Universal Army of Labor

Description

Nick Dyer-Whiteford:

"Fredric Jameson’s (2013) controversial proposition of a socialism based on “universal army of labour” in which every capable person performs obligatory part-time “public works employment”, across a very wide range of activities, for four hours a day (or some weekly or annual equivalent). This would be the main social organ of labour assignment, a livelihood is guaranteed, and the rest of your time is free."

(https://projectpppr.org/populisms/degrowth-communism-part-ii)

Discussion

Nick Dyer-Whiteford:

"How might “essential work” develop in an ongoing “polycrisis” (Tooze 2021) where escalating costs of living, pandemics, climate change, and war intertwine. I am struck by Cory Doctorow’s (2020) critique of Aaron Bastani’s (2019) “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”. He argues remediating climate change will involve “unimaginably labor-intensive tasks”: relocating coastal cities, building high-speed rail links to replace aviation, caring for millions of traumatized, displaced people, and treating runaway zoonotic and insect borne pandemics.

To this list one can add emergency firefighters, mass tree planters, rewilding land clearers, solar panel installers, housing insulators, coders of climate-sensing software, gigafactory workers, and many more. Indeed, if we think of climate emergency as a situation that is going to persist not just for years but for decades or indeed centuries, then we are envisaging a situation in which a very large proportion of necessary social labour is indeed that of the “essential worker”!

One way in which this situation might be handled is indeed a “government job guarantee” with an eco-crisis orientation, an idea advanced by some Green New Deal advocates (Tcherneva 2020), usually with a social democratic orientation: one can envisage better and worse implementations, most of which would be compatible with forms of state-of-exception capitalism.

However, it is also possible to envisage a far more radical version of “essential work”, whereby in climate emergency that lasts not just for years but decades (and perhaps centuries) such public works could become a central institution in the organization of labour, usurping the marketized sale of labour power across a range of “vital systems”.

It is in this context I return to Fredric Jameson’s (2013) controversial proposition of a socialism based on “universal army of labour” in which every capable person performs obligatory part-time “public works employment”, across a very wide range of activities, for four hours a day (or some weekly or annual equivalent). This would be the main social organ of labour assignment, a livelihood is guaranteed, and the rest of your time is free.

Jameson’s military terminology is a provocation to the anti-statist left. Nonetheless, conceived as part of an agenda of revolutionary democratization in governmentality, recognition of “essential” nature of reproductive labour, and with forms of both central and decentralized participatory planning, it could be a very flexible and pacific “army”.

Indeed, such an organization could combine both direct public service work and self-organized mutual-aid of the “disaster communism” (Out of the Woods 2018) type, and a variety of hybridizations between these top-down and bottom-up organizations. In this form, mobilization of de-commodified collective work would be part of the process by which in communism the state is transformed into “vast association” (Marx and Engels 1848).

As you say, the idea of a “universal army of labour” invites, indeed requires, articulation with concepts either of a basic income, or, my preference, a use-value allocation of basic services (housing, health, education), which could in turn be an element of a program that incorporates degrowth elements by unite sufficiency with equality.

The problem will, however, arise of how mandatory “universal labour” is compatible with “universal” provision of service or “universal income”. What of those who, for various reasons, decline such labour? One can see solutions ranging from the libertarian to authoritarian. A humane and practical response to this issue would, I think, require both an education and training system far more careful and thorough than that provided within capitalism, and ample provisions and exemption for medical and psychological reasons. With these provisos, however, collective cooperative labour might be abducted from the market, and repositioned in relation to eco-social crisis and species-survival.

* Bue: Nick, what tendencies, if any, do you see in the present that point in the direction of such a vast socialisation of labour and the means of reproduction?

Nick: You are right to ask that question, because on the surface, nothing could seem more unlikely after some fifty years of neoliberalism than a revival of interest in collective ownership and public works! One might well say that while there is ample evidence of the dissatisfaction with the status quo in the sequence of uprisings that spread round the planet from 2018 on—in France, Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon, then to Black Lives Matter in the USA and globally, and so many other unrests—no positive alternative agenda is yet apparent. However, I think one can go further than that now, and name at least four sectors where struggles over collective provisioning are in motion. First, an effect of the pandemic has been to raise awareness of the importance of the much maligned “public sector”, particularly in health care, but also around schools and other institutions: here unions and professional associations that unsparingly name the disasters caused by neoliberal policies are of critical importance, and we also see an international dimension in the fight against “vaccine apartheid.” Second, there is a wave of social movements sparked by the disrepair of social infrastructures: I am here thinking first of energy systems, particularly initiatives to re-make national electricity grids, an issue propelling movements that diffuse, complex, often contradictory—but with strong components that are for, in a very literal sense, “power to the people”. One might also here think of a wave of agroecological initiatives and contestations over the infrastructures of food security. Third, there are more sharply demarcated class struggles, especially around provision of housing in conditions of extreme income inequality and the condition of the homeless. And fourth, there is the environmental movement itself, where the concept of a Green New Deal, whatever its shortcomings, has explicitly articulated connections between climate emergency, employment creation, jobs guarantees and public works. So, I would say there is an incipient composition of struggles repudiating marketization and privatization and formulating a new collectivist synthesis, currently locked in battle with the polar opposite tendencies of “disaster capitalism”, and that a task of degrowth communists is to help connect, amplify and voice the connective logics of this new force."

(https://projectpppr.org/populisms/degrowth-communism-part-ii)