Author: Richard Swift

Illustration by Notable.ca The idea of a maximum wage is the logical counterpart of a minimum wage in ameliorating extremes in market outcomes. With the global equality gap rupturing societies almost everywhere, it is a sane suggestion to find ways to help rein in the super-rich. Traditional societies used everything

Occupy Detroit rally, Grand Circus Park, October 14, 2011. By Stiofan 1919 (Flickr).

It is a central irony of the history of the Left that
it so frequently comes to defend the very exploitive
and unjust institutions that were its sworn enemies
from the outset. One of these is certainly the sovereign
nation state, the strengthening of which
became the fulcrum of first Stalinist and then social
democratic politics. The state and its bureaucracy —
the critique of which was very much part of the early
Left’s inspiration (anarchist and Marxist) — is now
seen as an essential bulwark against capitalist globalization.
The consequences of this statist orientation
are that the Left has not infrequently had to surrender
the critique of a complacent and self-serving
political class and its national security and other
bureaucracies to a rhetorical if hypocritical libertarianism
of the Right. With a few exceptions, plans to
decentralize and democratize power are pushed off
into some distant future.

A parallel case is that of the system of wage
labour. The fight against wage “slavery” (the word
says it all) has been a core inspiration of critiques of
capitalism from the earliest days of that system. For
Marx the critique of wage labour was essential to
his labour theory of value and the notion of surplus
value derived from the labour of workers above and
beyond the wages they were paid. For the pioneers
of early socialism, getting rid of the wage system
was a first principle. Another less discussed part of
their critique of wage labour was that its authoritarian
core — the boss/worker relationship — undermined
the basic tenets of a democratic society. If a
vast majority of people spend most of their waking
lives under the direction of external management —
autocratic habits and discontents will deform all
social life. There is much evidence from contemporary
psychology and the study of alienation that a
significant truth resides here. Whether under capitalism
or state socialism, the wage relationship saps
the autonomy and self-determination of workers
needed to underpin a truly democratic society. This
view, too, was pretty much a pillar of the critiques of
the pioneers who envisioned a world beyond capitalism.
But gradually the economism of a more vulgar
Marxism displaced the belief that it was core
social relationships of hierarchy and the wage relationship
which needed to be transformed in order to
move beyond capitalism.

As socialism became a serious political contender
— either in its parliamentary or Bolshevik form —
wage labour came to be accepted as the only way
the wealth of society could be effectively distributed.
When pressed, some still expressed a belief
that this was a transitional phase to a remote and
rarely invoked future in which the wage relationship
would be transcended. The focus of the Left shifted
to the quantity of wages paid (did these amount to a
fair living wage?) and other conditions under which
wage labour was carried out — work safety, holidays,
pensions and other fringe benefits. The idea
that the labour market (or its centralized planning
equivalent) was a questionable way of deciding
thorny questions of income distribution ceased to
be considered a point for serious discussion.

Neoliberal revolution

Socialists and the labour movement instead advocated
a macroeconomic position in favour of full
employment, reasoning that this would leave the
working class (their prime constituency) in the best
position to occupy decent jobs at good wages in a
situation of high labour demand. Full employment
was only imaginable in the context of robust economic
growth, where labour and everything else
was in high demand in a rapid “flow through” economy.
The golden age of this model dates from the
1950s up into the 1970s, a span of time that witnessed
a relative fairness in the division of economic
surplus between capital and labour. This all
came to a crashing end in the 1980s with the neoliberal
counter-revolution spearheaded by Thatcher
and Reagan, aided by capital’s increasing globalized
flexibility. The two together succeeded in making
good wage settlements a piece of nostalgia. Instead
we entered an era of labour “flexibility” (read discipline)
marked by precarious employment, austerity
and shocking levels of inequality.

Fast forward to the year 2016. To socialists who
take humanity’s ecological crisis seriously — and it
is hard to take seriously those who don’t — the
growth that underpinned the full employment dream
is fast becoming a grave threat to the very existence
of our species, in addition to making the planet
entirely inhospitable to a good many other species.
One can see the flickering ironies in the flames that
are consuming the tar sands capital of Fort McMurray
— that ultimate job magnet drawing workers
from Eastern Canada to Somalia and Sudan —
destroyed by the very climate degradation its dirty
oil helped produce. Only the rankest cowardice prevents
our political class (Elizabeth May excepted)
from drawing the obvious connections.

Fact is we already have too many jobs and use too
much wage labour performing tasks in our speed-up
economy whose only real purpose is to generate
profit and as a side effect perhaps create more jobs.
But this kind of growth is something we can no longer
afford. There is a credible case being made by
ecological economists that what we actually need is
a kind of degrowth to regain a sense of ecological
balance as we face a series of cascading environmental
crises — climate degradation, resource
depletion, deterioration of the quality of soil, air and
water, a garbage explosion and widespread chemical
poisoning.

Capital “off the leash”

A few on the Left still yearn to return to “the golden
age” of the 1950s and 1960s and the era of decent
jobs where our exploitation is regulated by consensus
agreement of capital and labour. But there will
be no going back. Capital is “off the leash” and will
not likely be reined in by calls for fairness and ecological
sanity based on contradictory notions of full
employment and “green growth.” The Centre-Left
politics that underpinned the old consensus has
now largely capitulated to one form or another of
neoliberalism. Precarious labour has long been at
the centre of the political economy of the Global
South. With the aid of globalization and the hollowing
out of manufacturing work, precarity has
migrated north for good. Most of the new job growth
is part-time and/or low wage.

The main ideological tool in capital’s arsenal
remains the promise of more wage labour that never
seems to arrive, at least in the quantity and quality
promised. Whether it’s large transnational corporations
or the business-oriented think tanks that dominate
the policy superstructure, there is an almost
constant drumbeat of job blackmail. It is holy writ
that the business class must get its way in enacting
this particular tax policy or that particular free trade
deal or pushing through the latest pipeline or mining
project. Otherwise we will all suffer. They just
won’t invest, and the jobless and under-employed
can blame the politicians who failed to provide that
holiest of all grails: the “sound investment climate.”

This endless braying for jobs by everyone from
chambers of commerce to trade unionists traps us in
the logic of capital forever. It is frequently accompanied
by the glorification of any work at all as a morally
upright end in itself no matter its ecological and
social impact. Jobs are synonymous with wage
labour in most conventional understandings and it is
assumed that without the direction of some external
management we would all lay about doing nothing—
or worse, after all “idle hands do the devil’s work,”
as the expression goes. Wage labour is taken as the
natural condition through we distribute the wealth
of society based on the status and bargaining power
attached to the job in question. Those without jobs
end up both poor and unworthy.

Of course the corporate and related oligarchies,
who are quick to champion a life of compulsory
labour for the rest of us, now tend to draw their
income from securitized wealth such as stock portfolios,
derivatives, bonds and trust funds. These
have little to do with how the owners of significant
capital pass their waking hours. While they are
deserving of our animus for their self-satisfied
hypocrisy, we could also view them as pioneers in
destroying the centrality of the wage system as the
main means for distributing wealth. The massive
personal wealth that the one per cent has managed
to accumulate (up to one-third of global wealth is
currently nestled beyond the reach of tax authorities)
proves there is certainly enough pie to go
around without us expanding it even further.

An adequate basic income for all is, in this sense,
a good starting point for the Left to renew its assault
on compulsory wage labour. The organization of
work could be freed up to take on more cooperative,
decentralized and democratic forms in which workers
could decide for themselves what work is desired
and useful. Many seeds of this kind of work organization
already exist. Such reforms should be welcomed
insofar as they would significantly weaken
the power corporate job blackmailers currently
wield over society.

This article appeared in the Summer 2016 issue of Canadian Dimension (Basic Income).

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