Whenever you find someone doing useless, uninteresting work, you can be sure you're seeing an unequal power distribution in action. For example, take the bad child who acts up in school, and is set to writing sentences for his teacher: His writing them doesn't do the teacher any good, it doesn't do him any good (because if writing "I will not kick the Principal/ steal lunch money/ or whatever," the first time doesn't change him any, writing it 99 times more certainly won't either). Why is he writing? It's to make sure he understands that the teacher is the boss, and he isn't.
You can find examples of this kind of unequal power distribution throughout history, but probably the best example of all time was the workhouse of 19th century England. Born out of the arrogant and judgmental attitudes of Victorian aristocrats, the workhouse was seen as a solution, to the "problem" of poor people getting government aid without doing anything in return.
Marx's Kapital for Beginners
England's policy of aid for the poor goes back to the 16th century. Improved efficiency at that time, was making it less expensive to produce woolen cloth, and wealthy landowners were eager to cash in, by plowing under the farmland on their property, and replacing it with grazing land for large herds of sheep. The peasants who used to make their living farming that land were thus displaced, and headed for cities like London, to look for work.
Before this, punishment was usually the fate for anyone caught begging in England. With so many new beggars showing up though, this was no longer really practical. Plus with so many families and decent workingmen joining their ranks, it no longer looked very humane either. Parliament passed The Poor Law of 1601, which provided for giving money, food or clothing to the needy. This worked passably well and, after its passage, there were fewer people starving in the streets, fewer scenes of outright destitution to be seen in England. It had its limitations however, and one of those, that bothered moralists of the time very much, was that sometimes it allowed a few of the "able-bodied poor" to receive benefits without doing any work in return.
This was very upsetting to wealthy people of the time. They felt that anyone who could work, should work, and it bothered them no end when sometimes there was no work that could be found for them to do. In order to fix this perceived problem, an amendment to the Poor Law was passed in 1834. The main point of the amendment was to put pressure onto poor people, so that they would move around the country as needed, to go wherever the jobs were, instead of staying where they'd always lived, after all the jobs there had disappeared.
The main way this was to be done, was through a new rule, which said the only way anyone could get any aid at all, was by moving into a workhouse, an establishment where someone got food, of sorts, and a place to sleep for the night, but in return had to do whatever hard, menial work was set for them, by the workhouse administrators.
By design, this was always something depressing and nasty. The idea was that the poor should so hate the prospect of doing such horrible things, that they would go anywhere, take any job, accept even the most miserable wage, in order to save themselves having to go to the workhouse. Jobs like hammering rocks into gravel for use in road-building, were favored by workhouse administrators. Another popular job was picking oakum, which was fraying old ropes into fiber, for use as caulking to stop leaks on ships.
These jobs were useful at least. They might be back-breakingly difficult and unpleasant, but at least a person doing them could see that he was producing something useful. The worst job given to workhouse inmates however, walking the treadmill, frequently served no useful purpose whatsoever.
Although sometimes the power generated by work on the treadmill would be used to turn a mill, most of the time it went completely wasted. Able-bodied poor people would be forced to walk (or climb) in place for hour after miserable hour, frequently closed into cubicles so that they could not interact with the other people on the treadmill. By this useless labor, they supposedly "paid" for whatever food and shelter they were being given.
And what lesson were they to learn from this work they were doing? What lesson could be learned, except that the ruling classes ruled, while they served. The workhouse system in England was not a way of giving aid to the poor, nearly as much as it was a way of making sure they all understood their inferior status.
You know, what got me thinking about workhouses today, was the time I spent helping to fill out the demographics bubbles on standardized tests at the school where I work. The kids already took the tests a few weeks back, but they can't be sent in to the state to be scored until every detail about every child has been discovered, and filled in, on the proper little box on the test document. This includes such momentous decisions as what ethnicity to write in for the little girl with the Spanish-sounding name, who's parents were born in Mexico, and who speaks Spanish in the home, but who does not self-identify as Hispanic or Latino, and which of all the totally inaccurate ethnic designations to use for the Arabic-background kids (You'd think a state like California, that has hundreds of thousands of Arab-Americans living here, would have an ethnic designation for Arab-background on their standardized tests, wouldn't you? But no-ooo-oooo). My fellow reading teachers and I were sitting in the Vice-Principal's office, carefully filling in all the bubbles we were sure about. Because you see, there is a "correct" way to fill the bubbles in, and if you don't know what that is, you have to seek out your school-site expert to help you. And if they don't know the answer, you have to call the State and find out the correct answer, because heaven forbid the bubbles should be filled out incorrectly!
And I found myself amazed, at the thought of all the time this was taking. It wasn't just the time the kids had spent testing, or even the time the teachers had spent preparing them to take the tests -- It wasn't even the time the other reading teachers and I were spending filling in the damn bubbles after it all. No, what really amazed me, was how much extra time, on top of it all, the administrators were spending, in order to learn all the rules of bubble-filling.
No one was getting any benefit out of any of it. Research has shown that standardized tests are a very inaccurate way of measuring student achievement. Too much testing hurts student morale, not to mention what it does to the morale of the teachers. It also eats up valuable administrator-time. Whenever we reading teachers had questions about our bubble-filling duties, we had to go track down the Vice-Principal to answer them. And if he couldn't help us, we had to find the Curriculum Coach and see if she could. And if neither of them was sure, we had to wait while they debated various options, and precedents, and discussed whether a call to the State would be necessary. All along, life at the school was going on. Sixth-graders were breaking school rules, and needing lectures, volunteer parties were being planned that needed speeches by the Vice-Principal. And there he was right when he was needed, helping us figure out how to fill in bubbles.
And I asked myself, "what purpose does this serve? Is it helping anyone at all, or is it just a way of showing public school personnel that we don't matter very much -- that public schools don't matter very much -- because the movers and shakers can always force us to do this pointless, unnecessary work, when we could be doing something useful. I ask you now: What do you think?
HyperSmash
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