Totalizing rejection of the dignity of labor collapses into neoliberalism

(Anton Jäger is is a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, working on the history of populism in the United States. https://jacobinmag.com/2018/12/post-work-labor-ubi-coercion-capitalism)

DH Yeah, I once heard this argument about nurses — for example, they love their work, they love taking care of patients. But what they don’t like is the way the doctors treat them, the way their pay is stagnant, the way they’re always expected to do more and more work with fewer and fewer resources. They like the work, but the conditions under which they have to perform it are what’s oppressive, not the work itself. AJ Absolutely. I think there is a tricky thing in just calling for the defense of the dignity of labor. This is a critique of the article that is often leveled: “Oh, he’s just calling for the liberation of socially valued labor from capitalist labor.” The idea is that, “Oh, you can just liberate the concrete from the abstract and everything will be done with.” So the idea is, “If we just get rid of the doctors and the tyrannical hospital bosses, then the nurses can just run the hospitals for themselves.” But that’s a tricky thing, because even that concrete form or socially valuable form of labor is completely conditioned by the employment relationship. I would just call for defense of the dignity of labor. But at the same time, there is this easy abolitionism which just says, “Oh, these nurses are just culturally wrong to believe that the work they’re doing is valuable.” I find that not only condescending, but I think it’s also untenable, because it just doesn’t speak to people’s real desire for independence in many ways. DH By making the argument against work itself, as you point out in the piece (and you’ve said other people have pointed out), you’re writing off all questions of the organization of production and the organization of labor. We’re not talking about how we should organize work, we’re not talking about how we should organize economic life. We’re just throwing up our hands and saying, “Just write me a check for a UBI.” AJ Yeah. And I think the skepticism I have for post-work extends into the skepticism I have for UBI. I think if you look at the long history of social policy in which these kinds of basic grants have been proposed, the UBI is, again, a product of the late 1960s and early 1970s, where there was, first, this idea that there is a sort of neutralization of production. You have an abundance of consumer goods, you have the idea that full-on automation is around the corner. So the sphere of production really gets abandoned by certain people on the Left. And the idea as well that the main battle will now be waged on the level of consumption. But at the same time, it’s again an argument that’s not very tenable, because we have realized that consumption was still being determined by production. And if you want to seek emancipation of the sphere of consumption, you always have to ask the question, “Well, what is the sphere of consumption dependent on? Oh, it’s dependent on the sphere of production.” And if you don’t control production then you’ll never be able to fully seek freedom in the sphere of consumption. What I think UBI does nowadays is it naturalizes a whole list of factors which are actually intrinsically political. It naturalizes unemployment, it naturalizes low growth, it naturalizes the retreat from the sphere of production, which is already going on, certainly in the labor movement itself. I mean, there are technical objections to be made to the UBI. You can ask how much it costs. You can ask what it actually addresses with some of the real problems with our labor market. But at the same time, I think the real problem with the UBI is that it’s very, very unattractive politically, because the vision that underlies it —I don’t think it’s a vision hospitable to real notions of freedom, basically.