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Industry without Happiness: On the Guaranteed Minimum Income |
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by Thomas Schmid
Email: mbatko (nospam) lycos.com (verified) |
20 Apr 2005
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A basic income could heal our fragmented society caught in work fanaticism and work fetishism while work disappears..A basic income could change social attitudes and goals and give real meaning to the human rights to life and participation. |
INDUSTRY WITHOUT HAPPINESS – ARGUMENTS FOR DISARMING WORK
By Thomas Schmid
[This text from: Befreiung von falscher Arbeit (Liberation from False Work: Theses for a Guaranteed Minimum Income), Berlin 1986 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.archiv-grundeinkommen.de/.]
We face a socio-philosophical problematic that is hard to solve: Why should the right to food be tied to labor? Why should a person who loses his job through no fault of his own be socially punished as a result of this incident?
(Joseph Weizenbaum)
Every reflection leads almost inevitably to the idea of a minimum income that must be guaranteed in one way or another.
(Ralf Dahrendorf)
New social and political ideas often come surprisingly in roundabout ways. They are not further developments of well-known widespread practices. Because they mix up or ignore existing fronts, these ideas quickly fall under suspicion of heresy. They will ruin conditions or cast the emancipatory claim overboard and change camps. All the social blocks that manage the – material and ideological – assets and status quo react this way. Therefore new ideas often develop in the shadows of large organizations.
The guaranteed minimum income is such a new idea. This idea would be immediately obvious to a being from outer space not entangled in the business of this world. Without great joy, they would note that the ideology of the beneficial character of paid labor might have been necessary to help the industrial society to victory with gentle and direct force. Then it would be quickly noticed that this ideology has become old-fashioned today and can only be maintained with the strangest contortions. A great wealth is produced today – seemingly the best prerequisite for a good (material) likelihood of all – under antiquated social and labor market conditions. However this is not true at all.
Poverty, marginalization and emptiness of human life are not small but ever-greater problems. The being from outer space would quickly conclude that the whole thing was badly organized, that its distribution structure was long overdue and that the call for work for everyone is not reasonable but goes nowhere because it starts at the wrong point and is oriented in an outmoded model of prosperity. Therefore the being from outer space would find the proposal of not connecting work and income as firmly as in the past as plausible and compelling. You must stop your propaganda for full employment because you make paid work increasingly rare. For a long time you emphasized to people that paid work was the eye of the needle through which one had to pass in order to live. This obviously makes no sense today. You must make life possible to people even without paid labor.
This will naturally not be simple. Influential social blocks and their ideologies still oppose this simple insight, the two most important blocks: employers and unions. Although they have different opinions in many points, they – at least the majority – are agreed in rejecting a guaranteed minimum income. This attacks a model in which both blocks – in the distribution of roles – had united that was relatively effective for a long time: the material and intellectual hegemony over paid labor. The employers – and only the employers – made possible the material conditions enabling dependent persons to survive. The unions – and only the unions – insured that the dependent employees would be paid “properly”. The pact of the two large organizations was based on their hegemonial production. There was (almost) no work without the employer and (almost) no wage improvement without the unions. The holy of holies of capitalism – paid labor – stood in the center of this meeting. The marshy alternative terrain was drained from both sides.
Therefore the two structurally conservative power blocks of Germany did not quickly make friends with the minimum income. For the employer, it would be a grave blow against their spirit of calculation. Minimum income would take away some of the disciplining character from work, contribute to the disarmament of the working morale of factories and offices, loosen the bond of living labor to the dead and break through that iron law that still characterizes this society today: only one who works may eat. In other words, the minimum income would give free rein to laziness. The unions hardly see this differently. Without speaking clearly of laziness, unions are worried about the survival of their cliental. Employers have machines; unions have members. The machines must be operated with a working morale. The membership must be maintained – despite all potential threats.
Unions must be interested in the highest possible rate of employment since they are worker organizations and representing the interests of the non-working contradicts all of their moral imperatives. They must cherish the ideology of full employment and downplay structural unemployment as an industrial accident that can be repaired through the magic cure of a universal generalized reduction of working hours. Unions in fact are in a difficult situation. The industrial rationalization process means that their cliental will disappear in the long run. They try to stop this atrophy of members by making themselves propagandists of a scarce commodity to be distributed evenly: paid labor. However paid labor has increasingly lost its character of giving meaning, not only because of technology and rationalization. The guaranteed minimum income would do justice to this varied reality. Unions can only adjust to this with difficulty since they would thereby admit that they can no longer exercise any hegemonial power on all the non-employed.
The left is often reproached that one of the intellectual fathers of the minimum income was the rightwing American economist Milton Friedman. This is strikingly emphasized more by the reactionary and liberal schools. In a time when the old political classifications have lost much of their plausibility, it seems reasonable to distinguish between `reactionary’ and `liberal’. Where a minimum income is proposed by the rightwing, it should serve pacification, take away the threatening element from pauperization, stifle in advance the feared revolts of the marginalized and assure the smoothest possible functioning of the productive core of society. It is no more than necessary alms to the underdogs of the single-minded growth society. It is an asocial measure embodying mildness, not responsibility, and is marked by socio-political indifference.
In contrast, the liberal substantiation of minimum income (as presented by Ralf Dahrendorf today) is very clear. The liberals always had a less affective relation to the state and centralism than the left. Liberals never regarded the open battle of the two large social blocks as a very beneficial innovation. They had something against the ostentatious association structure produced in common struggle, the central state outfitted with oversized competence. The liberals always feared that this bulldozer would disempower individuals and diminish their elective possibilities. To be sure, they usually thought abstractly of the power imputed to individuals. They thought of the imaginary free economic subject and had no sense for the barbarism of economic liberalism that appears so free and yet presupposes the existence of dispossessed dependent masses.
However traditional liberalism contains something else: the conviction that responsibility must mark the community and that the victims of the bulldozer are entitled to more than a pittance. A strand of tradition of liberalism focused on social imperatives enters in the demands for a guaranteed minimum income. One need not be ashamed of this. The impetus of yellowed liberalism hostile to blocks and centralism appears in the search for ways out of the crisis of the social-democratic union social state.
The reference to Milton Friedman is misleading for another reason. What is atypical in the capitalist development of the last thirty years is blocked so that the minimum income seems like a breach of normality. The income of the majority of the population guaranteed through paid labor was a special historically unique state that is ending. In many historical formations, those who could not make their living did not sit in the dock of society. If one bids farewell to belief in the economic miracle of full employment, it is quickly clear that society is obliged to give a guarantee of life to the individual. There is no way back to the old days. One also need not be ashamed of this.
The leftist criticism of the guaranteed minimum income raises two very opposite arguments – sometimes in the same breath. The first is that the minimum income is not feasible. Employers (and their political organ, the state) would never allow this to pass. Ultimately paying non-work offends against all the principles of the profit economy and therefore is first conceivable in a post-capitalist society. The second argument is that the minimum income does not transcend the system and is only the pompous renaming of an existing measure – income support. It is the emancipatory camouflage of a fundamentally discriminatory measure. The contradiction between the two arguments – that often comes from the same mouth – seems very revealing to me. Both arguments are correct. To me, this constitutes the wittiness of the minimum income.
Employers, unions and the parties cannot easily support the guaranteed minimum income because they all fear that it will cause a pillar of society to collapse – readiness for work and working morale. The introduction of the minimum income would not be a revolutionary act or even an extravagantly costly reform. It would only sanction officially and positively what is already the case: that the community compensates those who become dispensable or non-essential in the former system of production.
Nevertheless I regard the demand for a guaranteed minimum income as very important. This demand cannot be settled in the old dialectic of reform and revolution. The purpose of the minimum income is not limited to whether it drives the ruling class to the edge of political bankruptcy. The minimum income accomplishes very little and yet very much, little because it no longer sees unemployment punished and stigmatized – as in the past – and much because it creates possibilities enabling (not dictating!) individuals to back off from the work society and lessen dependence on large organizations. Its subversive significance is that it restrains the hegemony of institutions over people. Thus the guaranteed minimum income would ring in an important cultural process of upheaval. It would bid farewell to employers, unions and the state as primary authorities of interpretation and put the future in the hands of people more than in the past.
This is not much and is hardly more than an honest accounting. The scandal is hidden in the small print, so to speak. It lies in what is intended but unsaid. The minimum income – very cautiously – gives the task of socialization back to society, that is to people. It does not hold so intensely to the socializing character of paid work and aims at forms of socialization beyond paid labor. While it does not create these forms, it makes them more possible than in the past. Minimum income opens up elective possibilities for people. This may not be much. However the past work society prevented real elective possibilities.
One could object to the minimum income that it tries to square the circle, so to speak, to drive out the social state with the means of the social state. This is partly true and constitutes the trick and danger of the measure. While the trick was emphasized, the danger remains. That the minimum income could be used as a means for pacifying “ghettos” is conceivable. However this would depend on the inmates of the “ghettos” pressing outside. State policy (including progressive state policy) ultimately produces these ghettos. The minimum income would naturally be a state measure (and the hope of completely renouncing on state interventionism would be illusionary).
Past social state policy aimed at moderating the consequences of industrial development. This policy was compensation for the wounds inflicted by progress. The minimum income is significantly different. It will not only heal wounds but prevent them. It will free people from having to risk their necks or sell themselves on the market. Even more, it could actively contribute to restraining paid work. The capitalist innovation process accomplishes the release of people from meaningless undignified work today. The profitability-calculus of employers is decisive, not the aversion of people to ridiculous, superfluous and degrading work.
The process of release from work is turned upside down, so to speak. While release occurs, it is dictated by production requirements, not by human interests. Since the minimum income was moved into gear from the human side, it would not only be a reaction to the reduction process of paid labor. Rather it would try to influence and promote this process from the side of human need. It would be a contribution to the repression of paid work by people, not only by machines. Fully developed paid work starts a destructive and wasteful industrial production. The minimum income could at least put a stop to this propensity to suicide. Something better may occur to people if they are not longer forced to sign on. There is no guarantee but minimum income could be a decisive help.
I will briefly discuss a last objection against the guaranteed minimum income brought by the right and the left: the minimum income will only promote irresponsibility and laziness. The minimum income has something to do with the ethic of social responsibility. Laziness remains. Whoever reasons with it does not cut a very good figure. On one side, the economy thriving today is a clear proof that people have energetic impulses pressing to activity. On the other hand, whoever warns of threatening laziness reveals a strangely inverted understanding of human nature. He obviously believes that the person – if no one forces the whip of work – is an idling minus-man. In the logic of this philosophy, the work pressure would be a solution that has nothing to do with emancipation. Those who warn of the threatening fury of laziness ignore that the tendency to laziness is usually nothing but the legitimate reaction of people to working conditions that have nothing to do with self-realization.
Since the first edition of this book (1984), remarkable changes have occurred in the discussion around a guaranteed minimum income. The idea – usually only laughed at then or dismissed as totally unrealistic – has caught on and is seriously discussed and probed by nearly all social groups, parties and unions (more or less influential minorities were involved in this discussion). Even with modifications, the conventional social-political structure is hardly appropriate to the demands of the future. Readiness to enter unknown territory has grown.
Attempts to take up the idea of minimum income in some form are not lacking but quickly turn into old social-political conceptions. In conclusion, several criticisms and experiments should be discussed and the unmistakably new in this guaranteed minimum income defined.
One of the clearest critics was Peter Glotz (3). I will ignore the polemical title of his invective (4) and concentrate on the central argument: the guaranteed minimum income “amounts to a division of society in two classes” (p.143). This anxiety is understandable. Conceptions of minimum security consciously aiming at the two-thirds society – given the end of that brief era marked by full employment – are not lacking to the right. However Glotz unfortunately overlooks that the minimum income could be good, that it could counteract the threatening division of society into job holders (in large part politically at home in his party) and those excluded from gainful work in the medium term or for a long term – as a remedy, not as a cure-all or panacea. Certainly, a universal generalized reduction of working hours would be such a remedy (discussing the exact terms of reduced working hours must be an essential element of employment policy).
The minimum income would make something else possible. It would make pervious the rigid dividing wall between work and non-work, illumine the movements between the two poles and make the dividing wall more translucent to both sides. In a society that bears the unchanging mark of lifelong work, this process in which Glotz fears mass explosive force cannot occur without frictions and conflicts. However research on the “change of values” shows that this perviousness is desired by many (and in no way only members of the “new middle class”), that time sovereignty, elective possibility and the desire for mixed life designs have risen in the scale of values. What actually speaks against the – gradual – introduction of minimum income, making realizable this desire up in the air today, so to speak? Happily there are social democrats who have no objections (5).
Others – including a large number in the Greens – would not exclude the minimum income but would narrow it as much as possible as an extension of traditional left social policy (6). The minimum income here – in view of an obvious crisis of all known employment policy for which a transcending answer is not in sight – is seen as a stop gap. As long as the goal of full employment is not producible, the state should be obliged to guaranteeing a minimum security to those falling out of the system of gainful work. The work fixation and the negative stigmatization of those who – for whatever reasons – are not gainfully employed remain. A minimum income substantiated in this way does not deserve this name. It fades out the great questions of the age, doesn’t contribute to the relaxation of the work society and evades the decisive problem how the socially and ecologically threatening growth imperative produced by the work society can be repealed.
The concept of an unconditional guaranteed minimum income for all would be misunderstood if one stylized it as “system-breaking” (7) or as a social-political drumbeat that immediately creates totally new conditions. As with all social policy, the minimum income would involve a slow reorientation, a policy of experiments of medium range that flows the trial-and-error process. Therefore no objections could be made – in a libertarian understanding – against a multitude of ways to the guaranteed minimum income. Several appear very inconspicuous in the beginning and hardly different from those work-centered approaches that propose nothing more than introducing “basic allowances” in the past system of social insurance.
While the minimum income for all is basically reformist, capable of modulation and adaptation, it also needs a certain maximalism. The struggle around the minimum income should envision another republic than that of labor. The significance of gainful work will in no way disappear in the foreseeable future. Minimum income will be a powerful project that can only be realized consensually in long discussions: ending the industrial phase of colonialization and beginning to release large parts of human (labor) power in society (8). The guaranteed minimum income for all without conditions would be a part of the overture. It benefits the state without making it stronger. It makes freedom possible. Why can’t there be a supporting majority – a majority to which all social groups could contribute without loss of face? |
See also:
http://www.mbtranslations.com
http://www.basicincome.com
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