So, I hang around some anti work communities online. People who are against the concept of working. I'm drawn to the concept because of my UBI support, and my political ideology. I've discussed my thoughts on this subject before, and I have my own ideas on the subject. But I feel like I'm a minority in these communities. Why? Because I'm not a far left anti capitalist leftist. And these guys like to gatekeep. They like to act like only they are the true anti work people, and that you can't be capitalist and anti work. They also like to act like leftism is inherently more anti work than capitalism. Neither of these claims are true, and that's what I plan to address on this topic.
Debunking the idea you cannot be capitalist and anti work
Well, first of all, let's clarify here. I'm not a hardcore, died in the wool, capitalist. I don't go on about how it's the greatest economic system ever, and blah blah blah. I don't sing its praises day in and day out. Capitalism to me, is that beat up, $800 car that's 20 years old and breaks every 5 miles. I hate the thing, it breaks down all the time, but it's the best we can do and it beats taking the bus or walking. Capitalism is...functional. In the sense that it produces wealth and distributes goods and services in a functional way that benefits most people. Regardless of its flaws, it seems to do better at producing and distributing goods and services than most left wing ideas, which either boil down to command economies or some pre industrial society that is about as practical or desirable as anarcho capitalism. More on that in the second part of this post.
But, capitalism does have flaws. It does break down. It is recession prone. It demands everyone works, while not providing them with work. When it does provide work, the work is often poorly paid. It hoards goods and services among the rich and doesn't distribute equitably to everyone. I get it, capitalism is flawed. And I support, generally speaking, progressive measures to fix it. My big problem with capitalism is the fact that doesn't distribute these goods and services equitably on its own, and in a sense, this leads to inherent coercion in the system. One of my first posts on this blog was about the flaws of the capitalist economy. And I would say my ultimate solution to that, would basically be medicare for all and basic income. If you can decouple work from income somewhat, while still providing incentives to work, you can solve poverty and reduce coercion, making the market far more voluntary and fair. I view those as desirable ends. And while I admit we will need to implement some further solutions to deal with certain problematic industries like the housing industry, generally speaking I see these problems as solvable, within capitalism.
And that's why I say I'm anti work while still being largely capitalist. Because I largely don't view the problems of capitalism as so severe that we can't solve the work issue without ending capitalism. Socialists, anarchists, believe the coercion and contradictions within capitalism are so great the entire system must be abolished and replaced with something else in order to solve these problems. I don't believe that. If we can solve some aspects of the ownership problem, guaranteeing enough resources to people to survive without work, we can shift markets to work more for people. The biggest problems with markets are the inequalities in power. One side has access to all of the resources, the other needs those resources to survive. This leads to exploitative power relationships that are the root of all evil under capitalism. Give everyone enough resources to survive without needing to work, and you essentially solve that problem.
Yes, pure ideological capitalism is inherently pro work. It trends toward infinite growth, and infinite productivity, and ignores how the conditions it forces on people actually affects them. The thing is I want to solve those problems without killing the golden goose.
And if you can, this is what will happen. Jobs reflect the pay they're actually worth in a true free market. With voluntary buyers and seller, truly voluntary, the market equilibrium changes. For some industries, this might lead to automation as its cheaper for employers to automate labor than to keep it being done by humans. This is a good thing, if we can fix the distribution issues with the system. Automation in capitalism as it exists means people dont have jobs meaning they lose access to resources. You can either create more jobs, the rallying cries of many mainstream ideologies everywhere, or you can fix the distribution methods. So I say, yeah, if people don't want to do a job at a fair wage, and an employer doesn't want to offer a fair wage, let it be automated, seems like a win win for everyone. Some industries might simply stop existing. These industries would likely be non essential luxuries. You know the kinds of things we've largely done without since COVID started, restaurants, amusement parks. I'm not necessarily against these disappearing. If people don't want to work them, and employers dont want to pay them, and the business model is unsustainable, then good riddance. I can do with fewer frivolous luxuries in theory, if those luxuries were essentially subsidized by wage slavery. However, I really don't think industries would off themselves completely. The third category is what will happen with most essential work, and stuff that can be adapted. Workers would have to be paid a living wage. If work can't be automated and it's essential to society, then the wages paid will reflect the actual value of the labor to the employer. Now, it is possible to go overkill on basic income. If basic income is too generous and no one works, then society falls apart and falls into a wage price spiral. That would be bad. So obviously there are limitations to my ideas. But if we set basic income at the highest sustainable level, where society doesn't collapse and people are as free as realistically possible, we can start moving society in a positive direction. And given basic income studies for the rough amounts I support haven't found insane work incentive drops, and the consensus ranges from no drops at all to around 15% less work, well, that's not the end of the world.
The point is, full employment is essentially a policy choice. We don't need to employ every single able bodied person. We just try to force it that way for some vague notion of economic growth, even if this does not translate into human well being. I'd rather continue living in conditions similar to what we experienced over this past year, if it means humans can be free, than to continue to go back to normal, where everyone works, and we have tons of economic growth, but everyone is enslaved to jobs that they hate and poverty exists despite this massive surplus. Poverty is no longer a material issue, it's a distribution issue and if we can distribute stuff better without killing the engine creating this prosperity, then we will be better for it.
And who knows? Over time if market signals push the economy toward automation and away from human labor, well all the power to us, that's a good thing. I'd rather move toward employing 20-30% of our population rather than 60%, or having everyone work 15-20 hours a week than 40+. I believe this is possible under capitalism. We just gotta organize our resources in a specific way to do so. I admit this will be difficult given the powers that be, and how they are designed to serve the benefits of capital, but ultimately I'd rather take the FDR route in dealing with them, than to take the Lenin route, if you know what I mean.
Leftism isn't any more inherently anti work than capitalism
That said, I would now like to take the sails out of leftist theory in being superior to capitalism on the anti work issue. I understand leftism is broad and there are many kinds of leftism, and perhaps certain strains of leftist theory could get us in a similar place as my version of left libertarian capitalism would.
First of all, most marxist strains of leftist theory are as inherently pro labor as any strain of capitalism. This is because Marx was not inherently anti work, he just thought that people were exploited under capitalism and that they were alienated from their work due to their employer stealing their labor. Marxists view the rich as parasites, similar to how conservatives view that of welfare recipients, or basic income supporters in my view. Both groups have this belief that workers are entitled to the fruits of their labor, and that anyone who takes from this is bad. Again, just a different bad guy. Conservatives go on about taxation, and marxists go on about the rich who own the means of production. But here's the thing. Ideologies like this are rigid and inflexible and not accomodating to an anti work perspective. Because think of it, if wealth exists, and an individual didn't work for it, it had to come from somewhere, right? Meaning someone, or in the case of automation, something had to produce it. That's two questions everyone has to answer in their political ideology, who works, and who receives the fruits of labor. In these kinds of ideologies, in order to receive resources, one must work, meaning that everyone essentially must work. On the right, they base their ideology on property, whereas the left has the labor theory of value. So let's just say none of these strains are even compatible with anti work views, as that involves some sort of weakening between work and income (or alternative resource receiving structure).
Then you have more moderate forms of socialism that aren't inherently Marxist. You know, stuff like market socialism or democratic socialism. Well, these ideologies in practice don't seem much different than liberal ideologies like social democracy. Social democracy carries with it an inherent pro work component based in the idea of "reciprocity", which basically comes down to "society is obligated to take care of you, but you are obligated to work", the relationship is reciprocal, in other words, hence the term. I dont really inherently view democratic socialism as any different. Especially since demsocs' ideas to solving many of our current crises seem to be more jobs programs like the green new deal. So they make work for the sake of making work, because people are obligated to work, and they work for a paycheck or living standard of living. This is more just than the poverty we currently see under right wing capitalism, but it seems to misdiagnose the issue and take all of the wrong lessons in solving it. I don't desire pointless drudgery as a solution to poverty because people can't think past the whole recprocity thing, if we don't have to work, we shouldn't all have to work. While infrastructure projects are good short term, ultimately we should work to live not live to work. Humans are the masters of the economy, not the other way around. And ultimately the point of work is to produce things. Not to provide people paychecks.
Market socialism seems even worse at solving these issues. After all isn't market socialism just worker cooperatives within a market economy? That's the problem with socialists. They think workers owning the means of production is an end all solution, and it just is divorced from the issue of anti work politics. It just changes who makes the decisions. It doesn't change the work-income link at all, and if anything given the theory of justice at work here it might strengthen is as people might think because workers own the companies there's no excuse to be poor or something. Admittedly some market socialists might be for other liberal solutions, but that makes them as anti work as a social democrat. Not inherently anti work, and they might be pro work. It depends on the underlying system.
But, you say, most leftists who are anti work aren't necessarily socialists, right? They're anarchists. Now, I'm going to be honest, I'm not super duper well informed on anarchist theory, but I did do a little research before making this topic, and here's the thing. Anarchists are often MORE anti work than most other leftists, but that doesn't mean they're anti work, at least not in the same way I am.
The problem with a lot of these theories is that I just can't see how they can work, or if they do, they either don't solve the issue or seem very undesirable. Anarcho communists tend to believe that the means of production should be owned collectively, and that people should work as much as they want, and those who don't should get resources. Okay, but here's the thing. I don't see the incentive structure here. How do we ensure enough people make enough stuff? In my system, I at least try to give detailed ideas of how we can get the ball rolling and use market signals to push the system that way, while ensuring we don't change too radically to destabilize the whole system. What's to stop the same kinds of resource hoarding or entitlement to resources based on labor we currently see under capitalism? It's one of those leftist theories that seem good on paper but not in practice. You got anarcho syndicalists and market anarchists, which seem to fall into the same overall issues we see with market socialism in my amateurish opinion. You got anarcho primativists who seem to think going back to pre industrial society and living in tribes is desireable. No, just no. I don't want to go back to dying at age 30 because I happened to get an infection or something. We need society. That's one issue I have with anarchists. I want to solve work, by conquering it with technology. I see capitalism as a flawed golden goose, and I don't want to destroy it. These guys want to do away with it and endorse all of these other ways of living that won't really abolish work, and even if they lead to less work, they also lead to significantly lower standards of living. I know I said I can do without sit down restaurants and amusement parks if their business models rely on essential slave labor, but I don't want to destroy society as we know it. Even if you worked say, 10-20 hours a week in an anarchist society, you would be doing so at a much lower standard of living. If possible I'd like to have my cake and eat it too.
Conclusion
So, here's the thing. I'm very anti work. I hate the idea of it. I believe it should be conquered. But, I have a very specific path to accomplish this. First, we use UBI to free people from the threat of poverty. Second, we allow society to evolve from there. If automation takes over labor, we could afford to work less and boost the UBI. Eventually, we might reach a largely automated economy that resembles post scarcity. We do this under capitalism, or a market socialist system. After all, it's not capitalism itself that's bad, but the unequal power relationships within. We solve that, and we can solve the work issue and get the ball rolling on achieving Keynes' dream of 15 hour work weeks and high standards of living for all. Leftism is not necessarily a good way to lead to anti work societies. I might not be opposed to market socialism as a way to further weaken the power of the ownership class in society and make their power more diluted, but beyond that, no. Most forms of socialism are inherently pro work, and the ones that aren't are indistinguishable from social democracy on the issue in my opinion. Anarchists might be more anti work, as they're anti current society in general, but they go too far with it. They have these books of theories that have never been tried, and I can't see how they can actually work in reality. Or, they are indistinguishable from social democracy in the best case scenario. Or, they would achieve a less work centric life at the expense of basically giving up most progress in modern societies. They are not desirable.
I'm not saying leftists can't be anti work. Many of them are. But they seem more against the capitalist idea of work, rather than work itself. Their solutions won't free us from the institution of work, most will just change it. I honestly don't believe the left is inherently more anti work as an idea than capitalists are. And I believe anti work goals can be done just as easily under capitalism as socialism, if not easier in most cases. You might be able to make an argument for me for some sort of market socialism over autocratic ownership of the means of production, but even then, I see the whole divide as secondary to the anti work question. Capitalism or socialism, the goals can be accomplished either way. And both systems have large, even majority pro work factions within them.
Anti work politics should transcend the capitalist-socialist divide. Not just be a circlejerk of a bunch of far leftists purity testing capitalists who support basic income because they don't advocate for the liberal abolition of modern society. Just saying. I'm just as anti work as any of those, even if I'm not a radical.
No comments:
Post a Comment