Social Wage

Discussion

Camille Barbagallo and Nicholas Beuret:

“The public services that are being cut include things that we need, but we hate how they are given to us: like unemployment benefits. They also involve jobs that we rely on but resent having to do. But what is also true is that they are part of a ‘social wage’ fought for and won by previous generations. By ‘social wage’ we mean the services and direct payments provided by the state that enable our subsistence. The health services, childcare, unemployment benefits, social housing– they are our social wage. The social wage has a dual effect. It is a method by which the state organises our lives and produces disciplined social subjects, and it also a means of reducing the direct cost (to us) of our own material reproduction. It is both our tool and theirs. The social wage is a way of providing for those needs that exist under capitalism that cannot be or are not paid for by individual capitalists, for example the need for an 1657. Starting From the Social Wage educated or healthy population. These are the social costs of capitalist reproduction and they are paid for through state expenditure. However, our needs are met on terms that are not our own or defined by ‘us’. By determining both our needs and problems, as well the ‘solutions’, the state is able to produce particular compositions of social relations and subjects. Through services and payments the direct costs associated with reproducing ourselves are reduced (and our needs to some extent satisfied). Instead of paying the ‘full’ cost for childcare out of our wages, we get subsidised or ‘free’ childcare. Instead of paying directly for health services when we are ill, such services are funded by taxation and provided by the NHS. Instead of having to put aside money in case we are sacked, we can claim the dole. In so far as our needs are real, these gains are real. By reducing the connection between wages and our ‘quality of life’ we have weakened the power of money to command our work and our existence. The social wage disconnects our material reproduction from our income levels, thereby undermining the discipline of the wage. Importantly the social wage is also a way of ‘paying the unpaid’. The social wage is one way of redistributing income so as to benefit those people whose (unwaged) labour is fundamental and vital for the reproduction of workers and capitalism in general. The primary focus of the social wage is social reproduction and this involves labour processes that would otherwise be unwaged. This work has historically been known as ‘women’s work’3 and involves tasks such as caring for young children, the elderly, the sick and disabled, the health of the body and emotional and psychological services such as counselling. The last forty years have seen significant shifts and changes to the who, where and how social reproduction occurs. For instance, more men are now involved in the work of looking after their children and more migrant workers are employed to look after our elderly relatives. While it is true that such work has been and continues to be gendered and racialised it is important to recognise that the landscape of social reproduction is by no means simple or without contradictions. None of this is to say that the social wage is unproblematic. Obviously it is- because under capitalism wage relations are based on exploitation and alienation, and the various elements of the social wage are no exception. We need the services because we have no other choice. This need relates back to the dual ‘freedom’ that Marx saw as the precondition of wage labour in capitalist societies: we are free to sell our labour and we have been ‘freed’ from the ability to reproduce ourselves in any other way. In the past struggle around the social wage has had a tendency to orientate to the second aspect of this ‘freedom’- our ability or lack of ability to reproduce ourselves outside of the wage-labour relation. It is here that the contradiction of the social wage appears because it is not a wage like any other. Its very existence undermines the authority and power of command of the wage. However, left as it is, the social wage also operates as a form of control and discipline, and as a way of enabling wage labour to exist at all in its current form. So, like other wage struggles, our ultimate aim must be to go beyond the immediate relation and create a new social relationship. But we can’t do this by opting out. Not only because dropping out and making our own little utopias does not get us any closer to the necessary transformation of the world in which we live, but because the social wage represents real struggles and gains. We need to be in, against and beyond the social wage.”

(https://thecommoner.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/07-barbagallo-beuret.pdf)