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.

Basic income versus the economy of coercion

 Proving basic income is affordable is merely the first skirmish in long war

In 2015, an academic from Birmingham University asserted that, contrary to the beliefs of sceptics, basic income was eminently affordable. Using Canada as his example, Richard Pereira quantified the likely effects of savings from the abolition of existing social security benefits, reductions in bureaucratic costs, a smaller burden on public health care and a crackdown on tax avoidance and evasion. His conclusion was that you could introduce a basic income at a ‘decent level’ without additional personal taxes. In fact, basic income might even enable reductions in personal taxes.

One of the priorities Pereira identified in making basic income affordable was plugging ‘tax leakage’ by multinationals and the rich. “Vast wealth is channelled away from public goods though … shady and secretive offshore jurisdictions,” Pereira wrote. “Some of the largest multinational companies are paying zero tax and receiving tax refunds and subsidies simultaneously.”

The release of the Panama Papers has lent Pereira’s claims about the affordability of basic income a distinct air of, to use a contemporary political buzzword, credibility. According to the Tax Justice Network, global offshore wealth amounts to $21-32 trillion. Get hold of that vast wealth and the whole political landscape shifts. Austerity loses its justification and basic income becomes a feasible aim. “Some may disagree with the notion of an unconditional cash grant, or object to it going to everyone. Just don’t say we can’t afford it,” noted one Panama Papers post-mortem.

The realisation that a colossal trove of wealth exists to fund basic income is coupled with a growing awareness that punitive welfare systems don’t even succeed in meeting their most elemental aim – that of saving money. All that checking on people’s fitness to work and whether they have applied for 47 jobs that week as they promised in their job search agreement, costs an inordinate amount of money. According the UK’s National Audit Office, the cost to the taxpayer of the private contractors carrying out fit to work tests is at least £600 million more than the government is forecast to save in benefits reductions. The ‘age of austerity’ should be renamed the ‘age of needless pain’.

But there is a danger that basic income advocates are lulled into the belief that all they need to do is rationally convince the public and policy-makers that a basic income is affordable, will lighten the burden on multiple public services and vastly increase personal freedom. People will slowly see the light.

This, however, is less than half the battle. A great many, very powerful people will not want basic income regardless of how affordable it is. They will fight against it mercilessly precisely because it will vastly increase individual freedom, and their entire worldview rests on human subjection.

The great German psycho-analyst and socialist Erich Fromm advocated a basic income sixty years ago his book, The Sane Society – he called it a ‘guaranteed subsistence minimum’. After refuting the idea that basic income sounds too ‘fantastic’ to be affordable, Fromm was less sanguine about convincing everybody that a basic income was necessary and right. “However, the suspicions against a system of guaranteed subsistence minimum are not unfounded from the standpoint of those who want to use ownership of capital for the purpose of forcing others to accept the work conditions they offer,” he said.

Even more than in Fromm’s day ownership of capital is now overtly predicated upon forcing people to accept the work conditions that are on offer. Economic recovery after 2008 rests upon low wage, insecure service sector work. According to economists, all the net growth in jobs in the US since 2005 has been in ‘alternative work arrangements’, such as contract and temporary posts. In Britain, zero hour contracts have mushroomed during recovery from recession, while other forms of flexible work contract have proliferated. In continental Europe, massive political weight has been expended to make it easier for employers to fire workers. In France, the Nuit debout protests are against a planned labour reform that would place the country’s entire labour laws up for negotiation with employers, including the 35 hour week.

All these changes are inherently about increasing coercion. “The labour market is never free,” says Paul Mason is his book, Postcapitalism. “It was created through coercion and is re-created every day by laws, regulations, prohibitions, fines and the fear of unemployment.”

The rise in sanctioning people on benefits in Britain for not looking for work with sufficient ardour and the hounding of sick and disabled people is not primarily about saving money because, as is evident now, money is conspicuously not being saved. The reason is to force people to take work at wages they can’t live on, make life on benefits so astoundingly awful that zero-hour contracts seem attractive, and to sound a clear warning to those in work that they need to knuckle under and obey. “Economics is the method,” said Margaret Thatcher. “The object is to change the soul.”

By contrast basic income threatens to undo all the hard work of neoliberalism in shoring up the power of employers. At present, as one basic income advocate says, “all negotiating power is in the hands of those offering the jobs and not those looking for them”. Basic income will grant palpable bargaining power to individuals in the labour market, and, for the first time, allow genuine personal choice. Erich Fromm thought basic income would be the beginning of real freedom of contract between employers and employees. Work will have to be interesting, or well-paid enough for people to want to do, or will be automated because no-one will.*.

But to the rulers of our societies this represents, not a dream of liberation, but a nightmare of the collapse of social coercion. Who knows where such a society will lead. Marilola Wili of the Swiss group, Generation Basic Income, contends that basic income will “unpredictably set human forces free in ways one may have never thought about”.

“Work for a salary is the bedrock of the system,” says Paul Mason. “We accept it because as our ancestors learned the hard way, if you don’t obey, you don’t eat.” Basic income will loosen that bedrock and quite possibly, in time, smash it completely. For that reason, many people at the summit of society will do anything to ensure it doesn’t come to pass. Let’s not kid ourselves, achieving basic income will be an almighty struggle. But it’s a struggle we need to embrace.

*Automation represents another danger basic income might pose to capitalism. According to Karl Marx, ‘the most fundamental law of capitalism’ is the tendency for the profit rate to fall as machines replace human labour, which is the ultimate source of value. If basic income cause a spurt in automation and a reduction in labour intensive employment, as unpopular jobs are increasingly mechanised, then profit rates may well, in time, crumble. Capitalism in the West has become reliant on low-wage, low productivity but labour intensive service sector jobs, which do not have to be done by people and in the future almost certainly won’t be, regardless of whether basic income is adopted. But basic income will accelerate that process. Human, sweatshop labour in China and East Asia has provided an enormous boost to profitability for multinational corporations, but that source of profit is drying up as the Chinese economy, and thus globalisation, slows. It is also true that, according to Marxian economics, various forces counteract the tendency for profit to fall, such as increased wages boosting consumer spending. Basic income could also be an offsetting force to falling profits, so its economic impact may be complicated.

Should the Left support Basic Income?

This article first appeared on the New Compass website

2016 will see basic income rise up political consciousness. Trials and referenda will take place across Europe. Should the Left support basic income? Half a century ago, the famous psychoanalyst and Frankfurt School theorist, Erich Fromm, examined the psychological effects of giving everyone a guaranteed income. His thoughts are instructive. He thought it a 'great step' but that without other changes, it is not enough to really change society.

From occupying the fringes of debate just a few years ago, basic income – the idea that the state should pay an unconditional income to each person as of right – has swiftly climbed up the political agenda. Finland has announced a basic income trial, Utrecht and 19 other Dutch municipalities are planning to introduce a pilot scheme some time in 2016 paying a small group of benefit claimants €876 a month. Also this year, notwithstanding the opposition of the Swiss Parliament, Switzerland will hold a referendum on the nationwide introduction of a basic income set at a much higher level - US$ 19,800 a year.

What should be the attitude of the libertarian Left to basic income? Is it a way of liberating people from an increasingly cruel and, in any case vanishing, welfare system and exploitative job market? Or does it shovel free money towards the already wealthy and save a dysfunctional capitalism from itself?

Before jumping to conclusions, it is worth weighing the opinions of radical thinkers throughout history on basic income. The idea is far from new. The English revolutionary Thomas Paine proposed something similar in 1797. And the German psychoanalyst and Frankfurt School theorist Erich Fromm advocated ‘a universal subsistence guarantee’ in his famous 1955 book The Sane Society. In 1966, he considered the issue in more depth in an essay entitled The Psychological Aspects of the Guaranteed Income.

Individual freedom

The most important reason for accepting the concept of a basic income, Fromm says, is that it would drastically increase the freedom of the individual. Up to this point in history, freedom has been constrained by the use of force on the part of rulers, but also by “the threat of starvation against all who were unwilling to accept the conditions of work and social existence that were imposed on them.”

A guaranteed income becomes for the first time possible in conditions of economic abundance or, in Murray Bookchin’s phrase, post-scarcity. This lifts the threat of starvation and makes genuine independence feasible. “Nobody would have to accept conditions of work merely because he otherwise would be afraid of starving – a talented or ambitious man or woman could learn new skills to prepare himself or herself for a different kind of occupation,” Fromm writes. “A woman could leave her husband, an adolescent his family.”

This “right to live, regardless”, as Fromm puts it, is the most important justification of a basic income, in my opinion. We live in societies in the West which are stiffening the ‘threat of starvation’ just as economic abundance becomes a realisable possibility. Over 90% of unemployed Greeks and nearly two-thirds of Spaniards, countries where unemployment is staggeringly high, do not receive any unemployment benefits. An estimated 1.5 million people in Britain use food banks. Welfare benefits have become increasingly conditional on satisfactory ‘job search’ activities, conditions which are imposed on sick and disabled people as well, with the withdrawal of income an ever-present threat.

What this means is that many more people than before are dependent on others, often older relatives or partners, and powerless before a labour market eager to exploit them. Or simply destitute. Precarious ‘bullshit’ jobs, or ‘shit work’ as Spanish labour unions call them, have mushroomed. In Britain, research has shown that spiralling flexible employment practices are causing widespread anxiety, stress and ‘depressed mental states’ because of the financial and social uncertainty they entail.

A basic income could restore independence and freedom to people whose lives are increasingly blighted as a result of economic circumstances, performing a role similar to that undertaken by trade unions and collective bargaining in the era of full employment. “Income from labour will be renegotiated,” says Enno Schmidt, one of the organisers of the Swiss group, Generation Basic Income. “No-one can be blackmailed with their existence” to do work they don’t wish to. “With a basic income, I can say no to a bad deal.”

The non-work society

Basic income can liberate people from the necessity of making a living and allow other non-market activities to flourish that, while not materially productive, nonetheless make life meaningful and have important functions. This might be looking after children, artistic creation, managing a chronic illness or education for the sake of it, not utilitarian ‘self-improvement’. “This right to live, to have food, shelter, medical care, education etc,” writes Fromm, “is an intrinsic human right that cannot be restricted by any condition, not even the one that the individual must be socially ‘useful’”.

This principle, of “the right to live regardless”, whatever someone’s personal utility might be, should, in my opinion, adorn any society that does not seek to oppress its members. However that society is organised.

To the above activities should be added democratic self-management of the community. Genuine democracy is not possible in a time-pressed, hurried society. Basic income should increase the free time available to many members of society and make direct management of the community feasible, not just theoretically desirable. The practices of democracy could be learnt by experience if work fades into the background.

To many of its advocates, basic income is explicitly about relegating the centrality of work in people’s lives, permitting a collective breathing space for other, undirected activities to come to the fore. Marilola Wili of Generation Basic Income maintains that the idea represents a paradigm shift in what work means. It can “unpredictably set human forces free in ways one may have never thought about”, she says.

The great step

However, basic income alone will not produce the paradigm shift that is required. “The great step of a guaranteed income will, in my opinion, succeed,” writes Fromm, “only if it is accompanied by changes in other spheres.” The danger of a basic income is precisely that it assumes changes in other spheres are not necessary and merely bolts on to our current capitalist society, leaving its deep flaws intact.

One such area is consumption. Basic income has been presented as a solution to the lack of demand in the economy. Under this justification, basic income becomes the ‘salvation of capitalism’, by buttressing weak consumer buying power and replacing the economically destructive growth of household debt and credit. Basic income stimulates the economy and increases corporate profits while, at the same time, giving workers more freedom and nullifying the threat of impending technological unemployment. What’s not to like?

Actually plenty. Under this scenario, basic income becomes a crutch that permits an ecologically and socially destructive economic system to preserve itself, neutralising its contradictions and performing a redistribution of wealth to blunt its oligarchic tendencies. Corporations can continue selling endless individual gadgets, continue forming monopolies, continue commercialising the pores of everyday life, and continue offshoring production to areas of the globe with dirt cheap labour and transporting the goods back to the rich world, thus causing global warming. They can continue doing this because basic income intervenes to ensure a market for their products in the wealthy countries.

Fromm contrasts two types of consumption; ‘maximal’ consumption which we currently have and ‘optimal’ consumption, which entails consumption for public use through amenities like theatres, libraries and parks. “Guaranteed income without a change from the principle of maximal consumption would only take care of certain problems,” writes Fromm, “but would not have the radical effect it should.”

I believe that a serious post-capitalist Left cannot just pit good collective consumption against bad individualised consumption. Myriad individual products make life function and liberate people from toil. But it is abundantly clear that a radical change in consumption needs to take place. Goods needs to be built to last, disposable consumption ended and the practice of transporting products across the world vastly curtailed. In short, the capitalist engine behind contemporary consumption needs to be switched off. “Such a change from maximal to optimal consumption would require drastic changes in production patterns,” writes Fromm, “and also a drastic reduction of the appetite-whetting, brainwashing techniques of advertising.” This is something basic income alone will not do. And it should be remembered that the western lifestyle of the 1960s, the lifestyle Fromm derided as ‘maximal consumption’, is considered healthy and moderate in retrospect by many climate activists, compared to hyper consumption now.

However, it must be borne in mind that Fromm wrote his essay at the height of the post-war boom and in the wealthiest country in history at the time, the United States. In 2016, it is quite conceivable that basic income will be employed to keep consumption going at ‘basic’ levels should a new and drastic economic crash occur, one that cannot be bailed out by governments. Basic income could, therefore, perform a rescue act to stop society from collapsing. Which is rather a different thing to providing a long-term surrogate for the perpetually expanding market that capitalism requires but cannot itself manufacture.

Not just for the precariat

It should also be recognised that basic income, in its pure form, is not just for the so-called precariat. The Dutch pilots are for benefit claimants only but under most basic income proposals everyone gets the same, wealthy and poor alike. A basic income would be paid to all adults. It is conceivable that a basic income would allow the wealthy or comfortably off to stop working altogether, become self-employed or switch to a less demanding job. These are quite plausible scenarios, and many wealthy people do seek an escape from their high-pressure lives. But, equally, it could also simply supply an additional mass of money to the already wealthy, an issue that applies particularly to the’ basic income max’ proposals of $20,000 or $30,000 a year. This money could be used to buy more property or invest on the stock market. Thus actually reinforcing inequality and bolstering financial speculation.

Fromm concludes that the “full effect” of guaranteed income will only happen if combined with a change in the habits of consumption, a new humanistic attitude and a “renaissance of truly democratic methods”. He envisages a new Lower house (he was living in the US at the time so presumably he means the House of Representatives) which summarises “decisions arrived at by hundreds of thousands of face to face groups, active participation of all members working in any kind of enterprise.” He warns of the danger of a state that nourishes all acquiring dictatorial qualities that can only be “overcome by a simultaneous, drastic increase in democratic procedure in all spheres of social activities.”

I believe a ‘welfare state’ that restricts itself to automatically paying all members of society a guaranteed income would actually have much less power than one that makes welfare provisional on myriad conditions and intrudes shamelessly into the lives of benefit recipients. However, Fromm is right that the ‘great step’ of a basic income is not a panacea. Any just society should grant its citizens economic freedom, and for that reason alone the Left should support a basic income. But basic income does not render other changes in society any less necessary and we should not be lulled into thinking it could.