Emphasizing work leads to global wage-less-ness

Still, we shouldn’t stop pushing back against reifying work as the source of both income and social worth. Ongoing expropriation and proletarianization have left billions worldwide in a condition of what historian Michael Denning calls “wageless life,” rendered surplus to capital’s needs and struggling to scrape by in a system that starts “not with the offer of work, but with the imperative to earn a living.” And so while basic income sounds like a program for rich countries—a luxury made possible by a certain level of prosperity—it may be even more promising in places where it seems most unaffordable. In recent years UBI pilot programs have rolled out in Namibia, Kenya, and Uganda, mostly funded by NGOs; more generally, cash transfer programs, which aim to diminish poverty by giving poor people money—though often with specific criteria or restrictions—are the latest fad in development. Elsewhere, public support provides more in the way of livelihoods than do private wages: the anthropologist James Ferguson notes that more South Africans receive income from government welfare programs, whether child allowances or disability aid, than from waged labor. Basic income, Ferguson argues, may be the way to achieve social welfare in countries where the prospect of job creation on a scale adequate to the population is little more than a fantasy. Of course, the above model, based on postwar growth in the United States and Western Europe, is now a fantasy here too. Donald Trump will fail to make America great again in the way he’s promised. The factory jobs aren’t coming back, and neither are 4 percent growth rates. Even the desperate deals to keep individual plants running won’t stave off the robots: Carrier, for example, has already said it will put most of the money it promised to invest in its Indiana plant into automation. Which is why, despite the dangers of UBI, it remains an important time for the left to develop a view of a society less oriented around work: as the futility of Fordist nostalgia becomes more and more apparent, both here and around the globe, the left should seize the opportunity to push for a different view of what work should be, how much of it we should do, and what role it should play in our lives.