André Gorz and the importance of refusing work

Twenty years ago the French philosopher André Gorz warned of the crucial difference between a basic income that enabled its recipients to refuse work and one designed to prompt them to take any on offer.

At a time when basic income advocates were a novelty, Gorz foresaw the dangers ‘inherent in demanding continuous income for discontinuous work’. Basic income was, according to one contemporary conservative advocate, not an end in itself, but the means for everyone to ‘fit themselves into this new system’.

The idea, said Gorz, was ‘to enable employment to become intermittent, and [it] may even encourage such intermittent employment’.

But a ‘sufficient’ unconditional basic income had precisely the opposite logic. “The aim,” he wrote in 1997’s Reclaiming Work, “is not to force the recipients to accept any kind of work on any terms whatsoever, but to free them from the constraints of the labour market. The basic social income must enable them to refuse work [my italics] and reject ‘inhuman’ working conditions.”

Far from encouraging work and entrepreneurship, Gorz wanted a basic income, in line with the ideas of libertarian communists and socialists of past eras, to lead to ‘less employment and less selling of labour and services’. He looked forward to the ‘elimination of work as the dominant form of activity’ and its replacement by myriad forms of ‘personal activity’.

In the late ‘90s, few policy-makers paid serious attention to proposals for a basic income. Now, by contrast, basic income pilots are springing up like mushrooms after a cloudburst. Experiments are planned, or are in progress, in Finland, Canada, the Netherlands and Scotland.  The kind of basic income they embody, however, is closer to Gorz’s nightmare than his dream of liberation.

Intermittent employment, through zero hours contracts, extreme part-time work, freelancing and the burgeoning gig economy, was only just emerging into the sunlight in the 1990s. But now it is an established fact of life for millions of people. And all the basic income pilots, without exception, take intermittent employment as a given, even a desideratum. Basic income, in other words, becomes a means for people to ‘fit themselves into this new system’.

In Finland, the centre-right government hopes the basic income pilot will help participants ‘take short-term jobs’ and ‘encourage people to seek and accept work’. The BI pilot in Ontario, Canada, though set at a more for generous level than in Finland, aims to ‘strengthen the incentive to work’.  In the Dutch city of Utrecht, the ruling socially liberal D66 party, which has initiated a BI experiment directed solely at the unemployed, is committed to ‘strengthening the economy for entrepreneurs, be they big multinationals or small-scale freelancers.

This all suggests that these basic income pilots, besides being more humane that punitive welfare systems, will be good for the economy. But ‘sufficient’, Gorz-style basic income, aimed at facilitating the refusal rather than the acceptance of work, while sounding utopian, may in fact be more economically beneficial. This is because it works to a counter western societies’ now permanent over-supply of labour.

A basic income that is i) substantial and ii) paid to everyone, not just the unemployed and the poor would, according to one article on radical implications of basic income, ‘simultaneously push up the wage rate for unattractive, unrewarding (which no one is now forced to accept in order to survive) and bring down the average wage rate for attractive, intrinsically rewarding work (because fundamental needs are covered anyway)’.

Or, as one of the organisers of the Swiss group, Generation Basic Income (which advocates a monthly ‘basic income max’ of nearly £2,000 a month), puts it: ‘Income from labour will be renegotiated ….Good work that people like to do, will be cheaper. Poor work that people do not like to do, will be better paid, because no-one can be blackmailed with their existence to do it.’

Many basic income advocates stress the inexorability of automation as demonstrating a ‘like it or not’ justification of an unconditional income. But so-called advanced economies, certainly the UK, are de-industrialised without being fully automated. In many ways, they are running on the easy availability of abundant cheap labour. There are now 20,000 hand car washes in Britain, while the automated version – rollover car wash machines – have halved in number in a decade.  This is reverse automation.

 A substantial basic income, that enabled the refusal of work, could turn off the labour tap and spur automation in a way that ‘incentivising employment’ basic income won’t.

In short we don’t need to create more low paid work but this is just what the intermittent employment model of basic income is predicated upon doing. A ubiquitous justification of this model is that it gives the recipients the confidence to start their own business because they won’t face starvation if they fail. It’s hard to argue with the logic except that the last thing we need is more small businesses. Self-employment in the UK, in the most un-basic income conditions imaginable, has already increased by 26% in the last ten years, and now encompasses 15% of the workforce. Simultaneously, since 2008, the income of the self-employed has dropped by a quarter.

The reason is that the ranks of the self-employed have been boosted by a legion of small-scale service businesses – cleaners, gardeners, dog walkers, website designers, personal trainers, nutritionists – that are often barely able to keep their head above water financially. Introducing an insufficient basic income would boost the number of these services immensely and – because they would be many more freelance dog walkers for busy dog owners to choose from – would water down self-employed income even more.

Ventures like Task Rabbit, which matches freelance contractors with people seeking help with tasks like moving or cleaning, have spread across the US and are now growing in the UK. According to the chief executive of one ‘crowdworking’ US company, technology now enables employers to recruit people for ten minute tasks, pay them a tiny amount of money and then ‘get rid of them when you don’t need them anymore’. This is as good a description of a capitalist dystopia as I can find, and it’s an economy that would be massively emboldened by the guilt erasing incentivising employment model of basic income.

The above may seem churlish in the context of a welfare state that has morphed into a punishment state, and relishes denying income to the sick and disabled, forcing them to beg at food banks. Compared to this, unconditional income is little short of an epiphany. But when I think of the future in the light of a basic income predicated on incentivising work, I can’t help but envisage millions of self-employed task bunnies meekly serving the myriad whims of the elite. Labour will have never been so cheap or so abundant. No-one will starve but everyone will be exploited.

The EU and the permanent over-supply of labour

Regardless of the result of Thursday’s EU Referendum, I would suggest that politics in the UK and Europe won’t be able to drag itself out of the racist and murderous cesspool it is descending deeper into until one issue is honestly faced – the now permanent over-supply of labour.

As is obvious, the vast majority of people require a paid job or jobs to physically survive and make sure their retirement is barely tolerable. Government policy has in the last two decades, and especially since the Great Recession, made entering the labour market under any terms inescapable. Sanctions, workfare, the compulsion applied to sick and disabled people to seek work and the new “in-work conditionality” of Universal Credit, represent an iron cage of labour coercion from it is impossible to escape. All that is impeding an utterly Dickensian race to the bottom is minimum wage legislation.

Meanwhile, retirement ages have been increased across Europe, increasing the ‘pool’ of available labour, and ‘structural reforms’ hawked by economic ‘experts’, like the OECD and the IMF, advocate increasing labour market ‘participation’ by reducing ‘generous’ welfare benefits, and thus, theoretically, trimming government deficits.

At the same technological change will make, and is making, labour far more dispensable and insecure. Research from the US indicates that for the bottom fifth of society a greater than 30% month on month change in total income is already the norm. In the UK, the charity Citizens Advice estimates that 4.5 million workers are in insecure work, defined as zero hours, variable hours and temporary or agency work. This figures does not include the 15% of the UK workforce in self-employment, by nature an insecure form of work, and whose income has plummeted by a quarter since 2008. The self-employed are not the digital whizz-kids of folklore but more likely to be freelance dog walkers and gardeners – pseudo-jobs whose owners are living with income precarity and poverty.

This structural over-supply of labour has been aggravated by the EU’s single market. The proportion of foreign-born workers in the UK working age population is now around 20%, compared to a steady 8% between 1984 and 1995.

The effects of an over-supply of labour has exacerbated by other changes in UK society. The secure tenancies and controlled rents of council housing have become a utopian dream for most people. The private rented sector, with tenancies that can be ended at a moments’ notice and rents that may eat up 60% of pay, has become the only alternative for millions, while lifetime tenancies for new council house tenants are being abolished.

“Human beings do not thrive in an atmosphere of relentless change over which they have little control,” says Anthony Painter of the RSA.

Internationally, the over-supply of labour has been a boon for multi-national corporations who scour the globe looking for the cheapest source of labour (a process misleading called ‘globalisation’). Between 1980 and 2007, the global labour force (people whose livelihood depends on working for pay) increased by 63%, from 1.9 billion to 3.1 billion.

“Not only has the growth of the global capitalist labour force (including the available reserve army) radically altered the position of third world labour, it has also had an effect on labour in the rich economies, where wage levels and stagnant or declining for this and other reasons,” say the Marxist economists, John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney. “Everywhere multinational corporations have been able to apply a divide-and-rule policy, altering the relative positions of capital and labour worldwide.”

The effect of this process on countries like the US, has been devastating. According to the behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman, US manufacturing and middle class jobs have been decimated in recent decades. “There are places where real incomes have dropped 30% over the last thirty years,” he told the Daily Telegraph. “There used to be a concept that if you do your job, and live your life properly, things will be fine. People don't think that anymore.” These places provide Donald Trump with his core constituency.

But the political consensus, the centre-left as well as the Right, is in purposeful denial about these developments. The resolution of governments has been to push people into any kind of work, while eulogising the benefits of free trade, immigration, deregulation and lower tax for corporations. “Public institutions should push against a dangerous tide rather than accentuate it,” says Painter. “We’ve done precisely the opposite.”

The question is, if the ‘relative positions of capital and labour’ have been altered, how do you redress the balance in favour of labour? As Painter and many others have pointed out, Basic Income could imbue labour with a measure of bargaining power that it currently sorely lacks. People who now can’t say no because anything is better than nothing, would be empowered to refuse low paid, insecure work. This change would also give a shot in the arm to automation if armies of desperate people were no longer available on tap. It would spell the end for an economy feeding off cheap labour.

An expansion, not a contraction, of social housing, together with secure tenancies, would also take some of the bite out of the structural over-supply of labour.

This, however, is only half the equation. Do you need a global basic income to really make a difference to the over-supply of labour? Is that remotely feasible? In its absence, there are things you can do, such as reducing low-wage EU migration into private sector jobs. The danger is that countries lapse into isolated, regulated national economies, or worse. But forgetting the fact that you live in an exploitative, capitalist economy, and that an international free market in labour is no more conducive to human welfare than a free market in capital is, is not a safe haven. Neoliberalism, inside or outside the EU, does not work.

Twenty-something things they don't tell you about our glorious economic system, part one

I realise I haven’t posted for a while. I’m currently engulfed in reviewing two books on Marxian economics, The Endless Crisis and The Failure of Capitalist Production – which is a bit of a challenge. In the meantime, I thought that, as this blog was originally intended to review books about capitalism in an in-depth way, I’d share some counter-intuitive and little known facts I’ve encountered along the way.

 1 Between 1980 and 2007 the global labour force grew from 1.9 billion to 3.1 billion, a rise of 63%. 73% of the labour force is located in the developing world and 40% in China and India alone. This has happened primarily because of ‘depeasantisation’ – peasants leave or are forced to leave the land and urban slums expand dramatically. 46 million workers join the labour force, across the world, every year.

2 In every region of the world, economic growth was higher between 1950 and 1973 than between 1973 and 2008. Growth more than halved in Western Europe, Latin America and Africa. Overall world growth stood at 2.9% between 1950 and 1973 and 1.8% between 1973 and 2008. (This data is gleaned from a table on page 53 of Andrew Kliman's The Failure of Capitalist Production)

3 Due to the expansion of credit, in the four years before the financial crisis (2003-2007), global growth averaged 4-5%, higher than at any time since the 1960s.

4 The 2008 crash was the second largest economic crisis in history, after the Great Depression of the 1930s. Without government bail-outs and stimulus, it would have been the largest.

5 Depression is now the condition most treated by the National Health Service in the UK. According to the UK government in 2000, one in six adults was suffering from a neurotic disorder, usually depression or anxiety or both. 

6 7-8% of the labour force in Brazil and 9% of the labour force in Egypt are employed as domestic servants. In England and Wales it is 0.3%. 30-50% of the non-agricultural workforce is self-employed in developing countries, in developed countries it is 12.8%. But as proletarianisation is increasing in the developing world (see point one) and self-employment increasing in the developed world, this balance will likely change.

7  35% of the workforce in Britain in the early 1970s worked in manufacturing. Now it is just over 10%.

8 0.1% of the Chinese and Indian populations are thought to be psychopaths. In Britain and America it is between 2 and 4%. 

9 “The Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism” is on MI5’s (Britain’s state security service) list of targets to be safeguarded against subversion.

10  Life expectancy for civilians increased in Britain by twice as much during the First and Second World Wars, as it did during the rest of the twentieth century.

11 Trade union membership peaked in Britain at 13.5 million in 1979. By 2009, it was down to 6.7m.

12 Had the share of GDP going to wages in the 1970s been maintained, UK consumers would currently have an extra £100 billion at their disposal, and US consumers £500 billion.