Full-Time Citizens: A critique of the debate around the Anti-Work Movement.

While a majority of Communist and Socialist parties, at least in Europe, still hold on to the demand of "work for everybody", a current of socialist thought that has developed and gained popularity over the years is that of the anti-work left. It holds that the idea of full employment is at best, a misunderstanding of social and material conditions, and at worst, a call for totalitarianism. The anti-work left instead generally calls for some sort of guaranteed minimum income and a radical reduction in work-hours.

I definitely agree that the call for full employment is mislead, even though, as I will discuss later, I have several big issues with the movement. It has it's roots in a series of misunderstandings and false ideals. Among these incorrect understanding, ideals and preconceptions are:

1. That full employment is necessary to satisfy the needs of society. Research done by people like Roland Paulsen shows that this is not the case. 
2. That people who are not employed constitute an exploitative class. This would then mean the disabled, children and stay-at-home parents are exploiters. This is usually not a view that is officially held, but rather a silent assumption inherited from bourgeois society.
3. Nostalgia for the U.S.S.R, PRC and other 20th century socialist systems. Most of these states were pre-industrial or severely backwards in terms of economic structure. They did have to work hard to both develop economically and satisfy the basic needs of the population. We, however, do not live in post-Tsarist Russia, or post-colonial China. The technology and means of distribution is radically different, and our demands must as such be different.
4. That the material conditions allow for full employment. Production of basic consumer goods and services now require less and less human labour.
5. Internalization of bourgeois ideals. The neoliberal agenda, whether left or right, is the creation of jobs and the growth of the capitalist economy. A socialist agenda should oppose the idea of the "creation of jobs" by stating that we want a society based on the motto "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs", not a society that without analysis of the needs and abilities of the people creates jobs that fill no other purpose than bringing in profit for the bourgeois class. The Socialist groups and parties who fails to remember this simple goal should be thoroughly criticized. 

While these are valid points against the rhetoric of full employment, all too often the proposed ideals, analyses and tactics fail to convince. If we just take something as simple as a semantic issue, "anti-work" might not be the best description of the problem. The problem isn't that there is too much work, it is that work is not directed toward the areas it is needed, like healthcare, distribution of resources, education. The central point is that productivity and social usefulness is not limited to the shackles of employment. Anti-employment could be more an appropriate term, but it is not without it's issues, since this might be interpreted as a call for "everyone must work, just not for wages". Still, it does represent the issue better.

Furthermore, there's a clear lack of understanding of third-world economic contribution in this mostly Western discourse. A lot of the calls for anti-work ignore global conditions like imperialism, colonialism and transnational economic exploitation. While such an analysis doesn't negate the struggle against needless expansion of jobs for profit, it does put a dent into utopian visions of social life being a holiday of Western self-fulfillment. If this is not carefully addressed by the movement, the movement could find itself in a position where it's arguing for Western people to live on the wealth produced by people in the Third World. All the wealth existing in the Western world is not ours to take and distribute, and some of the necessities might come from these Third World places. There needs to be a discussion of how to relate to this problem. This, however, does not negate the struggle against the neoliberal rhetoric of full employment.

In terms of tactics, most of the Anti-Work movement finds itself squarely in the postmodern politics of resistance. This ideological faction of the left is reluctant or dismissive of the idea of a revolution in the traditional sense. We are only to resist power, not take it and use it, is the general idea. Create local communes and coops and hope that it all will somehow tie in to some other people's communes and coops that with the use of lefty-magic we are to break the hegemony and destroy capitalism. The politics of resistance is in actuality a politics of avoidance, a refusal to recognize that unless you become the hegemony, the  hegemony will eat you. You can't hide from the class system - if we could we all would and should, but we can't - we must confront it directly and dismantle it. Furthermore the entire point of the struggle against the neoliberal employment system is that it creates employment where there is no need for employment, and neglects putting people into productive employment where it's needed. How do we expect that this postmodern left, who refuse to organize at a national and global level, are going to be able to rationally plan where productive employment is necessary on a macro-level, when they do not even acknowledge the need for any macro-level of administrative politics? True, some have a loose idea of a system of federation, but this idea sometimes contradicts their own values of local communal autonomy and anti-centralism (what use is the "up" in the "democracy from the bottom-up" if the "up" has no power to impose anything?). Even though we do not propose a return to a replica of early 20th century Bolshevism, a system for administrative economic planning on the macro-level is not something that can be dismissed simply by pointing at the end-results of historical Communist states. A system of economic planning, with the aim of keeping the waste of human labour to a minimum, needs to be discussed here. If we are worried about the potentially authoritarian results of working with planning at the macro-level, then discuss ways this authoritarian tendency can avoided, but don't dismiss the macro-level of economical and political processes.

Secondly, there needs to be a creative solution to the problem of what happens after employment. The "citizens income" solution is constantly being framed within the context of capitalism (in fact, Milton Friedman had his own ideas of citizens income, and Keynes suggested it as a future development). Capitalism is in most places assumed to be still intact when this system of income is introduced. In socialist society, it is already assumed that everyone has a right to food, shelter and healthcare etc. A common argument, which I support, is that for work-sharing, meaning a system of work were labor hours are reduced and workers share more than one job with each-other. Still, this is within the realm of an employed working class, and since we've concluded that full employment isn't a possibility, there are still a lot of people out there who don't have anything specific to do. I propose a system of Full-Time Citizenship, were these unemployed people are encouraged to engage in grassroots organizing and societal transformation in the spirit of Mao's Cultural Revolution. This idea means that a member of society not tied up with productive labor gets together with other people to analyse the needs ands wants of society, and democratically organize projects to fill those needs. A Full-Time Citizen is a person who's mission is to serve their local community, municipality and society at large, and is not tied to one specific line of work or employment. This could mean anything from raising ideological awareness to certain issues to building institutions and organizations that deal directly with a problem at hand. This is just a rough sketch of a new idea, but I think ideas such as this are the kinds of things that need to be brought to the forefront in the debate around the neoliberal employment society and alternatives to it.