Peter Frase

*[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.

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.

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.

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).

One thing that has long bothered me about many socialist and Marxist critiques of capitalism is that they presume that a system based on the accumulation of *capital* presupposes the existence of *capitalists*--that is, a specific group of people who earn their income from investment, rather than by working for wages. It is totally possible to imagine a system in which profit-making private enterprise still exists, the economy is based on profit-seeking and constant growth, and in which the entire population works as wage-laborers for most of their lives. I always figured the most likely candidate for such an arrangement was some kind of [pension fund socialism](http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/NSPensions.html). But today, Matt Yglesias gives [another similar path](http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/03/obtaining-the-returns-to-capital/). He's discussing something from Felix Salmon about how the rich increasingly have access to lots of investment opportunities that are closed off to ordinary investors, and he says:

> [T]he right thing to do is to just directly think about the issue of how best to ensure that everyone obtains the financial benefits of equity investments. And the answer, I think, is sovereign wealth funds. That’s how they do it in Singapore and conceptually it’s the right way to do it. An American version of Singapore’s Central Provident Fund would be much too large for any market to absorb, but the US share of world GDP should shrink over time and it’s conceivable that there would be some way to work this out on the state level to create smaller units. A fund like that would render the public listing issue irrelevant, since it would clearly have the scale to get in on the private equity game. This would, needless to say, entail injecting a hefty element of socialism into American public policy but I’m always hearing from smart conservatives how much they admire Singapore.

This points in the direction of an ideal type of society in which all businesses are owned by sovereign wealth funds of this type, which are used to pay for public services. So everyone works at a job for a wage or salary, and contributes some of their paycheck to one of these funds, just as they now contribute to pension funds. The returns from the funds are then used to pay for things like retirement, health care, education, and so on. Yglesias jokingly refers to this as "socialism". And by certain classic definitions, it is: the capitalist class has been abolished, and the workers now own the means of production (through their sovereign wealth funds).

But in many other ways, of course, this is not how socialism was traditionally conceived. In particular, you would still have profit-seeking companies competing with each other, and they would still be subject to the same kind of discipline they are now--the shareholders, which is to say the sovereign wealth funds, would demand the highest possible return on their investment. So at best, this is a kind of [market socialism](http://books.google.com/books?id=KWy9JbWvjywC). But while there are people who take on the task of the capitalist--the employees of the sovereign wealth funds--they don't make up a *capitalist class*, because they aren't investing for their own personal profit. Indeed, we've already moved a long way in this direction, which is why Peter Drucker was [talking about pension fund socialism](http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/07/23/socialism--american_style/) in 1972.

Of course, we do still have actual capitalists, and getting rid of them would be a long and difficult process. But the important point about capitalism without capitalists is that in many ways it isn't any better than capitalism *with* capitalists. You still have to sell your labor power and submit to a boss in order to survive, so alienation persists. Since firms are still competing to deliver the highest returns to their shareholders, there will still be pressure to exploit employees more intensely and to prevent them from organizing for their rights. Exploitation goes on as before, and it will be all the more robust insofar as it is now a kind of collective self-exploitation. And on top of all of this, the system will still be prone to the booms and busts and problems of overaccumulation that occur in today's capitalism. It was, after all, public and union pension funds that [bought many of the toxic mortgage-backed securities](http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aW5vEJn3LpVw) during the housing bubble.

All of this is why it is analytically important to separate the conceptual framework of *capital and wage labor* from the concept of *capitalists and workers*. In the system I've just described, capital and wage labor still exist, and still define how the economy works. But now each person is simultaneously a capitalist and a worker, in some degree or for some part of their life. Thinking through the inadequacy of such an arrangement is, for me, a more accessible way of thinking through the arguments of people like [André Gorz](http://books.google.com/books?id=7wxpl7sYYCYC) and [Moishe Postone](http://books.google.com/books?id=GwDxsHOxd84C). They argued that the point isn't to get rid of the capitalist class and have the workers take over: the point is to get rid of capital and wage labor.

Charles Stross hits another one out of the park today. The post attempts to explain the widespread sentiment that the masses are politically powerless: "Voting doesn't change anything — the politicians always win." Stross advances the thesis that we have been disempowered by the rise of the corporation: first legally, when corporations were recognized as persons, and then politically, when said corporations captured the democratic process through overt and subtle forms of corruption and bribery.

Playing off the notion of corporations as "persons", Stross portrays the corporation as a "hive organism" which does not share human priorities; corporations are "non-human entities with non-human goals", which can "co-opt" CEOs or politicians by rewarding them financially. The punchline to the argument is that:

In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.

I like this argument a lot, but it seems to me that it's less an argument about the corporation as such than an argument about capitalism. Indeed, Marx spoke about capitalism in remarkably similar terms. He notes that the underlying dynamic of capitalism is M-C-M': the use of money to produce and circulate commodities solely for the purpose of accumulating more capital. Money itself is the agent here, not any person. This abstract relationship is more fundamental than the the relations between actual people--capitalists and workers--whose actions are dictated by the exigencies of capital accumulation. From Capital, chapter four:

The circulation of money as capital is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.

As the conscious representative of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts and to which it returns. The expansion of value, which is the objective basis or main-spring of the circulation M-C-M, becomes his subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will.

According to Marx, the alien invasion hasn't just co-opted its human agents but actually corrupted and colonized their minds, so that they come to see the needs of capital as their own needs. Thus the workers find themselvs exploited and alienated, not fundamentally by capitalists but by the alien force, capital, which uses the workers only to reproduce itself. From chapter 23:

The labourer therefore constantly produces material, objective wealth, but in the form of capital, of an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist as constantly produces labour-power, but in the form of a subjective source of wealth, separated from the objects in and by which it can alone be realised; in short he produces the labourer, but as a wage labourer. This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the labourer, is the sine quâ non of capitalist production.

This, incidentally, is why Maoists like The Matrix.

Moishe Postone makes much of this line of argument in his brilliant Time, Labor, and Social Domination. He emphasizes (p. 30) the point that:

In Marx's analysis, social domination in capitalism does not, on its most fundamental level, consist in the domination of people by other people, but in the domination of people by abstract social structures that people themselves constitute.

Therefore,

the form of social domination that characterizes capitalism is not ultimately a function of private property, of the ownership by the capitalists of the surplus product and the means of production; rather, it is grounded in the value form of wealth itself, a form of social wealth that confronts living labor (the workers) as a structurally alien and dominant power.

Since the "aliens" are of our own making, the proper science fiction allegory isn't an extraterrestrial invasion but a robot takeover, like the Matrix or Terminator movies. But close enough.

So in light of my last post, does this make Capital an early work of science fiction? Or does it make contemporary science fiction the leading edge of Marxism? Both, I'd like to think.

As a teenager in Minnesota, I attended my first Democratic Party caucus, where we sat in a church basement while a prospective candidate for office appealed for our support. At one point, a member of the audience asked the candidate for his position on the means-testing of public programs. When the candidate responded by asking which programs, in particular, ought to be means-tested, the questioner replied "any that conceivably could be means-tested".

At the time I didn't yet understand what "means testing" meant, but I still found this response a bit peculiar. It suggested that "means testing" was some kind of general point of principle rather than some technical point about implementing specific programs, which is what it sounded like.

I later found out that means testing refers to the practice of making public benefits conditional on one's demonstrated need for them, and on one's financial means of obtaining equivalent services in the private market. Policies that are specifically targeted at the poor, such as food stamps and Medicaid in the United States, are therefore means-tested programs. People like the man at the caucus meeting are in favor of extending this structure to programs which are not currently means-tested, like Social Security. They argue that cash support for the aged should be provided only to those who do not have sufficient income to get along without it.

This position has a superficial plausibility that makes it attractive not only to conservatives, but even to people on the left who are concerned about equality and social justice. It seems unnecessary, even unjust, to provide public benefits to those who are already affluent, particularly when doing so uses up finite public funds that could otherwise be redirected to those more deserving. However, I have come around to the position that means-testing of public benefits is something that the left should essentially never support.

The first justification for this position is entirely political in nature. In short, I do not believe it is possible to sustain the public consensus necessary to defend a generous welfare state regime, if the benefits of that regime are perceived as being directed to a privileged subset of the population. Setting up benefits in this way inevitably breeds resentment among those segments of the working class who pay taxes and do not receive substantial benefits, who then become open to the argument that the poor are parasitic on their hard work. This tendency is accentuated by the fact that the beneficiaries of means-tested programs will tend to be people who are already subject to social stigma and bigotry, such as women and members of racial minorities. The paradigmatic example of this in the United States is the dismantling of "welfare as we know it" in the 1990's. In that struggle, the barely-coded racist imagery of "welfare queens" highlighted a perception that the recipients of welfare were undeserving and opportunistic Others rather than people who could have, with a bit of bad luck, been any of us.

Not all elements of the welfare state suffer the same fate as welfare, however, not even in the United States. Consider, for example, the resilience of Social Security and Medicare in the face of decades of persistent conservative and neo-liberal attacks, culminating most recently in George W. Bush's abortive attempt to privatize Social Security. Those programs remain extremely popular with a broad cross-section of the public, to the point that Republicans will demagogue against Democratic health care proposals by posing as defenders of Medicare.

The difference between Medicare and Welfare, of course, is that Medicare is for everybody. You receive it when you turn 65, with no ifs, ands or buts. It therefore has the character of a social right, an entitlement of citizenship, rather than a special benefit or privilege. If a means test were to be imposed, however, it would convert Medicare into a program like Welfare--or indeed, a program like Medicaid, which, though ostensibly available nationwide, tends to be provided in a quite paltry form in poorer and more conservative states.

I therefore conclude that means testing of public benefits is little more than a trap set for progressives by those whose ultimate goal is the total destruction of these programs. Universal social rights are politically defensible, while particularist benefits are not. This lesson is, I think, supported by the work of Political Scientist Paul Pierson; as Joshua Tucker explains at the Monkey Cage, Pierson "explained how difficult it would be for governments to consolidate or retrench existing social policy programs, because these policies (pensions being the best example) create their own support coalition that reaches far beyond the left-wing electorate."

There is, however, an additional reason to support universalistic rather than targeted public programs, and this is a matter of principle rather than politics. The problem with means-tested benefits is not only that they are politically untenable, but that they inevitably put the state in the business of judging the worth and deservingness of applicants--and thus, by extension, judging the way in which they lead their lives. If, for example, welfare benefits are made contingent on performing work of some kind, then the state must decide what counts as a legitimate form of work. Does, for example, a mother's time spent raising a child count? Does getting a college education count? If it does, are all majors equally acceptable?

The fact that the state must adjudicate these issues--and must do so continually over time, since a person's status is constantly subject to change--means that benefit recipients are constantly subject to arbitrary bureaucratic domination. Universal benefits, on the other hand, require relatively little meddling in people's lives: in a country with universal health care, the only consideration for the state is whether or not you are a citizen. One should not, of course, understate the extremely fraught and contentious politics of citizenship itself, which may turn out to be the Achilles' heel of social democracy in the 21st century. Nevertheless, I regard it as a major step forward if we are arguing over who has the rights of citizenship rather than attempting to judge what makes a person deserving of some particular benefit.  I think that ultimately, means tested benefits tend to make the poor less free and less autonomous than the affluent. This is precisely the opposite of the goal we should be aiming at in thinking about the welfare state, which should be about enhancing human freedom and facilitating human flourishing.

This line of argument is, in a certain sense, in sympathy with critiques of the welfare state that have been offered from libertarian, anarchist, and Foucauldian perspectives. Unfortunately, discussion of these arguments tends to become bogged down in a narrow debate over whether one is "for" or "against" the welfare state. By now, however, we should all understand that there is not one welfare state but many, and that different institutional configurations can have very different implications for people's lives. Thus my goal as a writer and researcher is to promote a vision of the welfare state that enables individual autonomy and freedom by guaranteeing a basic standard of living as a human right, while simutaneously critiquing the idea that public benefits are special supports provided only to the deserving poor, and only in those instances where the private capitalist marketplace has "failed".

[Cross-posted from The Activist]

Serious debate about our visions for the future is always welcome, so it's nice to see Jason Schulman and David Schweickart debating "market socialism" and related things on this site. I don't have a lot more to add about formal models of the socialist economy, because frankly I'm not all that interested in them. Schemes for socialist economies--whether market or planned or whatever--tend to come off as a a bit of an exercise in what Marx derisively referred to as  "writing recipes for the kitchens of the future". Trying to predict exactly what socialism will look like is foolhardy--and moreover anti-democratic, since it pre-empts the actions and decisions of the actual masses who will have to make a post-capitalist world happen. So while these thought experiments about alternative economic models can be useful in clarifying our principles, I don't think we need to take the details all that seriously.

Rather than trying to draw up a detailed blueprint of a socialist economy, I prefer to think in terms of what Andre Gorz called "non-reformist reforms": changes to the system that can be implemented under capitalism, but which set the stage for further radical transformations. And I want to highlight one particular such reform that's associated with Gorz, and which commenter R. Burke brings up in the comments of Jason's recent post: the guaranteed minimum income, or "Universal Basic Income" as it's sometimes called.

This is just what it sounds like, an income that every citizen would be entitled to, independent of work. And I find it compelling because it directly addresses one of the most fundamental objectionable things about capitalism, namely the fact that it makes almost everyone dependent on performing wage labor in order to survive. This is despite the fact that we live in a society that is more physically productive than any other that has ever existed. Eighty years ago, John Maynard Keynes was predicting that the greatest problem his grandchildren would face was what to do with their abundant leisure time.  Instead, we are all working more than ever.

A guaranteed income could begin to reverse this state of affairs by giving people the option of opting out of the labor market, which today is only possible for a wealthy few. It would therefore address a goal that Pat Devine mentions in a passage Jason quoted: reducing the amount of unpleasant labor that people are forced to perform. As I already noted, I think this goal is of such paramount importance that I'm baffled by any theory of a socialist economy that doesn't make it absolutely central.

Which brings me to one thing I found quite unappealing about the vision David Schweickart presents. His description of economic life seems to assume that the ideal way to live is to have some job that you go off to for 40 hours a week for the rest of your life. If labor is unpleasant, the solution is to give workers more control, rather than giving them the option of opting out of work--"voice" rather than "exit", to use Albert Hirschman's lovely phrase. Now maybe this makes sense to people who grew up in the mid-20th century, when the labor market was less volatile and careers were more stable. But it doesn't make any sense to me. Even if full employment is possible, why would it be desirable? If there's not enough work to go around, why would you go and create more? And maybe it's true that if we make the workplace democratic, then work will be fulfilling and people won't mind it. But in that case, why force them?

It's at this point that you're supposed to start talking about "material incentives", to take Schweickart's choice of jargon. It usually starts with some troll objecting that socialism is impossible because nobody will do any work without the fear of starvation. The socialist then comes back with some argument about how socialism is going to motivate everyone to go out there and work hard. For Schweickart's system, the answer is that "one’s income is directly tied to the success of one’s firm", and so you work hard for the material reward. Jason doesn't explicitly address this issue, but I'm sure he could come up with a response.

But approaching the problem this way gets the whole issue backwards, by proposing solutions before we have understood what the actual problem is.  If you just talk in general terms about giving people "incentives to work", you're neglecting the reality that while some work would have to get done in any kind of desirable society, other kinds of work should actually be dis-incentivized. Broadly, I'd say that paid work in capitalism falls into at least the following categories:

1. Things that people want done, but which nobody particularly wants to do.
2. Things that people would do voluntarily provided they have enough time, even if they weren't paid.
3. Things that are useless or destructive, and happen only because they facilitate capital accumulation and people need jobs.
4. Things that people may want done and/or may want to do, but which have destructive effects on other people or the environment.

The discussions about material incentives are relevant to things in category 1. But much of the labor in modern capitalist societies falls into the other categories--more of it than we think, I suspect. I'd argue that a lot of artistic and knowledge work falls into category 2. So does child care, although just who does it voluntarily is another matter, which is why feminism is a core part of socialist analysis. Financial engineering, telemarketing, and basically anything that happens at a private health insurance company fall into category 3. So does much of the estimated 25% of U.S. employment that's taken up by what economists Sam Bowles and Arjun Jayadev call "guard labor": supervising workers, running the prison-industrial complex, providing private security, and other stuff that is mostly about preserving current power relations and maintaining inequality, rather than making anything useful. Driving a car or burning coal for electricity may fall into category 4.

Even though I can sketch out examples like this, in general it's pretty hard to differentiate these different kinds of labor in capitalism. That's because capitalism creates a situation where all work is "good" because it provides jobs, which people need in order to survive. However, these different kinds of labor wouldn't get differentiated in Schweickart's version of market socialism either, since he still assumes that everyone is forced to work--moreover, the idea of government as "employer of last resort" implies that we'd be actively creating useless category 3 work for people.  Devine's alternative, meanwhile, would attempt to use a convoluted planning process to differentiate between desirable and undesirable uses of labor. That may be necessary in some cases, but I don't think it should be our first solution--attempting to comprehensively micromanage every aspect of production strikes me as undesirably bureaucratic.

More importantly, I don't think it's necessary to go down this road at all. Rather than starting with these complicated issues of economic planning, we should start with the thing that's actually most desirable: making people less dependent on wage labor. Social Democracy has already gone part of the way in this direction, by removing things like health care and education from the market. But to really attack wage labor at its root, you need something like the guaranteed minimum income--perhaps in combination with reductions in the length of the work-week. 

At this point we get back to the incentives business again, with the critics screaming "but nobody would do any work!" At one level, I think this is just silly. For one thing, at least in the short run, most people would want to make more than the guaranteed minimum, and so would continue to work. For another thing, it's clear that people do various jobs for lots of different reasons that don't have to do with money, and some kinds of work would get more popular if people didn't have to worry about having the money to meet their basic needs. Some jobs really are enjoyable, in other words, and people would do them for free if they could. Other kinds of work give their returns by conferring status--for example, for all but the most famous artists, making art is more about gaining recognition than making money.  One appealing aspect of a basic income is that it would start to sort out the distinctions between the different kinds of labor outlined above. If some jobs start being things people do as hobbies, then great! If some jobs disappear, and we don't miss them, then great! If you have to pay people more to make them take crappy jobs, great!

Which isn't to say that basic income is a one-shot magic solution to all the problems of capitalism (although for the argument that it could be, check out a weird and provocative article called "The Capitalist Road to Communism"). Indeed, he best thing about a guaranteed income is that it stands a pretty good chance of provoking major economic disruption and social crisis--that's what makes it a "non-reformist reform."  In a world with a guaranteed income, it could very well turn out that there are some things that just aren't getting done. It's not clear that you'd be able to find enough people to clean office bathrooms or work the night shift at 7-11 if they had access to a basic income, no matter what you paid them.

Some people invoke the above scenario as an argument against the basic income, but let me emphasize that this is a problem I would love to have. Once it becomes clear what kind of work is both desired and undersupplied, we can have a political struggle about how that work will get done. By offering special rewards (i.e. "material incentives")? By creating some kind of national service requirement in exchange for the basic income (you have to go clean toilets or work the night shift once a month, say)? By finding clever new ways to automate these jobs? Or by deciding we can really do without some things we thought we "needed"?

I can't predict in advance what the solution would be. And I don't have to. That's really the most important point I want to make here.  I think the lesson of history is that momentous social change never happens because someone came up with a detailed plan for the future, won people over to it, and then implemented it. The chaos of real people making their own history always overwhelms such neat plans.

And I want to suggest that socialists, armed with an analysis of capitalism and a set of basic principles for the future, shouldn't be afraid of a politics that aims to provoke a crisis without knowing exactly where it will lead. The idea of a basic income that breaks our dependence on wage labor is a proposal for pushing toward that productive crisis, and for that reason I find it far more compelling than all the sterile blueprints for economic democracies and democratic plans and Parecons and what have you.

Leaving aside the economics, is a guaranteed income politically feasible? It's certainly a long shot--but then, so is any kind of radical economic change. It at least has the virtue of being straightforward and easy to explain. As I noted above, in some ways it's really just a an extension and completion of the historical project of Social Democracy: conferring a "social right" to the necessities of life and reducing the dependence of individuals on the labor market. And oddly enough, some on the right--like Milton Friedman and  the notorious Charles Murray--have endorsed versions of guaranteed income (although with some important differences from the leftist variants). Moreover, if it could be won it would be very difficult for the capitalist class to undo, because truly universal social programs are generally quite popular and nearly impossible to roll back.

Regardless, I think it's something worth talking about and agitating for. And who knows--if the current predictions of a long, high-unemployment "recovery" are borne out, perhaps people will begin to look more favorably on the idea of separating income from employment.

Lots of interesting stuff in the most recent New Left Review. Last night I went through Gopal Balakrishnan's latest, in which he argues that the capitalist world system is not in for a return to rapid growth any time soon, but is instead headed toward the stagnant "stationary state" that characterized pre-industrial civilizations:

Note that this is subtly different from the "catastrophist" predictions which leftists have historically made, and which have a terrible track record. Balakrishnan is not arguing that capitalism is on the verge of collapsing and giving way to something else, because there is no oppositional movement powerful enough to bring about this outcome. He opens his essay with a quote from Gramsci, speaking about the potential for a "crisis that lasts many decades"; the passage evokes a more famous remark Gramsci's that "the old is dying, and the new cannot yet be born".

Balakrishnan gives four reasons for his prognosis: "demographic disproportion, ecological deterioration, politico-ideological de-legitimation and geo-political maladaptation". These refer to:

• The aging of Western societies, leading to a situation in which there are fewer productive workers supporting the retirement benefits of a growing elderly population. The growing cost of health care and the weak prospects for productivity growth in the service sector will lead to serious fiscal pressure on the state.
• The effects of climate change and other man-made disasters. While a transition to a "green capitalism" may theoretically be possible, at present it seems as though neither the bourgeoisie nor the political elite have the will to see this through.
• Neoliberalism has been discredited by the crisis, but the Keynesianism of the postwar era seems equally incapable of restoring growth, and instead can only prop the system up with a series of desperate bailouts and fiscal stimulus measures. Meanwhile, there remains no credible ideological challenge from the left. The consequence is escalating depoliticization and cynicism across the world polity.
• Finally, no clear successor to the American hegemon presents itself: China's economy is still too weak to shoulder the burden, Europe lacks the unified state capacity to do it, and no ad-hoc alliance of world powers seems capable of truly restructuring the system and moving it to a new stage.

The piece is speculative, without much in the way of empirical evidence, but it's nonetheless useful. As to these four explanations, some strike me as more plausible than others.

The ageing of Western societies is a real phenomenon, of course, but I am skeptical that it will have quite the impact that Balakrishnan suggests. For one thing, there is no reason to suppose that the current retirement age will remain fixed--indeed, we have already seen some efforts to push it up. Since fewer jobs today require intensive manual labor, it is feasible for people to remain at work longer. Of course, increasing the retirement age would be a reversal of one of the great gains made by the working class in the twentieth century, and it would have highly inequitable consequences for those who do still work in manual occupations. But we are speaking here only of possible resolutions of the crisis, not desirable ones.

Balakrishnan is also too quick to accept at face value the argument that health expenditures will continue to accelerate rapidly while the service sector will experience no productivity gains, based on what appears to be a variant of Baumol's cost disease theory.  The argument about health care betrays some ignorance about health care economics. Much of the cost of care in the United States is driven by the perverse structure of the market for health services, and the comparison of modern welfare states shows that the state is quite capable of restraining cost growth. As for the rest of the service sector, the issue of slow productivity growth is a real one, but I would not discount the possibility of realizing substantial efficiency gains. Think of the growth in self-checkout machines at grocery stores, which could do to grocery employment what ATM's did for bank tellers. Or, even more dramatic, consider the innovations in online education which could completely upend the existing system of higher learning. I suspect, in fact, that increased productivity in services has been held back by the appallingly low wages at the bottom of the American labor market, which have disincentivized employers from economizing on labor.

As for ecology, I am unfortunately afraid that Balakrishnan is right. The way the climate change debate has unfolded in the United States and elsewhere certainly suggests that the capitalist class is incapable of putting their long-term interests ahead of short-term profits and ideological antipathy to state solutions such as carbon taxes or even cap-and-trade. (Although the recent defections from the chamber of commerce are perhaps hopeful signs.) At the same time, it's still difficult to imagine that China will really consent to restrain their emissions in a way that the earlier industrializers never had to, all in order to ameliorate a problem that they themselves did not create.

While the consequences of climate change for humanity will be terrible, however, I do wonder whether they will really be as bad as all that for capital accumulation. On the one hand, ecological chaos would lead to a widespread destruction and devaluation of capital, allowing a new round of accumulation to proceed. On the other hand, there' s no reason in principle that adapting to and cleaning up after climate change-induced mayhem can't be highly profitable, even if its human consequences are terrible. The relevant maxim here, it seems to me, is that the reason capitalism never collapses is that there always turns out to be a way of resolving the crisis at the expense of the working class.

The issue of ideological drift and delegitimization of political institutions is, to me, the strongest of the arguments Balakrishnan musters--though oddly, it is the one he gives in the least detail. The bankruptcy of neoliberalism and the insufficiency of mainstream Keynesian solutions are plain enough.  As is the depoliticization and demobilization of the demos, the supposed mass base of bourgeois democracy. But what is even more ominous is the way in which bourgeois political institutions seem increasingly incapable of competently managing capitalism, even from a narrowly capitalist standpoint. Years of tax revolts and racist pandering from the right have lead to a situation in which it is always possible to appropriate new funds for new programs (at least if they take the form of giveaways to business or the rich), but never possible to raise the tax revenue to pay for them.  The end state of this trajectory is California, where Proposition 13, a 2/3 majority requirement for legislative tax increases, and a fanatical Republican minority have rendered the state an ungovernable wreck.

This situation appears intolerable, yet there remains no ideology on the horizon that seems capable of challenging it--certainly not Barack Obama's technocratic center-rightism, which appears to be interested only in the restoration of postmodern finance capitalism's status quo. And as Fredric Jameson points out, “the mass of people . . . do not themselves have to believe in any hegemonic ideology of the system, but only to be convinced of its permanence”.

The final of the four arguments, about geo-politics, is the most difficult to assess. As to the present moment, it certainly seems correct. American power is already over-extended, and the fiscal dilemmas outlined above may, eventually and hopefully, actually make cuts in defense spending thinkable in this country. I'm less pessimistic than Balakrishnan about the future of a united Europe, but it certainly doesn't seem like any rapid further consolidation is likely in the near term. As for China, it may yet rise to take its place in a Sinocentric world system, as Giovanni Arrighi and other World Systems theorists predicted long ago. But in the meantime, it does seem as though we are in for a period of uncertainty and chaos.

It is never wise to discount capitalism's ability to reinvent itself. We may yet see the launch of a new regime of accumulation in the coming years. Or, we may see another speculative bubble, putting off the crisis for another decade before culminating in an even worse crash. But if Balakrishnan is right, and we're in for a slow, grinding stagnation, then the political order of the day will be the Gramscian "war of position", as the left struggles to reorganize itself and raise the banners of "a better world in birth".

But what is that world, and what will be inscribed on our banners? That is, what are the principles that would underpin an alternative to capitalism today? That, alas, is a topic for another day.