Die Neue Zeit
15th December 2009, 02:34
When to Discard the Hahnel Criterion and Applications
As illustrated in Chapter 1 and discussed at the beginning of Chapter 6, there are certain types of demands that meet the Kautsky criterion but do not “make further progress more likely” or “facilitate other progressive changes” by means of reforms under bourgeois-fied commodity production, simply because they are indeed the maximum that could possibly be achieved under any form of bourgeois-fied commodity production. In the case of reforms of this type (as opposed to the more obvious directional and maximalist demands), they are on the threshold before the point whereby the working class must expropriate ruling-class political power. As elaborated upon in Chapter 5, even demands that are necessary for such political capture can be on the threshold, since on an individual basis they can be fulfilled without eliminating the bourgeois-capitalist state order. Regardless, any identifiable threshold demand is still an integral component of a formal program even when the bulk of immediate demands are not yet on the threshold!
One such demand pertains to further reductions in the normal workweek corresponding to increased labour productivity, part of the 32-hour workweek demand in Chapter 5. The historic reductions in the workday to ten hours and then eight hours did correspond to increased labour productivity beforehand as a result of the Industrial Revolution, but unfortunately were not part of some economic development policy or plan that dealt directly with such reductions and with more typical productivity expectations. Such normalized policy or planning, but with the acknowledgement of participatory-democratic aspects on the normal workweek, would be on the threshold simply because it does not enable policy or planning in other areas of societal concern. It would not be self-directional, because the only aspect covered is labour time. However, this being on the threshold is nevertheless important, because it would be a major blow against further attempts by the bourgeoisie and even petit-bourgeoisie to extract surplus value by increasing labour time (what Marx called “absolute surplus value”).
A second threshold demand was identified in Chapter 6. Pre-war European Social Democracy existed in an environment where the bulk of taxation was levied on consumption and where welfare states were, where existent, barely developed. In response, the movement went beyond questions of mere progressive taxation, and was politically aggressive about shifting all tax burdens on labour, whether such burdens were direct or indirect (via consumption), towards the polar opposite factor of production – capital (through the development of the real estate industry, “capital” is nowadays inclusive of those profiting purely from economic rent in the classical sense). Today’s means of achieving this shift comes in the form of socio-income democracy, or direct democracy in income taxation.
A third threshold demand, also identified in Chapter 6, deals with workers’ cooperatives. Even after unconditional economic assistance for pre-cooperative worker buyouts of existing enterprises and enterprise operations, there is still the problem of cooperatives subcontracting out work. The same Kiraz Janicke of Venezuelaanalysis.com contrasted the Inveval cooperative with the paper company Invepal, whose cooperative owners effectively became business partners by contracting out work to casual labourers. There would have to be a prohibition of all subcontracting whereby at least one contractual party is a workers’ cooperative. This is necessary for the directional measure of enabling society's cooperative production of goods and services to be regulated by cooperatives under their common strategic plan, as noted earlier by Marx on cooperatives in the Paris Commune.
Another threshold subject for consideration would be the “totality” of the next chapter. The fulfillment of economic “national-democratization” as specified in the next chapter would be on the threshold for any particular nation-state, in spite of deficiencies on the question of transnational class struggle. Related to “national-democratization” of the energy industry, agriculture industry, transport industry, and communication infrastructure is the threshold demand for public ownership over all land, which stems from dealing properly with economic rent in land.
One more threshold subject should be considered: zero non-frictional unemployment. It is indeed a threshold subject and not a purely transformative, genuinely transitional, or directional one.
Public Employer of Last Resort for Consumer Services: For the Precariat and Zero Unemployment
“But if a surplus labouring population is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus-population becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation.” (Karl Marx)
In Chapter 25 of Volume I of Das Kapital, Marx made this damning observation of a phenomenon that, until the advent of bourgeois-fied commodity production, existed only as a result of natural disasters and wars: structural unemployment. Meanwhile, and earlier in this work, the question of comprehensive labour reform in the form of both living-wage minimums and deflation-protected, accurately measured cost-of-living adjustments for various kinds of compensation took into consideration the necessity of applying these towards unemployment insurance and voluntary workfare benefits. Additionally, the question of unemployment arising from workplace closures, mass sackings, and mass layoffs was addressed by means of partially rehabilitating Lassalle’s political agitation for the formation of producer cooperatives with state aid (in this case, pre-cooperative worker buyouts of existing enterprises and enterprises just like what happened in the Paris Commune). However, these two measures would still be insufficient to tackle fully the problem of unemployment or, to use more precise economics terminology, non-frictional unemployment. In the first instance, the mention of voluntary workfare benefits refers to pay levels and not to operational aspects of the government programs themselves. In the second, non-frictional unemployment can arise from other situations.
In the recent economic crisis, there has been much discussion in the United States about all the measures of unemployment used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
§ U1: Percentage of labor force unemployed 15 weeks or longer
§ U2: Percentage of labor force who lost jobs or completed temporary work
§ U3: Official unemployment rate per the International Labour Organization
§ U4: U3 + "discouraged workers", or those who have stopped looking for work because current economic conditions make them believe that no work is available for them
§ U5: U4 + other "marginally attached workers", or "loosely attached workers", or those who "would like" and are able to work, but have not looked for work recently
§ U6: U5 + Part time workers who want to work full time, but cannot due to economic reasons.
At the end of 2009, U6 was well over 15%.
Now, consider a similar downturn elsewhere and a few years back. Towards the end of 2001, the Argentine economy went into a nosedive after two decades of privatization and liberalization. Official unemployment jumped to 21.5% by the middle of 2002, and over half the population was living in poverty. However, local currency alternatives to government money flourished and, not unlike the workers of the Paris Commune, Argentine workers reclaimed many abandoned factories to form the cooperative movement in that country. Moreover, in April 2002 the government created the Heads of Household program, providing part-time work for all household heads who met various family requirements. This part-time work consisted of participation in nonprofit-administered training programs and, more notably, provision of community services.
In the March 2008 issue of Dollars and Sense: Real World Economics, Ryan A. Dodd described the above before making a general point about that program:
Not surprisingly, as Argentina's economy has recovered from the depths of the crisis, the government has recently made moves to discontinue this critical experiment in direct job creation.
The Argentine experience with direct job creation represents a real-world example of what is often referred to as the employer of last resort (ELR) proposal by a number of left academics and public policy advocates. Developed over the course of the past two decades, the ELR proposal is based on a rather simple idea. In a capitalist economy, with most people dependent on private employment for their livelihoods, the government has a unique responsibility to guarantee full employment. This responsibility has been affirmed in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes a right to employment. A commitment to full employment is also official U.S. government policy as codified in the Employment Act of 1946 and the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1976.
[…]
Today, the ELR idea is mostly confined to academic journals and conferences.
Because it is long overdue for the class-strugglist left to commit to programmatic clarity, quoted at extensive length is L. Randall Wray of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College on the subject:
The mainstream interpretation of Keynes’s economics seemed to offer theoretical justification for policies that could tame the business cycle, promote full employment, and eliminate poverty. The two main levers to be used would be fine-tuning of investment spending to keep it at the full-employment level, supplemented by welfare spending to keep aggregate demand high while protecting the unfortunate who might be left behind by a rising tide. While Hyman Minsky is best known for his work on financial instability, he was also intimately involved in the postwar debates about fiscal policy and what became the War on Poverty. Indeed, at Berkeley he was a vehement critic of the Kennedy/Johnson policies and played a major role in developing an alternative.
[…]
Minsky argued that we need a “bubble up” policy, not trickle down economics (Minsky 1968). Spending should be targeted directly to the unemployed, rather than to the leading sectors in the hope that tight labor markets might eventually benefit lagging sectors and poor households. For this reason, he advocated an [Employer of Last Resort] program that would take workers as they are and provide jobs that fit their skills (Minsky 1965, 1968, 1973, 1986). He argued that only the federal government can offer an infinitely elastic demand for labor, ensuring that anyone willing to work at the going wage would be able to get a job. Further, he argued that in the absence of tight full employment, the true minimum wage is zero; however, with an ELR program, the program wage becomes an effective minimum wage.
Before continuing, one could argue that the last sentence on an effective minimum wage also applies to the normal workweek, in that a pro-worker normal workweek established by such a program becomes the effective normal workweek for society as a whole. Continued:
ELR could include part-time work, child maintenance, and a discounted youth wage, if desired. In addition to providing jobs where they are most needed, ELR would also provide public goods and services where most needed – in urban ghettos – to help quell unrest.
To ensure taxpayer support of the program, it would need to provide readily visible public benefits. Minsky advocated a progressive income tax, and would distribute the benefits of publicly produced goods and services progressively (Minsky no date). Hence, taxpayers would get something for their taxes – parks, safety, clean streets, education, child care and elder care, etc. – but there would be a strong redistributive bias. He recognized that the program would probably need a permanent cadre to provide critical services – as the public becomes accustomed to receiving public services from the ELR program, these cannot be suddenly shut off (Minsky 1973).
One of the goals of the program would be to make labor more homogenous through education and training, but Minsky opposed any education or skills requirement for admission to the program (Minsky 1965). He also opposed means-testing, which would turn the program into what is now called workfare […] He recognized that the nation would still need some programs for skilled workers who lose high wage jobs and fall into the ELR program. As discussed, a dynamic economy would always be creating structural unemployment, so retraining programs would be needed to ameliorate skills mismatch. He also recognized that the nation would still need welfare for those who could not, or should not work […] However, he showed that an ELR program by itself would solve most of the poverty problem […] He saw ELR as an alternative to the dole, arguing that unemployment compensation just institutionalizes unemployment. By contrast, jobs affirm the dignity of labor and allow all to participate more fully in the economy.
This particular kind of job creation program is a major leap in approaching structural (and also cyclical) unemployment, including that which arises from offshore outsourcing and that which gives rise to the newest, cross-sectoral, and growing part of the working class that is the precariat. Traditionally, public works programs have been initiated to get people back to work, but in the recent crisis have been on the whole ineffective because of their treatment as being little more than short-term stimulus spending by governments. Moreover, public works themselves do not take into account the skill sets of most resident and guest workers in developed economies, which are not in manufacturing or construction trades, but rather in skilled and unskilled services. Consequently, grassroots agitation for public works – much less for the traditional Trotskyist call for fully implementing a sliding scale of hours – tends to not win solid support from these workers, to say the least.
Because this is the most that bourgeois-fied commodity production can accommodate with respect to non-frictional unemployment, this reform – for the expansion of public services to fully include employment of last resort for consumer services – does not meet the Hahnel criterion for facilitating other threshold demands or even immediate and intermediate ones. The biggest stick of bourgeois-fied commodity production is non-frictional unemployment; without this threat of employees entering unemployment, employers can only resort to carrots. Other reactions by employers would have to be pre-empted or dealt with swiftly, and a number of measures should be implemented beforehand to prevent capital flight, investment strikes (not investing as required by government plans towards maintaining or expanding production), and other economic blackmail on the part of the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie.
Some will undoubtedly rush to say that this proposal is little different from the post-modernist call for unconditional basic income as discussed in Chapter 2. Recall that this scheme would, under bourgeois society, result in both the monetization of social benefits through their privatization and a universally downward shift in wages. Moreover, with jobs come certain psychological benefits not found in mere welfare receipts, not to mention the usual skills development, as demonstrated aptly by the rejection of welfare receipts by some of the very same participants in the Argentine government’s job creation program (who in turn preferred work). The brief implementation of proposal in places like Argentina and even in the Depression-era US also means that this threshold demand is, as mentioned earlier, not directional or genuinely transitional.
How, then, does this reform enable the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view”? Besides the obvious “Precariat of the world, unite!” and the call to broader class strugglism and pro-immigrant transnational politics against the biggest stick of bourgeois-fied commodity production, consider the approach to zero non-frictional unemployment by an economy operating on the principle(s) of social labour, as explained by Paul Cockshott in a video on socialist economies:
One of the key differences between a socialist economy and a capitalist economy is that, in a capitalist economy, there is always unemployment. This unemployment acts as a stick to beat the worker to work harder. Now, in a socialist economy where the allocation of resources is being planned, you tend to get full employment [...] However, full employment could come in two forms. It could either come because, in the economy as a whole, there was sufficient demand for labour to take up all the people willing to work – or it could come because people had a right to work at one particular workplace where they started work. Now, if you have the latter form, you run the danger that the economy will become set in concrete; it becomes very difficult to reallocate resources to new industries and to run down old industries as tastes change or technologies change. So, it has to be the case that the state guarantees people a job, but doesn't necessarily guarantee them a job at the same place indefinitely.
REFERENCES:
Das Kapital, Volume I by Karl Marx
[http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm#S3]
A New WPA? by Ryan A. Dodd [http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2008/04/a_new_wpa_an_in.html]
Minsky’s Approach to Employment Policy and Poverty: Employer of Last Resort and the War on Poverty by L. Randall Wray [http://www.levy.org/pubs/wp_515.pdf]
Towards a New Socialism (video) by Paul Cockshott [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl5k1zH2oGM]
As illustrated in Chapter 1 and discussed at the beginning of Chapter 6, there are certain types of demands that meet the Kautsky criterion but do not “make further progress more likely” or “facilitate other progressive changes” by means of reforms under bourgeois-fied commodity production, simply because they are indeed the maximum that could possibly be achieved under any form of bourgeois-fied commodity production. In the case of reforms of this type (as opposed to the more obvious directional and maximalist demands), they are on the threshold before the point whereby the working class must expropriate ruling-class political power. As elaborated upon in Chapter 5, even demands that are necessary for such political capture can be on the threshold, since on an individual basis they can be fulfilled without eliminating the bourgeois-capitalist state order. Regardless, any identifiable threshold demand is still an integral component of a formal program even when the bulk of immediate demands are not yet on the threshold!
One such demand pertains to further reductions in the normal workweek corresponding to increased labour productivity, part of the 32-hour workweek demand in Chapter 5. The historic reductions in the workday to ten hours and then eight hours did correspond to increased labour productivity beforehand as a result of the Industrial Revolution, but unfortunately were not part of some economic development policy or plan that dealt directly with such reductions and with more typical productivity expectations. Such normalized policy or planning, but with the acknowledgement of participatory-democratic aspects on the normal workweek, would be on the threshold simply because it does not enable policy or planning in other areas of societal concern. It would not be self-directional, because the only aspect covered is labour time. However, this being on the threshold is nevertheless important, because it would be a major blow against further attempts by the bourgeoisie and even petit-bourgeoisie to extract surplus value by increasing labour time (what Marx called “absolute surplus value”).
A second threshold demand was identified in Chapter 6. Pre-war European Social Democracy existed in an environment where the bulk of taxation was levied on consumption and where welfare states were, where existent, barely developed. In response, the movement went beyond questions of mere progressive taxation, and was politically aggressive about shifting all tax burdens on labour, whether such burdens were direct or indirect (via consumption), towards the polar opposite factor of production – capital (through the development of the real estate industry, “capital” is nowadays inclusive of those profiting purely from economic rent in the classical sense). Today’s means of achieving this shift comes in the form of socio-income democracy, or direct democracy in income taxation.
A third threshold demand, also identified in Chapter 6, deals with workers’ cooperatives. Even after unconditional economic assistance for pre-cooperative worker buyouts of existing enterprises and enterprise operations, there is still the problem of cooperatives subcontracting out work. The same Kiraz Janicke of Venezuelaanalysis.com contrasted the Inveval cooperative with the paper company Invepal, whose cooperative owners effectively became business partners by contracting out work to casual labourers. There would have to be a prohibition of all subcontracting whereby at least one contractual party is a workers’ cooperative. This is necessary for the directional measure of enabling society's cooperative production of goods and services to be regulated by cooperatives under their common strategic plan, as noted earlier by Marx on cooperatives in the Paris Commune.
Another threshold subject for consideration would be the “totality” of the next chapter. The fulfillment of economic “national-democratization” as specified in the next chapter would be on the threshold for any particular nation-state, in spite of deficiencies on the question of transnational class struggle. Related to “national-democratization” of the energy industry, agriculture industry, transport industry, and communication infrastructure is the threshold demand for public ownership over all land, which stems from dealing properly with economic rent in land.
One more threshold subject should be considered: zero non-frictional unemployment. It is indeed a threshold subject and not a purely transformative, genuinely transitional, or directional one.
Public Employer of Last Resort for Consumer Services: For the Precariat and Zero Unemployment
“But if a surplus labouring population is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus-population becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation.” (Karl Marx)
In Chapter 25 of Volume I of Das Kapital, Marx made this damning observation of a phenomenon that, until the advent of bourgeois-fied commodity production, existed only as a result of natural disasters and wars: structural unemployment. Meanwhile, and earlier in this work, the question of comprehensive labour reform in the form of both living-wage minimums and deflation-protected, accurately measured cost-of-living adjustments for various kinds of compensation took into consideration the necessity of applying these towards unemployment insurance and voluntary workfare benefits. Additionally, the question of unemployment arising from workplace closures, mass sackings, and mass layoffs was addressed by means of partially rehabilitating Lassalle’s political agitation for the formation of producer cooperatives with state aid (in this case, pre-cooperative worker buyouts of existing enterprises and enterprises just like what happened in the Paris Commune). However, these two measures would still be insufficient to tackle fully the problem of unemployment or, to use more precise economics terminology, non-frictional unemployment. In the first instance, the mention of voluntary workfare benefits refers to pay levels and not to operational aspects of the government programs themselves. In the second, non-frictional unemployment can arise from other situations.
In the recent economic crisis, there has been much discussion in the United States about all the measures of unemployment used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
§ U1: Percentage of labor force unemployed 15 weeks or longer
§ U2: Percentage of labor force who lost jobs or completed temporary work
§ U3: Official unemployment rate per the International Labour Organization
§ U4: U3 + "discouraged workers", or those who have stopped looking for work because current economic conditions make them believe that no work is available for them
§ U5: U4 + other "marginally attached workers", or "loosely attached workers", or those who "would like" and are able to work, but have not looked for work recently
§ U6: U5 + Part time workers who want to work full time, but cannot due to economic reasons.
At the end of 2009, U6 was well over 15%.
Now, consider a similar downturn elsewhere and a few years back. Towards the end of 2001, the Argentine economy went into a nosedive after two decades of privatization and liberalization. Official unemployment jumped to 21.5% by the middle of 2002, and over half the population was living in poverty. However, local currency alternatives to government money flourished and, not unlike the workers of the Paris Commune, Argentine workers reclaimed many abandoned factories to form the cooperative movement in that country. Moreover, in April 2002 the government created the Heads of Household program, providing part-time work for all household heads who met various family requirements. This part-time work consisted of participation in nonprofit-administered training programs and, more notably, provision of community services.
In the March 2008 issue of Dollars and Sense: Real World Economics, Ryan A. Dodd described the above before making a general point about that program:
Not surprisingly, as Argentina's economy has recovered from the depths of the crisis, the government has recently made moves to discontinue this critical experiment in direct job creation.
The Argentine experience with direct job creation represents a real-world example of what is often referred to as the employer of last resort (ELR) proposal by a number of left academics and public policy advocates. Developed over the course of the past two decades, the ELR proposal is based on a rather simple idea. In a capitalist economy, with most people dependent on private employment for their livelihoods, the government has a unique responsibility to guarantee full employment. This responsibility has been affirmed in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes a right to employment. A commitment to full employment is also official U.S. government policy as codified in the Employment Act of 1946 and the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1976.
[…]
Today, the ELR idea is mostly confined to academic journals and conferences.
Because it is long overdue for the class-strugglist left to commit to programmatic clarity, quoted at extensive length is L. Randall Wray of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College on the subject:
The mainstream interpretation of Keynes’s economics seemed to offer theoretical justification for policies that could tame the business cycle, promote full employment, and eliminate poverty. The two main levers to be used would be fine-tuning of investment spending to keep it at the full-employment level, supplemented by welfare spending to keep aggregate demand high while protecting the unfortunate who might be left behind by a rising tide. While Hyman Minsky is best known for his work on financial instability, he was also intimately involved in the postwar debates about fiscal policy and what became the War on Poverty. Indeed, at Berkeley he was a vehement critic of the Kennedy/Johnson policies and played a major role in developing an alternative.
[…]
Minsky argued that we need a “bubble up” policy, not trickle down economics (Minsky 1968). Spending should be targeted directly to the unemployed, rather than to the leading sectors in the hope that tight labor markets might eventually benefit lagging sectors and poor households. For this reason, he advocated an [Employer of Last Resort] program that would take workers as they are and provide jobs that fit their skills (Minsky 1965, 1968, 1973, 1986). He argued that only the federal government can offer an infinitely elastic demand for labor, ensuring that anyone willing to work at the going wage would be able to get a job. Further, he argued that in the absence of tight full employment, the true minimum wage is zero; however, with an ELR program, the program wage becomes an effective minimum wage.
Before continuing, one could argue that the last sentence on an effective minimum wage also applies to the normal workweek, in that a pro-worker normal workweek established by such a program becomes the effective normal workweek for society as a whole. Continued:
ELR could include part-time work, child maintenance, and a discounted youth wage, if desired. In addition to providing jobs where they are most needed, ELR would also provide public goods and services where most needed – in urban ghettos – to help quell unrest.
To ensure taxpayer support of the program, it would need to provide readily visible public benefits. Minsky advocated a progressive income tax, and would distribute the benefits of publicly produced goods and services progressively (Minsky no date). Hence, taxpayers would get something for their taxes – parks, safety, clean streets, education, child care and elder care, etc. – but there would be a strong redistributive bias. He recognized that the program would probably need a permanent cadre to provide critical services – as the public becomes accustomed to receiving public services from the ELR program, these cannot be suddenly shut off (Minsky 1973).
One of the goals of the program would be to make labor more homogenous through education and training, but Minsky opposed any education or skills requirement for admission to the program (Minsky 1965). He also opposed means-testing, which would turn the program into what is now called workfare […] He recognized that the nation would still need some programs for skilled workers who lose high wage jobs and fall into the ELR program. As discussed, a dynamic economy would always be creating structural unemployment, so retraining programs would be needed to ameliorate skills mismatch. He also recognized that the nation would still need welfare for those who could not, or should not work […] However, he showed that an ELR program by itself would solve most of the poverty problem […] He saw ELR as an alternative to the dole, arguing that unemployment compensation just institutionalizes unemployment. By contrast, jobs affirm the dignity of labor and allow all to participate more fully in the economy.
This particular kind of job creation program is a major leap in approaching structural (and also cyclical) unemployment, including that which arises from offshore outsourcing and that which gives rise to the newest, cross-sectoral, and growing part of the working class that is the precariat. Traditionally, public works programs have been initiated to get people back to work, but in the recent crisis have been on the whole ineffective because of their treatment as being little more than short-term stimulus spending by governments. Moreover, public works themselves do not take into account the skill sets of most resident and guest workers in developed economies, which are not in manufacturing or construction trades, but rather in skilled and unskilled services. Consequently, grassroots agitation for public works – much less for the traditional Trotskyist call for fully implementing a sliding scale of hours – tends to not win solid support from these workers, to say the least.
Because this is the most that bourgeois-fied commodity production can accommodate with respect to non-frictional unemployment, this reform – for the expansion of public services to fully include employment of last resort for consumer services – does not meet the Hahnel criterion for facilitating other threshold demands or even immediate and intermediate ones. The biggest stick of bourgeois-fied commodity production is non-frictional unemployment; without this threat of employees entering unemployment, employers can only resort to carrots. Other reactions by employers would have to be pre-empted or dealt with swiftly, and a number of measures should be implemented beforehand to prevent capital flight, investment strikes (not investing as required by government plans towards maintaining or expanding production), and other economic blackmail on the part of the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie.
Some will undoubtedly rush to say that this proposal is little different from the post-modernist call for unconditional basic income as discussed in Chapter 2. Recall that this scheme would, under bourgeois society, result in both the monetization of social benefits through their privatization and a universally downward shift in wages. Moreover, with jobs come certain psychological benefits not found in mere welfare receipts, not to mention the usual skills development, as demonstrated aptly by the rejection of welfare receipts by some of the very same participants in the Argentine government’s job creation program (who in turn preferred work). The brief implementation of proposal in places like Argentina and even in the Depression-era US also means that this threshold demand is, as mentioned earlier, not directional or genuinely transitional.
How, then, does this reform enable the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view”? Besides the obvious “Precariat of the world, unite!” and the call to broader class strugglism and pro-immigrant transnational politics against the biggest stick of bourgeois-fied commodity production, consider the approach to zero non-frictional unemployment by an economy operating on the principle(s) of social labour, as explained by Paul Cockshott in a video on socialist economies:
One of the key differences between a socialist economy and a capitalist economy is that, in a capitalist economy, there is always unemployment. This unemployment acts as a stick to beat the worker to work harder. Now, in a socialist economy where the allocation of resources is being planned, you tend to get full employment [...] However, full employment could come in two forms. It could either come because, in the economy as a whole, there was sufficient demand for labour to take up all the people willing to work – or it could come because people had a right to work at one particular workplace where they started work. Now, if you have the latter form, you run the danger that the economy will become set in concrete; it becomes very difficult to reallocate resources to new industries and to run down old industries as tastes change or technologies change. So, it has to be the case that the state guarantees people a job, but doesn't necessarily guarantee them a job at the same place indefinitely.
REFERENCES:
Das Kapital, Volume I by Karl Marx
[http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm#S3]
A New WPA? by Ryan A. Dodd [http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2008/04/a_new_wpa_an_in.html]
Minsky’s Approach to Employment Policy and Poverty: Employer of Last Resort and the War on Poverty by L. Randall Wray [http://www.levy.org/pubs/wp_515.pdf]
Towards a New Socialism (video) by Paul Cockshott [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl5k1zH2oGM]