The main victory secured by capital over labour around the beginning of the twenty-first century did not lie in the world-wide restraint of wage growth or in the general weakening of trade unions or even in the fact that left governments and parties of all stripes were forced to surrender their positions. The most significant victory of capital was ideological and consisted in the general acceptance that the changes that had taken place were “irreversible”. Neoliberalism imposed on society the hegemony of its ideas, and as a result, numerous political groups and currents, even ones that had zealously and sincerely criticised the ruling class, made their peace with this hegemony. Needless to say, this ideological victory reflected a changed relationship between the power of various social forces and classes, but at the same time, this temporarily established relationship of forces became set in the consciousness of the vanquished as something fixed and immutable with an objective existence.
Although it is quite natural for any victorious class to consolidate its political and social success in ideological terms, achieving this created definite problems on this occasion both for the victors and the vanquished. The problems had derived from the flagrant contradiction with the logic of development that had been dominant over the previous 200 years. The triumph of social reaction meant that progress was reversible in historical terms (which, logically, might signify that any social changes, including ones that had just transpired, were similarly reversible). Meanwhile, if the logic of historical progress were repudiated by a thesis positing the irreversible nature of changes that were diametrically opposed, this would create problems for the legitimation of the bourgeois system itself. In one fashion or another, this system legitimised itself historically on the basis of earlier progressive developments. It was no accident that both socialists and liberals appealed to the tradition of the Enlightenment and to the heritage of the French Revolution.
The cult of the creative idler
The revolt of the “New Left” that broke out in the West during the late 1960s directed its ideological fire not only against the power of capital but also against the social democratic institutions with whose help the radical students considered the subsuming of the working class into the bourgeois order had taken place. The achievements of the post-war epoch had indeed softened substantially the confrontation between classes in European and North American society. In this context, the anticapitalist uprising by the students was doomed to failure. Nevertheless, the left-radical critique of the state and of social policy came to be drawn on – only not by the workers’ movement and opponents of the system but by the ideologues of neoliberalism, who began an assault from the right on the very institutions for which the revolutionary students felt such a dislike.
Those who had criticised the welfare state from the left proved unable in later times to explain why, during the years of neoliberal reaction, the ruling class displayed such fury in dismantling, and even demolishing, the same institutions that the left radicals had considered (not altogether unreasonably) to be props of the bourgeois order. There is nothing mysterious about this situation; all that is needed is to recognise the contradictoriness of capitalist development. The welfare state, which arises out of the development of the class struggle in just the same degree as the naturally changing needs of the economy, itself alters the relationship of forces within society. For this very reason, it is the object of bitter attacks by capital even while the system experiences an objective need for the results of its functioning.
This contradiction is in turn responsible for the apparent inconsistency of neoliberalism, which at every stage proves unready to act in line with its own rhetoric and to do away with all manifestations of the welfare state once and for all. In part, this situation is explained by the strength of worker resistance, but there are other reasons as well. The resistance of the masses has proven effective on each occasion, despite the dominant strategic position of the neoliberals, precisely the issue that has concerned something greater than the class interests of the oppressed. The demands of the struggling lower orders have reflected definite social needs, which not even the triumphant bourgeoisie itself has been able to ignore completely.
The conceptual approach of neoliberalism thus represents an attempt to preserve some of the fruits of the welfare state at the same time as its institutions and bases are undermined, and most important, while its class content is banished. It is from this that the three main principles of neoliberal social policy are derived.
First, we have commercialisation, the transformation of unconditional state assistance and obligations into a sum of social services. These services may be provided free of charge or subsidised, but the approach itself is altered. A list of paid and free services (unlike inalienable rights) may be reviewed arbitrarily depending on the priorities of current policy.
Second, welfare policy undergoes a process of fragmentation in which a unified complex of social services and civil institutions is replaced by an array of programs that can also be reviewed and varied since they are not connected in any way. Welfare spending may even increase in financial terms, but its overall effectiveness invariably declines, which in turn provides a basis for the radical wing of the bourgeoisie to demand that the list of programs be reviewed and cut back, as a pointless waste of money.
Third, and last, the principle of targeted assistance comes to prevail. This assistance is not provided to all as an entitlement of birth and citizenship but exclusively to the “weak” and “needy”, the list of whom is again compiled and reviewed arbitrarily by the bureaucracy, together with liberal experts who determine the criteria.
The paradox lies in the fact that this approach invariably increases the dependence of citizens on the state rather than reducing it. Boundless possibilities open up for the exercise of bureaucratic caprice, and the situation also explains the explosive growth in the number of state functionaries in all the countries that undergo market reforms. Although the neoliberal critique of the welfare state accuses the left of implanting paternalism and parasitism, these phenomena arise precisely from the universal introduction of targeted assistance. The principle of the welfare state which presupposes the universality of rights and the equality of citizens runs directly contrary to the paternalist approach, which is based on the fatherly care of the authorities for one or another category of their subjects. In a welfare state, citizens have no reason to thank rulers or bureaucrats for anything; laws and regulations that are general, and the same for everyone, are simply required to be obeyed. The situation is different in a society where a system of targeted assistance and welfare programs holds sway. There, the authorities are at liberty to include individuals, groups of people or entire regions in the category of the needy, or else to exclude them. Those who receive assistance are condemned in turn to be incorporated into clientelist relationships, doomed to dependence on a patron. On the international level, the same paternalist principle became a reality within the setting of the European Union, where particular regions or groups received direct aid from Brussels, bypassing their own governments which were transformed into hostages of neoliberal integration. This was particularly evident during the 2016 referendum on the exit of Britain from the European Union. Regions that had received targeted assistance from Brussels were inclined to vote contrary to the majority of the population and against the interests of their own country since they had been caught on the hook of the corresponding programs, becoming in essence clients of the eurobureaucrats. It was this, and not separatism or any peculiarities of the national mentality, that was responsible for a majority being in favour of the EU in Scotland, to which the eurocrats had consciously directed streams of money, trying to create a counterweight to unyielding, independent England.
The same applies to labour relations as well. The systematic weakening of the trade unions and the reform of the labour market put a substantial sector of the workforce in the position of a “precariat”. Although this term was coined by sociologists comparatively recently,1 the phenomenon itself is by no means new. In fact, many hired workers found themselves by the beginning of the twenty-first century in the same position as the proletariat of the first half of the nineteenth century, before the organised labour movement had begun to emerge. In the earlier case, the social situation was changed by the advent of strong trade unions. Now, everything is somewhat different. Unlike industrial workers, who are easily organised and who are capable of mounting an effective struggle for their rights by stopping production, a substantial part of the precariat is concentrated in the area of services and in new post-industrial sectors. There, the conditions of labour are by no means conducive to organised struggle. In this situation, strengthening the position of workers in the labour market and altering their status becomes a directly political question that cannot be settled through conflict with a specific, individual employer, but that demands the reform of the labour relations system as a whole.
In this context, the idea of a universal basic income (UBI) has achieved currency and won the support of numerous politicians from both the right and left. On the one hand, this concept proposes a return to the universalist principle of welfare policy, while on the other, it does away with the nexus between the class interests of workers and the development of the welfare state. The twentieth-century welfare state, in both its social democratic and Soviet variants, rested on an employment policy according to which people with jobs, who made up the bulk of the population, supported their unemployed or disabled fellow citizens through making contributions to the financing of health care, education and culture. The Marxist idea of the universality of labour was thus embodied in practice. A “universal basic income” will not lead in any way to the disappearance of work or to general idleness, but it is meant to break this nexus and to weaken society’s work ethic, in both the protestant and proletarian understandings of this concept. Further, this approach is technically feasible only in the richest countries and is intended to increase the gap between the countries of the “centre” and “periphery”, while undermining solidarity between various groups of workers on a global level. For these reasons, a reform that might seem to embody the ideology of equality and universality in the spirit of communist utopias has enjoyed unexpectedly strong support among right-wing liberals in a number of wealthy countries.
Orthodox Lutherans, Calvinists and Baptists (just like socialists) have always condemned unearned income. This was reflected in the results of the referendum in Switzerland in June 2016 that saw the country’s population overwhelmingly reject an initiative calling for the introduction of a UBI. This fiasco ended an attempt to make the demand for a UBI a slogan in the socialist election campaign in France a year later. In Finland a UBI began to be introduced from above in the form of an experiment, whose initiators were trying to gradually get society used to a new reality.
The resistance of the mass of people to attempts to impose unearned income on them is quite understandable. In a certain sense, left ideology grows logically out of the “spirit of capitalism” expounded by Max Weber. The corresponding critique of bourgeois society presumed not only a protest against growing inequality, but in the first instance, a refusal to accept the fact that this inequality bore no relationship to the quantity and quality of socially useful labour that people expended. The initiators of the idea of a universal basic income proceeded from a directly opposite logic. Instead of doing away with unearned income, they sought to turn it into a universal basic principle.
The question “Who’s going to pay for it?” is far less complex than it seems; those who would do the work would be migrants, workers in China or India, and, of course, a few robots. Meanwhile, the members of Western European society would be transformed into a uniformly creative class for whom work would be transformed into pleasure, entertainment, a game or a means of self-fulfilment. This is also a sort of communist utopia but one that is fundamentally hostile to both bourgeois and proletarian values; it reflects the self-satisfied conception that the creative class has of itself as the ideal of future humanity.
The universal basic income was posited precisely as an alternative to socially useful labour, as a source of wealth that would allow people to belong to the middle class while doing absolutely nothing, while not expending any effort and while not doing anything beneficial for anyone. In other words, the state is supposed to provide a stimulus for people to set themselves apart from society, for their social atomisation and for the destruction of the economic bonds between them. Of course, the authors of the idea were quite correct in objecting that even after the introduction of the system, a considerable number (even, probably, a majority) of people would make a choice in favour of labour. The problem, however, does not lie in the number of citizens who would continue working, or who would prefer to parasitise others, but in the question of what would become the basic principle for the distribution of income: the logic of behaviour and the dominant ethic in society.
The liberation of human beings from the “curse” of labour is an age-old idea that can be traced back to the myths of the Garden of Eden and a lost paradise. But in the Marxist tradition, it will not be brought to realisation through turning the creative idler into the ideal of the free personality, but through the transformation and humanisation of labour itself so that the human individual ceases to be simply a living appendage of the machine. What is required here is a social revolution, or reforms that affect the mode of production, the social relationships and the structure of the socium, not a redistribution of wealth in favour of those who refuse to share the burden of labour with their fellow citizens. To the contrary, the utopia of the people behind the Swiss referendum suggests a future straight out of the H.G. Wells novel The Time Machine, in which the refined Eloi parasitise the labour of the brutish Morlocks – until, of course, the latter crawl out from underground seeking to devour them.
The emergence of such a project bears witness to a crisis of the idea of social transformation. What we find here is a modern-day, late-bourgeois social mathematics that urges us to divide everything up while leaving out nothing. Discussion on the justice of this is reduced to the question of effective distribution and stable consumption. No one is interested in how values come into being, in who controls them, or most important, in everyone...
