40 Professionalism

One of the bizarre contradictions of contemporary capitalism is the label “essential worker.” As most forms of commerce, business, production, and exchange shut down to minimize the spread of the virulent coronavirus, certain sectors of society have been designated as essential to the skeleton crew keeping a quarantined society afloat. Incidentally, many of these “essential workers” turn out to be some of the worst paid and most precariously employed. However, rather than, say, bump up their pay and benefits as befitting of their essential status within society, capitalists have turned to calling them heroes.

One clue may be a paper written by sociologist Harold Wilensky titled “The Professionalization of Everyone?” published in 1964. Wilensky considered the idea that eventually, every job would become a profession and every worker a professional. In the end, he concluded that the idea of the professionalization of everyone “is a bit of sociological romance”. However, he did mention, “It may also be true that the empirical, critical, rational spirit of science finds its way into an increasing number of occupations” that leads to “a happy integration of professional and civil culture”.

The world Wilensky lived and worked within was on the cusp of a fundamental, traumatic transformation, the consequences of which we now grapple with today.

To understand the origins of professionalism, we need to understand capitalism.

Capitalists argues that whoever owns the means of production owns whatever the means of production produces even if they are not the ones who produces it.

Our entire society — laws, culture, infrastructure — are designed around this simple fact. And it is here, in the empty spaces within the framework of this basic economic relationship where we will introduce the early professional

Taclott Parsons and Harold Wilensky saw professionals as an outgrowth or natural conclusion from the development of rationalism, capitalism, and science. Magali Larson sees professionalism as an economic strategy where workers in a field get together and decide to create a mini-monopoly by restricting who gets to work in it and building prestige around their knowledge and skills through scarcity. Hannes Siegrist saw professionalism as a new service class whose clients were primarily bourgeois and so the professionals imitated the bourgeois to gain their sympathy and patronage. Others saw professionals as evolving from medieval guilds, using scarcity to justify insulation from the constant shocks of the free market. But one thing was certain, professionals didn’t exactly fit into the neat picture of capitalism as the owners of production (the bourgeois) or the laborers whose work is exploited for profit (the proletariat).

There are some agreed upon traits found among most of the original professions (generally considered medicine and law, sometimes military, teaching, clergy, and engineering). They include:

an esoteric body of knowledge that professionals claimed mastery over
some form of occupational enclosure (restricted access to being a member of the profession)3. some formalized or institutionalized process that regulated membership within the profession (usually through credentials and education)
a camaraderie or collegiality among peers recognized as fellow professionals
autonomy as a worker (generally self-employed) and autonomy as a field to self-regulate itself
A service-oriented ethic, usually one that asserts the profession serves a higher societal good above mere commerce which often leads to the profession developing a sense of purpose beyond profit

Already, there’s some characteristics about professionals that seem anti-capitalist. For one, there’s the idea of occupational enclosure; the concept of a free and unregulated market is anathema to the idea of a monopoly or oligopoly, and professions were essentially that.

Most professions allied with the newly formed and growing nation-states of the 1700s and 1800s, relying on the state to regulate their markets through legal systems that made it illegal to practice without some kind of license or degree.

The collective identity of professionals belonging to a single profession (and often creating powerful organizations and interest groups to protect and promote their agendas) also flies in the face of capitalist ideas of self-interest, enlightened greed, and individualism.

There is an idea that professionals work for a higher calling than profit.

** Unions vs Professions**: As capitalism and labor markets grew more complex and workers became more aware of their exploited status, there were two options a workforce could essentially take in the 1800s-1900s: they could either unionize or professionalize. Unions and professions basically had the same goals — create regulations that would bring more profit to their work — but allied with different agendas. Unions veered towards a proletariat identity while professionals veered towards a bourgeois identity. You can see this in how they celebrate themselves and how they’re perceived in society. Unions emphasize the trades and craftsmanship, solidarity amongst the working class regardless of occupation and organizing against the owners of the means of production. Professions emphasize their skill but through mastery of knowledge and education, their status as individual experts rather than a collective group, and internalizing bourgeois values of apolitical neutrality, a disdain for conflict, and Victorian ideas of discretion and comportment.

And then neoliberalism happened. During the 1970s, a series of economic crises such as stagflation and recessions and oil price spikes disrupted the capitalist dream. With the ever- looming threat of communism, capitalists began to push for a more aggressive, even more distilled version of capitalism. If the post-Great Depression era was leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt saving capitalism from itself by making it softer and kinder (to an extent), then the new neoliberal capitalists saw the answer in pushing capitalism to its limits. Because of their belief in the invisible hand and virtuous self- interest, they sought to make everything in society governed by the free market. This often meant drastic deregulation and the elimination of any kind of government-run program or centralized structures and institutions. It meant subjecting everyone to the full whims of the market, with all of its booms and busts, believing that the it would sort out the winners and the losers and that both of them would be deserving of their respective fates.

Perhaps one of the most pervasive (and perverse) effects of neoliberalism, however, is how it changed the very concept of the self. Because neoliberals worshipped capital, they also believed people should act like capital itself — fluid, easilytransformed, fungible, mobile, infinitely transmutable, and self-generating in profits. We should be entrepreneurs, not workers.

Neoliberalism rooted the means of production in the individual. It (falsely) redefined the means of production as labor, and everyone could provide some kind of labor. Everyone was redefined as a capitalist. It was all a slight of hand to get us to look away from the actual structural problems of capitalism and focus on the individual instead. Neoliberals did not like professions at all.

Capitalists broke up unions much more aggressively and violently; to break the power-base of professionals, who were often wealthier and held more status and power, more subtle strategies were necessary.

Capitalism began to purposefully exploit that labor more and more by “de- skilling” certain types of work and then using the excuse that a once valued skilled work is now unskilled. As women and people of color entered the professions, those who paid the professionals used it as an excuse to denigrate professional work and thus professional pay. This not only changed the nature of work but the nature of the worker: “people bend towards an adaptable/sacrificial /oblative position.

Precarization: governing a population through creating precarity. Neoliberalism, by leaning hard into capitalism’s roots, rebranded precarity as freedom: Convince people that precarity was self- empowering.

Thus, the gig economy isn’t exploiting workers by giving them unstable, hard-to-predict-or-plan-for working hours; it’s giving them the freedom to work whenever they wanted.

Precarity, isn’t something to insulate yourself from; it is a virtue to embrace. Precarity means freedom and empowerment.

As labor became more fluid and decentralized, it became more profitable and easier to exploit but also made it harder for employers to control. But then neoliberals figured something out. What does this new worker sound like? Someone who works autonomously and individually as opposed to in a collective or corporate group setting, someone who has to self-regulate themselves, who sees their economic value in their diverse set of skills rather than what they directly produce or own, and often wants a higher purpose in their work outside of just getting enough money to survive? Oh. They sound like professionals, suddenly, the professional, that oddball of capitalism, found the perfect slot to fit into in neoliberalism.

Professionalism was a ready-made, already existing pool of ideas and beliefs and aspirations and emotions that employers could tap into to control the increasing margin of indeterminacy or flexibility in work. It turns your work into your identity, and you into your work. To put it more bluntly, you didn’t have to obsessively watch over your employees anymore if you could get your employees to do it for you by surveilling themselves.

And so, we have all for the most part accepted the idea that we must all act like professionals even if we enjoy the complete opposites of the privileges professionals traditionally enjoyed. And, perhaps most chilling of all, most of us want to be a professional, desire to be professional, and judge those who are not, regardless of whether we’re treated as such.

The phrase: “socially essential.” Paramedics, ambulance drivers, grocery store clerks, truck drivers, cleaning staff, cooks — all of these jobs are “socially essential” but aren’t treated or paid as such.

To be professional is to be self-sacrificing, and if there’s one thing capitalists and the bourgeois middle class love to do, it’s sacrificing others for themselves.

Why do we pay the most worthless of our society the most and the most valuable members of our society the least? Because we’re all professionals now. And professionals are not supposed to be in it for the money but for the love of the game. Except we didn’t make the rules for the game. The capitalists did.

Lee (2021) We Are All Professionals Now: Or, How Did Grocery Workers Become Essential “Heroes”? (pdf)