Do-it-yourself ideology re-absorbs formerly paid labor into leisure

Evidence

Even the most superfluous and senseless activity undertaken in people’s free time is integrated in society. Once again a social need is at work. Certain forms of service, in particular domestic servants, are dying out; demand is disproportionate to supply. In America only the really wealthy can afford to keep servants, and Europe is following close behind. This means that many people carry out activities which were formerly delegated. The slogan ‘do it yourself’ latches onto this as practical advice. However, it also latches on to the resentment which people feel towards mechanization, which unburdens people, without - and not the fact itself but only its current interpretation is a matter of dispute - their having any use for the newly acquired time. Thus, once again in the interests of certain specialized industries, people are encouraged to perform tasks, which others could do more simply and more proficiently for them, and which for this very reason, deep down, they must despise. Actually, the idea that one can save the money one spends on services, in a society based upon the division of labour, belongs to a very old level of bourgeois consciousness; it is an economy made from stubborn self-interest, an economy which flies in the face of the fact that it is only the exchange of specialized skills which keeps the whole mechanism going in the first place. William Tell, the obnoxious paradigm of absolute individuality, proclaimed that the household axe spared the need for the carpenter - indeed a whole ontology of bourgeois consciousness could be compiled from Schiller’s maxims. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 264

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The DIY analysis anticipates how ‘productive hobbies’ recapture outsourced domestic labor into self-exploitation — connects to later gig-economy and passion-economy critiques of work disguised as freedom.
• SHARE: The ‘William Tell, the obnoxious paradigm of absolute individuality, proclaimed that the household axe spared the need for the carpenter’ line — perfect for someone who studies 19th-century bourgeois ideology or Schiller reception.