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(Richard, Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow (adjunct) at the Hoover Institution, is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, New York University Law School, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. https://www.hoover.org/research/wealth-tax-poor-idea)

Today’s aggressive progressives hope to stall that movement by imposing an exit tax on these would-be exiles. These efforts should evoke oppressive regimes like East Germany, which erected the Berlin Wall to keep malcontents at home. It will surely face a fierce constitutional attack, as our Constitution has long been understood to have created a nationwide free-trade zone. In the United States, goods, services—and individuals—can move easily across state lines to promote economic development and growth. An exit tax imposes an explicit barrier on that project and is likely to be struck down as an impermissible burden on interstate commerce, as it is a direct descendant of the taxes and regulations that Chief Justice John Marshall struck down in such notable cases as Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) and Brown v. Maryland (1827).

(David, https://www.npr.org/2021/11/13/1054711913/progressives-wealth-tax-super-rich-elon-musk-jeff-bezos , 11-13)

ProPublica's report showed how the rich often find a myriad of ways to avoid taxes. The U.S. tax code is full of loopholes, and time and time again, U.S. billionaires have demonstrated how skilled they — and their accountants — are at making use of them. The rich can also relocate to avoid paying higher taxes. Recently, Musk moved to Texas, a state that has no income tax. France is another example of the limits of a wealth tax. After imposing higher taxes on the rich, more than 40,000 millionaires left the country. Because of all this, Dyreng, the Duke professor, sounds a cautionary note about how effective a wealth tax could be. Even if there were the political appetite in congress to pass Wyden's "billionaires tax," or something like it, it's almost certain the super rich would try to find ways to get around it, according to Dyreng. "I have never seen a tax that was not avoided in some way," he says.

(Dean, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, https://www.bostonreview.net/forum_response/dean-baker-wealth-tax-distraction/ , 4-5)

Can a wealth tax combat the effects of this policy-driven upward distribution? I would argue that it could not possibly succeed for very practical political reasons. First, as many have pointed out, it would almost certainly be ruled unconstitutional. This is not an abstract question of constitutional law: it is a concrete question about how we would expect the current Supreme Court to rule on the issue. Given the composition of the court, there can be little doubt on this question. And even before a wealth tax gets to the court, it has to pass Congress. While Zucman and Saez are confident that the IRS can be more successful in preventing evasion and avoidance than other countries have been, there is one unstoppable form of tax avoidance: rich people can simply renounce their citizenship. In their proposal, they seek to check this escape route by imposing a 47 percent exit tax. That would be a strong disincentive, once the tax is in place. However, nothing would stop rich people from renouncing their citizenship as the tax is being debated by Congress. Furthermore, they could use the threat of mass renunciation as a weapon against a Congress debating a wealth tax. Suppose that a thousand of the country’s richest people, controlling half or more of the wealth that was being targeted by a tax, signed onto a public letter threatening to renounce their citizenship if Congress were to move forward with a wealth tax proposal. Does anyone think that Congress would move ahead when faced with such a threat? Is there any reason to believe that the country’s richest people would not be prepared to take such extreme measures to protect their wealth? They already spend huge amounts of money on tax lawyers and accountants to limit their tax liabilities, often employing tactics of questionable legality. These are people who love their money much more than their country. It would be absurd not to expect them to organize with all the power at their disposal to stop a measure that would deal a huge blow to their wealth and power. A newly elected progressive president would suffer a major political embarrassment running into this brick wall.

(Karl, Adjuct#TaxFoundation, former Economics@ChapelHill, https://www.bostonreview.net/forum_response/karl-smith-wealth-tax-will-hurt-economy-not-help/ , 3-17)

Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman make two quite different claims about a progressive wealth tax. It is necessary, they say, not just to raise government revenue, but also to curb the injustice of our current system and to protect democracy from the ruinous effects of inequality. While they make a convincing case against concentrated power, they fail to show why a wealth tax, and only a wealth tax, would effectively combat the ills they intend to address. Their central contentions—that such a policy would diminish the power to influence government policy, stifle competition, and shape ideology—are simply taken for granted. They devote hardly any space to their most import assertion, that the income of today’s superrich is earned at the expense of everyone else—and thus that everyone else’s well being will be improved if a wealth tax were implemented.

(Richard, Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow (adjunct) at the Hoover Institution, is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, New York University Law School, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. https://www.hoover.org/research/wealth-tax-poor-idea)

Ironically, the rosy revenue projections that wealth-tax supporters such as Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman made in 2021 for its revenue potential—starting in 2023—are now hopelessly out of date. Two years ago, at the height of the pandemic, billionaires accumulated capital at near-record rates. Now, potential gains from a wealth tax have fallen because of the enormous declines in wealth (toward greater income equality!) experienced by virtually all newly minted tech moguls. Elon Musk leads the pack, with capital losses of $115 billion in 2022 alone. He has good company in Jeff Bezos ($80 billion); Mark Zuckerberg ($78 billion); and Larry Page ($40 billion). In sum, the American billionaires lost $660 billion this past year, about one-third of the $2 trillion in losses worldwide. Nothing guarantees that they will recover those losses any time soon, if ever. Considering a hypothetical 3 percent wealth tax rate, close to $20 billion in domestic wealth-tax revenue disappeared in 2022; this number would be far higher if the wealth tax also reached foreigners. Pass the tax and those losses will only get larger. Killing the goose that lays a golden egg is to be expected in any system that stresses redistribution first and growth second.

(Maggie, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-green-new-deal-is-impractical-but-practical-solutions-havent-worked-either/ 2-14)

The Green New Deal that Ocasio-Cortez and Markey proposed last week is broad, ambitious and vague. It’s a list of goals more than an actual policy, and it calls for, among other things, funding to retrofit energy-inefficient buildings, building charging stations for electric cars, and guaranteeing health care and jobs for all Americans. Under the Green New Deal, this country would stop using fossil fuels to generate power in just 10 years — something experts think may not actually be possible. American companies would build more electric cars and American consumers would buy them. High-speed rail lines would spiderweb the country and eliminate the need for air travel. The resolution doesn’t include proposals for how to pay for any of this, it just states that we should. The result is a piece of legislation that captures the economy-spanning scope of fossil fuels in our lives but that is also functionally impossible to achieve. Nancy Pelosi called it a dream. It has divided Democrats. The experts I spoke to framed the bill as a tool that was really good for restarting stalled conversations around how to address climate change … and not good for much else.

(Lydia, https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/31/politics/what-is-the-green-new-deal/index.html , 1-31)

Washington CNN — A month ago, almost nobody had heard of the Green New Deal, but the phrase is suddenly everywhere. The call to fight climate change through a massive jobs plan aimed at eliminating fossil fuels started with freshman New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been name-checked by Democratic presidential contenders Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and now has the apparent endorsement from an unlikely source: billionaire Michael Bloomberg. But what is the Green New Deal, exactly? The idea has been around for years. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman mentioned the concept in 2007, and Barack Obama campaigned on “green jobs” and elements of his stimulus packages were meant to both alleviate unemployment while building low-carbon infrastructure. Even the United Nations put out a plan for a global green new deal in 2009, as the world ground its way through the crippling financial crisis. US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks during the Women's Unity Rally at Foley Square on January 19, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Angela Weiss / AFP) (Photo credit should read ANGELA WEISS/AFP/Getty Images) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey to unveil 'Green New Deal' bill The current iteration has no official definition, leaving room for advocacy groups and prospective presidential candidates to endorse the implied dual mission — stopping global warming and mitigating economic inequality — without getting into details. Its sudden ubiquity comes as Democrats look for a positive message that has nothing to do with opposition to President Donald Trump heading into the 2020 campaign. “While the Green New Deal is going in the right direction, it means slightly different things to different people at this point,” says Bill Snape, senior counsel at the non-profit Center for Biological Diversity, which is collaborating on efforts to create a common platform. “I think we’re all committed to tying those loops together, but it’s going to take some work.” Some of that ambiguity will be resolved as soon as next week, when Ocasio-Cortez plans to introduce a resolution with Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey that more clearly outlines a legislative definition of the Green New Deal, after weeks of consulting with other groups who are planning to sign on. According to the Sunrise Movement, the group that staged sit-ins with Ocasio-Cortez in Nancy Pelosi’s office in November and December in a failed bid to demand a select House committee on climate change, the plan will have three essential parts: Transitioning to 100% clean and renewable energy by 2030, guaranteeing jobs fighting climate change to everyone who wants one, and funneling much of the money that will be required to do the first two things into communities of color and those that will be most impacted by the ravages of global warming. The resolution will be mostly symbolic, given that its proponents profess no hope that any part of it could become law under Trump. But it could be a powerful commitment device, as something other legislators can sign on to, and as a set of principles that activists can demand that candidates live up to. “There’s something powerful about the vagueness, and it creates a lot of alignment,” says Varshini Prakash, the group’s director. “The hard work is in defining it and ensuring that people are not just paying lip service and actually understand the substance behind it.” The key way in which Sunrise’s vision differs from most others — and by which most other plans will fall short, in their estimation — is in the sheer scale of the effort. While the group doesn’t identify as socialist per se, part of its aim is to rehabilitate the image and role of government, so as to muster and deploy the kind of capital and intervene in the economy with the degree of forcefulness that will be needed to meaningfully affect the climate. “If you look at all the major moments in American history that are on par with what we’re talking about, it was a more activist government that cared about the interests of all people,” Prakash says. And how do they plan to pay for it? Nobody asks that when America has faced other national emergencies, they say, such as war and economic collapse. A carbon tax might help, as would a higher top marginal tax rate, but neither of those would be enough — the real answer is to print money, under the philosophy that inflation hasn’t been a serious threat for decades and isn’t going to start now. That’s the kind of approach that people like former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg likely aren’t going to include in whatever plan they might come up with and label a “Green New Deal.” “I’m a little bit tired about listening to things that are pie in the sky, that we never are gonna pass, that we never are gonna afford,” Bloomberg said while promoting his book at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire. “I think it’s just disingenuous to promote those things. You gotta do something that’s practical.” Bloomberg didn’t elaborate on what proposals he saw as “pie in the sky,” and said he was working on a more fleshed-out plan for a Green New Deal. Former Reps. Beto O’Rourke and Julian Castro, as well as Harris, Warren and New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand have also all supported the idea of a Green New Deal. But none of them have put out specific plans explaining what they mean. Those who have put out plans share the goals of transitioning to 100% renewable energy and creating lots of jobs, but differ on how they get there, and how quickly. One very detailed report from the think tank Data for Progress would make the shift by 2035, through a combination of policies such as phasing out oil exports and internal combustion engines and public investments in electrified mass transit and reforestation. Another, from the Peoples’ Policy Project, would massively scale up the Tennessee Valley Authority, essentially handing energy production over to the federal government. A letter organized by the Center Biological Diversity and signed by 650 mostly environmental groups focuses on full enforcement of the Clean Air Act in order to regulate fossil fuels out of existence. A group called Elected Officials to Protect America has endorsed the basic Green New Deal goals, but plans to start with a campaign to prevent Saudi Arabia from buying up US water rights in order to ensure enough remains to fight climate change-fueled wildfires. And groups that have traditionally worked at the intersection of climate and labor are staying quiet, given that several unions in the construction, oil, gas and coal sectors are having a hard time with the idea of giving up fossil fuels entirely. “We have not endorsed the Green New Deal, and it’s because it sounds to me that it’s still something that’s evolving,” says Kim Glas, executive director of the Blue Green Alliance, a partnership of labor and environmental groups. “I think everybody is liking this conversation, and is waiting to see what the policy prescriptions are.”

(Maja, Socioeconomics@Vienna, and Roland, BusinessAdministration@Lund, Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research, Environmental Sociology 6:4)

Conclusions: postwork politics and practices We argued that modern-day work is a central cause for unsustainability, and should therefore be transformed to advance towards sustainability. We have contributed to this field of research, firstly, by developing a systematisation of the ecological harms associated with work – comprising the factors Scale, Time, Income, and Work-induced Mobility, Infrastructure, and Consumption – taking those studies one step further which investigate the ecological impacts of working hours quantitatively. One of the analytical advantages of this approach is that it avoids the mystification of work through indirect measures of economic activity (such as per capita GDP), as in the numerous analyses of the conflict between sustainability and economic growth in general. Our second substantial contribution consists in combining these ecological impacts of work with an analysis of the various structural dependencies on work in modern society, which spells out clearly what the recurring jobs-environment-dilemma actually implies, and why it is so difficult to overcome. While this dilemma is often vaguely referred to, this has been the first more detailed analysis of the different dimensions that essentially constitute it. Reviewing the literature in environmental sociology and sustainability research more generally, we also found the work-environment-dilemma and the role of work itself are not sufficiently addressed and remain major unresolved issues. We proposed the field would benefit from taking up the long intellectual tradition of problematising modern-day work, through the approach of postwork or critiques of work. While the described problems of unsustainability and entrenched dependencies cannot easily be resolved, we discussed how postwork arguments can contribute to pointing out and understanding them, and to opening up new perspectives to advance sustainability debates. A third contribution is therefore to have introduced the concept of postwork/critiques of work into sustainability research and the work-environment debate, and to have conducted an initial analysis of the ways in which postwork may be helpful for tackling ecological problems. Besides being ecologically beneficial, it may also serve emancipatory purposes to ‘raise broader questions about the place of work in our lives and spark the imagination of a life no longer so subordinate to it’ (Weeks 2011, 33). In order to inspire such ‘postwork imagination’ (Weeks 2011, 35, 110) and show that postwork ideas are not as detached from reality as they may sound, in this last section we briefly outline examples of existing postwork politics and practices. The most obvious example is the reduction of working hours during the 19th and 20th centuries. These reforms were essential to the early labour movement, and the notion that increasing productivity entails shorter working hours has never been nearly as ‘radical’ as today (Paulsen 2017). As concerns about climate change are rising, there is also renewed awareness about the ecological benefits of worktime reduction, besides a whole range of other social and economic advantages (Coote 2013; Frey 2019). Worktime reduction is usually taken up positively in public debate. Carlsson (2015, 184) sees a ‘growing minority of people’ who engage in practices other than waged work to support themselves and make meaningful contributions to society. Frayne (2015b) describes the practical refusal of work by average people who wish to live more independently of the treadmill of work. Across society, the disaffection with work is no marginal phenomenon (Graeber 2018; Cederström and Fleming 2012; Paulsen 2014, 2015; Weeks 2011); many start to realise the ‘dissonance between the mythical sanctity of work on the one hand, and the troubling realities of people’s actual experiences on the other’ (Frayne 2015b, 228). Public debates are therefore increasingly receptive to issues such as industries’ responsibility for climate change, coercive ‘workfare’ policies, meaningless ‘bullshit jobs’, or ‘work-life-balance’, shorter hours, overwork and burnout; topics ‘that will not go away’ (Coote 2013, xix) and question the organisation of work society more fundamentally. 5 The debate about an unconditional basic income (UBI) will also remain. UBI would break the existential dependency of livelihoods on paid work and serve as a new kind of social contract to entitle people to social security regardless of paid economic activity. In addition to countless models in theory, examples of UBI schemes exist in practice, either currently implemented or planned as ‘experiments’ (Srnicek and Williams 2015). The critique and refusal of work also takes place both within the sphere of wage labour and outside it. Within, the notions of absenteeism, tardiness, shirking, theft, or sabotage (Pouget 1913 [1898]; Seyferth 2019) have a long tradition, dating back to early struggles against work and industrialisation (Thompson 1967), and common until today (Paulsen 2014). The idea of such deliberate ‘workplace resistance’ is that the ability to resist meaningless work and the internalised norms of work society, and be idle and useless while at work, can be recognised and successfully practised (Campagna 2013; Scott 2012). Similarly, there is a growing interest in productive practices, social relations, and the commons outside the sphere of wage labour and market relations, for example in community-supported agriculture. This initiates ways of organising work and the economy to satisfy material needs otherwise than by means of commodity consumption (Chamberlain 2018; Helfrich and Bollier 2015). For such modes of organising productive social relations in more varied ways, inspiration could be drawn from the forms of ‘work’ that are prevalent in the global South in the so-called informal sector and in non-industrial crafts and peasantry, neither of which resemble the cultural phenomenon of modern-day work with its origins in the colonial North (Comaroff and Comaroff 1987; Thompson 1967). This, however, contradicts the global development paradigm, under which industrialisation, ‘economic upgrading’, global (labour) market integration and ‘structural transformation’ are pursued. Modern work, especially industrial factory jobs and ideally in cities, is supposed to help ‘the poor’ to escape their misery (Banerjee and Duflo 2012; UNDP 2015). Many of these other forms of livelihood provisioning and associated ways of life are thus disregarded, denigrated or destroyed as underdeveloped, backward, poor, and lazy (Thompson 1967), and drawn into the formal system of waged work as cheap labour in capitalist markets and global supply chains – ‘improved living conditions’ as measured in formal pecuniary income (Rosling 2018; Comaroff and Comaroff 1987). There are indications that these transformations create structural poverty, highly vulnerable jobs and an imposed dependence on wage labour (while few viable wage labour structures exist) (Hickel 2017; Srnicek and Williams 2015). There is also clear evidence of numerous struggles against capitalist development and for traditional livelihood protection and environmental justice (Anguelovski 2015). These are aspects where a postwork orientation is relevant beyond the industrialised societies of the global North, as it puts a focus on the modern phenomenon ‘work’ itself and the conditions that led to its predominance, as it questions the common narrative that ‘jobs’ are an end in themselves and justify all kinds of problematic development, and as it allows to ask which alternative, postcolonial critiques and conceptualisations of ‘work’ exist and should be preserved. To conclude, we clearly find traces of postwork organisation and politics in the present. However, these ideas are contested; they concern the roots of modern culture, society and industrial-capitalist economies. Waged work continues to be normalised, alternatives beyond niches appear quite impractical for generalisation. Powerful economic interests, including trade unions, seek to perpetuate the status-quo (Lundström, Räthzel, and Uzzell 2015). Job creation and (global) labour market integration (regardless of what kind) are central policy goals of all political parties, and presently popular progressive debates on a Green New Deal tend to exhibit a rather productivist stance. There is one particular aspect that appears hopeful: the present socio-economic system is unsustainable in the literal sense that it is physically impossible to be sustained in the long run. It was Weber (1992[1905]) who predicted that the powerful cosmos of the modern economic order will be determining with overwhelming force until the last bit of fossil fuel is burnt – and exactly this needs to happen soon to avert catastrophic climate change. 6 This is the battlefield of sustainability, and lately there has been renewed urgency and momentum for more profound social change, where it might be realised that a different societal trajectory beyond work and productivism for their own sake is more sustainable and desirable for the future.

(Maja, Socioeconomics@Vienna, and Roland, BusinessAdministration@Lund, Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research, Environmental Sociology 6:4)

What is the problem with modern-day work from an environmental perspective? A number of quantitative studies have researched the correlation of working hours and environmental impacts in terms of ecological footprint, carbon footprint, greenhouse gas emissions, and energy consumption, both on micro/household and on macro/cross-national levels, and for both ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries (Fitzgerald, Jorgenson, and Clark 2015; Hayden and Shandra 2009; Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013; Nässén and Larsson 2015; Rosnick and Weisbrot 2007). Based on these findings, and going beyond them, we develop a qualitative classification of ecological impacts of work broadly (not working hours only), distinguishing four analytically distinct factors (Hoffmann 2017). Fundamentally, all productive activity is based on material and energy throughputs within wider ecological conditions, which necessarily involves interference with the ecosphere. The appropriation and exploitation of non-human animals, land, soil, water, biomass, raw materials, the atmosphere and all other elements of the biosphere always to some extent causes pollution, degradation, and destruction. Thus, work is inherently both productive and destructive. However, this biophysical basis alone need not make work unsustainable, and it has not always been so (Krausmann 2017). Contributing to its unsustainability is, firstly, the Scale factor: the greater the amount of work, the more ‘inputs’ are required and the more ‘outputs’ generated, which means more throughput of resources and energy, and resulting ecological impacts. In other words, the more work, the larger the size of the economy, the more demands on the biosphere (Hayden and Shandra 2009; Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013). Obviously, there are qualitative differences between different types of work and their respective environmental impacts. Moreover, besides the evident and direct impacts, indirect impacts matter also. The tertiary/service sector is therefore not exempt from this reasoning (Hayden and Shandra 2009; Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013), not only due to its own (often ‘embodied’) materiality and energy requirements, but also because it administrates and supports industrial production processes in global supply chains (Fitzgerald, Jorgenson, and Clark 2015; Haberl et al. 2009; Paech 2012). Additionally, modern work is subject to certain integrally connected and mutually reinforcing conditions inherent in industrial economic structures, which aggravate ecological impacts by further increasing the Scale factor. These include the systematic externalisation of costs, and the use of fossil fuels as crucial energy basis, which combined with modern industrial technology enable continuously rising labour productivity independently of physical, spatial or temporal constraints (Malm 2013). Taken together, this leads to constantly spurred economic growth with a corresponding growth in material and energetic throughputs, and the creation of massive amounts of waste. The latter is not an adverse side-effect of modern work, but part of its purpose under the imperatives of growth, profitability, and constant innovation, as evident in phenomena such as planned obsolescence or the ‘scrapping premium’, serving to stimulate growth and demand, and hence, job creation (Gronemeyer 2012). These conditions and effects tend to be neglected when ‘green jobs’ are promised to resolve the ecological crisis (Paus 2018), disregarding that the systematically and continuously advanced scale of work and production has grown far beyond sustainable limits (Haberl et al. 2009).

(James, History@Rutgers No More Work: Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea)

These days everybody from Left to Right—from Dean Baker to Arthur C. Brooks—addresses this breakdown of the labor market by advocating full employment, as if having a job is self-evidently a good thing, no matter how dangerous, demanding, or demeaning it is. But “full employment” is not the way to restore our faith in hard work, or playing by the rules, or whatever (note that the official unemployment rate is already below 6 percent, which is pretty close to what economists used to call full employment). Shitty jobs for everyone won’t solve any social problem we now face. Don’t take my word for it, look at the numbers. Already a fourth of the adults actually employed in the United States are paid wages lower than would lift them above the official poverty line—and so a fourth of American children live in poverty. Almost half of employed adults in this country are eligible for food stamps (most of those who are eligible don’t apply). The market in labor has broken down along with most others. Those jobs that disappeared in the Great Recession just aren’t coming back, regardless of what the unemployment rate tells you—the net gain in jobs since 2000 still stands at zero—and if they do return from the dead they’ll be zombies, those contingent, part-time, or minimum-wage jobs where the bosses shuffle your shift from week to week: welcome to Walmart, where food stamps are a benefit. And don’t tell me that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour solves the problem. No one can doubt the moral significance of the movement. But at this rate of pay, even at forty hours a week—an unlikely amount in fast-food franchises—you’re still at that official poverty line. What, exactly, is the point of a (sic) earning a paycheck that isn’t a living wage, except to prove that you have a work ethic? But isn’t our present dilemma just a passing phase of the business cycle? What about the job market of the future? Haven’t the doomsayers, those damn Malthusians, always been proved wrong by rising productivity, new fields of enterprise, new economic opportunities? Well, yeah—until now, these times. The measurable trends of the past half century, and the plausible projections for the next half century, are just too empirically grounded to dismiss as dismal science or ideological hokum. They look like the data on climate change—you can deny them if you like, but you’ll sound like a moron when you do. Oxford economists who study employment trends tell us that fully two-thirds of existing jobs, including those involving “non-routine cognitive tasks”—you know, like thinking—are at risk of death by computerization within twenty years. They’re elaborating on conclusions reached by two MIT economists in a book from 2012 called Race against the Machine. Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley types who give TED talks have started speaking of “surplus humans” as a result of the same process—cybernated production. Rise of the Robots, the title of a new book that cites these very sources, is social science, not science fiction.1 So this Great Recession of ours is a moral crisis as well as an economic catastrophe. You might even say it’s a spiritual impasse, because it makes us ask what social scaffolding other than work will permit the construction of character—or whether character itself is something we must aspire to. But that is why it’s also an intellectual opportunity: it forces us to imagine a world in which the job no longer builds our character, determines our incomes, or dominates our daily lives. In short, it lets us say, “Enough already; fuck work.”

(Maja, Socioeconomics@Vienna, and Roland, BusinessAdministration@Lund, Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research, Environmental Sociology 6:4)

How can a ‘postwork’ approach contribute to resolving these issues? The notions critique of work (Frayne 2015a, 2015b) or postwork (Weeks 2011) have emerged in recent years in social science research and popular culture, building on a long intellectual tradition of (autonomist and neo-)Marxist, anarchist, and feminist theory (Seyferth 2019; Weeks 2011). The critique of work targets work in a fundamental sense, not only its conditions or exploitation. It is aimed at the centrality of work in modern ‘work society’ as a pivotal point for the provision of livelihoods through monetary income, the granting of social security, social inclusion, and personal identity construction, on which grounds unemployed persons and unpaid activities are excluded from recognition, welfare provision and trade union support. Moreover, the crucial role of waged work in the functioning of the welfare state and the modern industrialised economy is part of this critique (Chamberlain 2018; Frayne 2015b; Paulsen 2017). Although commonly taken as naturally given, this kind of societal order and its institutions such as the wage relation, labour markets, unemployment, or abstract time are historically and culturally exceptional modes of human coexistence (Applebaum 1992; Graeber 2018; Gorz 1989; Polanyi 2001 [1944]; Thompson 1967). This critique of the structures and social relations of work society is accompanied by the critique of its cultural foundation, the work ethic; an ideological commitment to work and productivism as ends in themselves, moral obligations, and as intrinsically good, regardless of what is done and at what cost (Gorz 1982; Weber 1992 [1905]; Weeks 2001). Postwork, however, is not only a critical stance. Criticising work and work society, aware of their historical contingency, implies the potential for an emancipatory transformation of industrial society. The focus is thereby not necessarily on abolishing work tout-court, but rather on pointing out and questioning its relentless centrality and asking what a more desirable, free and sustainable society might look like; a society in which work is no longer the pivotal point of social organisation and ideological orientation, including all questions and debates around this objective (Chamberlain 2018; Frayne 2015a; Weeks 2011). As a relatively new and dynamically developing approach, postwork is, despite similar political claims, not uniform in its reasoning. Some, drawing on the classical ‘end-of-work’ argument (Frayne 2016), assume an imminent technology-induced massive rise in unemployment. This is welcomed as an opportunity to reduce and ultimately abolish work to liberate humankind (Srnicek and Williams 2015). Others emphasise the remarkable fact that throughout the past two centuries technological development has not challenged the centrality of work in modern lives, despite the prospect that technological change would allow for much shorter working hours (e.g., Keynes 1930). This has not materialised due to the requirements of a work-centred, work-dependent society. On the contrary, work has become more central to modern societies. These deeper structural and cultural aspects and dependencies seem to remain unaffected by technological trends (Paulsen 2017; Weeks 2011). The ecological case for postwork The perspective of postwork/critiques of work may enrich sustainability debates in many ways; here, our focus is again on ecological concerns. First, postwork offers a much needed change in focus in sustainability debates, away from narrow critiques of individual consumption and the overemphasis on ‘green jobs’, towards understanding work as one central cause of sustained societal unsustainability. Postwork directs the focus towards crucial overlooked issues, e.g. the ways in which work is ecologically harmful, or which problems arise due to the social and cultural significance of modern-day work, including existential dependencies on it. Postwork seeks to re-politicise work, recognising that its conception and societal organisation are social constructs and therefore political, and must accordingly be open to debate (Weeks 2011). This opens conceptual space and enables open-minded debates about the meaning, value and purpose of work: what kind of work is, for individuals, society and the biosphere as a whole, meaningful, pointless, or outright harmful (Graeber 2018)? Such debates and enhanced understanding about the means and ends of work, and the range of problems associated with it, would be important in several regards. In ecological regard it facilitates the ecologically necessary, substantial reduction of work, production and consumption (Frey 2019; Haberl et al. 2009). Reducing work/working hours is one of the key premises of postwork, aiming at de-centring and de-normalising work, and releasing time, energy and creativity for purposes other than work (Coote 2013). From an ecological perspective, reducing the amount of work would reduce the dependency on a commodity-intensive mode of living, and allow space for more sustainable practices (Frayne 2016). Reducing work would also help mitigate all other work-induced environmental pressures described above, especially the ‘Scale factor’ (Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013), i.e. the amount of resources and energy consumed, and waste, including emissions, created through work. A postwork approach facilitates debate on the politics of ecological work reduction which entails difficult questions: for example, which industries and fields of employment are to be phased out? Which fields will need to be favoured and upon what grounds? Which kinds of work in which sectors are socially important and should therefore be organised differently, especially when altering the energy basis of work due to climate change mitigation which implies decentralised, locally specific, intermittent and less concentrated energy sources (Malm 2013)? These questions are decisive for future (un-)sustainability, and yet serious attempts at a solution are presently forestalled by the unquestioned sanctity that work, ‘jobs’ or ‘full employment’ enjoy (Frayne 2015b). Postwork is also conducive to rethinking the organisation of work. There are plausible arguments in favour of new institutions of democratic control over the economy, i.e. economic democracy (Johanisova and Wolf 2012). This is urgent and necessary to distribute a very tight remaining carbon budget fairly and wisely (IPCC 2018), to keep economic power in check, and to gain public sovereignty over fundamental economic decisions that are pivotal for (un-)sustainable trajectories (Gould, Pellow, and Schnaiberg 2004). An obstacle to this is one institution in particular which is rarely under close scrutiny: the labour market, a social construct linked to the advent of modern work in form of the commodity of labour (Applebaum 1992). It is an undemocratic mechanism, usually characterised by high levels of unfreedom and coercion (Anderson 2017; Graeber 2018; Paulsen 2015) that allocates waged work in a competitive mode as an artificially scarce, ‘fictitious’ commodity (Polanyi 2001 [1944]). 4 It does so according to availability of money and motives of gain on the part of employers, and appears therefore inappropriate for distributing labour according to sustainability criteria and related societal needs. As long as unsustainable and/or unnecessary jobs are profitable and/or (well-)paid, they will continue to exist (Gorz 1989), just as ‘green jobs’ must follow these same criteria in order to be created. An ecological postwork perspective allows to question this on ecological grounds, and it links to debates on different modes of organising socially necessary work, production and provisioning in a de-commodified, democratic and sustainable mode. Finally, postwork is helpful for ecological reasons because it criticises the cultural glorification of ‘hard work’, merit and productivism, and the moral assumption that laziness and inaction are intrinsically bad, regardless the circumstances. Postwork is about a different mindset which problematises prevailing productivist attitudes and allows the idea that being lazy or unproductive can be something inherently valuable. Idleness is conducive to an ecological agenda as nothing is evidently more carbon-neutral and environment-sparing than being absolutely unproductive. As time-use studies indicate, leisure, recreation and socialising have very low ecological impacts, with rest and sleep having virtually none (Druckman et al. 2012). Apart from humans, the biosphere also needs idle time for regeneration. In this sense, laziness or ‘ecological leisure’, ideally sleep, can be regarded as supremely ecofriendly states of being that would help mitigate ecological pressures. Moreover, as postwork traces which changes in attitudes towards time, efficiency and laziness have brought modern work culture and modern time regimes into being in the first place and have dominated ever since (Thompson 1967; Weber 1992 [1905]), it provides crucial knowledge for understanding and potentially changing this historically peculiar construction. It can thereby take inspiration from longstanding traditions throughout human history, where leisure has usually been a high social ideal and regarded as vital for realising genuine freedom and quality of life (Applebaum 1992; Gorz 1989).

(Editor-in-Chief Rosie Warren Editorial Collective Jamie Allinson Charlotte Heltai John McDonald China Miéville Kevin Ochieng Okoth Annie Olaloku-Teriba Barnaby Raine Richard Seymour Rosie Warren Art & Fiction Editor China Miéville Poetry Editor Caitlín Doherty https://salvage.zone/the-tragedy-of-the-worker-towards-the-proletarocene/ , 1-31)

Capitalism, like certain bacteria, like the death-drive, is immortal. It has its limits and crises but, perversely, seems to thrive on these. Unlike the multi-species life-systems powering it, the only terminal limit to capital’s perpetual augmentation is, if driven toward from within, external: either revolution or human extinction; communism, or the common ruin of the contending classes. Long ago, both Max Weber and Walter Benjamin pointed out an occulted religious foundation in capitalist civilisation. As Michael Löwy points out, Benjamin, by defining capitalism as a cultic religion, went much farther than Weber in identifying a Puritan/Capitalist guilt-driven imperative to accumulate. ‘The duration of the cult,’ for Benjamin, ‘is permanent’. There are ‘no days which are not holidays’, and ‘nothing has meaning that is not immediately related to the cult’. In what sense is capitalism a cult? What are its rituals, its fetishes? Those of investment, speculating, buying and selling. It has no dogma other than those ‘real abstractions’, as Alfred Sohn-Rethel put it, entailed by its rituals. In Sohn-Rethel’s words, the act of commodity-exchange is the key exemplar of a social action governed by an abstraction of which the participants have no consciousness. The buyer may be concerned only with the sensuous particularities of the commodity, the needs it fills, but behaves in the moment of exchange as though what matters is the quantity of exchange-value embedded in it. Ritual action determines dogma; social being, that is, determines consciousness. Capitalist theology instates, not dogma, but unyielding imperatives governing action. ‘Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!’, Marx sarcastically withered in Capital. Accumulation is, for capital, an imperative and not an option. To exist as a unit of capital in conditions of universal competition, is to accumulate or die. As long, therefore, as there is labour-power to exploit and, in Jason W Moore’s term, ‘cheap nature’ to appropriate, capital will augment itself. This very bifurcation of life into the exploitable and the appropriable, which Moore identifies as the foundation of a ‘Cartesian dualism’ unsustainably counterposing ‘Nature’ to ‘Society’, is not dogma but programme. It is related to a distinctive move of capitalist theology, currently given right-Evangelical sanction by Calvin Beisner and the Cornwall Declaration, to disavow in practice the existence of inherent physical limits. It posits, in its action, the Earth as limitless cornucopia over which humans have dominion, and from which limitless accumulation must be extracted. This disavowal, this ‘real abstraction’, is the social basis of capitalist implicatory denial: the seemingly evidence-proof conviction of capitalist states that capitalogenic climate change can be remedied by means, and according to systems, that guarantee its perpetuation. The capitalocentric purview is commonly, but mistakenly, identified with the anthropocentrism of ancient and medieval monotheisms. Here, however, it is clearly not the Anthropos that stands at the centre, as though appointed by God to steward the garden of Earth. At the centre is the ritual: that unconditional imperative to accumulate. And insofar as this imperative drives ‘adorers’, as Benjamin put it, to the horizon of human extinction, capitalism can – must – be described as a death cult. Fossil capital is but one modality of the death cult, albeit a paragon. The ‘externalities’ of capital – climate chaos, biosphere destruction, resource depletion, topsoil erosion, ocean acidification, mass extinction, the accumulation of chemical, heavy metal, biological and nuclear wastes – extend far beyond the specific catastrophe of a carbonised atmosphere. Capitalism is a comprehensive system of work-energetics. The food industry, which powers waged labour, and is key to the shifting value of labour-power itself, is as central to the deterioration of the biosphere as is fossil-fuelled transit. Nonetheless, the continuing decision for fossil fuels as a solution to the energy demands of capitalist production, for all the growing denial of climate-change denial among the anti-vulgarian ruling class, for all their concerned mouth music, is an exemplary case of the capitalist imperative of competitive accumulation at work. As Andreas Malm has fiercely and beautifully argued, capitalism did not settle for fossil fuels as a solution to energy scarcity. The common assumption that fossil energy is an intrinsically valuable energy resource worth competing over, and fighting wars for is, as geographer Matthew Huber argues, an example of fetishism. At the onset of steam power, water was abundant, and cheaper to use even with its fixed costs, than coal. The hydraulic mammoths powered by water wheels required far less human labour to convert to energy, and were far more energy-efficient. Even today, only a third of the energy in coal is actually converted in the industrial processes dedicated thereto: the only thing that is efficiently produced is carbon dioxide. On such basis, the striving for competitive advantage by capitalists seeking maximum market control ‘should’ have favoured renewable energy. Capital, however, preferred the spatio-temporal profile of stocks due to the internal politics of competitive accumulation. Water use necessitated communal administration, with its perilously collectivist implications. Coal, and later oil, could be transported to urban centres, where workers were acculturated to the work-time of capitalist industry, and hoarded by individual enterprises. This allowed individual units of capital to compete more effectively with one another, secured the political authority of capital and incorporated workers into atomised systems of reproduction, from transport to heating*. Thus, locked in by the short-termist imperatives of competitive accumulation, fossil capital assumed a politically privileged position within an emerging world capitalist ecology. It monopolised the supply of energy for dead labour, albeit in a highly inefficient way. This is the tragedy of the worker. That, as avatar of a class in itself, she was put to work for the accumulation of capital, from capitalism’s youth, amid means of production not of her choosing, and with a telos of ecological catastrophe. That thus even should the proletariat become a class for itself, and even if it does so at a point of history where the full horror of the methods of fossil capitalism is becoming clear, it would – will – inherit productive forces inextricable from mass, trans-species death. This does not preclude systemic, planet-wide transformation. Particularly given the inevitably uneven global growth of class consciousness and resistance, however, and the concomitant embattledness of any reformist, let alone revolutionary, power on the global stage, it does ensure that it faces extraordinary barriers. As will become clear.

(Maja, Socioeconomics@Vienna, and Roland, BusinessAdministration@Lund, Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research, Environmental Sociology 6:4)

If work is associated with environmental pressures in at least four different ways, why do we have to maintain it at constant or increased levels? We hold that in industrial society four distinct levels of structural and cultural dependency on work may be discerned. These are to be understood as broad analytical categories which in reality comprise and cross individual and structural levels in various ways, and are all interdependent. Personal dependence. A first aspect is individual or personal dependence on work: Work as regular, gainful employment constitutes one of the central social relations in modern ‘work society’ and is a central point of reference in people’s lives. As a principal source of income, waged work fulfils the existential function of providing livelihoods and social security. It is constructed to secure basic social rights, social integration, recognition, status, and personal identity (Frayne 2015b; Weeks 2011). This is probably why ‘social’ is so often equated with ‘work’. State dependence. Secondly, dependence on work pertains to the modern welfare state: the revenues and economic growth generated through work contribute substantially to the financing of social security systems. Affording welfare is therefore a main argument for creating jobs. Wage labour is thus a dominating tool for redistribution; through wages, taxes on wages and on the consumption that production generates, almost all distribution takes place. Hence, what the job is, and what is being produced, is of secondary importance (Paulsen 2017). Work is moreover a convenient instrument of control that structures and disciplines society, and ‘renders populations at once productive and governable’ (Weeks 2011, 54; Gorz 1982; Lafargue 2014 [1883]). Specifically, the dominant neoliberal ideology, its condemnation of laziness and idealisation of ‘hardworking people’ has intensified the ‘moral fortification of work’. Accordingly, the neoliberal ‘workfare’ reforms have focused on job creation and the relentless activation for the labour market, effectively ‘enforcing work (…) as a key function of the state’ (Frayne 2015b, 16). Economic dependence. Thirdly, besides the economic imperative for individuals to ‘earn a living’ and pay off debt, modern economies are dependent on work in terms of an industrious labour force, long working hours for increasing economic output under the imperatives of capital accumulation, growth and competition, and rising incomes for increasing purchasing power and demand. Creating or preserving jobs constitutes the standard argument for economic growth. In turn, work as one basic factor of production creates growth. However, the relation between growth and employment is conditioned, amongst other factors, primarily by constantly pursued labour productivity: for employment to rise or stay stable, the economy must grow at a sufficiently high rate to exceed productivity gains, in order to offset job losses and avoid ‘jobless growth’. Moreover, faltering expansion triggers a spiral of recession which not only affects economic stability but results in societal crises as a whole (Jackson 2009; Paech 2012). However, besides being unsustainable and insatiable, growth is also increasingly unlikely to continue at the rates required for economic stability (Kallis et al. 2018; IMF 2015). The individual and structural economic dependence on work and economic growth therefore implies profound vulnerability as livelihoods and political stability are fatefully exposed to global competition and the capitalist imperative of capital accumulation, and constrained by ‘systemically relevant’ job and growth creating companies, industries and global (financial) markets (Gronemeyer 2012; Paech 2012). Cultural dependence. A fourth aspect concerns cultural dependence: The ‘work ethic’ is the specific morality described by Max Weber (1992[1905]) as constitutive of modern industrial culture, 2 and determining for all its subjects as shared ‘common senses’ about how work is valued and understood. It means an ingrained moral compulsion to gainful work and timesaving, manifested in the common ideals of productivity, achievement and entrepreneurship, in the feeling of guilt when time is ‘wasted’, in personal identification with one’s ‘calling’, in observations of busyness, even burnout as a ‘badge of honour’ (Paulsen 2014), and in descriptions of a culture that has lost the ‘capacity to relax in the old, uninhibited ways’ (Thompson 1967, 91). Even for those who do not share such attitudes towards work, in a work-centred culture it is normal to (seek) work. It is so commonsensical that it seems impractical to question it, and it continues to be normalised through socialisation and schooling. Consequently, people become limited in their imagination of alternatives, the prospect of losing one’s job usually causes heartfelt fear (Standing 2011). For a work society that ‘does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won’, there can be nothing worse than the cessation of work (Hannah Arendt, cited in Gorz 1989, 7–8). The wage relation based on the commodity labour is, in other words, an essential functional feature of the industrial-capitalist system, and the exaltation of work remains its social ethic. For modern industrial society work is ‘both its chief means and its ultimate goal’ (Gorz 1989, 13; Weber 1992 [1905]; Weeks 2011); it is centred and structurally dependent on work, despite work’s environmentally adverse implications. This constellation constitutes the dilemma between work and the environment, and it is why we argue that work is absolutely central to present-day unsustainability and should accordingly be dealt with in sustainability research.

(https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/publications/no_warming%2C_no_war_06_green_jobs_and_just_transition.pdf)

The Military is the Only Major Federal Jobs Program in the U.S. Understanding that climate disruption is an outcome of our broken economic system, climate threats cannot be separated from other forms of insecurity that people experience in their daily lives. Vast economic insecurity and inequality are outcomes of the financially extractive, fossil-fueled economy. The U.S. military has long capitalized on economic precarity, recruiting poor people who lack other options and middle-class populations faced with significant debt and instability. As a matter of practicality, the prevalence of militarized jobs in communities remains a key political blockade to reducing military funding. As such, solutions to the climate crisis must also address the absence of an adequate number of well-paying jobs, poverty, inequality, and other prevalent socioeconomic concerns of our time. At the same time, we must convert a major share of U.S. manufacturing and engineering from building weapons of war to building a 100% clean energy economy by 2030. While official estimates are known to be too low, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted about six million people as unemployed and actively seeking work in 2019—a figure now rendered obsolete by the coronavirus crisis, but indicative of our economy under “good” circumstances.96 This figure does not include all working age people who are unemployed and more comprehensive methods of calculating unemployment often double the standard unemployment rate. Even in the best of times, unemployment rates also vary drastically by geography, race, and age; rural workers, Black workers, Latinx workers, and young people all have higher than average rates of unemployment. In normal times, forty percent of the U.S. workforce is employed in insecure positions, such as temporary, part-time, and “on-call” workers, contractors, and the self-employed. 97 While employment statistics can help illustrate the economic crisis, they can also minimize the lived-realities for the tens of millions of people living in poverty in the United States. In the richest country in the world, even prior to the coronavirus pandemic and its associated economic implosion, there were 140 million poor and low-wealth people. That’s over 43% of the population of the United States. Low pay, job scarcity or inaccessibility, and attacks on unionization work together to keep people in poverty. Do We Have a Poverty Draft in the United States? Mandatory military service ended in 1973, and by the 1980s the term “poverty draft” gained prominence as a term used to describe “the belief that the enlisted ranks of the military were made up of young people with limited economic opportunities.”98 In the context of vast economic precarity in the United States, military service often functions as a “draft-like system” that attracts low-income and other marginalized groups into enlisting because of a lack of other job, income, and educational opportunities available in their communities. Half of all young people who join the military do so as a means to pay for future education.99 Military recruiters have historically recruited among middle and lower classes. Reporting by the Seattle Times in 2005 found, for example, that nearly half of new recruits came “from lower-middle-class to poor households.”100 Native Americans, who have the highest poverty rate of any racial or ethnic group in the United States, also serve in the country’s armed forces at the highest rate of any ethnic group in the country.101 Despite such vast economic insecurity, the military is the only major federal jobs program in the United States. Over 1,300,000 Americans are on active military duty and over 800,000 more are in the military reserves. Another 1,600,000 Americans work for companies contracted by the U.S. military not only to supply weapons of war, but also the goods and services that support military operations. 102 The Department of Defense calls itself America’s largest employer - larger than Walmart, even.103 Since the military industrial complex is spread across the United States, some members of congress justify military spending by the jobs it provides their states or districts. War spending is often perceived as an effective way to increase employment, but there are far better ways besides a massive military jobs program to employ Americans.

(Steve, https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/05/31/army-officials-claim-improved-recruiting-service-wont-show-numbers.html)

The Army is in a recruiting slump, struggling to pitch service to a skeptical Gen Z or even to find enough qualified candidates to join. But just how deep in the hole are the Army's recruiting numbers? It won't say. The service has declined to provide the basic recruiting data, despite Army Secretary Christine Wormuth repeatedly telling Congress it is doing better on recruiting this year compared to last year, when it came up 15,000 soldiers short of its goal of bringing in 60,000 new troops. On April 5, Military.com first requested the data on how many new soldiers enlisted for each quarter for the current and previous fiscal years. But the Army has balked for weeks, and service officials also declined to give the publication a reason it was withholding the data. Read Next: A Soldier Attempted Suicide in Poland. Left to Roam atFort Riley, He Killed Himself. "We have seen an increase across the force in each quarter," Madison Bonzo, an Army spokesperson, told Military.com in a statement. "We expect to finish the third quarter strong and continue this momentum as we move into the fourth quarter." Lawmakers broadly see the Army's recruiting slump as one of the top issues for the Pentagon. The Army is by far the largest branch and is key to bolstering NATO's front lines in Europe and training Ukrainians on American weapons systems. The Army is also in the midst of shifting its doctrine and focus toward conventional warfare in the Pacific, which is going to require large formations of soldiers and a shift from the Global War on Terror, where most combat was relatively small skirmishes against poorly equipped insurgents. "We are seeing improvements in our recruiting situation. We are better off this year than before the previous year," Wormuth told lawmakers at a hearing May 2. The service has made changes that could boost the number of new recruits, including a pre-basic training course for applicants who fall outside the service's body fat or academic standards. If those applicants can comply within 90 days, they can move on to basic training. Those courses have the capacity to graduate about 12,000 recruits per year into basic training, a massive batch of enlistees the Army wouldn't have otherwise been able to bring in. But even with a boost from new initiatives, Wormuth and other senior officials have complicated the recruiting picture by warning publicly that the service will still not meet its goals. "At the same time, the chief and I set a very ambitious goal of 65,000 recruits this year," Wormuth said during testimony to the Senate Appropriations Committee's defense panel. "We are not going to make that goal. We are doing everything we can to get as close to it as possible." The Army's struggle to bring in new recruits is multifaceted but partly due to a low unemployment rate and a civilian job market in which employees are better positioned to negotiate salaries, time off and other incentives.

The story of world politics is often told as a game of thrones in which a rotating cast of great powers battles for top-dog status. According to researchers led by Graham Allison at Harvard, there have been sixteen cases in the past five hundred years when a rising power challenged a ruling power. 3 Twelve of these cases ended in carnage. One can quibble with Allison’s case selection, but the basic pattern is clear: hegemonic rivalry has sparked a catastrophic war every forty years on average for the past half millennium. The emergence of unipolarity in 1991 has put this cycle of hegemonic competition on hold. Obviously wars and security competition still occur in today’s unipolar world—in fact, as I explain later, unipolarity has made certain types of asymmetric conflict more likely—but none of these conflicts have the global scope or generational length of a hegemonic rivalry. To appreciate this point, just consider the Cold War—one of the four “peaceful” cases of hegemonic rivalry identified by Allison’s study. Although the two superpowers never went to war, they divided the world into rival camps, waged proxy wars that killed millions of people, and pushed each other to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. For forty-five years, World War III and human extinction were nontrivial possibilities. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, by contrast, the United States has not faced a hegemonic rival, and the world, though far from perfect, has been more peaceful and prosperous than ever before. Just look at the numbers. From 1400 to 1991, the rate of war deaths worldwide hovered between 5 and 10 deaths per 100,000 people and spiked to 200 deaths per 100,000 during major wars. 4 After 1991, however, war death rates dropped to 0.5 deaths per 100,000 people and have stayed there ever since. Interstate wars have disappeared almost entirely, and the number of civil wars has declined by more than 30 percent. 5 Meanwhile, the global economy has quadrupled in size, creating more wealth between 1991 and 2018 than in all prior human history combined. 6 What explains this unprecedented outbreak of peace and prosperity? Some scholars attribute it to advances in communications technology, from the printing press to the telegraph to the Internet, which supposedly spread empathy around the globe and caused entire nations to place a higher value on human life. 7 Such explanations are appealing, because they play on our natural desire to believe in human progress, but are they convincing? Did humans suddenly become 10 to 20 times less violent and cruel in 1991? Are we orders of magnitude more noble and kind than our grandparents? Has social media made us more empathetic? Of course not, which is why the dramatic decline in warfare after 1991 is better explained by geopolitics than sociology. 8 The collapse of the Soviet Union not only ended the Cold War and related proxy fighting, it also opened up large swathes of the world to democracy, international commerce, and peacekeeping forces—all of which surged after 1991 and further dampened conflict. 9 Faced with overwhelming U.S. economic and military might, most countries have decided to work within the American-led liberal order rather than fight to overturn it. 10 As of 2018, nearly seventy countries have joined the U.S. alliance network—a Kantian community in which war is unthinkable—and even the two main challengers to this community, China and Russia, begrudgingly participate in the institutions of the liberal order (e.g., the UN, the WTO, the IMF, World Bank, and the G-20), engage in commerce with the United States and its allies, and contribute to international peacekeeping missions. 11 History may not have ended in 1991, but it clearly changed in profound ways—and mostly for the better.

(Meagan, https://jacobin.com/2018/10/military-recruits-full-employment-welfare-state , 10-19)

Working-class support for the military is often overstated, but it is high enough to hamstring any antiwar movement angling for mass support — which is the only kind of antiwar movement that can win. The more recruits the military has, the more deeply it embeds itself in working-class American life. This obviously presents an enormous obstacle to building opposition to war. And it is precisely the working class that must oppose war, because not only are workers the majority of society and the group with the actual leverage to force change, but they’re also the ones who fight and die in the wars themselves. As Eugene V. Debs said, “The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose — especially their lives.” In order for our society to achieve peace, working people must realize they’re being conned into war. So how do we go about removing the economic incentive for joining the military? Ensuring full employment is a great start. Full employment means that everyone who’s actively looking for a job can easily find one, which forces employers to compete with each other for hires, and gives workers more options and more power in the economy. Although unemployment is pretty low right now, there will inevitably be another economic crisis, and the gains made will evaporate. A better way to achieve full employment for the long haul is a federal job guarantee of some kind.

Bidari, who heads to basic training in August, is just the latest in a growing number of legal migrants enlisting in the U.S. military as it more aggressively seeks out immigrants, offering a fast track to citizenship to those who sign up. Struggling to overcome recruiting shortfalls, the Army and the Air Force have bolstered their marketing to entice legal residents to enlist, putting out pamphlets, working social media and broadening their outreach, particularly in inner cities. One key element is the use of recruiters with similar backgrounds to these potential recruits. "It is one thing to hear about the military from locals here, but it is something else when it's from your fellow brother, from the country you're from," said Bidari, who was contacted by Army Staff Sgt. Kalden Lama, the Dallas recruiter, on a Facebook group that helps Nepalese people in America connect with one another. "That brother was in the group and he was recruiting and he told me about the military." The military has had success in recruiting legal immigrants, particularly among those seeking a job, education benefits and training as well as a quick route to becoming an American citizen. But they also require additional security screening and more help filling out forms, particularly those who are less proficient in English. Both the Army and the Air Force say they will not meet their recruiting goals this year, and the Navy also expects to fall short. Pulling more from the legal immigrant population may not provide large numbers, but any small boosts will help. The Marine Corp is the only service on pace to meet its goal. The shortfalls have led to a wide range of new recruiting programs, ad campaigns and other incentives to help the services compete with often higher-paying, less risky jobs in the private sector. Defense leaders say young people are less familiar with the military, are drawn more to corporate jobs that provide similar education and other benefits, and want to avoid the risk of injury and death that service in defense of the United States could bring. In addition, they say that little more than 20% meet the physical, mental and character requirements to join.

Some scientists are concerned that there could risks associated with solar geoengineering—unintended effects on the weather, for instance, or damage to the planet’s protective ozone layer. Because most research on solar geoengineering has been restricted to modeling studies, there’s disagreement among experts about the possibility, or seriousness, of these potential side effects. Keith, himself a specialist on solar geoengineering, believes the science so far suggests these risks are “small.” He and other Harvard scientists, including atmospheric chemistry expert Frank Keutsch, are planning a series of small-scale field . It’s the first of their kind, and the researchers hope they will provide more information on the physical behavior of aerosols in the atmosphere. These experiments may have sparked some of the discussion around the need for geoengineering governance. While small-scale tests likely carry little risk, they’ve introduced the idea that solar geoengineering may be moving from theory to reality.

The aim of solar geoengineering would be to keep Earth’s temperature as close to equilibrium as possible says Peter Huybers, a professor of earth and planetary sciences and of environmental science and engineering. “That’s what we know best.” And from an engineering perspective, he suspects such action could do more good than harm—“at least if you’re smart about it, start out very small, and proceed in a reversible way.” Keith’s modeling also suggests that if the process were used to halve warming, that would moderate climate hazards nearly everywhere. Only 1.3 percent of land areas would see a change in water availability—as increased moisture, not as drought. In addition to attenuating global average temperature, this halving of warming would in theory lessen the intensity of tropical cyclones, reduce regional changes in water availability, ease extreme precipitation and extreme temperatures, and even reduce atmospheric carbon concentrations and ocean acidification.