It is not the same to be poor in a society which needs every single adult member to engage in productive labour as it is to be poor in a society which, thanks to the enormous powers accumulated by centuries of labour, may well produce everything needed without the participation of a large and growing section of its members. It is one thing to be poor in a society of producers and universal employment; it is quite a different thing to be poor in a society of consumers, in which life-projects are built around consumer choice rather than work, professional skills or jobs.

Factories turned out many and varied commodities, but all of them, in addition, produced the compliant and conforming subjects of the modern state. ... Just how crucial that other, latent function was, one can gather from the panics which periodically erupted throughout the modern era whenever the news broke out that a considerable part of the adult population was physically unfit for regular factory employment and/or army service.

Whatever explicit reasons were given to justify the concern, invalidity, weakness of the body and mental impairment were seen as a threat and were feared because they cast their victims outside the reach of the panoptical drill on which the maintenance of social order relied; people out of employment were also masterless people, people out of control – not surveilled, not monitored, not subjected to any regular, sanctions-fortified routine.

The passage from producer to consumer society has entailed many profound changes; arguably the most decisive among them is, however, the fashion in which people are groomed and trained to meet the demands of their social identities (that is, the fashion in which men and women are integrated into the social order and given a place in it). Panoptical institutions, once crucial in that respect, have fallen progressively out of use.

With mass industrial employment fast shrinking and universal military duty replaced with small, voluntary and professional armies, the bulk of the population is unlikely ever to come under their direct influence. Technological progress has reached the point where productivity grows together with the tapering of employment; factory crews get leaner and slimmer; downsizing is the new principle of modernization.

The way present-day society shapes up its members is dictated first and foremost by the need to play the role of the consumer, and the norm our society holds up to its members is that of the ability and willingness to play it.

It is often said that the consumer market seduces its customers. But in order to do so it needs customers who are ready and keen to be seduced (just as, in order to command his labourers, the factory boss needed a crew with the habits of discipline and command-following firmly entrenched). In a properly working consumer society consumers seek actively to be seduced.

They live from attraction to attraction, from temptation to temptation, from swallowing one bait to fishing for another, each new attraction, temptation and bait being somewhat different and perhaps stronger than those that preceded them; just as their ancestors, the producers, lived from one turn of the conveyer belt to an identical next.

From the work ethic point of view, any work – work as such – humanized, whatever immediate pleasures (or their absence) it held in store for its performers. ...

Not so the aesthetic scrutiny and evaluation of work. This emphasizes distinction, magnifies the differences and elevates certain professions to the rank of engrossing, refined objects of aesthetic, indeed artistic, experience, while denying to other kinds of remunerated livelihood-securing occupations any value at all.

The 'elevated' professions call for the same qualities which are demanded for the appreciation of art good taste, sophistication, discernment, disinterested dedication and a lot of schooling. Other types of work are regarded as so uniformly abject and worthless that by no stretch of the imagination can they become objects of willing, unforced choice.

Jobs in the first category are 'interesting'; jobs in the second category are 'boring'. These two brief verdicts encapsulate complex aesthetic criteria which gives them substance.

The point is, though, that in the world where aesthetic criteria rule supreme the jobs in question have not retained their formerly assumed ethical value either. ... Rough coercion once hidden under the veneer of the work ethic now appears bare-faced and unconcealed. Seduction and arousal of desires, those otherwise unfailingly effective integrating/motivating vehicles of a consumer society, are in this case appallingly irrelevant and toothless. In order to fill jobs that fail the aesthetic test with people already converted to consumerism, a situation of no choice, enforcement and fight for elementary survival must be artificially re-created. This time, though, without the saving grace of moral ennoblement.

Work that is rich in gratifying experience, work as self-fulfillment, work as the meaning of life, work as the core or the axis of everything that counts, as the source of pride, self-esteem, honour and deference or notoriety, in short, work as vocation, has become the privilege of the few; a distinctive mark of the elite, a way of life the rest may watch in awe, admire and contemplate at a distance but experience only vicariously through pulp fiction and the virtual reality of televised docu-dramas. That rest is given no chance of living-through their jobs in a way the vocations are lived.

The 'flexible labour market' neither offers nor permits commitment and dedication to any currently performed occupation. Getting attached to the job in hand, falling in love with what the job requires its holder to do, identifying ones place in the world with the work performed or the skills deployed, means becoming a hostage to fate; it is neither very likely nor to be recommended, given the short-lived nature of any employment and the 'until further notice' clause entailed in any contract. ...

Under these circumstances, exhortations to diligence and dedication sound insincere and hollow, and reasonable people would be well-advised to perceive them as such – to see through the trappings of apparent vocation into the game their bosses play. Bosses do not really expect employees to believe that they mean what they say – they wish only that both sides pretend to believe that the game is for real, and behave accordingly. From the bosses point of view, inducing the employees to treat the pretence of a vocational pattern to their employment seriously means storing trouble which will erupt whenever the next downsizing exercise or another bout of rationalizing occurs.

Defining the norm defines also the abnormal. The work ethic encapsulated abnormality in the phenomenon of unemployment – 'abnormal' was not to work. Expectedly, the persistent presence of the poor tended to be explained alternatively by the shortage of work or the shortage of the will to work. The messages of the likes of Charles Booth or Seebohm Rowntree – that one can remain poor while in full employment, and therefore the phenomenon of poverty cannot be explained by the insufficient spread of the work ethic – came to the British enlightened opinion as a shock. The very notion of the 'working poor' had all the markings of a blatant contradiction in terms, certainly as long as the universal acceptance of the work ethic figured most prominently in public thinking about social problems and continued to be seen as the cure-all for social ills.

As work gradually moved away from its central position of the meeting point between individual motives, social integration and systemic reproduction, the work ethic – as we have already noted – was slowly demoted from its function of supreme regulatory principle. By now it had backed out or has been elbowed out from many areas of social and individual life it previously directly or obliquely regimented. The non-working section of the population remained perhaps its last retreat, or rather its last chance of survival. Blaming the misery of the poor on their unwillingness to work, and so charging them with moral depravity and presenting poverty as the penalty for sin, was the last service the work ethic performed in the new society of consumers.

In a consumer society, a 'normal life' is the life of consumers, preoccupied with making their choices among the panoply of publicly displayed opportunities for pleasurable sensations and lively experiences. A 'happy life' is defined by catching many opportunities and letting slip but few or none at all, by catching the opportunities most talked about and thus most desired, and catching them no later than others, and preferably before others. As in all other kinds of society, the poor of a consumer society are people with no access to a normal life, let alone to a happy one. In a consumer society however, having no access to a happy or merely a normal life means to be consumers manquées, or flawed consumers. And so the poor of a consumer society are socially defined, and self-defined, first and foremost as blemished, defective, faulty and deficient – in other words, inadequate – consumers.