So here we are friends, Sanders is proposing the Job Guarantee and there is a lot of huffing and puffing as both liberals and leftists alike argue about whether or not they think it is realistic, affordable, desirable etc.
I think bringing this idea back into the mainstream is more radical and challenging to the status quo than UHC, and while UBI made people consider whether or not capitalism as we know it will last due to automation, I think the differences between JG and UBI makes people grapple with ideas about their social role in poduction. A UBI can be good, but it suggests a certain desire for unfetter individualism within the capitalist mode of production. You are supported for nothing, finally liberated to do anything you want (within the bounds of the UBI, obviously. But if you want to be a surf bum, you won't be starving). The JG on its own requires work, but also hands control of the reserve army of labor to the state completely. This is one of the capitalist class' most prized assets, the ability to pull from the unemployed freely at low cost. It's such an asset, our central banking system's monetary policy is designed to increase unemployment when the reserve army gets too low. The JG socializes marginal labor, and compels us to make decisions on what to do collectively. Should we tell people to dig ditches, or should they build housing? Should they rake leave, or should they modernize our energy grid? The unemployed truly become our responsibility because now we are compelled to give them something to do. I think this was the best article on it available: democracyjournal.org/magazine/44/youre-hired/
So how you feel leftypol? Pic unrelated, can't be fucked to get a picture of Bernie Sanders or something.
JG with lowered workweeks is the way of the future.
UBI would only end up with Porky trying to pit the employed and unemployed against each other.
Ryan Collins
Job Guarantee (and similar Keynesian ploys) won't work in our day and age precisely because there is no more work around, especially for the unskilled. The major cause for the long-term decline in manufacturing jobs is not outsourcing, it's automation. Why "guarantee" a job that simply doesn't exist when you can just redistribute the fruits of automation and get rid of economic insecurity altogether in the process?
Ryder Lee
It actually is naive and unrealistic in the US compared to something relatively easy like UBI, but the reasons for this may make it worth pursuing as a talking point–work is outright disappearing in America due to automation and outsourcing of labor, something that simply cannot be solved by getting rid of illegal residents. A significant right wing talking point in the US is a belief in the unemployed as lazy and lacking the will to live, and a succdem putting guaranteed employment on the table would be useful to turn this narrative against itself. Confronting Social Darwinism in American culture is necessary if the US has any chance of having a left wing, or in a few decades, any political clique that does not make a discipline out of being as right wing as possible.
Jace Gonzalez
I think it can work, but not as a job inserted in the general market. What it should be done is to create a separate economy, with the state as the intermediary between the two.
The problem with cooperatives as a path to socialism is of course that they do not overcome capitalism, but if we isolate them from the global market and put them in a closed environment, they can actually work as a step forward. In practice I would envision something like the state creating (mainly) agricultural communes that will produce for themselves first and sell the excess to the state second. The system can then be expanded to include manufactoring (in an organic manner as the commune accumulates capital) and then research, etc.
Joseph Hill
God help you if you want to pursue such ideas in America. We're talking about people that mentally associate socialism with a literal apocalypse, people that think universal health care is a logistical impossibility but instant delivery for online shopping is not.
Aaron Williams
well I am not a burger. Never even been to the US, so you do have a point. Still I think this might be the way forward.
Logan Ross
This reminds me of Vonnegut's The Player Piano… An overabundance of 'employed' labor and high automation, and revolution for the lulz
Luke Cox
This. UBI is very inflationary, JG isn't. People who say UBI is more realistic than JG, "we are running out of things to do" etc. are wrong. People without a job who aren't starving are already receiving something from others, whether that is via state benefits or friends and family or a mix of these. Even from a narrow socdem point of view, the newly created public-sector job for such a person doesn't need to justify everything the person then gets as an income, the productivity only needs to cover the difference.
Anthony Flores
Blatantly untrue, especially if you live in a dirty and decaying city. There is an endless sponge for human labour in urban renewal, infrastructure, and basic tidying of the living environment. Make work jobs are not hard to create.
Samuel Gutierrez
The problem I have with UBI right now is actually how it is often framed by liberals, which I think reveals its weaknesses as a policy at this moment. I temperature check some liberal forums on a regular basis, and I saw that in response to this Sanders news some liberals were upset that he wasn't going for a UBI because they felt that the JG would just create busy work in the face of automation. What is interesting about this to me is that, they didn't question capitalist property relations at all. The UBI didn't inherently drive them further left, though I consider that an inevitability of the suggestion as a cure for major automation. If you don't change capitalist property relations post-automation, but instead simply give people a monthly allowance, then the capitalist class is almost indomitable in its position from any reasonable angle. Normally a justification for their status is meritocracy, but without a means for the vast majority of the population to rise in a company since jobs don't exist anymore, the capitalist becomes a lord of their capital, and the capital can only change hands based on their will. This seems to be clearly unjust, even to a moderate liberal, maybe even to a conservative. I think this would have to bring about a questioning of what entitles one person or another to ownership of production when everybody else is dependent on it but totally disenfranchised from the process of production outside of their ability to vote.
Which is to say, I think UBI right now is jumping the gun for something that simply hasn't happened yet to a significant enough degree to make it the center of policy. In fact, I'd think a UBI, when it was needed, would be short lived because a cultural awareness would arise about what I just said, and eventually the terms of ownership of capital would become attacked by the state on behalf of voters. A JG, on the other hand, paired with normal welfare type benefits for those who can't work, allows the state to control the reserve army of labor right now and set the standard which capital has to measure up to, it logically creates the conditions for larger economic planning to occur at the margins in order to make the most productive use of the unemployed, expanding social goods and welfare, and it guarantees benefits and income to anybody who can work. If automation makes work so obsolete during the time of the JG that 3 people are paid to stand on each street corner and watch children cross the road, or dig proverbial holes, then we already effectively have a UBI with busywork, and we can move into a full UBI/full nationalization of the economy as it becomes apparent to everybody that the system has become absurd.
So no harm no foul, and we'd have more to gain right now from a JG both in terms of diffusing inequality and attacking upper class power than UBI, which seems like it is primarily trying to get ahead of an automation crisis that really isn't much of a crisis with JG anyways, just a kind of temporary headache for everyone who has to do busywork until the program is changed.
If you're already doing a job guarantee then the society should be past that neurosis.
Jack Robinson
Something like this could set a new standard for what we consider as "minimum wage" if we tie social welfare programs like health coverage and EBT to it. It would force employers to become more competitive if anyone willing work through this program would get health insurance, paid leave and other benefits from what would be considered an entry level job.
Jack Wright
It's ded in the water, shit like that would never be passed in muttland unless the country was on the verge of revolution
Christopher Smith
…and let the wealth of the poor trickle up, eh?
Joshua Evans
This. If Sanders or anyone else ran on a jobs guarantee and won, the government would be crippled by its current owners before he even took office. He'd have to beg the Congressional committee for deficit reduction just to keep the government operating.
John Walker
UBI is just an excuse to cut wages, job guarantees and unemployment benefits are good socialist praxis and drive up wages. Benefits are already, in essence, a minimum wage for existing. No company can ever pay its workers less - either workers simply don't take the job, or they are freely able to strike without any risk of losing their livelihood. A job guarantee is even better, since it removes the reserve army of labour and again provides a minimum standard for wages - this time without any porky complaints about "muh moochers".
Brandon Wood
If I look up job guarantee on twitter right now and check the latest tweets, I see a bunch of random accounts and checkmarks reposting articles from today criticizing Sanders, while everybody replying is saying "we should just have a UBI"
Which is kind of unexpected tbh. I didn't think so many people, including people like pic related, would forego paying people to do things and instead just opt to send them a check. It makes me even more suspicious. Matt Bruenig has been on a tear about the JG for months now as far as I've seen, and he occasionally drops the line that if there is unemployment, we probably just don't have anything else to do and shouldn't be trying to make jobs up. Which is such a weird statement coming from a self-identified leftist, implying that the capitalist mode of production completely fulfills all possible socially valuable labor through its employment opportunities. It's coming out the other side into this staunch capitalist realism as though we don't decide what is useful labor collectively, only the market decides.
No, you don't get it maaan. It's utopian to change three 40-hour jobs in the public sector into four 30-hour jobs. It's just the way things are. On the one side people have to work all day and make the food and clothing and everything else for stock owners, landlords, and the unemployed with their activity. And on the other side you have people who don't work and have a wonderful or dreadful life. Now, UBI makes the life of those who are in the group no work and dreadful life somewhat better and for that we have to either shave something off from the powerful group of well-off people who don't work (good luck with that) or extract more from the people who do work. And that's very realistic and the working class loves to hear about paying more for the unemployed instead of turning unemployment into employment. And also, like that tweet said, with UBI instead of JG we don't waste so much money and training on the unemployed, we just say: fuck the idea of ever integrating you idiots into society, you are the eternal loser caste. Other people, please pay more for these useless untermenschen. Yeah, I don't see how that could cause social conflict.
Tyler Robinson
What liberals and their ilk mean by UBI is very different from what we would understand as UBI. Mainly, their understanding of the policy does not involve a living stipend, which completely subverts the very point of UBI.
John Richardson
It is totally disheartening. I suspect that not a little of the problem is the creeping mind poison of voluntarism, the gift economy, and FALC. If people are under the delusion that we can simply move into a gift economy where quasi magical automation will ensure that all our needs align perfectly with our willingness to produce this or that as if it were a hobby, they will be in for a rude awakening. Labour remains scarce, and the way any one individual might choose to spend their time need not be socially useful. At least with a job guarantee you ensure that the time of the otherwise unemployed is directed to a socially usefull task, and in the process you cut off the social power that the capitalist has over the worker via a threat of unemployment. It's a stepping stone to a perfectly planned economy, which is the only way to start to rationaly reduce collective time spent labouring without disrupting the carrying out of socially neccesary labour.
Joshua Hall
It does seem a bit utopian to me. The argument is usually either about post-scarcity automation that hasn't happened yet, or it's about "splitting human worth from work". Which is fine in sentiment, I don't want peoples sole value to be their utility as a worker either. But it also seems like a utopian reason to pursue some kind of political action. When it comes to your relationship to the social product, it IS determined by your social labor. That's why Marx advocated for replacing currency with labor vouchers in lower stage communism. It revealed the relation to production of your work, that your abstract labor was used to build up the social product. It seems like the emphasis on a right to live regardless of work has no relationship to any particular material analysis, it's just an ideological position based in natural rights that obfuscates the fact that while you become entitled to a certain amount of the social product through your basic income, it is dependent on social labor and social production which you still have no more significant control of.
It's possible the capitalist class would be better off, since now they don't have to directly support you, just offer you a little more than the basic income. Some people seem to think this would make workers only choose to do great jobs, but I don't see why. Your income would still mostly go to rent, food, clothes, gas, other bills like insurance. The market demand for goods is still in all of the same places, those are the jobs that will be out there. Employers don't have to compete with your basic income, it just subsidizes their ability to continue offering you as little as they can. Unless basic income is very generous, I assume most people will still feel compelled to work. If they didn't, we'd have a larger problem. If they all just felt like making YouTube videos and music that'd be a catastrophe, but it seems like most UBI advocates assure anybody who actually worries about that that it won't happen because people enjoy working or they'll want more, which I agree with to an extent but that just puts us back at saying "actually the job market will look basically the same, don't worry". We've eliminated poverty, so that's good, but where has this put us for a leftist project to move away from capitalism?
Thomas Cruz
UBI and JG are both shit.
Aiden Flores
agree
Eli Butler
Neoliberals are reductive, they push for as much religious bourgie worship as they can, but are willing to make some compromises if it means avoiding violent insurrection. JG forces them to acknowledge UBI as a realistic policy when otherwise they could push the laziness narrative.
Yeah, but I'm American and succdem is the best we can get.
Samuel Jackson
...
Ayden James
Job Guarantee is just compulsory work, wageslavery by another name made more explicit. Work shouldn't be apportioned out of a paranoid need to make sure everyone is doing their part, it should be done because work needs to be done and the tasks are important.
JG in the context of capitalism is just literally going to be subsidizing Porky with state wage-slaves. It is obvious the JG people will be shunted off into a seperate group from the "real" workers, not when they don't have to and the ruling class knows what the working class is trying to accomplish. Shit isn't getting done in America because Porky doesn't want it done, because the ruling class doesn't want it done, and there are forces at work that actively want to make sure the standard of living drops for Americans. It is not just a matter of Porky acting in ignorance - misery IS THE POINT.
Jackson Scott
These two are not in contradiction. Work needs to be done, a lot of it if we want to maintain any kind of material living standard, and we need to make sure everyone is doing their part.
Brandon Foster
Which is why the Dems are in full swing proposing legislation when they didn't give a fuck the 8 years Obama was in office. It's easy brownie points with voters for no actual work.
Luis Evans
Job guarantee =/= forced labour, fam. No sane socialist society would ever not go for full employment, since it means that everyone gets to work fewer hours. There is plenty of work today that needs to be done which is not done, because it is not profitable. A job guarantee would not only allocate all this vacant labour to a socially useful goal, it would also create a competitor in the labour market that can pretty much outbid everyone, driving up wages.
Oh, I remember him from a godawful article couple years ago. Some dumb shit about different types of economists ("MMT peeps are like Daleks because reasons and also I'm le quirky nerd ecksdee"). Also he was to the right of socdems back then and he's probably still a fuckwit (he gets retweeted by some confused ex-fash Malthusian "Maoist", so there's a data point to consider), so kindly piss off with that ourguy shite.
this is good for the rest of the world because if bernie manages to win in 2020 and gets congress to implement this policy, other countries like australia, ireland, canada, britain and UK will be pressured to do the same, because america is never supposed to "out-left" canada. this would affect politics around the world as it would push the overton window more to the left
conservatives seem to think that there are just all these jobs out there just waiting to be filled. And that the problem is that you have all these unemployed lazy NEETs, refugees and welfare queens who just don't wanna work. lmao. That's why they are against the Jobs Guarantee. Because they think that the jobs are already there for the taking. Or they think full employment would be possible if they just got rid of that pesky minimum wage.
Then there's the more sinister edgy side from the right. That you see on 4chan. Where they say "le survival of the fittest. If you can't get a job, you deserve to fucking die anyways."
Meanwhile in Ancapistan all these alt-right soyboy cucks would be sitting dicks for roving bands of low-inhibition high-T Chads, Tyrones and Muhammads. They keep going on about survival of the fittest. Yet the only thing stopping Tyrone from fucking an alt-right cuck's wife right in front of him and then shooting the alt-right faggot dead and stealing his shit THE GOVERNMENT THAT RIGHT-WINGERS HATE SO MUCH. THE GUNS OF THE STATE.
I talked about this on my Youtube podcast youtube.com/watch?v=IzJprGPh3xo (my podcast series is nihilism-themed. It is not leftist themed. But I take shots at the absurdity and hypocrisy of libertarianism in this particular video).
Kevin Reed
It is often brought up by JG activists, but the irony of positions like this which are often held by Republican elected representatives is that our monetary policy right now is built around avoiding full employment. We simultaneously have Ben Carson trying to ratchet up the rent burden on low income families in order to "encourage them to seek higher wages", while also running a monetary policy that says when the reserve army of labor gets too low the economy needs to suffer through higher interest rates so that people get fired and wages can be suppressed.
Liam Sullivan
By doing this, they just prove Marx's statement in how Capitalists ultimately value labor power
Nathan Perez
You just can't win with these fuckers. When you do quantitative easing, you're turning the US into Wiemar Germany. When you raise the interest rates, you're avoiding full employment. Well then what the hell would they have the Federal Reserve do, then?
Angel Brooks
if there's no competition, why would anyone be competent?
imagine this, your tooth hurts, and you go to a dentist, and he dislocates your jaw and somehow even breaks your rib, because his job was fucking guaranteed, and he never really had to study hard and compete for his job, because it was fucking guaranteed, why even try hard if its a priori guaranteed? same with crossing a bridge same with everything
Oliver Miller
Damn bitch, did you look up anything? The JG isn't for dentists or basically any skilled labor, though some JG proposals include the notion that there could be programs facilitating skilled training, and that certain jobs may be carried over into more long-term or permanent positions with chance of a raise. For 95% of JG workers, though, it's a way to get by until you can find better opportunities in the private sector. For society at large it is a way to curb joblessness and poverty while also employing low skill labor for socially beneficial purposes.
It's a public employment program, not a law that says somebody can't be fired.
It's sad that you have no idea how pathetic this post is.
Isaac Ramirez
This is really good if it can at least become public debate even tho itll never get anywhere. Expand the horizon of possibility significantly and shift the rhetoric so that itll be harder to frame the poor as just begging "socialists" for gib me dats when what theyre asking to be gaurunteed is honest work. AND i can see it being really popular with those swing voters in postindustrial areas that voted for both obama and trump because theyre just trying anything
I mean, there's an absolute fuckton of work around. You can't have perpetual housing crisis and then say there's no work, there are cities out there in desperate need of massive tower blocks. You can't have the elderly going without care and then saying there's no work. You can't have bridges falling down and hotels falling into the sea and then say there's no work.
Alternatively we can go down the real route of the future, the truth of the dessert of the real, which is the real and true future of work. There is furry porn, desired but not commissioned. There are still gaps in the let's play market. There are infinite short, insufferable youtube clickbait videos yet to be made, and the economic potential of simply renting friends as a commercial transaction to perform activities (in particular, playing videogames.) has not yet been tapped. For all of those, too, there is the potential for employment. UBI or not, that's probably coming. UBI just decides to what degree we're enslaved to californian liberals. For those who fall short, there will be no housing, there will be no social care, for the majority the only infrastructure will be their fibre-optic internet connection. Even there, however, there is work to be done.
The question, as always, is whether we're going to have full employment, and for what purposes we will apply that employment.
Logan Perez
don't get angry at this poster, thankfully next time he sees a "stop" sign he'll stop breathing.
Brody James
Wat wud u do bout housing prices then
Chase Wood
Nobody likes you.
Zachary Miller
This this this.
UBI is also inherently alienating and would cut the proletariat off completely from the means of production and society. Essentially making them a class of helpless consumers, porky gets to keep his reserve army of labor and has a boogyman to pit against the renaming working class, UBI just pro-longs capitalism. Conservatives aren't wrong about workfare. The way they want to go about it is wrong. They want to make welfare itself work instead of actually putting people to work on many of massive projects that need to be done. They create a situation where finding a job becomes a job under unemployment. When people could productively be fixing infrastructure, performing socially necessary services like child care, criminal reform, healthcare, education, building websites for the government or just picking up trash on the free way. The public sphere has been completely neglected and is crying out for a massive public works project but porky doesn't want to do it in less they can build toll roads and get cash hand outs from uncle sam while being called "brave entrepreneurs" for getting governments kickbacks. UBI is a death trap and creates learned helplessness. But we don't need the conservative solution of just ignoring poverty outright and making welfare a more bureaucratic bullshit in till you find one of those "Free" market jobs their tax cuts promised would create.
