Specifically, the aff’s job guarantee is a disciplinary tool against the working class that expands the state’s control of the subject.

Larger surpluses of labour are, on the one hand, beneficial to capitalist interests. They serve as a disciplinary tool against the working class (particularly when filtered through racism, nationalism and sexism) and as a reserve to call upon in times of growth. They reduce wages, sow competition among workers and shackle the ambitions of the proletariat. These are among the reasons behind a gradual drive to incorporate the world’s population into a global labour force, fostered by imperialism and globalisation.117 On the other hand, capital requires a particular type of surplus population: cheap, docile and pliable.118 Without these characteristics, this excess of humanity becomes a problem for capital. Not content to lie down and accept its disposability, it makes itself heard through riots, mass migration, criminality, and all sorts of actions that disrupt the existing order. Capitalism therefore has simultaneously to produce a disciplined surplus and deploy violence and coercion against those who resist.

One of the principal ways to manage the unruly surplus has been to champion the social democratic ideal of full employment, whereby every physically capable (male) worker has a job. In support of this ideal, economic policies aim to reincorporate the surplus into capitalism as disciplined and waged workers, secured by a hegemonic consensus between the representatives of labour and capital. The apogee of this approach was the postwar period, when working-class struggle and conservative concern with social order positioned full employment as a necessary economic goal.119 In this brief ‘golden age’ of capitalism, unemployment was kept to a minimum, and capital had to seek out pre-capitalist populations around the world in order to expand and accumulate.120 For the most part, job growth was achieved through healthy economic growth that increased the demand for labour.121 Historically, growth of the national economy has often been important in warding off the effects of technological unemployment – either by increasing the output of existing industries or by inventing new industries to employ the displaced workers. For instance, during the latter half of the 1800s, the rise in capital goods output created jobs that offset the surplus population newly released from the agricultural sector.122 In the prewar and postwar eras, growth in manufacturing jobs was sustained by the rise of mass consumerism and surges in government military spending.123 Today, we can see similar attempts at creating new markets through accumulation by dispossession – turning public or common goods into privatised (and monetised) commodities. If increases in labour demand are to be successful, however, they require the right supply of labour – which means an increasingly high-skilled workforce. Education has been the primary way to achieve this, with, for example, secondary education having its origins in efforts to produce more skilled workers. The demand to educate workers for jobs held wide support during the high unemployment period of the Great Depression,124 and early neoliberals went so far as to argue that education was necessary only to adapt human beings to the constant changes in the economy.125 Today, the growth areas of the labour market tend to be in high-skilled, non-routine and cognitive jobs.126 This means any attempt at full employment increasingly requires new skills from workers – a demand that helps explain the aggressive efforts to reduce higher education to glorified job training.127 The overall societal aim becomes the production of competitive subjects undergoing constant self-improvement in an endless effort to be deemed ‘employable’.128 The demands that workers be constantly retraining and that policies support healthy economic growth are necessary components to the drive for full employment.129

But while calls for more jobs remain ideologically pervasive, the practical viability of full employment has largely disappeared. With tight labour markets in the postwar era, the ensuing strength of the working class increasingly became a problem for capitalism. The crisis of stagflation in the 1970s, in particular, presented an opportunity to reverse the priority given to employment. Class pressure and its effects – work stoppages, wage inflation, declining profits – were a major factor in central banks’ decisions to raise interest rates, in the hope of reducing aggregate demand and increasing unemployment.130 Indeed, Thatcher’s chief economic advisor eventually admitted that the war against inflation was in fact a proxy war against the working class.131 The tight monetary policy of the early 1980s was therefore precisely an effort to undermine the power of the working class, increase unemployment to a level acceptable for capital, and end the dream of full employment. Yet even if full employment had not been attacked, it requires strong economic growth – a condition that looks increasingly unlikely for the global economy. In recent years, global growth has remained significantly lower than during the pre-crisis period.132 Across the political spectrum, economists are warning that fundamental changes to the economy mean growth may have settled into a permanently lower state.133 Moreover, firms that are leading growth sectors – such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – simply do not create jobs on the scale of classic firms like Ford and GM.134 In fact, new industries currently only employ 0.5 per cent of the American workforce – hardly an inspiring record of job creation.135 And after a steady decline, the average new business creates 40 per cent fewer jobs than it did twenty years ago.136 The old social democratic plan to encourage employment in new industries falters in the face of low labour- intensity firms and sputtering economic growth. Still, it might be imagined that, with the right political pressure and policies, a return to full employment could be an option.137 But, given that the height of the social democratic era required the exclusion of women from the waged workforce, we should in fact wonder whether full employment has ever been possible.

If full employment remains operative only as an ideological mystification, its normalisation of work still extends to the unemployed. The transformation of welfare and the rise of workfare – forcing people to work in order to receive benefits – represent an increasingly insidious example of this. Mirroring the changing fortunes of full employment, unemployment has long been governed according to different ideas.138 Initial approaches saw unemployment as an individual accident – something to be mitigated by insurance- like solutions. But the mass unemployment of the Great Depression overwhelmed this approach, and unemployment subsequently came to be seen as a structural (and male) problem. The labour movement became an employment movement, and governments adopted welfare and full employment policies partly in response. Today, many of the transformations that the welfare state is undergoing can be understood as an attempt to revive the disciplinary function of the unemployed. Their free labour, in the form of workfare, acts to repress wages and threaten the jobs of the employed; the figure of the ‘jobseeker’ imposes a norm of work on everyone; and attacks on disability benefits turn even those outside the labour force into a reserve army of potential workers.139 The unemployed have to fulfil an increasingly long list of conditions in order to gain even minimal benefits: attending training, constantly applying for jobs, listening to advice, and even working for free. The increase in surveillance and control is designed to produce not only an obedient, skilled and flexible surplus population, but also one that exerts pressure on the employed. It therefore makes little difference whether these schemes actually reduce unemployment or not, since their purpose lies else- where.140 Increasingly, the welfare state is becoming little more than an institution designed to deploy the surplus against the working class.

The management of surplus populations does not just revolve around the production of disciplined workers and pliable jobseekers. Increasingly, domination and punitive measures are becoming the norm in dealing with the excess to capital. For instance, the size and composition of this group is heavily regulated through immigration policies. For the surplus, migrating to countries with better job prospects is a common response to high unemployment and has been the historical norm. In the nineteenth century, as the mechanisation of agriculture transformed the countryside, the dominant outlet was mass emigration to the New World.141 Yet today the option to migrate is increasingly closed off for the developing world. While there are a variety of reasons voiced to justify tighter immigration controls, reducing the potentially unruly excess labour supply has often been a dominant one.142 Today, we see the militarisation of America’s border with Mexico and the rise of Fortress Europe in response to mistaken fears about jobs being taken by foreigners. Yet the desperation of immigrants to find a decent job is such that, even when faced with the threat of death, they still make the perilous trip to a new country. The result is that the past fifteen years have seen over 22,000 migrants die trying to get into Europe, more than 6,000 die trying to cross the Mexico–US border, and over 1,500 die trying to get to Australia.143 These lethal barriers to migration are one of the primary mechanisms used today to segregate and manage global surplus populations. And inextricable from this treatment of migrants is racialised coding: these immigrants are not simply other individuals, but other races. Whether ‘foreign hordes’ threatening the sanctity of the European border, or immigrant textile workers in Thailand being subject to hyper-exploitation and abuse, racial hierarchies are an essential component of the control of surplus populations.144

When the co-optation of the surplus into a disciplined excess workforce has failed, the state can always resort to simply locking up, excluding and brutalising large sections of the surplus population. Across the world, mass incarceration has been increasing as the size of prison populations rise in both absolute and relative terms.145 Moreover, there is a significant racial component to this – most notably in the mass incarceration of the US black population, but also of Muslims in much of Europe, Aboriginals in Canada, and the detention and deportation of foreign migrants around the world.146 These systems of mass incarceration must be understood to extend beyond prisons, as they encompass an entire network of laws, courts, policies, habits and rules that work to subjugate a group of people.147 Mass incarceration is a system of social control aimed primarily at surplus populations rather than at crime. For example, increases in manufacturing unemployment are associated globally with increases in police employment.148 As the reserve army grows, so too does the state’s punitive apparatus. Likewise, the expansion of immigrant detention centres responds to the demise of subsistence economies and the formation of a mobile proletariat.149 Those who are unwilling to be forced into slums seek better opportunities elsewhere, only to be locked up or left for dead on the Mediterranean. The American system is perhaps the clearest example of how surplus populations and police enforcement intertwine. The well-documented surge in mass incarceration over the past few decades was not a response to rising crime rates,150 but rather to the proliferation of jobless ghettos and the advances made by the civil rights movement. The racialised nature of this system is well known, but the patterns of incarceration cannot be fully understood without reference to class and surplus populations. For instance, middle-class and upper-class black populations are largely left alone,151 and the vast majority of the prison population consists of the ‘working or workless poor’.152 Likewise, the disparities in incarceration between races are outpaced by the disparities in terms of class,153 and the rise of mass black incarceration coincides with the decline in employment for that same population.154 In fact, the racial nature of mass incarceration in America stems ‘exclusively’ from the wildly disproportionate locking up of lower-class black populations.155 Mass incarceration has therefore become a means to manage and control this surplus that has been excluded from the labour market and left in poverty. Spatially concentrated in inner-city ghettos, these groups became an easy target of state control. This intersects with race, of course, as the origins of jobless ghettos lie in the active exclusion of the black population of the United States. And in many ways, the carceral system perpetuates the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the ghettos – replacing many of their functions with a new system of exclusion.156 But class enables us to see a distinction: whereas those previous systems of social control exploited free labour and attempted to transform black populations into a disciplined workforce, the modern prison system is designed largely to exclude and control the surplus population.157 Given the effects of having a criminal record, the carceral system brings about a triple exclusion: from cultural and educational capital, from political participation and from public aid.158 The end result is that incarceration initiates a vicious circle with the urban poor left unemployed and unable to find a job, thereby endlessly reproducing these groups as outside of capital.159 Rather than trying to reform, educate and reintegrate prisoners into capitalist society, convoluted systems are set up to keep them out and to prevent their re-entry into normal wage labour after prison. At its extreme, these populations become simply disposable, situated outside of normal society and subject to gratuitous violence. The end result is a system that produces and reproduces permanent exclusion from the formal economy. These populations are deemed dispensable, and subjected to all the police brutality and state violence that can be mustered against them. We have, therefore, an entire range of mechanisms that the state and capital use to manage surplus populations, ranging from disciplined integration to violent exclusion.