Peter Frase

Mike Konczal [said something](https://twitter.com/#!/rortybomb/status/95569439671590913) on Twitter that pointed out the odd resonance between [this Will Wilkinson post](http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/07/unemployment-and-jobs) at the *Economist* and the rant against obsessing over "job creation" that I wote for [*The Activist*](http://theactivist.org/blog/stop-digging-the-case-against-jobs). Actually, I originally wrote it for the newsletter of the political organization that I'm a member of, the [Democratic Socialists of America](http://dsausa.org/dsa.html), and my argument was directed at my fellow leftists who I think sometimes lose sight of our historic criticisms of wage labor as a source of alienation and domination.

Wilkinson, by contrast, is kind of a softcore libertarian. And yet here he is echoing a longstanding commonplace of Marxism:

> David Ellerman, one of my favourite challenging thinkers, argues that the employer-employee relationship is more like the master-slave relationship than we are inclined to believe. I know this sounds a little crazy, and I don't entirely buy his argument. But take a look; he's on to something. Philosophical questions of self-ownership and the alienability of labour aside, I am convinced that autonomy is profoundly important to most of us, and that the sort of self-rental involved in the employment relation is regularly experienced as a lamentable loss of autonomy, if not humiliating subjection. I think a lot of us would rather not work for somebody else.

This is not really very different from Marx's account of alienated labor in capitalism. (It is, incidentally, especially hilarious to see this is published by the *Economist*. It has existed since Marx's day, and you can actually find passages in Marx's work where he trashes the *Economist* for basically the same reasons people trash it today.) I was making basically the same point in my essay:

> Most of the unemployed don't actually want jobs -- that is, they don't just want a place to show up every day and be told what to do. The real problem these people have is not that they need jobs, but that they need money. We've just been trained to think that the only way to solve this problem is to get people jobs.

In other words, wage labor sucks, and a lot of people will only do it if the alternative is destitution.

Of course, Wilkinson's argument differs from mine in important ways. In particular, he conceives of the alternative to wage labor in terms of other kinds of monetized interactions, like "cutting hair for money in a kitchen, or legally making a few bucks every now and then taxiing people around town in a 1988 Ford Escort", whereas I focused more on socially beneficial activities that are outside the money economy altogether, like taking care of children and writing open source software, and on the inherent benefits of simply increasing everyone's free time. Hence his policy recommendations, while overlapping with mine somewhat, are focused on deregulation and opening up the informal economy.

I'm not necessarily against deregulating the labor market. But deregulation would have to be paired with a far more robust social democratic safety net in order to ensure that a life outside the control of the boss is possible for everybody, and not just for a small labor aristocracy of people like Will Wilkinson (and me). That's why my essay talked about national health care, more generous unemployment, efforts to reduce the work week, and ultimately some kind of guaranteed income that allows people to survive outside of the labor market. (As for where the money for this should come from, please see [John Quiggin](http://crookedtimber.org/2011/07/25/where-the-money-is/).) Those are the things that make exiting the labor market a real option for the non-rich. And just as importantly, they reduce the risk and uncertainty that's associated with not having regular, full time employment. As it stands, the downside risk of losing your job is much greater if you're less educated, less healthy, or have more dependents than Wilkinson does.

I view all of this as an alternative strategy for getting back to full employment that doesn't rely entirely on job-creation programs. I want to clarify this point, because it wasn't made well in my original essay, which was constructed to be as brief and inflammatory as I could make it in order to attract as much attention to the argument as possible. I've noticed that some people conflated my rant against *jobs* with an opposition to *full employment*.

So I should make clear that I'm not opposed to full employment; in fact, I think that achieving and maintaining full employment is of paramount importance if we want to give people the real option of cutting back hours or quitting their jobs. For example, we know that there are lots of people who [wish they could work fewer hours](http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/social_forces/v081/81.4reynolds.html), but whose employers won't let them. And studies like these probably understate the desire for fewer hours because they don't do a very good job of distinguishing the desire for work from the desire for money. But whatever people would *like* to do, they don't have much leverage to negotiate or to find new jobs if they face a millions-strong reserve army of the unemployed. In a high-unemployment environment like the current one, we see people who have jobs [being worked harder](http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speed-up-american-workers-long-hours), but quitting at [historically low rates](http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/23/news/economy/trapped_in_a_job/index.htm).

However, the demand for full employment is distinct from the demand for jobs in ways that are politically salient. It is important to bear in mind that "full employment" is not just another way of saying "lots of jobs". It is a piece of economic jargon, a technical term for the situation in the labor market when employers' demand for labor meets or exceeds the supply of people looking for jobs across all the broad categories of employment. Keeping the economy in this state is highly desirable for working people and for leftist politics, for reasons best explained in the 1940's by the Polish economist Michal Kalecki, in his important essay on ["Political Aspects of Full Employment"](http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/kalecki220510.html):

> [U]nder a regime of permanent full employment, the 'sack' would cease to play its role as a 'disciplinary measure. The social position of the boss would be undermined, and the self-assurance and class-consciousness of the working class would grow. Strikes for wage increases and improvements in conditions of work would create political tension. It is true that profits would be higher under a regime of full employment than they are on the average under laissez-faire, and even the rise in wage rates resulting from the stronger bargaining power of the workers is less likely to reduce profits than to increase prices, and thus adversely affects only the rentier interests. But 'discipline in the factories' and 'political stability' are more appreciated than profits by business leaders.

Demands for government-led job creation target full employment by increasing demand for labor in the hopes that this will both soak up surplus labor directly and spur increased private sector demand for labor through the multiplier effect of public investment. However, there is no *a priori* reason why creating more demand for wage labor should be the only or the primary mechanism of reaching full employment. To the extent that job sharing schemes reduce unemployment by distributing work across more workers, the economy can approach full employment without creating new work in the aggregate. Just as importantly, since the definition of full employment depends on both the supply of and the demand for labor, full employment can be reached by reducing the supply of labor rather than increasing demand.

Why would we want to reduce labor supply? One reason, which I emphasized in "Stop Digging", is that wage labor is a form of domination that lots of people find inherently unpleasant, and that a lot of what people do for wages is less socially desirable than what they could do if they had control over their own time. But another good reason is that certain political priorities that the left supports for other reasons have the effect of decreasing labor supply. Hence a focus on the labor supply side can help us to ensure that the quest for full employment is not at cross purposes with our other goals.

Take, for example, health care reform. It is [generally accepted](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/01/theres_no_job-killing_health-c.html) that there are a certain number of people who would like to retire or otherwise leave the labor force, but who stay in their jobs because that is the only way they can maintain access to health insurance. A program of national health care that successfully guaranteed universal coverage and severed health care from employment would cause these people to drop out of the labor force; all things being equal, this would move the economy toward full employment as these jobs were filled by the unemployed and the total pool of people seeking work shrank. However, this move toward full employment involves no net job creation since it is entirely targeted to the labor supply side.

More generally, any reform that makes it easier to survive outside of employment may have the effect of reducing labor supply, if you believe--as I do and Will Wilkinson does--that lots of people would prefer not to work for wages if they can avoid it. Health care, government-funded child care, social security, welfare, and disability benefits are all steps toward what sociologists of the welfare state [refer to as the "de-commodification"](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/06/de-commodification-in-everyday-life/) of labor power. To the extent that people can get by without working for wages, they are able to avoid commodifying themselves and selling their labor.

Even at the height of an economic expansion, large numbers of people are not participating in wage labor. Among Americans aged 16 and older, about a third are neither working nor looking for work--and this was true even before the recession. Some of these people are so-called "discouraged workers" who want a job but have given up looking for one, but many others are retired, or are in school, or unable to work due to disability, or are taking care of children and elders, or are voluntarily out of employment for some other reason. There are ways that public policy could be used to force many of these people into the labor force. But doing so is in general a *right-wing* policy goal: for the same reason that full employment is politically good for workers, it is bad for capitalists, and the political agents of capital understand that one way of avoiding full employment while maximizing profits is to keep the supply of labor as high as possible. Which is why Republicans are currently obsessed with [increasing labor supply](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/07/26/279048/the-bigger-the-government-the-taller-the-people/) while doing nothing to increase the demand for labor.

"Against jobs, for full employment" seems at first like a paradoxical demand, but I hope I've shown that it isn't. By opposing the narrow rhetoric of job creation, I didn't intend to diminish the importance of tackling the crisis of the unemployed head-on; I merely wanted to suggest that there are alternative avenues for addressing this crisis that are both more humane and more radical.

*[Editors Note: I wrote this a while back, originally for [The Activist](http://theactivist.org/blog/stop-digging-the-case-against-jobs), but I never bothered to post it here. I'm reposting it now because I have a whole lot more readers than I did a couple of weeks ago, and because I'm going to post a follow-up in the next couple of days.]*

Much of the left has, mostly without debating it, coalesced around "jobs" as a unifying political demand. The motivation for this is clear: one of the biggest problems the country faces is that there are 20 million people who are unsuccessfully seeking full time employment. But while it may seem obvious that the solution to this problem is to create millions of new jobs, this is not in fact the only possible solution--and there are major drawbacks to a single-minded focus on increasing employment. For one thing, it may not be feasible to create that many new jobs. Moreover, it's equally debatable whether, from a socialist perspective, it is *desirable* to create these jobs even if it is possible.

We should differentiate three separate reasons why it might be desirable to create jobs. One is that a job provides a source of income: we often talk about the need to create jobs when what we really mean is that people need income. Most of the unemployed don't actually want *jobs*--that is, they don't just want a place to show up every day and be told what to do. The real problem these people have is not that they need jobs, but that they need *money*. We've just been trained to think that the only way to solve this problem is to get people jobs.

A second argument for creating jobs, and not just handing checks to people, is that having a job gives a person a greater sense of self-worth than getting a handout. To the extent that this is true, however, it's largely because we, as a society, treat wage labor as though it is a unique source of dignity and worth. The left has historically perpetuated this view, but we should be challenging it. We should point out that there is a lot of socially valuable work that is not done for pay. The biggest category of such work, as feminists have long pointed out, is household labor and the care of children and elders. But today we are seeing the growth of other categories of valuable unpaid work, in everything from community gardens to Wikipedia.

This is not to say that all of the socially necessary labor of society could be performed by volunteers. The third reason to create jobs is that some useful things won't get done unless someone is paid to do them. But it's difficult to make the case that there are enough socially necessary tasks out there to make up our job shortfall and also replace the destructive jobs that we need to eliminate.

Some argue that if we could build the manufacturing sector and start "making things" in America again, we could solve our unemployment problem. The reality is that we already make plenty of things, and the decline of manufacturing jobs is due more to technology than to off-shoring. The U.S. economy produces more physical output now than at any time in American history, but with fewer workers.

Public works are another of the usual suspects. Our infrastructure is indeed in a pretty sorry state, but repairing bridges is not going to create 20 million jobs--and in any case, it's a short-term fix, since eventually we'll clear out the backlog of neglected infrastructure projects. Then what?

Finally there is the call for "green jobs", based on the laudable idea that we need to put lots of people to work moving us away from our dependence on fossil fuels. This may be a source of some new jobs, like people making solar panels or weatherizing buildings. But the more common pattern is that old jobs are turning into different, greener jobs. The construction worker is now a green construction worker, and the corporate lawyer is now a corporate environmental lawyer, and so on. These are positive changes--but they don't create new jobs.

On top of all this, many of the jobs people are currently paid for are socially destructive: forget job creation, we need to do more job killing. Cutting the military budget, reining in the financial sector, and dismantling the prison-industrial complex will destroy many jobs. So, too, would a single payer national health care system: the Republican attacks on Obama's "job-killing" health care law were lies, but only because Obama's plan is so inadequate. As long as the left remains fixated on more wage labor as the solution to our problems, we'll always be vulnerable to the argument that the socially beneficial changes we want will "kill jobs".

What, then, should the left support, if not more jobs? Shortening the work week disappeared from labor's agenda after World War II, and we need to bring it back. We should also make unemployment benefits more generous in order to ease the pain of joblessness. Ultimately, though, we need to get more radical than that, and move away from tightly linking jobs and income. To reiterate, the real problem of the unemployed isn't their lack of jobs, it's their lack of money. That's why some on the left are coming around to the idea of just giving people money: a guaranteed minimum income, which everyone would be entitled to independent of work.

The objections to these ideas are typically: "how do we pay for it?" and "how do we achieve it?". Finding the money shouldn't be a problem where the will of a powerful political coalition is present--the richest country in the history of the world can guarantee a decent standard of living for everyone. But building that political coalition is a harder question. The first step is to admit that the current consensus around job-creation is unworkable, and not really any more "realistic" than the ideas I've just proposed. The next step is to highlight existing proposals that are being ignored because of the obsession with job creation. For example, Congressman John Conyers recently proposed legislation to subsidize employers that reduce employee hours, a policy that has been effective in Germany. This is an inadequate policy in many ways, but it's still a more useful focus than just obsessing about how to create new jobs.

John Maynard Keynes famously observed that "If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths . . . and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again . . . there need be no more unemployment". One of the things that ought to distinguish socialists from liberals is that we think it's possible to do better than this. Today, it seems that hole-digging has come to occupy a central place in the imagination of the left. But socialism should be about freeing people from wage labor, rather than imprisoning them in lives of useless toil.

Back in January, Freddie DeBoer wrote [a post](http://lhote.blogspot.com/2011/01/blindspot.html) in which he noted the absence of a genuine *left* in the mainstream political blogosphere. He astutely observed that the distinction between the moderate and extreme left is generally formulated in terms of differences in *tone*--the calm ratiocination of an Ezra Klein versus the fiery polemic of a Glenn Greenwald. But in terms of their political allegiances and their policy preferences, all of these people are just regular mainstream liberals.

DeBoer went on to accuse most of the mainstream liberal bloggers of being neo-liberals, in the sense that they a) favored deregulation, globalization, and the general expansion of market relations; b) were instinctively more hostile to people on their left than to people on their right. Whatever the merits of this accusation, it started the discussion off on a hostile note. There was some discussion from folks like [Kevin Drum](http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/01/liberals-and-labor) and [Matt Yglesias](http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/01/pas-dennemi-a-gauche/), but then the conversation kind of trailed off.

Now, however,the debate seems to have re-started on a somewhat sounder footing. Once again, it started with somebody crticizing Matt Yglesias for being a neoliberal--in this case, [Doug Henwood](http://lbo-news.com/2011/07/16/the-limits-of-easy-money/). For a while, it seemed like a rerun of a sterile debate that counterposed thinking about policy to thinking about politics. But Noah Millman came up with a good [summary](http://theamericanscene.com/2011/07/18/alternatives-to-neoliberalism) of what is actually at stake: the *integration* of policy analysis into a larger theory of politics. Henry Farrell then [intervened](http://crookedtimber.org/2011/07/19/20991/) with a framework that I think is very helpful:

> He seems to be muddling three very different things together – "policy proposals," "theories of politics," and "actionable programs to rebuild the American left." "Policy proposals" are clearly what he’s most comfortable with – proposed institutional or regulatory changes that would lead to attractive policy outcomes. And they are obviously good and important things to debate.

> But equally obviously, they are not the whole of politics nor anywhere near it. Policy is not made, in the US or anywhere else, through value-neutral debate among technocrats about the relative efficiency of different proposed schemes. Hence, the need for a theory of politics – that is, a theory of how policy proposals can be guided through the political process, and implemented without being completely undermined. And this is all the more important, because (on most plausible theories of politics) there are interaction effects between policy choices at time a and politics at time a+1. The policy choices you make now may have broad political consequences in the future. Obvious examples include policies on campaign spending, or union organization, which directly affect the ability of political actors to mobilize in the future.

Here we have three distinct elements of a comprehensive left political strategy:

- Detailed policy ideas
- Short-term political strategies for building a coalition to implement policy ideas.
- A long-term strategy for pursuing policies that strengthen the coalitions that can win and sustain progressive policies, rather than undermining them.

To some degree, there can be a division of labor between these three levels. It's really too bad that Matt Yglesias somehow ended up in the middle of this debate again, because he isn't really the issue. He's focused on policy, and that's fine--we need to have detailed policies lying around that successful political coalitions can draw on when they get into power. But to some degree, everyone has to have at least a basic idea about how the three levels fit together. Otherwise, as Farrell says, policy thinkers "have difficulty thinking about the interactions between short-term policy proposals that they like and the political conditions that might make these and other proposals achievable, and sustainable after they have been brought through." This is where the criticism of policy wonk bloggers as neoliberals is correct--more so in some cases than others. There is a tendency to believe that politics happens by having good ideas and convincing people of them, rather than through the clash of power and interest.

My only real contribution here is to point to a specific example of the above contradiction playing out in our current politics. There has been a lot of discussion lately of Suzanne Mettler's work on the [submerged state](http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6979/the_submerged_state/): government policies and services that people benefit from but don't realize that they benefit from. For example, the majority of people who benefit from the mortgage interest tax deduction [don't think they use government programs](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/02/the_submerged_state_in_one_gra.html). This phenomenon is directly linked to one of the Left's political problems: as J.P. Green [points out](http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/2011/07/pr_campaign_needed_to_check_go.php), anti-government sentiment is still widespread among Americans even at a time when the need for regulation and intervention in the economy should be most obvious. That kind of attitude is very hard to combat if people aren't *aware* that they benefit from government programs: ["get the government's hands off my Medicare"](http://www.slate.com/id/2224350/), and so on.

And I think you can directly connect this to the problem that Farrell addresses: neoliberal policy thinkers who lack a theory of politics, and hence don't think carefully about whether they are promoting policies that will ultimately undermine the political basis for being able to win elections and enact progressive legislation. Specifically, they will often favor policies that grow the submerged state. This may make sense from a narrow policy perspective, since it does actually help people. But because it isn't visible, it doesn't do anything to increase the number of people who think that government programs make a positive difference in their lives.

This problem also arose in the adminstration's attempt to stimulate the economy. To take one very specific example: consider the [tax cut](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/us/politics/19taxes.html) that the Obama administration passed. This was an income tax cut of $400 to $800 per year. But instead of sending people checks, the administration decided to quietly reduce the amount of withholding from paychecks. From a technical policy wonk standpoint, this was a perfectly defensible idea. The idea, based on [Sunstein-Thaler "nudge"-type theories of libertarian paternalism](http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1889153,00.html), was that if people didn't notice their temporary windfall they would be more likely to spend rather than save it. The consequence is that doing the tax cut this way makes it more effective as stimulus in the short run.

But the downside is now clear: most people [didn't realize they got a tax cut at all](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/us/politics/19taxes.html). From the policy wonk perspective, of course, that was the point--but it meant that Obama didn't gain anything *politically* from having cut taxes, and Republicans could still go around claiming that he had raised taxes.

As the [old saying goes](http://econ161.berkeley.edu/movable_type/2003_archives/002422.html), you [may not be interested](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/07/18/272099/what-is-the-alternative-to-neoliberalism/) in theories of politics, but theories of politics are interested in you.

In the new *Jacobin*, Mike Beggs has a [great article about Marxism]( http://jacobinmag.com/summer-2011/zombie-marx/) in which he lays out an approach to Marx's thought that very much resonates with my own conception of Marxism:

> If we are to engage in these ways with modern economics, what, if anything, makes our analysis distinctively Marxist? It is the two-fold project behind Capital as a critique of political economy: first to demonstrate the social preconditions that lie beneath the concepts of political economy, and especially their dependence on class relationships; and second, to demonstrate these social relations as historical, not eternal.

> These two strands of Marx’s thought are as valid as ever. The way to apply them today is not to maintain the form and content of Capital as a complete, separate way to approach economics, as if we are superior because we begin from superior principles. Instead, I think it is to approach modern economics as we find it and ask the same kinds of critical questions: what are the social conditions that make economic phenomena appear the way they do? It is to deal not only, not even mainly, with economic high theory, but also with the applied economics produced every day in the reports and statements of central banks, Treasuries, the IMF, etc., and ask, what are the implicit class relations here? Why are these the driving issues at this point in history? What are the deeper social contradictions lying behind them? The pursuit of a separate system of economics as something wholly other from mainstream economics isolates us from the political and ideological space where these things take place: better, instead, to fight from the inside, to make clear the social and political content of the categories.

Beggs also posted a fascinating [letter from Joan Robinson](http://jacobinmag.com/blog/?p=632) on the topic of non-orthodox Marxism, prompting a post from [Kieran Healy](http://crookedtimber.org/2011/07/17/what-i-mean-is-that-i-have-marx-in-my-bones-and-you-have-him-in-your-mouth/).

Contrast this with the recent series of posts at Crooked Timber, where John Quiggin wrote on "Marxism Without Revolution". There he poses the question: "what becomes of Marxism if you abandon belief in the likelihood or desirability of revolution?" Quiggin's own politics are a form of Keynesian Social Democracy, which he sets in contrast with what he sees as the inadequacy or obsolescence of the revolutionary Marxist tradition.

But Marxism is only obsolete if you approach it in the spirit of what Beggs calls the "zombie Marxists". Like Quiggin, my day-to-day politics are in many ways social democratic--I am concerned with elections, welfare state policy, and the like. Unlike Quiggin, I consider myself a Marxist, primarily because I do still believe in "revolution" in the sense of a transition to a post-capitalist society, though not necessarily in the sense of an insurrectionary seizure of state power by a revolutionary movement.

However, Quiggin raises a number of important points about what is or isn't still relevant in Marxism, so I found it useful to work out in some detail where I do and don't agree with his takes on three major aspects of Marxism: class, crisis, and capital.

### Class

In the [first post](http://crookedtimber.org/2011/06/19/marxism-without-revolution-class/), Quiggin says that:

> The analysis of economics and history in terms of class struggle is the central distinguishing feature of Marxism, and remains essential to any proper understanding. That said, the specifically Marxist class analysis in which the industrial working class, brought together in large factories, and increasingly homogenized and immiserised, serves as the inevitable agent of revolution, clearly hasn't worked and isn't going to.

I don't quite agree with the first sentence: class struggle was obviously a preoccupation of Marx, but I don't think that the explanation of history as the product of class struggles is necessarily the most important part of the theory, or the one most relevant to the present day. I will return to that point below.

I do, however, agree with the second point. In Marxist thought, two meanings of "the working class" are often conflated. At a high level of abstraction, the working class is all those who make their living by working for others rather than by owning the means of production and hiring employees to operate them. In this sense almost all of us are working class; yet as Quiggin observes, the working class in this sense is too heterogeneous and diffuse to form a self-aware "class for itself". Thus Marxists have also long spoken of a working class defined in more narrow sociological terms as given here by Quiggin.

And I agree with Quiggin that the industrial, factory-based working class is unlikely to serve as the collective agent of revolution due to its declining centrality in capitalist economies. Indeed, this very problem is at the heart of my new essay in *Jacobin* (not currently online), in which I reach back to a theory of non-class based collective identity (Benedict Anderson's theory of nationalism) in order to extract some ideas about where the collective revolutionary agent may come from in 21st Century America.

So what use is Marxism, without its central collective actor? We can extract the aspect of Marxist class analysis that is still useful, if we think more carefully about the paradoxical position that the working class occupies in Marx's thought. On the one hand, the working class in the narrow factory-industrial sense was supposed to be the group that led and carried out the revolution against capitalism. But on the other hand, the working class in the most general sense--as wage labor--is also the thing that is supposed to be *abolished* by the revolution. The notion of a class that simultaneously realizes and abolishes itself is a clever historical irony, but it is perhaps easier to imagine that the task of abolishing wage labor would be carried out by people who, while they are wage laborers, do not *identify* themselves or their movement as "working class" first and foremost. Certainly it's tempting to think so today, when identification with the idea of being someone who "works" is so often bound up with [a reactionary politics](http://jacobinmag.com/winter-2011/hipsters-food-stamps-and-the-politics-of-resentment/) of producerist *ressentiment*.

The above, then, is my response to the way Quiggin ends his post. He notes that while the traditional working class may be disappearing, it is still quite coherent to speak of a "ruling class", the top 1 percent of society. But if there is a coherent ruling class and only an inchoate exploited class, then Marxism risks ending up in a defeatist dead end. What I am trying to suggest, however, is that such defeatism is not inevitable. What is necessary instead is a recognition that while the oppressiveness of wage labor as a system of domination has not disappeared, we no longer know what the political vehicle for overturning that domination will be. The answer is not to give up, but to think harder about different models of collective identity and movement formation.

### Crisis

Quiggin [breaks Marx's theory of crisis into two parts](http://crookedtimber.org/2011/06/25/marxism-without-revolution-crisis/) . The first is "the idea that crisis is a normal part of capitalism rather than an aberration resulting from exogenous shocks." The second is "crises would grow steadily more intense, driven by the declining rate of profit, until they brought about the revolutionary overthrow of the system."

The first component is, I agree, a major intellectual contribution of Marx's, but I interpret its importance somewhat differently than Quiggin, as explained below. As to the second component, it seems to me that Quiggin is making the same error here that he does in the discussion of class: he insists that Marxism must be closely tied to a doctrine of historical inevitability. Now, there is no doubt that Marx did at times speak in these terms, sometimes for rhetorical effect. And some of the Marxists who followed him (like Kautsky) went much farther in this direction than the founder himself did. But this is not all Marxism is. It is much more helpful to think of it as a systemic, structural account of capitalism, and a way of thinking of the various *possibilities* for moving beyond capitalism. Speaking of crises "bringing about the revolutionary overthrow of the system", as Quiggin does, is at best vacuous and at worst counter-productive. At one level, clearly capitalism cannot last forever, and so sooner or later a crisis will end it. But there is always the choice between "socialism or barbarism", as Rosa Luxemburg put it. And if Marxist-influenced political movements just wait around for the crisis rather than thinking about ways to *take advantage* of the crises that inevitably arise, then they will fall into just the kind of passivity and defeatism that Quiggin warns against in his post on class.

This last idea, that anti-capitalist movements must take advantage of capitalist crisis, is in my view the most productive use to which Marxist crisis theory can be put. In a way, this makes my critique of Quiggin's crisis post the inverse of my critique of the class post. Above, I argued that what was especially important in a specifically Marxist class theory was the more "apolitical" structural element, which identifies wage labor as both a defining category of capitalist society and the source of a morally odious form of domination. What has been rendered superfluous is the political argument about the importance of the fraction of the working class working as a factory proletariat. With regard to crisis, my intuition is rather the opposite: I place less emphasis on the structural place of crisis within capitalist development, and instead I emphasize the *political* meaning of crisis and its importance in thinking about the transition *out* of capitalism.

The way to think about crises in capitalism is not in terms of historical inevitability. On the contrary, crises are the moments when the system is at its least deterministic and most full of alternative possibilities. The last major crises prior to the present one, in the great Depression and the 1970's, were also the last times when the continued survival of capitalism really appeared in question. Of course, capitalism prevailed and instituted a new regime of accumulation, but this does not mean this was the only possible outcome; history is in some measure stochastic, and there is no reason to be certain who would prevail if we could "run the tape again". Rather than thinking of post-capitalism as a single *telos* that we will arrive at when the conditions within capitalism are "ripe", we should think of the repeated crises of capitalism as producing "branching-off points" in historical time: each crisis *could* have been the jumping-off point for a successor to capitalism (and those hypothetical successors would each have been different and historically specific), or for a new and revivified capitalism. As things actually turned out, of course, capitalism won out each time. But that's all the more reason to think about how things might go differently next time.

Today, of course, there is precious little evidence of anyone using the global crisis to challenge the capitalist system; on the contrary, the elite has further entrenched its rule. This has lead some on the Left, like Doug Henwood and Duncan Foley, to forcefully argue against the idea that crisis is ever "good" for the Left. I agree with them in the narrow sense that it is counter-productive to just sit around and passively wait for a crisis to come along and abolish capitalism, and yet I also think their line of critique misses a larger point about the dialectic of reformist struggles and crisis in capitalism. It's true, as they argue, that incremental victories for the working class--higher wages, an expanded welfare state, and so on--are more likely to be won in stable, healthy economic times rather than in a crisis. But these very reforms tend to reduce the profit rate, erode labor discipline, and generally tip the balance of power away from capital and toward labor. For the ruling class, this is [intolerable on both a political and an economic level](http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/kalecki220510.html), and hence the progress of reform itself tends toward crisis--a crisis which must either discipline labor or replace capitalism. The crisis of the 1970's was a crisis not just of capital, but of the whole Keynesian-New Deal-Fordist class compromise of the postwar years.

If achieving pro-worker reforms tends to produce capitalist crisis, then clearly the left--even, or especially, the reformist Left--needs to have a strategy for directly addressing the crisis, one that goes beyond just preserving an untenable status quo. This, I believe, was one of the fundamental shortcomings of the late 20th century socialist movement. On the reformist, social democratic side, you had parties that understood how to make incremental, day-to-day progress, but were flabbergasted in the face of a crisis, though there were a few intriguing stabs at a transformative strategy such as the [Meidner plan]( http://www.counterpunch.org/blackburn12222005.html). On the revolutionary Communist side, you had parties that ignored such incremental work entirely in order to wait around for the big crisis. Neither perspective is adequate, and what is needed instead is a dialectical synthesis of reform and revolution.

### Capital

Quiggin's [final post](http://crookedtimber.org/2011/07/01/marxism-without-revolution-capital/) is about capital, which I view as really the central category of Marx's mature thought. (The long version of why I think this is more or less Moishe Postone's *Time, Labor and Social Domination*.) Quiggin begins with some stuff about the labor theory of value, but debates about that tend to devolve quickly into uninteresting scholastic disputes about "transforming" values into prices, which is neither very interesting nor very central to what Marx was trying to do. He quickly moves on, however, to something much more important:

> Most importantly, capital is not just an aggregate of machines, buildings, trading stock and so on. It is a social relation, and gives rise to a kind of society quite different from previous societies where power over land was the core relation.

This notion of capital as a social relation structuring society is absolutely central to my definition of Marxism, and it relates back to my earlier critique of Quiggin's post on class. What defines capitalism is not a relationship between people, such as capitalists and workers. Political struggles may manifest themselves as contests between groups of people, but the identity of the specific people is not what is fundamentally at stake. This is unlike a pre-capitalist society defined by relations between lords and peasants, say.

Capitalism is constituted by a relation between two *categories*, capital and wage labor. Each of these categories refers to a particular pattern of actions that is detached from the needs or desires of individual people. The imperative of capital is to turn money into an ever-greater quantity of money irrespective of the particular economic activity by which this is accomplished. The imperative of wage labor is to perform work that one has no inherent interest in so as to acquire the money needed for survival. These categories can overlap and interpenetrate even within the same individual (I am a worker, and I also invest in the stock market). Indeed, as I argued in an [earlier post](www.peterfrase.com/2011/03/capitalism-without-capitalists/) on "capitalism without capitalists", it is possible to conceive of a society that is structured by the opposition between labor and capital, but in which no human beings occupy the role of "capitalist".

At the end of the last post, Quiggin describes the politics of his own non-Marxist social democracy:

> Capitalism is more dynamic than any previous society, but also, in its pure form at least, more unstable, and at least as unequal. These features have been amplified, in ways we have yet to fully comprehend, by the explosive financialisation of the last three decades or so. . . . The problem for social democrats is to keep the dynamism and innovation while delivering more stable and sustainable, and less unjust outcomes.

I agree with the diagnosis of capitalism, but I define the political problem differently. It may be possible to deliver "stable and sustainable" capitalism for a while, but ultimately such a project is both self-contradictory and morally inadequate. Moreover, I suspect that maintaining "dynamism and innovation" in the present era of immaterial production depends on getting *beyond* capitalism rather than depending on it; the alternative is the stagnant artificial scarcity of [anti-Star Trek](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/). I would say that the problem for Marxist social democrats is to figure out how to build political movements that can win concrete material rewards for people through piecemeal reform, while also creating the conditions for moving society away from the dependence on wage labor and towards other kinds of voluntary forms of productive activity. But I will wait for another post to say more about what I mean by that.

With Mitch McConnell now desperately trying to [pull the Republicans back from the brink](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/in-praise-of-mcconnells-plan/2011/07/11/gIQAoiHHBI_blog.html) of a sovereign debt crisis, I'm honestly a little surprised that there hasn't been more discussion of Matt Yglesias's argument that the debt ceiling fiasco signals the incipient [collapse of the American system of government](http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=founding_falter). He's been making this argument on the blog for a while, and now he's made it at greater length in the American Prospect. Basically, the idea is that:

1. In a Presidential system like the U.S.'s, the President and congress have independent sources of political legitimacy and an independent ability to obstruct the operation of the government.
2. For this reason, the system is unstable: if the two branches are controlled by rival parties, they can bring the system to a standstill. Most other countries that have adopted American-style political systems ultimately either saw a military coup or a presidential abrogation of the legislature's power.
3. The reason this didn't happen in America is because we didn't have cohesive, ideological parties, and so it was possible for Presidents to make compromises and deals with congressional factions.
4. Now we have disciplined, ideological parties. Or rather, we have *one* such party, but that's enough. The result is constant gridlock.

This has some things in common with the argument I made about [contagious delegitimation](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/11/contagious-delegitimation/) in the American political system. My point there was that the government's inability to function was making various branches of government increasingly unpopular, and that this was further inhibiting their ability to do anything. Yglesias provides a structural account of just why this is happening.

It isn't really all that surprising, either--as Yglesias points out, the American system of government pioneered modern bourgeois democracy, and the founders didn't really have other examples to work from. The constitution is like the operating system for the country's political and legal system, and we've basically been running Democracy 1.0 (with 27 patches to address major vulnerabilities) since the 18th century. No wonder our politics now work about as well as a computer that's still running Windows 95. Other countries have moved on to [better designed, less buggy implementations](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_system), and eventually we'll have to do so as well. Maybe people are just unwilling to accept that at some point, the U.S. system of government could become so dysfunctional that it would actually fall apart. Maybe liberals are just too terrified to contemplate what would happen if we had a constitutional convention in this political environment.

Or maybe people just don't know what to say about a proposal that's so far outside the parameters of what everyone else is talking about. There's another piece like this that I also think isn't getting enough attention: Dean Baker's [argument](http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/91224/ron-paul-debt-ceiling-federal-reserve) along with Ron Paul that the Fed should destroy the 1.6 trillion dollars of government bonds that it owns in order to get around the debt ceiling crisis. I've seen remarkably little discussion of this, even though it's, you know, *Dean Baker arguing alongside Ron Paul* that the Fed should *destroy 1.6 trillion dollars in bonds*. Maybe people don't love wacky and counter-intuitive [#slatepitches](http://www.mediaite.com/online/slates-contrarian-ways-mocked-on-twitter/) as much as we thought.

But when the American constitutional order disintegrates, don't say you weren't warned.

I feel like I've written a million almost-finished blog posts in the past month without coming up with anything I wanted to put up. But now I'm inspired, because something very interesting is going on in the progressive policy-wonk blogosphere right now. A whole bunch of different writers suddenly seem to be converging on an idea that I've also been playing with for a while: capitalism has gone through, or is going through, the transition to an economy in which rents rather than profits are the dominant form of value extraction.

This started when Robert Kuttner [touched off a conversation](http://www.creditslips.org/files/kuttner-on-past-future-bkcy.pdf) about the role of the rentier class in American politics. Kuttner frames our politics as a contest between the claims of the past and the claims of the future: the former are bonds, loans, and the like, while the latter are potentially productive investments. It's a framing that evokes an old tradition of differentiating productive and unproductive labor, but fingering the financial elite as rentiers is particularly suited to our moment. This idea then got picked up and elaborated in a whole bunch of different places ([Konczal](http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/robert-kuttner-on-the-aftermath-of-debt-bubbles-and-restructuring-debts/) , [Krugman](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/the-rentier-regime/) , [Horning](http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/142726-)).

Konczal, in particular, has been great on this. Prior to Kuttner's essay, he had already been writing about the increasing [dominance of the financial sector](http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/towards-a-theory-of-corporate-and-financial-sector-solidarity/) in the economy. But what really blew my mind was the post he [put up today](http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/rents-versus-profits-in-the-financial-reform-battle-and-post-industrial-economy/). He goes much farther than any of the other comments by noting that what we really need is to "get a generalizable theoretical framework for conflicts between profits and rents in the post-industrial world." And in search of such a framework, he digs up a [Michael Hardt essay](http://seminaire.samizdat.net/IMG/pdf/Microsoft_Word_-_Michael_Hardt.pdf) that poses the question in explicitly Marxist terms.

Hardt, following Marx, portrays the transition between different economic eras in terms of the dominant form of property in each. Under feudalism and early capitalism, the dominant form is "immobile" property, chiefly land. Under mature industrial capitalism, it is "mobile" property, chiefly the outputs of industrial production. But today, mobile property is becoming subordinate to "immaterial property": copyrights, patents, affect, care, financial claims, and so on. The interesting twist is that it is only under the regime of mobile property that profit becomes the dominant form of value extraction. In both the regime of immobile property and the regime of immaterial property, the dominant form of value extraction is through rent. The key difference between rents and profits is that, according to Hardt:

> In the collection of rent, the capitalist is deemed to be relatively external to the process of the production of value, merely extracting value produced by other means. The generation of profit, in contrast, requires the engagement of the capitalist in the production process, imposing forms of cooperation, disciplinary regimes, etc.

This, I think, gets at the heart of what is going on in contemporary political economy. And it's mildly shocking to me to see somebody like Mike Konczal endorsing it, because this dude is no academic Marxist. He's a former financial engineer who now works at the [Roosevelt Institute](http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/), which is just the sort of mainstream New Deal liberal outfit that it sounds like.

I do think Konczal gets it a bit wrong in one spot, though. Commenting on the Hardt essay, he says:

> Much of the modernization that Marx triumphed was a victory of profit-makers over rent-holders. What Hardt argues is that, as the economy becomes more and more about information, the crucial ends of capital holders is to take things that could belong to the commons and instead appropriate them as property rights and sell them off. The implies a prioritization of rent-holders over profit-makers in terms of power over the economy (also implying a regression back from the future that Marx thought would come after profit-makers – take that Hegelian Marxism!).

Take that, indeed! I think this line of argument is actually a lot more Hegelian than than Konczal gives it credit for. It's true that the return of the rentier looks, superficially, like a regression back to pre-capitalist social relations. And it may bring with it some seemingly atavistic political movements: I'm thinking in particular of movements for debt forgiveness, a political demand that dates back to [ancient times](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(Christianity)). But while the form of value extraction as rent looks the same, the *content of the value-creating activity*--and the form of social life that this activity produces--is completely different.

Above, I noted that you can describe economic systems in terms of their dominant property form. But another way to look at it is in terms of the identity of their exploited class. Under a primarily agrarian system based on control of land, it's peasants; under industrial capitalism, factory workers. One big difference between the exploited classes under these two systems is that under the former, peasants are fragmented and isolated from each other, while under the latter the proletariat is brought together in factories and cities and hence becomes a unified and self-aware *class*. Marx famously (or infamously) referred to the "idiocy of rural life", by which he meant that peasants were "idiots" in the etymological [Greek sense](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_(Athenian_democracy)): people concerned exclusively with individual and private rather than public affairs. From the [*18th Brumaire*](http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm):

> The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. **Their mode of production isolates them from one another** instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore **no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships**. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. **A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes**. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.

Factory work has a completely different character than this, which is why Marx thought the proletariat was capable of becoming a "class for itself" that could lead the way in overturning capitalism, whereas the peasantry was politically inert.

Above, I noted that peasants and factory workers are the key exploited classes for agrarian and industrial capitalism respectively. What about rentier capitalism? Arguably--and definitely this is Hardt's argument--it's those who provide "immaterial labor". Some of these people are isolated from each other like peasants--women providing care in the home, for example. But a lot of them are engaged in producing what Hardt refers to as "the common": "the results of human labor and creativity, such as ideas, language, affects, and so forth". For instance, one of the big new facts about today's economy is that you have lots of people connecting, collaborating, creating and sharing things over the Internet, creating value that is then extracted by the big network-controlling rentiers like Google and Facebook. That's why Konczal is wrong, and rentier capitalism isn't a regression to an earlier mode of production but rather, as Hardt says in explicitly Hegelian jargon, the "negation of negation": first capitalism negates the individual property of the small proprieter, and then it negates its own form of property as it comes to depend increasingly on the common.

Now, it's certainly possible to argue that these kinds of mass sociality and creativity aren't promising for building political consciousness, and that they just encourage narcisissm, consumerism, and self-commodification. That's what I generally take [Rob Horning](http://www.popmatters.com/pm/blogs/marginal-utility/) to argue, for example, and he's a thoughtful guy whose arguments need to be reckoned with. But while the comment sections on major websites might suggest that the class of immaterial laborers are "idiots" in the contemporary sense, they are in a quite different situation from the rural idiocy Marx described. The "multifariousness of development, diversity of talent, wealth of social relationships" that Marx thought was missing from the peasantry is precisely what contemporary forms of immaterial labor tend to foster. Hence I tend to be cautiously optimistic about their political potential. That, I think is the rational kernel of the talk of "multitude" by Hardt, Negri, et al, even though I tend to find their arguments kind of blustery and overly speculative. (I have some more things to say about creating a new collective agent of anti-capitalist struggle, but those will appear in my essay in the forthcoming issue of [*Jacobin*](http://jacobinmag.com/).)

But it's certainly not inevitable that those who build the common will become a class for themselves. And if they don't, then we instead get a full-fledged rentier capitalism, in which the exploited class is held in new kinds of domination by the rentier class. That's what I was thinking about when I wrote about [Anti-Star Trek](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/) and [Idiocracy's theory of the future](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/01/idiocracys-theory-of-the-future/). Which brings me back to why I was so excited about the whole rentier debate in the blogosphere. If so many people are coming around to these ideas from wildly different directions--Kuttner's old fashioned liberalism, Krugman's neoclassical economics, Hardt's post-modern Marxism, and my own weird mix of social democratic and communist impulses--then I start to think that we're hitting on something real and profound about how the current political economy is working.

In his influential treatise on the modern welfare state, [*The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism*](http://books.google.com/books/about/The_three_worlds_of_welfare_capitalism.html?id=Vl2FQgAACAAJ), Gøsta Esping-Andersen proposed that one of the major axes along which different national welfare regimes varied was the degree to which they de-commodified labor. The motivation for this idea is the recognition--going back to Marx--that under capitalism people's labor-power becomes a commodity, which they must sell on the market in order to earn the means of supporting themselves.

Following Karl Polanyi, Esping-Andersen describes the *de*-commodification of labor as the situation in which "a service is rendered as a matter of right, and when a person can maintain a livelihood without reliance on the market" (p. 22). So long as the society remains a capitalist one, it is never possible for labor to be *totally* de-commodified, for in that circumstance there would be nothing to compel workers to go take a job working for someone else, and capital accumulation would grind to a halt. However, insofar as there are programs like unemployment protection, socialized medicine, and guaranteed income security in retirement--and insofar as eligibility for these programs is close to universal--we can say that labor has been partially de-commodified. On the basis of this argument, Esping-Andersen differentiates those welfare regimes that are highly decommodifying (such as the Nordic countries) from those in which workers are still much more dependent on the market (such as the United States).

In the lineage of comparative welfare state research following Esping-Andersen, de-commodification is generally discussed in the way I've just presented it: in terms of the state's role in either forcing people into the labor market, or allowing them to survive outside of it. However, from the standpoint of the worker, we can think of the de-commodifying welfare state as giving people a *choice* about whether or not to commodify their labor, rather than forcing them to sell their labor as would be the case in the absence of any welfare-state institutions. The choice that is involved here is not merely about income. It ultimately comes down to how we want to organize our time, and how we want to structure our relations with other people.

What is ultimately at stake here is not merely the commodification of labor-power, but the commodification of all areas of social life. For based on the institutions that exist and the choices people make within them, we can imagine multiple social equilibria. Social life could be highly commodified: everyone performs labor for others in return for a wage, and also pays others to perform social functions which they don't have time for. But we could have a much lower level of commodification where people work less, because their cost of living is much lower: they are able to satisfy many of their personal needs without spending money.

To elucidate this point, consider a simplified thought experiment. Suppose you and I live in adjacent apartments. Now consider the following ways in which we might satisfy two of our needs: food and a clean habitat.

In scenario A, I cook my own meals and clean my own bathroom, and you do the same for yourself.

In scenario B, you pay me to cook your meals, and I pay you to clean my bathroom.

In scenario C, I pay you to cook for me and clean my bathroom, and you pay me to cook your meals and clean your bathroom.

This hypothetical is a bit silly, since with only two people involved we could just barter the trade in services rather than paying each other money. But in a more complex economy with many people paying each other for things, the medium of exchange becomes necessary, so I leave that element in place even in this simplified example.

What might make each of these three scenarios desirable?

The advantage of scenario A is that each of us has maximal control over our labor and our lives. I cook and clean when I choose, I eat just what I like, and I will do just enough cleaning to ensure that the bathroom meets my standards of cleanliness.

The advantage of scenario B is that it might be more efficient, if each of us has what economists call "comparative advantage" in one of the tasks. If I'm a better cook, but you're better at cleaning, then each of us ends up with overall better meals and cleaner bathrooms than we would have had otherwise. The downside, however, is that each of us has now partly alienated our labor to some degree. I have to monitor you to make sure that you're doing a complete job of cleaning, and you can boss me around if you dislike my food or I don't have dinner ready on time. What's more, the only way for this exchange to be fair to both of us is in the unlikely event that you enjoy cleaning the bathroom just as much as I like cooking. In the more likely case that both of us find cleaning much less pleasant than cooking, you get a raw deal.

Scenario C would seem to combine the worst elements of the other two scenarios. There is no efficiency gain, since we are both performing both tasks. And our labor is maximally alienated, since we are doing all our cooking and cleaning at someone else's command rather than for ourselves.

The point of these examples is that they represent different visions of how the economy might work. Scenario A is the one I sympathize with, and it's one that motivates many socialists, feminists, social democrats, and advocates of shorter working hours and less consumerist ways of living. Scenario B is more like the traditional vision of 20th century liberal capitalism: by commodifying more of social life, we increase our material abundance but at the expense of living alienated lives as commodified labor.

However, I would argue that a lot of political and economic discourse in the United States is actually dominated by the third scenario, which sees commodification as a good in itself, irrespective of its efficiency or its effect on our working lives. I said above that scenario C didn't have anything to recommend it, but this is not exactly true. For in a society where labor-power is still commodified and people are dependent on the labor market, it is essential that we constantly create new jobs for people to perform--otherwise, you end up with mass unemployment just like we're seeing right now. Scenario C is the one that maximizes job-creation and GDP growth, even though it is by no means obvious that it is the scenario that maximizes human happiness and satisfaction.

It's worth belaboring this point precisely because so many liberals and even leftists take the "high-commodification" equilibrium for granted. Take the example of [Matt Yglesias](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/issue/) of the Center for American Progress. I write about him often (and once got [Yglesiassed](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/03/23/200322/endgame-419/) in return) because in many ways I find him a more congenial thinker than a lot of more traditional "leftists" who seem trapped in nostalgia for mid-20th century industrial capitalism. But the issue of commodification gets at a core area where we see the world differently.

Yglesias often writes about the fact that industrial employment is inevitably declining for technological reasons, and hence services are bound to make up an increasing share of the employment. This motivates some of his other hobby-horses, such as his crusade against occupational licensing, which he sees as an impediment to creating these needed service jobs. Now, I have no particular attachment to occupational licensing, and on the issue of manufacturing and industrial employment, Yglesias and I are basically in agreement. Where we disagree is in seeing the best future trajectory of the economy as one in which people perform more and more services for each other, for pay. [For example](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/03/07/200135/the-yoga-instructor-economy/):

> [T]his is why I’ve been saying that yoga instructors have the job of the future. Nothing in these trends suggests that the actual quantity of janitors is going to increase in the future. If anything, falling demand for office workers implies that the future can have fewer. So is the future a smallish number of wealthy office workers served by an "aristocracy of labor" of unionized janitors awash in a pool of unemployed people enjoying free health care? Presumably not. The people of the future will be richer than the people of today, and therefore will more closely resemble annoying yuppies. Nicer restaurants are more labor-intensive than cheap ones, and the further up the scale you go the more specialized skills (think sommelier) come into play. Annoying yuppies take yoga classes, or even hire personal trainers. Artisanal cheese is more labor-intensive to produce than industrial cheese. More people will hire interior designers and people will get their kitchens redone more often. There will be more personal shoppers and more policemen. People will get fancier haircuts.

It's easy to mock the idea that the future economy will be based entirely on giving each other haircuts and yoga instruction. But my objection is not that this is *implausible*--I think it's entirely plausible, and such a world could even feature a relatively egalitarian income distribution, depending on the bargaining power of labor and the intervention of the state. The real question, I think, is whether this is the only way for things to turn out--that is, is it really true that [the yuppie that is richer only shows, to the less rich, the image of their own future](http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1.htm)? And if not, is it the most desirable outcome?

I don't want to pre-judge this choice so much as just argue that it *is* a choice. Whether we end up in a low-commodification, low cost of living scenario A or a high-commodification, high cost of living scenario C will be the result of an interaction between the state and other institutions and individual choices within those institutions. It is thus both a political and a cultural question. Even now, not every country resolves these questions in the same way. In the Netherlands, for example, both incomes and working hours are lower than in the United States, and a good argument can be made that the well-being of the Dutch is [at least as high as our own](http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:129022).

This is why I think that the politics of de-commodification in the 21st century will be closely linked to the politics of time.

On the occasion of Osama bin Laden's death, I'm dusting off something I wrote a long time ago but never bothered to publish anywhere. The brief essay below is about six and a half years old, and it was written shortly before the 2004 U.S. elections. Bin Laden had just [put out a tape](http://english.aljazeera.net/archive/2004/11/200849163336457223.html), now mostly forgotten, in which he seemed to be inserting himself into the election in an especially bizarre way. At the time, there was lots of chatter about how this tape would help Bush's re-election, particularly because of the way bin Laden's comments seemed to echo things that the left was saying about Bush at the time.

The whole affair caused me to reflect on the bizarre way that Americans allowed bin Laden to affect the national discourse after 9/11. He disrupted our society just as much through his rhetoric as through his violent plots--and that rhetoric sometimes appeared to be a self-conscious parody of the rhetoric of American power. How, I thought, could bin Laden not be aware of the power he held to discredit ideas in the eyes of mainstream American opinion, simply by associating himself with them? Thankfully, he can no longer perform this role, but the underlying problem--the way we allow official "enemies of America" to exercise a veto over our political discourse--persists.

This is what I wrote in 2004:

Finally, the suspense is over. We've gotten the answer to the question on everyone's mind: what does Osama Bin Laden think about the US Presidential election?

The release of a new Bin Laden tape in late October would have become the center of the electoral contest in any event, but now Bin Laden has intervened directly in American politics. Previous tapes have directed themselves primarily at Bin Laden's presumptive *umma*, the disaffected Muslims who provide his recruits. For Americans, Bin Laden had only threats and invective. Now, however, he appears to appeal directly to Americans, over the heads of their leaders. "Security is an important pillar of human life", says Bin Laden, and "we only engaged battle with you because we are free persons".

What are we to make of this new pose, with Bin Laden cloaking himself in the language of American democracy, in tones of empathy and conciliation (admixed with violence and threats)? With Osama Bin Laden, nothing can be taken at face value. Every sector of American culture has spent the past three years constructing Bin Laden as the personification of all that is bad, to the point that he has become both the author and the embodiment of evil and untruth, to an almost metaphysical degree.

Osama is radical negativity. Any position becomes nearly impossible to affirm in public as soon as it has been upheld by Osama Bin Laden. As a consequence, Bin Laden has gained a seemingly magical power to pollute and corrupt any discourse in which he intervenes. His latest intervention seems conscious of this, in the way it deploys tropes of the domestic anti-Bush left: the commentary neatly wraps together the allegations of Bush's slowness to react on the day of the attacks (including even the "My Pet Goat" incident shown in *Farenheit 911*) with the effort to connect American foreign policy with the roots of terrorism.

Does Osama understand what he represents to Americans? Does he understand that anything he touches becomes anathema in our political discourse? If he does, then surely he knows that his comments are a gift to George W. Bush: now that Osama has raised questions about the prudence and competence of Bush's policy, no-one else can legitimately do so.

David Brooks understands this. In [his *New York Times* column](http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/30/opinion/30brooks.html), he dutifully acts as a reflexive puppet of the Bin Ladenist rhetorical virus. "What we saw last night was revolting", he says of the video. "Here is this monster . . . trying to insert himself into our election, trying to lecture us on who is lying . . . with copycat Michael Moore rhetoric about George Bush in the schoolroom, and Jeb Bush and the 2000 Florida election." Brooks drips with an ominous discursive authoritarianism, carried on the winds of innuendo and suspicion. Bin Laden talked about Bush lying. What does that tell you about those who call Bush a liar? Bin Laden criticized Bush's behavior on 9/11. What does that tell you about people who criticize the administration's response to the attacks? And so on. The power of Bin Laden is already there, and Brooks has only to invoke it. Simply remind the audience that *Osama said this*, and watch the life drain out of a once-cutting piece of political invective.

Parody, wrote Jonathan Swift, is the act of impersonating the style and manner of those whom one wishes to expose. The latest incarnation of Osama Bin Laden is as a parody of the American empire. Here is a man whom westerners utterly identify with murder and evil, declaiming that his acts of carnage were all in the service of "liberty" and "security"; the parodic echo of Bush is obvious. Here, too, is Bin Laden, addressing the American people directly—as if any American cares to listen to his disingenuous sympathy. Bin Laden's feigned concern with the American right to security mocks Bush's lectures to Iraqis and Afghans about the gifts of freedom and democracy their new occupiers have brought them. If, at one level, Bin Laden has propped up Bush by undermining all rational criticisms of his administration, he has also introduced an element of radical absurdity into the logic of the American empire: in Bin Laden, we see the ludicrous reflection of perpetual war for perpetual piece.

Bin Laden the radical negation of criticism, and Bin Laden the parody of empire, both serve to undermine reason as a basis for policy or political discussion. Most viscerally, Bin Laden provokes the furious outrage which Brooks wants us to feel. That rage fuels the continuation of the "war" in its present form, which suits Bin Laden's needs as well as it suits Bush's.

One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to suppose that if Bin Laden did not exist, American conservatives would have had to invent him.

So it turns out that Matt Yglesias [advocates](http://twitter.com/#!/mattyglesias/status/56096800112783360) replacing Medicare with cash grants to senior citizens. Tyler Cowen [agrees](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/04/cash-grants-instead-of-medicare.html) from a libertarian perspective, but suggests this be presented as an alternative to traditional medicare rather than forced on everyone.

Cowen cites Paul Krugman's comment about government-provided healthcare, that "what would terrify the right . . . is the likelihood that genuine socialized medicine would actually win that competition" with private insurance. Cowen responds that "What would terrify the left . . . is the likelihood that genuine privatized cash would actually win that competition." This strikes me as a case of the common political fallacy where the motivations of one's political opponents are assumed to be the inverse of one's own: if conservatives are in favor of less government, the left must be in favor of more government. But this isn't very plausible; most liberals and leftists that I'm aware (including me) see government as a means of achieving social justice and equality, not as an end in itself.

In general, I'm very much in favor of doing redistribution by just handing people unconditional cash rather than subjecting them to [bureaucratic tests and restrictions](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/03/against-means-testing/). In the specific case of health care, however, I'm not persuaded. This is not because I think government health care is inherently desirable, but because I think just giving people money to purchase their own health care violates the communist principle that underpins social rights in the welfare state.

What does it mean to say that social rights are communist, with a small "c"? Only that they are based on the principle of *from each according to ability, to each according to need*. In a capitalist society with an unequal distribution of income, "ability" becomes "ability to pay". This principle, that contributions to the welfare state should be proportional to income, is well established-- although in practice it is of course deeply contested. What is more difficult is determining what qualifies as "need".

The simplest way to deal with this is to say that the state should be neutral about what specific things individuals "need" to live a decent life, and should instead just give everyone the means to procure whatever *they* view as their basic needs--in other words, we should just give everyone money. This is the principle behind the [Basic Income](http://www.basicincome.org/bien/), which is based on ensuring that everyone in society receives some baseline income irrespective of work and which is something that I strongly support as a long-term goal.

However, simply giving everyone an equal amount of money is a solution that breaks down in cases where, for reasons that are basically outside the control of individuals, needs are very unequally distributed. And health care is the pre-eminent case of this. Some people simply require more health care than others, whether because they happen to be genetically predisposed to illness, or because they get hurt in an accident, or because they get cancer, or because they happen to be [a woman](http://www.amcp.org/data/jmcp/JMCPSupp_April08_S2-S6.pdf).

This is why it makes sense for Medicare to be organized the way it is: from each according to their ability to pay (though this principle is compromised because not all income is subject to Medicare taxes), and to each according to their need for health care services. Setting things up this way creates political and policy problems, of course, because someone has to decide what counts as a health care "need". Hence all the debates we've been having about Cadillac health plans, comparative effectiveness research, death panels, etc. Moreover, there will inevitably be a struggle to define just which health conditions are truly involuntary, and which reflect individual decisions regarding, e.g., diet and exercise.

But handing people checks is no substitute at all. If you just hand people money and tell them "go buy some health care", you're doing an injustice to those who have higher health care costs through no fault of their own. If you tell them to "go buy some health insurance" instead, then you either create a market where insurers will only take healthy applicants, or you go in the direction of mandates on insurers to accept people and mandates on individuals to buy insurance. At that point, you're basically back to guaranteeing people access to the health care they need, rather than telling them to buy as much health care as they want.

Things like health care are a challenge for the way I like to think about the welfare state. My preference is for a kind of [communist-libertarian synthesis](http://www.bepress.com/bis/vol1/iss1/art6/) in which we are all guaranteed substantive equality without requiring the state to micro-manage our decisions. The best way to do that is through simple, unconditioned transfers like Basic Income. However, such schemes will always be complicated by the ways in which needs are substantively and quantitatively unequal, and thus formal equality of income results in substantive inequality of condition. To deal with health and illness is to deal with the biological level of human existence in a way that leftists are often somewhat reluctant to do. From a Marxist perspective, you can look at this the way [Sebastiano Timpanaro does](http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=1472):

> Marxists put themselves in a scientifically and polemically weak position if, after rejecting the idealist arguments which claim to show that the only reality is that of the Spirit and that cultural facts are in no way dependent on economic structures, they then borrow the same arguments to deny the dependence of man on nature.

> The position of the contemporary Marxist seems at times like that of a person living on the first floor of a house, who turns to the tenant of the second floor and says: 'You think you're independent, that you support yourself by yourself ? You're wrong! Your apartment stands only because it is supported on mine, and if mine collapses, yours will too’; and on the other hand to the ground floor tenant: 'What are you pretending? That you support and condition me? What a wretched illusion!' . . .

> To maintain that, since the 'biological' is always presented to us as mediated by the 'social', the 'biological' is nothing and the 'social' is everything, would once again be idealist sophistry. . . .

> . . . it must be added that although the biological level has virtually no importance in determining traits distinguishing large human groups (there is, for example, no correlation between membership of a certain race and the possession of certain intellectual or moral gifts), it does again have a conspicuous weight in the determination of individual characteristics. Humanity is not made up of individuals who are all equal in psycho-physical constitution, differentiated only by the social environment in which they happen to find themselves.

Recognition of these brute physical facts of existence forces us to confront the complex texture of human needs. Thus while the formal economic equality signified by the basic income is an important general principle, it must be supplemented by direct provision of services in areas like health care, where needs are seriously unequal. This is, among other things, something that differentiates the left-wing and Marxist-influenced conception of basic income from the right-wing version propounded by someone [like Charles Murray](http://www.fljs.org/sites/www.fljs.org/files/publications/Murray.pdf).

I went into excruciating detail about manufacturing output statistics in my last post, mainly so that I could post some more analysis using various international sources. One question that often comes up about American manufacturing, after all, is whether our pattern of deindustrialization is unusual compared to other countries. To get some idea, we can use the statistics on employment and output compiled by the OECD. These numbers are, as best I can tell, roughly comparable to the Federal Reserve "output" numbers I used in my initial post on U.S. manufacturing.

For most countries, the OECD data only goes back a few years. So for some of the most interesting cases--namely, recently industrializing poor countries--we don't have good historical data. However, we can at least compare the U.S. to other rich countries. Here's manufacturing employment and output for the U.S., Sweden, and Japan, going back to 1970:

Here, we see that "deindustrialization" in the sense of declining manufacturing employment is not just a U.S. phenomenon. Likewise, manufacturing output has grown dramatically in all three countries. Indeed, output growth has been faster in the U.S.

This is particularly amusing with respect to Japan. Back in the 1980's, of course, Japan played the role of bête noir in American popular discourse that China plays today: the scary Asian menace that was going to out-compete the U.S. economy and ensure our economic doom. And indeed, output and employment in manufacturing both grew faster in Japan than in the U.S. in the 1980's. But since then, Japan has followed the same pattern of employment decline as the United States, while its output has remained stagnant. This is worth keeping in mind when considering the likely future of manufacturing in today's low-wage countries.

But what if we expand our view to include some more recently industrialized countries? Given the available data, we are unfortunately limited to just the most recent business cycle. Still, there are some interesting patterns:

Now some different patterns emerge. The U.S., Germany and especially Korea show the pattern of divergence between employment and output. In South Africa and Turkey, on the other hand, the two are more closely linked. Turkey, in fact, shows an actual increase in the number of manufacturing employees, unlike any of these other countries. This is likely due to a combination of low Turkish wages and proximity to EU markets--along with the anticipation of possible future Turkish membership in the EU. There are those who would like to "bring back" manufacturing jobs from offshore locations like Turkey. But it's not clear how many jobs this would actually create--Turkish manufacturing is a big employer precisely because it isn't all that productive. Protectionist policies--or increases in wages in the low-wage producers--would probably create some jobs in the rich countries, but they would also probably lead to increased use of labor-saving technology.

Of course, we still haven't dealt with the panda bear in the middle of the room: China. But I'm going to wait and put that one in its own post.