プリズムとしての釜ケ崎

釜ヶ崎反失業連絡会
Homo laborans
HOMO LABORANS AN ANALYSIS OF THE MEANING OF WORK

"Man insofar as he is homo faber tends to isolate himself with his work, that is to leave temporarily the realm of politics. Fabrication poiesis, the making of things), as distinguished from action praxis) on one hand and sheer labor on the other, is always performed in a certain isolation from common concerns, no matter whether the result is a piece of craftsman-ship or of art. In isolation, man remains in contact with the world as the human artifice; only when the most elementary form of human creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one's own to the common world, is destroyed, isolation becomes altogether unbearable. This can happen in a world whose chief values are dictated by labor, that is where all human activities have been transformed into laboring. Under such conditions, only the sheer effort of labor which is the effort to keep alive is left and the relationship with the world as a human artifice is broken. Isolated man who lost his place in the political realm of action is deserted by the world of things as well, if he is no longer recognized as homo faber but treated as an animal laborans whose necessary "metabolism with nature" is of concern to no one. Isolation then becomes loneliness. Tyranny based on isolation generally leaves the productive capacities of man intact; a tyranny over "laborers," however, as for instance the rule over slaves in antiquity, would automatically be a rule over lonely, not only isolated, men and tend to be totalitarian. "("The Origins of Totalitarianism ,"ca. p.474)

On Levin's "Animal Laboransand Homo Politicw in Hannah Arendt" (Volume 7, No.4, November 1979)
In the November 1979 issue of Political Theory Martin Levin has accused me of misrepresenting Hannah Arendt's viewsl on the "animal laborans" by taking the notion to refer to a specific social class, namely the "working class" or ~Marxian proletariat." According to Levin, animal laborans is an abstract category that does not refer to any particular social group,l so that Arendt's strictures upon it do not amount to "elitism." Dr. Levin is barking up the wrong tree. I did not claim that Arendt meant the modern sociologists' "working class" by animal laborans, neither did I suggest that her elitism was a matter of middle-class contempt for the proletariat. But the fact is (contrary to Levin's claims) that Arendt frequently does use the term animal laborans and its analogs to refer to particular social groups, especially in her frequent discussions of premodern societies. This is a claim that is easy to document. In The Human Condition. for example, Arendt considers Labor partly as one human activity among others, but also identifies this mode of life with particular social groups, such as the slaves of ancient Greece, whom she sees as restricted to a life of Labor and nothing else. It is clear that in this context, animal laborans refers not to all men some of the time, but some men all of the time.) Slaves, apparently, are pure specimens of animal Laborans. Where they are concerned, man is what he does: his mode oflife limits his whole outlook, disabling him from Action.' Even more explicit assumptions about the connection in certain social groups between biological necessity and incapacity for freedom pervade On Revolution. Instead of using the term animal laborans in this book, Arendt talk about "the poor," who are obsessed with consumption and with escape from the pressure of life's necessities. She therefore makes quite explicit the connection between a particular class and a particular materialistic attitude to life which poses a threat to the free politics that only those liberated from biological necessity can appreciate.'
I do not see how it can be denied that in discussing premodern societies, Arendt usually does mean a particular social class when she delivers her strictures on the animal laborans, and normally does see the lower orders as a danger to free politics because of their subjection to necessity and the craving for consumption that this engenders. In the past, therefore, free politics has (she maintains) been an elite preserve for reasons of objective biological necessity. Arendt's views on premodern societies(which are strangely neglected by Dr. Levin) are clear, if unpalatable. The ambiguities begin when she comes to talk of Labor in the modern world. One might expect, given the rise in general prosperity and the liberation of whole populations from the pressure of objective bodily necessity, that there should be more scope for Action in the modern world than eyer before. But Arendt maintains, on the contrary, that the effect of modernization has been to give an undue predominance to the servile values of~Life" and to turn virtually everyone (not just the work ing class) into job.holders, animals laborantes, all sharing that base ideal of endless consumption that is really "the age-old dream of the poor and destitute." As a result, free politics (which always was the business of an elite of fret men guarding their public space against necessity in the shape of the slaves or the poor) now becomes the business of an elite of those who appreciate public freedom, in opposition to the consumption-oriented modern masses. The interesting point is that the basis for elitism in the present is different from its foundation in the past. In preindustrial societies, one of the necessary conditions for Action was freedom from biological necessity: if you were preoccupied with the cares of the body, you were objectively disqualified from Action. In the modern world, however, where according to Arendt all classes are "job--holders," the qualifications appear to be subjective. Those who can rid themselves of the laborer's and consumer's mentality can "select themselves'" as a true political elite. And this, of course, is where the other side of Arendt's thought (what I called the "democratic side") comes in. For while Arendt castigates modern masses, she also asserts that all men are in principle capable of Action. In the ancient world, slaves were capable of Action only if they ceased to be slaves: if their objective circumstances changed. For modern animals laborantes to Act, what is necessary is not so much an objectiVe change in their social circumstances as a subjective change in their outlook-a change that Arendt herself was presumably trying to bring about. As I suggested in my previous article, her views about the likelihood of such a change seem to have oscillated a good deal. To sum up then, Martin Levin's emphasis on the working class is both a misinterpretation of my article and a red herring. for the ambiguity between elitist and democratic tendencies I identified in Arendt's work has other foundations.

Source: On Levin's "Animal Laborans and Homo Politicus in Hannah Arendt" Margaret Canovan, in Political Theory, August 1979.8(3):403-405