The SPD under Merkel

As part of its continuing series on the European Left, The Current Moment publishes an article by Wolfgang Streeck on the SPD under Merkel. Wolfgang Streeck is a director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. Widley recognized in Germany and abroad for his work in sociology and political economy, Wolfgang Streeck’s most recent book is published this month in English with Verso, under the title Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.

 

***

Since the fall of 2013 Germany has been governed by a Grand Coalition, led by the Christian Democrats under Angela Merkel and including as junior partner the Social Democrats under Sigmar Gabriel. Arguably the union of Black and Red was nothing more than the formalization of an informal cohabitation that had followed the end of the first Grand Coalition of the new century in 2009. Now that the opposition in the Bundestag has been reduced to a tiny and politically dispersed minority, it seems not much of an exaggeration to consider the government firmly in the hands of a centrist national unity party into which the two former Volksparteien have peacefully dissolved.

What is remarkable is how happy the two parties are with their reunion, and how stable their share in the vote has remained since 2009: the CDU/CSU attracting roughly 40 percent of the electorate – at steadily declining rates of turnout – and the SPD being stuck at around 25 percent, a result that was considered catastrophic in 2009 when it was attributed to having been the smaller party in a Merkel cabinet. Now the SPD seems content with having ceased to be in serious completion for the Chancellorship, if not forever then for a very long time.

There are several reasons for the stability of the current power-sharing – or better: cooptation – regime and its apparent prospects for a long life. Angela Merkel seems much to prefer the SPD over the coalition partner of her second term, the FDP. With the Social Democrats on board, she is no longer at risk of being forced by her party, or tempted by her own passions if such she has, to hurt the feelings of pensioners, the unemployed, or the remaining clients of the welfare state by pursuing neoliberal “reform”, at least in Germany. While the SPD is less given to electoral-political panic, being (still) sufficiently far away from the five-percent hurdle, the FDP may never recover and disappear in the no-man’s land outside of the Bundestag. Moreover, if the SPD were for some reason to break away from Merkel, there are now Greens, eagerly waiting to claim the place of the SPD as the CDU’s partner in government – and the SPD knows this. Having abandoned their old leadership after the disappointing election results of 2013, the Greens are still angry with themselves for having rejected Merkel’s invitation to coalition negotiations. Merkel can now choose between two comfortable majorities, one with the SPD and one with the Greens, and next time around she may actually want to change partners once the SPD will have done the dirty work of revising the Energiewende in line with the interests of the German export industry and, perhaps, the private households suffering from steadily increasing prices of electricity. More on this below.

Meanwhile, Red-Green-Red, a government formed under SPD leadership and including the Greens and the Left, looks ever more remote as a practical possibility. The Greens, having finally abandoned their leftist inclinations, will not let entering a government that includes Die Linke get in the way of their being perceived as a thoroughly buergerliche, middle-of-the road party with a socially progressive and environmentally conscious agenda. And while the Left has worked hard to style itself as a staunch supporter of “Europe” – which in Germany is now the same as the Euro – its empathy with Russia in the crisis over Ukraine is likely to make it even more of an outcast in the German party system than it already is, not least because of the SPD’s untiring denunciations.

Inside the SPD Sigmar Gabriel, party leader and minister of economic affairs, is now fully in control. Not least this is because Merkel, by making major substantive concessions to him during the coalition negotiations, including a disproportionate representation of SDP ministers in the cabinet, made it easier to forget the party’s crushing defeat of 2013 that ut received under his leadership. Moreover, Gabriel’s candidate for Chancellor, Steinbrück, miraculously disappeared only two or three days after the election, as though he had never existed; nobody has heard from or of him since. Steinmeier, Gabriel’s other former rival, is happy to be back at the Foreign Office, in the post he already occupied in the first Grand Coalition 2005 to 2009 when the party was sufficiently impressed with him to make him candidate for the Chancellorship, to disastrous effect.

As to Gabriel, his junior partnership with Angela Merkel has given him the means to heal the rift between the SPD and the unions, with two policy moves he extracted from the CDU/CSU. The first is the introduction of a general minimum wage, the second an effective lowering of the pension age for a select group of workers. Both measures are still in the legislative process and details are contested between the SPD and factions in the Christian-Democratic Parties. The Chancellor, however, as one would expect, sticks firmly to the Coalition agreement and there is no doubt that the two measures will eventually be passed in one form or other.

The prehistory of the impending minimum wage legislation is rather curious. For a long time the unions had opposed any legal regulation of low wages, in order to protect collective bargaining. The first to break ranks was the service sector union, Verdi, which after the Hartz reforms had finally lost control over the low wage end of the labor market. With a delay of a few years IG Metall, still the most powerful among the unions, concurred, which it might have done much earlier given that there are practically no low wage workers in its constituency. Now the SPD can offer a legal minimum wage as a tribute to its union allies, and as a sign that social-democratic participation in government carries real benefits for workers – which in this case is actually true.

Pension reform, too, serves to mend fences with the unions. Under the first Grand Coalition the then Social-Democratic party chief and Minister of Labor, Franz Müntefering, almost single-handedly raised the legal age of retirement to 67 years, bypassing the SPD in what was practically a coup-de-état with the support of Merkel. The new legislation will allow workers with more than 45 years of service, including times of unemployment, to retire at age 63, at full pension. The matter is more complicated than it looks and more complicated than its supporters and detractors make it look. What is true is that it will benefit mainly the core union constituency of male manual workers. In exchange, the SPD has swallowed an even more expensive pension increase for mothers with children born before 1992, which was and is a pet project of the Christian Democrats trying to get back the female vote. Like the minimum wage, both pension reforms are fought tooth and nail by German economists, a neoliberal monoculture of astonishing internal conformity that has never been more predictably opposed than now to anything looking only slightly like it might be social-democratic.

In addition to minimum wage legislation and pension reform, three issues in particular will dominate the agenda of the Grand Coalition. Ultimately they will decide upon which constellation of political forces Merkel’s fourth term – and nobody seriously doubts that she wants and will get one – will be founded. The first is Europe. Here the SPD was always in agreement with Merkel, in government or out. It is true that once in a while it deployed anti-Merkel rhetoric to attract the Euro-idealistic segment of the middle class, as represented primarily by the Greens. In this vein, before the 2013 election Gabriel made several attempts to win the backing of intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas, for what he pretended to be a social-democratic alternative to Merkel’s European policy. The message, although mostly coded and subtle, was that Merkel did less than required to mitigate the suffering in the South. But the only practical consequence, if any, was that Merkel won and the SPD lost among those afraid that “Europe” would become too expensive. It seems that this was why Merkel felt no need to be vindictive about the Social-Democratic attacks.

In fact, when coalition negotiations began after the election, the first deal that seems to have been struck on the very first day was that the SPD gave up on the Europeanization of government debt (“Eurobonds”) so dear to the heart of the Greens and the progressive middle-class milieu, in return for the CDU agreeing to the legal minimum wage. Both CDU/CSU and SPD know that more than symbolic assistance for the crisis countries would be costly at the ballot box although the SPD, to Merkel’s delight, had to pretend for the consumption of the “progressive” part of its constituency that it did not care about this. In truth, Merkel, Schäuble, Gabriel, Steinmeier and the forgotten Steinbrück have for long formed an Einheitsfront, knowing they must defend the Euro to the hilt as it is the lifeline of the German export industry, not just of its employers but also of its unions. For the German economy, European Monetary Union means a favorable external exchange rate plus fixed prices for their products in a captive “internal market” protected from political distortion in the form of a readjustment of national currencies. The German political class knows that at some point this will have to be paid for, but they are determined to keep the price as low and as invisible to voters as possible. One way of doing this is insisting on “reforms” in debtor countries, another offering financial support for social programs in Greece or Spain that are small enough not to make a dent in German public finances but also too small to make one in the South’s misery. Much more important is the tacit backing by both CDU and SPD of the European Central Bank’s various covert measures to bail out the ailing Southern European banking industries and surreptitiously refinance the debt of the Mediterranean states, in contravention of the Maastricht Treaties. While the Christian Democrats pretend they don’t know, the Social Democrats claim credit with their pro-Euro supporters for not getting in the way of the ECB’s “emergency measures”.

The so-called “European elections” were officially framed in German politics in two not readily compatible ways at the same time and by the same players. First, they were depicted as a Manichaean battle between the “good Europeans” united in the CDU/CSU/SPD/Greens/FDP Einheitsfront and the “enemies of Europe” – the “Anti-Europäer” – represented mainly by a new center-right party, AfD, which had formed to demand an end to monetary union. During the election campaign all controversial issues among the governing parties, most of them just pseudo- controversial anyway, had been hidden away (no mention any more of “Eurobonds”!), just as at the European level all impending critical decisions had been postponed (like banking union and the various additional “rescue operations” it will require). This left as common objectives for both Christian and Social Democrats a higher voter turnout and keeping the AfD as small as possible. Both goals were in part achieved as the 7.0 percent won by the AfD remained below the protest vote in many other countries, and turnout increased for the first time in decades in a national election, from 43.3 to 48.1 percent.

Second and simultaneously, the election was presented as a competition between two individuals, both long-serving European functionaries with indistinguishable European convictions, running Europe-wide for the Presidency of the European Commission on behalf of their respective “party families”: the Luxemburger Christian Democrat Jean-Claude Juncker and the German Social Democrat Martin Schulz. Merkel had more or less enthusiastically allowed her party to participate in the charade, apparently on condition that she rather than Juncker was featured on the CDU election posters. The SPD, on the other hand, insisted that the “winner” of the contest had to be appointed President, even though nothing like this can be found in the Treaties, and although Schulz never had a realistic chance of gaining a majority in the Parliament. Remarkably, throughout the campaign the SPD presented Schulz under the slogan, “From Germany, for Europe”, in obvious contradiction of Schulz’ pan-European rhetoric outside his home country. The nationalist frame in which the Social-Democratic “European” candidate was advertised paid off handsomely. While the Christian Democrats lost 2.6 percentage points and ended up at 35.3 percent, the SPD gained 6.5 points (up from 20.8 percent in 2009, which had been the party’s lowest result ever) to finish at 27.3 percent.

The election over, it is again the time of the European Council, the representation of national governments, which today means the time of Angela Merkel. If she wants she can now act as the informal leader of her “party family” and try to install Juncker at the head of the Commission. For the required majority in the European Parliament she will need the support of the Social Democrats, which she might get if she offers Schulz a post as Commission member, maybe as Vice President. This she would be able to do by sacrificing the sitting German commissioner, a former Christian-Democratic Minister President of the Land of Baden-Württemberg who, conveniently, happens to oppose Merkel’s anti-nuclear energy policy. Sending Schulz to Brussels on the German ticket would make Merkel’s German coalition partner happy: not only would it transport the German Grand Coalition to the European level – where Christian Democrats and Social Democrats had always worked together hand-in-glove – but the SPD had during the coalition negotiations demanded the German post on the Commission, without the two sides having come to an agreement. Moreover, a Schulz appointment would usefully demonstrate, if such demonstration was still needed, that Merkel knows how to punish disobedient members of her camp. Alternatively, Merkel could, after a period of indecision, disregard the election results altogether and appoint a Commission President able to get the approval of the British – which would exclude both Juncker and Schulz. This would be a positive signal to the rising numbers in Europe, not just in the UK, who favor a repatriation of competences from Brussels to the nation-states. In particular, it would be a good preparation for the impending negotiations with London on a revision of the Treaties in this sense. Germany, it would appear, should have a strong interest in keeping Britain inside the EU, if only as reassurance against all too ambitious integration projects as are likely to originate in Southern member countries and could be quite costly from a German perspective. Ultimately, perhaps after some public fuss, the SPD, in charge after all of the German Foreign Ministry, will go along with this as it always has.

The second issue the SPD will somehow have to master is the implementation, drawn out over more than a decade, of the balanced budget constitutional amendment passed by the first Grand Coalition under Merkel in 2009. As CDU-CSU and SPD had passed the amendment together, it would be hard for both to defect from it. On the other hand, while the language that was inserted in the Constitution is extremely detailed and technical, making the amendment the longest ever and entirely unreadable for the general public, loopholes can always be found to mitigate spending cuts if need be. As long as the general economic situation in Germany continues to be as good as it is now, the consolidation of public finances, which has already begun, will cause only little pain and budget balancing can remain a joint undertaking. Already, however, the 2014 pension reform was counter to the spirit of austerity under which the Schuldenbremse was installed, and the moment tax revenues will begin to stagnate or decline, the higher pension entitlements will make themselves painfully felt. Among the budget items that may then become politically contentious are the still very high annual transfers to the Neue Länder, the former GDR. For a government that will for political if not for other reasons have to defend these against spending cuts, it will be impossible to advocate new fiscal transfers to the Southern and, increasingly, the South-Eastern member states of EU and EMU, regardless of whether through Brussels or on a bilateral basis. Obviously this will further constrain German options in Europe and in the defense of the common currency. While this is unlikely to destabilize the Black-Red coalition, what may become critical is that the Länder, which together account for half the public spending in Germany, may have a harder time than the federal state to consolidate their finances as required for them by the amended federal constitution. It so happens that most of the Länder are today governed with strong Social-Democratic participation, and some Länder Prime Ministers are powerful figures within the SPD. Bringing them in line with the Federal Government’s fiscal consolidation policy will be a strong test for the SPD national leadership and the Social-Democratic cabinet members, and one that they may well fail.

The third and final of the three critical issues for the Social Democrats under the Grand Coalition is energy. When Merkel ended the nuclear age in Germany by command decision during the panic after Fukushima, she with one stroke gained for herself the option of a Black-Green coalition. In this, perversely, she could count on the support of the SPD, which had long identified itself with the Greens’ anti-nuclear energy stance, in spite of considerable skepticism among the unions, who were concerned about jobs, and among local governments, often Social-Democratic, who worried about a secure energy supply. When general enthusiasm about the Energiewende had dissipated and the immense difficulties of replacing nuclear energy wholesale with renewables began to make themselves felt, Merkel cunningly conceded energy policy to the SPD, by agreeing to move it from the ministry for the environment to the economics ministry which the SPD had claimed for its party leader. Gabriel will now have to square several circles at the same time. First, he will have to find ways to end and perhaps reverse the rise in energy prices for private households caused by the heavy subsidization of renewables. Second and at the same time, he must reassure the Green element in the SPD that he will not fall behind Merkel with respect to the pace and scope of the “energy turn”. Third, German industry has meanwhile become more restive than ever over the rising price of energy, and firms are beginning to talk about relocating production to countries where energy is cheaper. The same fear is expressed by unions in the manufacturing sector, in particular the union of chemical workers, which happens to represent also the energy-producing industry, including the operators of nuclear power plants. Fourth, the European Union in Brussels has become suspicious about what it perceives to be public subsidies (“state aids”, in Brussels jargon) to lower the costs of energy for manufacturers in energy-intensive sectors – which, in turn, are in fear of Brussels depriving them of their benefits. Fifth, citizens, including some of those who had applauded the end of nuclear energy, are becoming averse to the construction of the new power lines required for the transport of wind energy from the north to the south of the country. For Social Democrats, the main battlefield will be the retail price of electricity for low-income households, followed by employment in manufacturing and energy production. No doubt Merkel had every reason to hand the responsibility for Energiewende to her partner, with the Greens waiting in the wings for when Gabriel will have to throw the towel under the intensifying pressures from different and incompatible interests. This, then, may be the hour of Black-Green.

 

The Future of Work

TCM editor, Alex Gourevitch, will be speaking with Kathi Weeks, author of The Problem With Work, about ‘The Future of Work‘ this Sunday at PS1. It is part of Triple Canopy’s ‘Speculations on the Future‘ program. In advance of this event, we thought it worth laying out a few facts relevant to the discussion. While we have spoken about some of the political questions at stake in the work/anti work debate (here, here, and here), those were relatively fact free speculations. And necessarily so. The issue at stake was hopes and desires for the future, and the organizing aspirations for a possible left. These discussions, however, can always do with a small dose of vulgar empiricism. A brief look at some relevant facts suggests that the most likely, if not most desirable, future of work is roughly that of increasing dependence on the labor market and lower quality work for most people. One word of caution: the data is limited to the US and Europe, entirely because that is our area of expertise and where the data is most readily available.

Although every so often there are breathless declarations of the end of work, the collapse of work, and that technology is leading to a world without work, the historical trend is the opposite. Ever since the 1970s, an increasing share of the population has been working. For instance, the graph below shows the employment to population ratio in the United States. Notably, even after the dramatic post-2008 decline, a higher percentage of Americans still work in the formal labor market than anytime before the mid 1970s. Similar survey data from Eurostat of all people between ages 15 and 64 shows, wherever data is available, that there have been dramatic or gradual declines in ‘inactivity‘ or non-participation in the labor market. In Germany, 35.9% of 15 to 64 year olds were inactive in 1983 while in 2012 that number had sunk to 22.9%. In Spain the drop was from 44.1% in 1986 to 25.9% in 2012. For France, 31.6% (1983) to 29% (2012), and the UK 29.1% (1983) to 23.7% (2012). The Netherlands saw the largest decline from 1983 to 2012, from 41.4% to 20.7%. The most likely future of work in the US and Europe is that more people will be working for wages or salaries than ever before, as absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population.

Three recent changes to the political economy suggest not only increased participation in, but greater dependence on, wage-labor, especially by those on the bottom end of the labor market. These are a) stagnation or reduction of welfare benefits, b) stagnation or decline of wealth and c) stagnant wages and precarious employment. Welfare and wealth are alternatives to wages as sources of consumption; lower wages and precarious employment increases insecurity of and need for employment.

For instance, in the case of welfare, the stagnation or reduction of welfare benefits means that states offer the same or worse benefits to those who cannot find or live off a job. This is consistent with increased numbers taking advantage of these benefits. For instance, recent reports made much of the 70% increase in Americans using food stamps, which represents a doubling of the amount spent on food stamps, since 2008. But food stamps alone are hardly enough to live off, and their increased use reflects the increase in unemployment. More broadly, American welfare benefits are not enough for most people to live off, many states recently cut benefits, and the welfare system is famously designed to spur labor market participation, not provide an alternative to it. Moreover, in Europe, where welfare benefits are more generous and less conditional, the consequence of austerity policies is, at best, to limit the growth of any such programs and in various countries to reduce or even eliminate them. Cuts to public employment and hiring freezes, increases in retirement age, and other measures mean the reserve army of labor will be larger, and most people will have fewer/poorer state provided alternatives to finding a job.

Finally, the increase in part-time, low-wage work, alongside stagnant or declining wealth at the bottom, further entrenches labor market dependence. We were unable to find longitudinal wealth data on Europe, but in the United States we have seen net declines in wealth for the bottom 60% of the population.

Since wealth assets are not only an alternative source of income, but also, in the US especially a source of retirement income, this means greater dependence on the labor market for the working age population, as well as postponement of retirement, further swelling the ranks of the labor market. On top of which, wages remain stagnant and full-time work harder to find. Jobs are low-paying, part-time, and insecure and once one starts looking not at median but bottom quintiles, the situation is only worse. These trends are equally evident in Europe, where part-time, less secure employment has increased in places like the UK and Netherlands, alongside the more often commented increases in unemployment in places like Greece, Spain and Portugal.

In all, then, we can say that alternatives to employment have gotten worse or disappeared for the majority of people in the US and Europe, while the available jobs pay, on average, less than they used to and offer less security. There is every reason to think that the most likely near future of work will give us strong reasons to think about a different way of organizing work – about a better, if less likely, future.

Work is (potentially) one good thing: A response to Livingston and other post-workists

In today’s post, TCM co-editor Alex Gourevitch replies to Jim Livingston and other anti-workists, a debate that heated up after Ross Douthat’s op-ed on the subject. For the earlier iterations of this discussion see our earlier post, along with Peter Frase, Evan Burger, and Jim Livingston’s – and some older posts by Seth Ackerman, Chris Maisano, and Kathi Weeks.

Leisure is one good thing, but work is another

Leisure is a good thing. But it is not everything. That is one problem with the post-workists. The other problem is that they have a very one-sided view of work, one that, ironically, comes from adopting rather than overcoming a distinction that the constraints of this society impose on us: the distinction between production and consumption.

Consider Jim Livingston’s most recent foray into the work debate, in which he argues that work is culturally obsolete. The “renunciation of desire,” which Jim sees as the hallmark of work, was once useful insofar as it led to massive increases in human productivity. Once it became possible for machines to do the work of humans, however, the historical mission of the work ethic was exhausted:

“What if the deferral of desire is no longer the condition of life because the socially necessary labor of the proletarian has receded?  What if the realization of desire (yes, the consumption rather than the production of values) has become the condition of life as such—of human development, as Hegel would say?  Then the morality of the slave, the Stoic, the worker—the repression of desire—becomes a constraint on human development, a fetter on the growth of the forces of production.”

The real possibility available to us, if we overcome our inner compulsion to work and free our desires, is that “man is able to step aside and install machines in his place (Hegel).”

Jim offered these thoughts in the name of “trying to slow us all down,” but he was far too quick. First, the identification of work with the “renunciation of desire” is just wrong. Second, discipline and desire are not opposites. And third there are many different kinds of discipline, some good some bad. If we get our thinking straight about this we’ll see that we should not be seeking to “abolish work” but to change it.

To begin with, to condemn work as the “renunciation of desire” is slipshod. After all, if the very renunciation of desire, whatever exactly that means, were the thing that was bad about work, work would not be the only bad thing. Many activities people engage in during their free time would be bad – like training for a sport or practicing music. It is hard to think of anything but purely non-instrumental activities – like playing games, hobby-painting, revelry, hanging out, and maybe religious worship – as having any value if all renunciation of desire is bad. All purposeful activities require some discipline. So one problem is that the abolish work position, by attacking “discipline” or the “renunciation of desire” isn’t really identifying something specific to work, at least as Livingston defines it. But there’s more.

Livingston wants to celebrate rather than renounce desires, forgetting that the development of many desires is only possible over the course of a life in which there is also discipline. Livingston’s delight in the razzle-dazzle of textual interpretation, his desire to synthesize Hegel-Marx, has required decades of disciplined study; indeed, mere reading itself requires years of discipline and development. It is only after we have developed an ability that we desire its skillful exercise and enjoy its realization.

One would think someone with a fondness for Hegel would be sensitive to this fact, but Livingston’s world is weirdly techno-primitivist. On the one hand, society is brimming with machines, which are a product of a very advanced stage of historical development that presumes a radical transformation and expansion in human needs and relationships. People in this modern society are not born into their occupations and, for that same reason, do not have a fixed or given set of needs defined by hereditary social roles. We define our needs, and have the relative freedom to do so both because our roles are not fixed and because of the massive increase in the technical ability to do so. Further, our way of organizing our desires is stamped by this historical development. The very conception of leisure as free time starkly opposed to productive activity, upon which post-workists lean so heavily, is not a natural one. It is the product of the capitalistic organization of work, in which daily work is radically separated from the satisfaction of needs. The average worker gains access to a wage on condition that she gives up control over her work to a boss – her free time is time spent consuming. Thus our very way of relating to work, leisure and desire is the unwitting and not immediately visible product of a long historical process and specific social constraints. Livingston’s celebration of machines would seem to require acknowledgement of this, and to develop an argument for consumption out of these historical facts.

Yet, on the other hand, though Livingston knows all this, his argument approaches desires as spontaneous and ‘natural,’ not impulses that we develop and refine over a lifetime and a history. Desires have an odd, childlike immediacy for Livingston – direct impulses that we either repress or satisfy. Somehow, in Livingston’s world, we at once heroically bestride the world, consuming with unreflexive gusto all of the amazing technological outputs, yet do so with the simplicity and innocence of a child, for whom any and all constraint is the “renunciation of desire,” the oppressive residue of a bygone era holding us back like a stern father. It is not even clear how Livingston suggests we will maintain just that level of know-how to keep machines running (they do break down!), let alone why this is a way of thinking about desire and consumption that is in any way appropriate for us modern creatures. Alternatively, we could acknowledge that we are reflexive about our desires, that we shape and define them – which involves a more complex dialectic between discipline and development than Livingston’s “renunciation of desire” allows.

Though Livingston pretends to a kind of romanticism, the actual Romantics suffered for their art.  They sometimes exercised quite intense discipline (and took exquisite, often perverse, pleasure in it). Balzac wrote every day for hours at a time, denying himself food and sleep, just to improve and develop his art, even if he then discarded that day’s labor. What he strived for, what he most desired, was the virtuosic display of his abilities, not just any old verbal expression. Nor is this just a point about artists and writers. All human skills, from engineering to teaching to cooking, require patience and discipline to develop. Once developed, they produce in us a host of new desires for their skillful exercise, and we take real pleasure in that. Surely a great part of the pleasure in exercising these abilities is the satisfaction of a job well done, of having achieved something that was difficult, which took foresight, effort and directed energy.

Though the examples so far have been individualistic, we can say the same for collective activity: achieving collective aims requires discipline, and the satisfaction and joy in achievement is related to that discipline. Post-workists frequently mention painting and other artistic activities as the truly creative, free activities, but why not also see, say, the design and execution of a mass transit system as an act of collective creativity? True, it will require certain restraints, like at least a temporary division of labor among participants, and thus a certain amount of individual discipline in order to achieve that long-term end. And there are many undesirable ways for that discipline to be organized (more on that below). But the very fact that discipline is required can’t be what’s bad about them. Surely, one of the things that people find satisfying about cooperative work is that each person restricts some personal desires to one side to participate in and realize a shared a project. If the aim of designing a mass transit system is a democratically defined purpose, and participants can exercise equal control in the design and execution of this work, why not see it as a collective work of art? A full expression of human creativity and productive powers? True, it may only be possible to find pleasure in such activities if we have developed certain ideas about the nature and necessity of social cooperation, about the value of creating and recreating the world around us, about recognition of others as a condition for the exercise of our own powers. But I can see nothing slave-like in any of that. Moreover, those ideas and values already exist in all kinds of work, even those kinds of work shot through with domination and injustice. And that enjoyment of collective endeavors is, among other things, the source of some of that solidarity that has formed the necessary basis of left wing movements.

That we train, refine and expand our impulses is evident even in those desires that Livingston favors: the non-productive or passive desires. I love watching soccer, but I most love watching good soccer. If nobody makes the effort to become a good soccer player, there will be little to appreciate. That desire simply goes unsatisfied. We can say the same thing about a movie, a meal, or anything else we passively consume. Further, when I used to play soccer, a wholly unproductive activity, I got the greatest pleasure from playing well. But to get there, I had to put in hours of training. It was not productive, and what I consumed was the activity of playing. But I could only get that full pleasure after a long period of training my body and mind. In fact, it was only through the process of training that I gained a full appreciation for and desire to play well. Once again, the relevant desire that seeks satisfaction depends upon prior discipline. Discipline is not necessarily or inherently the “renunciation of desire.” It is, or at least can be, the restriction and shaping of impulse, and one that can produce a whole new set of refined and novel desires.

There are many kinds of discipline

I can hear the post-workists sharpening their knives, ready to thrust all kinds of contemporary examples, from creepy workplace surveillance to inhuman working conditions, into the heart of my argument. How could I ignore all the oppression and coercion in so much actually existing work? What good is all that restriction of desire? Why put people in conditions where, in order to satisfy basic needs they have to take shitty jobs, thereby renouncing their deeper longings and desires. And they are right, those are terrible forms of discipline.

But they are right in a way that identifies a problem with Livingston’s post-workism, not my position. The forms of worker coercion and social discipline that are most objectionable are not eternal facts about work but specific to the organization of work under capitalism. It is Livingston who naturalizes many of the negative features of work under capitalism, thereby backhandedly displacing criticism from historically specific relations of political and economic power. Livingston turns a social problem into a problem with, in Livingston’s words, “the ontology of work.”

In fact, some of the absurdity of the position that identifies work with the “renunciation of desire” comes from this unwillingness  to differentiate among different kinds of discipline. The discipline that economic need exercises on a poor worker and the discipline that a boss exercises on an employee are not inherent features of work. Surely we can imagine a society in which people’s basic consumption needs are unconditionally satisfied, and in which all possess equal control over work. But this would not be a society that had “abolished work”; it would be a society that had abolished the class relationships that condemn people to a lifetime of economic need, crappy bosses, and stultifying work. The abolition of the ‘working class’ is not, as the post-workists believe, the abolition of work. It is the reorganization of control over work, and the machines and materials we use to work, so that everyone has the chance for self-developing, better work, should they want it. It is perfectly reasonable to imagine people needing high quality work to feel fulfilled; that it be a central desire in a highly productive society. That is not something a basic income and mechanization of thoroughly unpleasant work could satisfy. There is no obstacle to defending the value of work while still criticizing many forms of worker coercion and social discipline (see here for a piece that I co-authored on just that subject with Corey Robin and Chris Bertram).

Work will not set you free. It is not the only good thing in life. But opportunities for self-developing work are one good thing in life, just as unproductive free time is another good thing. Post-workists, however, tend to be single-minded and therefore one-sided in their conception of a free society. That is why they gravitate towards things like basic income and mechanization, but put less emphasis on the value of collectively controlling the aims and organization of work. Rather than give us a picture of the future, they just take one side of the present and use it beat up on the other side. That is what Livingston does when he argues for the “consumption rather than the production of values.” Surely there are many sides to a full and flourishing existence. In a future society we would not replace producers with consumers but would see the expansion and transformation of both in a way that would see a dissolving, or at least easing, of the contrast between the two things. Work would be something less instrumental and less frequently limiting, but rather freer and self-developing – a productive activity that we can consume. Leisure would be more experimental and wide-ranging, less dominated than it is now by the requirements of recharging for another day at a bad job.

This is not just an argument over utopian ethical ideals. As post-workists themselves have recognized, there is a political problem with the ‘abolition of work.’ As Peter Frase says, “by asking workers to give up not just their chains but their identities as workers, anti-work theorists relinquish the forms of working class pride and solidarity that have been the glue for many left movements.” This problem is clearest in Livingston’s own position, which condemns the desire to work as a slave morality, and which sees discipline as the renunciation of desire, rather than also as the path to achievement and further self-development. If I am right, or even in the ballpark, then there is no reason to discard outright these important sources of solidarity. Nor is there reason to see the kinds of personality required to engage in sustained and organized political struggle as, at best, regrettable necessity, and at worst, slaves on the march. Unless, of course, the post-workists really believe that radical social change is mere child’s play.

The Persistence of Work

The breathless announcement of ‘the end of work’ has been a feature of capitalism almost from its inception. It has featured especially prominently during every capitalist crisis of the twentieth century. From Keynes’ ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’ (1930) and Bertrand Russell’s ‘In Praise of Idleness’ (1932),* to Clive Jenkins and Barrie Sherman’s The Collapse of Work (1979) and Andre Gorz’s Farewell to the Working Class (1980), to Jeremy Rifkin’s (seriously mistimed) The End of Work (1995), we have seen some variety of the claim that there is a tendency for the working class to be replaced by machines. The most recent entrant to this motley crew is Ross Douthat, whose recent column in the New York Times carried the title ‘A World Without Work.’

The rhetorical thrusts and parries of Douthat’s op-ed make it difficult to follow, though his bottom line appears to be that the ‘end of work’ is a secular trend that represents a wider cultural malaise: it is “of a piece with the broader turn away from community in America — from family breakdown and declining churchgoing to the retreat into the virtual forms of sport and sex and friendship.” In other words, it is the product of a series of voluntary individual choices to withdraw from social life. This social disintegration is a threat to human well being – “it’s our fulfillment, rather than the satisfaction of our appetites, that’s threatened by the slow decline of work” – and this is because, while it appears it is easier to survive without working (“steady work is less necessary to human survival than ever before”), we lose all of the personal benefits of work. These benefits are everything from ambition (“it poses a much greater threat to social mobility than to absolute prosperity. [A nonworking working class may not be immiserated; neither will its members ever find a way to rise above their station.]), to “structure” “a place to meet friends and kindle romances” and “a path away from crime and prison for young men.”

Douthat is worth paying attention to because he is not giving us the run-of-the-mill concern with unemployment but rather raising the specter of the rejection of employment. He thinks the voluntary withdrawal from the labor market is the defining feature of our economy: “the decline of work isn’t actually some wild Marxist scenario. It’s a basic reality of 21st-century American life, one that predates the financial crash and promises to continue apace even as normal economic growth returns. This decline isn’t unemployment in the usual sense, where people look for work and can’t find it. It’s a kind of post-employment, in which people drop out of the work force and find ways to live, more or less permanently, without a steady job. So instead of spreading from the top down, leisure time — wanted or unwanted — is expanding from the bottom up.”

The conflation of “wanted and unwanted” leisure is already something of a black-eye for Douthat’s argument. To the degree most current ‘leisure’ is unwanted, it is forced idleness, not voluntary withdrawal. People know that it would, under current circumstances, be better to have a job, but they despair at finding one. Despite record high profit rates, corporations sit on huge loads of cash instead of investing it, and since that is the only source of job growth in this economy, those who want a job but can’t find one are helpless. Unwanted leisure is not expanding from the bottom up, it is forced from the top down.

But let’s put this to one side for now because, at another level of facts, Douthat is lost in a mirage. What Douthat calls “work-force participation” has declined only relative to the highs of the early 2000s and is still significantly above the halcyon days of this nation-of-joiner’s post-war boom. Here is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ graph of labor-force participation rates going back to 1948, the earliest data point.

Before 1973 the labor-force participation rate never beat 60% while now, though below its 2000 peak of 67%, it is still at a steady 63-64%. There is no end of work, but rather a one-off decline and then plateau. Even with this decline we continue to labor-force rates plateauing higher than back in the good old days. (Employment-to-population figures tell the same story.) So the historical trend of increasing participation in the labor market, due to the entry of women in the work force, is what still dominates our political economy. Work persists.

Worse yet for Douthat, is his claim that “the decline in work-force participation is actually being made possible by material progress.” Let’s say that Douthat is actually talking about this one-off decline after the recession – since that is the only actual economic fact that conforms to his story. Douthat never explains how material prosperity suddenly lead to a 4% decline in labor-force participation, but there are two options: welfare benefits and ‘getting by.’ Why those two options would suddenly and spontaneously be attractive to people in 2008 he never says, but that is because he can’t. The problem is not the lack of demand for jobs due to superior alternatives, which is what Douthat’s claim amounts to, but rather the persistent lack of supply, which has led especially new entrants to the labor market to temporarily withdraw or postpone entry (ie go to college). This shows up, for instance, in the steep decline in household formation among young people who, lacking adequate income or job security, have fallen back on living with their parents or group housing. In other words, the ‘problem’ registered in the post 2008 numbers, is not material prosperity and government benefits but, rather, economic stagnation. This may be a prosperous society but it is not a dynamic one, nor is it one in which people are unaware of the social disadvantages of getting a job.

The issue here is not just that Douthat gets his facts wrong but that his facts are (mis)assembled to tell a particular kind of story. Like many end of workists before him, Douthat gives the strong impression that the natural tendency of capitalist economy is to bring about an end of work. These statements are always over-reactions to one aspect of capitalist development that miss a larger whole. The natural tendency of the capitalist economy is to generate immense material prosperity alongside unemployment and over-work. While there are fantastic machines, which generate material wealth and replace human workers, this is only one-side of the coin – not evidence that “we’ve gained a world where steady work is less necessary to human survival than ever before.” In fact, a supermajority remain dependent on the labor market for satisfaction of needs, and will remain so unless the political economy is radically transformed. And, further, it is a serious mischaracterization of the situation to say that those who have decreased their dependence on the labor market have done so voluntarily.

That there is no natural tendency towards a leisure society, and that much leisure is in fact forced idleness, is important because it means a society based on free time is one that will require political struggle. It will not naturally evolve through more machines and cultural changes. Moreover, it means that instead of thinking we face some kind of social disintegration due to a cultural shift away from work, community and church, we face a problem of power and control in economic life. Only Douthat’s lack of imagination, combined with mischaracterization of historical trends, lead him to present us with two alternatives – present underemployment (and overwork) or a return to “a grinding job” and all its auxiliary social benefits. Nobody thinks that unemployment is a good thing, least of all those of us who think escaping crappy jobs and nasty bosses is a good thing. Douthat seems to think that “the right not to have a boss” can only take the form of withdrawal from the labor market – a retreat from the world of work itself. But that presumes a current structure of ownership over means of production that there is no good reason to assume. Some jobs may necessarily be grinding, but many of the undesirable aspects of work have to do with subjection to someone else’s will. Change ownership and control and work itself can change. And while drudgery may not disappear, it need not define anyone’s life. There is no reason why we cannot have both more free time and better, more self-developing jobs. The obstacles to that world are social and political, not natural. Douthat, however, wants to leverage on obvious point about the social advantages of the world of work to limit our expectations and lower our horizons.

It is true that the immense wealth, and remarkable, labor-saving machines, of our society make a leisure society possible. But that world of freedom, in which we can be both free at work and free from work, is not one that will naturally appear. It is something people will have to fight for.

*To be fair to Russell, he doesn’t quite belong in this crowd because he appreciated that the leisure society was not something we were naturally approaching so much as a possibility that could only be achieved through political change.

Freedom in the Economy 2: Cooperative Control

In a previous post, we defended a universal basic income as a freedom-enhancing economic policy. Such a proposal seems to be of the moment. Peter Frase and Mike Konczal discussed it, built off a post Frase wrote defending a basic income and discussing a convergence between right-wing and left-wing defense of it. Despite the apparent convergence between Left and Right, we suspect a potential divergence is on the surrounding economic conditions (h/t Suresh Naidu on this difference). There are many good things about a universal basic income, but it has its limits. For one, a universal basic income is a lot more freedom enhancing if loads of public goods are already provided – roads, primary education, universal healthcare.

More importantly, a basic income is a good but limited instrument for securing economic freedom in workplace relations. It raises bargaining power, and makes it materially possible to exit work. But the freedom to leave work is not fully guaranteed by a basic income, nor is freedom to leave work all there is to freedom in and at work. Some recent debates between Corey Robin (followed up here) and libertarians, especially Jessica Flanigan at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, and a reminder of a post ‘against jobs’ by Peter Frase, have drawn attention to just this point. It is obvious that having the economic means to leave a job, or at least being able survive for a while without a job, does not remove some of the most significant obstacles to leaving a job. We can use economic language and call these ‘sunk costs’ or simply use common sense and point out that spousal employment, schools for one’s children, family networks, social commitments, expertise and re-training requirements, can all majorly raise the cost of leaving a job. Even on its own terms, a basic income might be insufficient to secure the conditions necessary to allow workers to leave a job, or at least make threats to leave credible enough to put off domineering employers.

But that is not even the most significant point, as it is still a matter of how to think about whether or in what ways we are free to leave a job. The deeper point is that the forms of domination and unfreedom that can exist in an economy are heterogeneous and variegated. A basic income, and the freedom to leave and choose among employments, is a crude way of securing overall economic freedom. After all, though a credible threat a worker makes to leave employment might very well forestall some kinds of abuse, it is something of a nuclear option. If the only way to resist coercion in the workplace is by threatening to leave then it is not all that hard for the employer to call the employee’s bluff, especially when many actual cases of coercion are minor. One suspects that, when the main way of guaranteeing freedom from coercion, abuse and intimidation is by threatening to leave, workplace relations become more antagonistic and conflictual. When all you have is a hammer every problem is a nail. If most problems that arise in the workplace fall below the threshold of needing that hammer, there is little for the worker to fall back on. Unless that worker had voice, not merely exit.

Moreover, even if a basic income can create less unequal bargaining power between employee and employer, it is impossible to write contracts that specify all the relevant conditions. Contracts are inherently incomplete for reasons of imperfect knowledge. A million decisions arise in the workplace itself that could not be predicted. The question then is who should have the rights to control these decisions? These ‘residual rights’ as the economist Oliver Hart called them, can be organized so one person monopolizes them, or they could be distributed more democratically. That is to say, the point is not merely that workers should be free to say what they want, there should be power behind their voices. That is a conventional defense for unions, but onecan take the argument further. It is the idea behind cooperative organization and control of work itself. Workplaces in which the assumption of a labor contract is not that you pick your master, but that you become a co-operator, allow workers to enjoy kinds of freedom that simply are not available if their only option is to stay and serve and employer, or leave and serve a different employer. It is only in this way that each can exercise equal power in the day-to-day structure and operation of the workplace.

A final word in defense of basic income despite its limitations. Workplace cooperatives without a universal basic income would be considerably worse than those when each has a basic income. That is because in cooperatives there will be majorities, not unanimities, and the subtler pressures of public opinion. It is always necessary that any individual be able to leave those conditions. Though one suspects those forces would be weaker, and workers more willing to exercise their control rights against popular opinion, if they enjoy the economic security of a basic income. So if a basic income deals with only one dimension of economic freedom, it is also supportive and supported by other dimensions. All in all, though, there is good reason to think that economic freedom is not exhausted simply by guaranteeing non-coerced contracts. How the workplace is organized, who controls daily decisions, is also its own, distinct question.