality, chastity, “personal responsibility”) can be inferred from one’s wealth, many Christians believe that the poor must be lazy, profligate, licentious, and irresponsible. The only way to get them to shape up is to keep them in poverty and precarity until they earn and save their way out by practicing the work ethic.
Never mind that innocent children are the inevitable collateral damage of such a system. As Malthus explained, God is not unjust to “visit the sins of the fathers on the children.” For the laws of the free market are the laws of nature, instituted by God to goad the inferior classes onto the path of virtue as the work ethic defines it. Burke heartily agreed. There’s libertarianism, coming straight out of the capitalist work ethic. And that’s the kind of thinking that makes you so comfortable about making poor children suffer that you will mock other people who are upset at you for doing so.
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