Sphinx

In recent years, it’s become clear that the traditional model of work, in which one is paid a regular wage for specified hours and tasks, generally carried out at a designated workplace, applies to ever fewer people, at any rate in the West. The division between work and non-work is blurred, as increased connectivity and/or zero hours contracts both, in different ways, create and support the expectation of permanent availability, and – especially but not only in the creative industries, including academia – the mantra of “do what you love, love what you do” turns enthusiasm and dedication into a system of self-exploitation. One of the revelations of the recent (ongoing) industrial action in British universities has been the revelation – for me, as I suspect for many, not so much a hitherto unknown bit of information, but something previously not fully registered or felt – of how far the whole system depends on us all working way beyond contracted hours (insofar as those can be defined at all), so that working to contract is tantamount to failing to fulfill the terms of the contract. Goodwill, self-sacrifice and willingness to go the extra couple of miles are now treated as the norm, or even the minimum.

One of the ways in which this works is the difficulty of distinguishing between things we do for the universities who employ us and things we do for ourselves – as seen in the debates around what activities we should and shouldn’t carry on doing during industrial action. (Yes, I know that there’s a clear union line on most of these, but empirical evidence suggests that it doesn’t appear so clear to many academics). Research and writing: a major part of most of our contracts – but something that we’d want to do anyway, and we’re still going to want to write these things later so actually we’re just hurting ourselves by refusing to do them now. Applying for grants: vital for faculty financial plans – but with the potential to allow us to do things we really want to do. Blogging: not something they pay us to do – but they’ll probably claim it as impact and engagement. Editorial boards and reviewing: prestige, for us and the institution, and we probably wouldn’t be doing it if we weren’t employed as academics…

The specific context for these musings was my second appearance on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, talking about Roman Slavery with Ulrike Roth and Myles Lavan (to be broadcast next Thursday, 5th April – but I would really recommend going for the podcast version, with the extra ten minutes at the end; you’ll see why…). Over coffee afterwards, the question came up: is this the sort of thing that we would have been expected to cancel if this had been a strike day? Is a cosy (albeit unduly Spartacus-focused) chat with Lord Bragg ‘work’ – and, if it is, is it work for our primary employers, or for the BBC?

One of the things we discuss in the programme is the Roman institution of the peculium. Legally, a slave was property, and clearly an object owned by somebody cannot itself then be the rightful owner of anything. But Roman slaveowners allowed some of their slaves to accumulate money as if they were acting on their own behalf as well as managing their owner’s business, and to retain this money as if it were actually their own, and to use this to purchase their freedom in due course. It’s a brilliantly nasty bit of social control: slaves are thus incentivised to remain absolutely loyal (since they have no legal right to the peculium, nor to purchase their freedom; it still depends on the consent of their owner), and to work as hard as possible, and at the end they continue to have obligations to their former owner, even as free people, and have furnished their owner with the means to buy a replacement slave.

The parallel with academic life isn’t exact, of course, but it is suggestive. We believe that we are working on our own behalf, writing books and popular articles and making media appearances, and this isn’t untrue – but it’s all dependent on our position as university employees, and it all works to the university’s benefit too; not just for REF environment statements and student recruitment, but precisely because it helps obscure the boundary between public and private, work and leisure.

The point is not to make a crass and manifestly silly claim that academic employment is like slavery, but to note the similar ways in which the real conditions of the worker are deliberately obscured in order to make him/her work harder and toe the line obediently. “The Roman slave was bound by chains,” Karl Marx said. “The modern wage-labourer is bound by invisible threads.” But actually the Roman slave was bound by plenty of invisible threads too; the threat of the whip (and worse) was omnipresent, as Myles notes in the programme, but Roman slaveowners had other techniques at their disposal as well, above all making the slaves believe that they were working for themselves, and that they had greater autonomy than was actually the case.

There was the phony consultation, for example, as Ulrike noted in our conversation afterwards; landowners might regard their slaves as “tools with voices”, not as autonomous human beings, but they also recognised that allowing those tools to speak, and pretending to take their views seriously, was a useful management strategy:

When I perceived that their unending toil was lightened by such friendliness on the part of the master, I would even joke with them at times, and allow them also to joke more freely. Nowadays I make it a practice to call them into consultation on any new work, as if they were more experienced, and to discover by this means what sort of ability is possessed by each of them and how intelligent he is. Further, I observe that they are more willing to set about a piece of work on which they think their opinions have been asked and their advice followed. (Columella 1.8.15-16)

Yes, we’re all involved in the same enterprise, working towards the same goals… What’s striking about this class is that they are paranoid and fearful, harshly punishing any hint of dissent, and yet utterly dependent on the loyalty and sense of duty of the exploited class – which they generally receive with little question. Senior university management? No, no, Roman slaveowners, honest…