Young Master Smeet
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Actually, he also had this to say, which I may have been remembering:
“The first draft of the constitution,<sup class=”enote”>[86]</sup> made before the June days, still contained the droit au travail, the right to work, the first clumsy formula wherein the revolutionary demands of the proletariat are summarized. It was transformed into the droit à l’assistance, the right to public relief, and what modern state does not feed its paupers in some form or other? The right to work is, in the bourgeois sense, an absurdity, a miserable, pious wish. But behind the right to work stands the power over capital; behind the power over capital, the appropriation of the means of production, their subjection to the associated working class, and therefore the abolition of wage labor, of capital, and of their mutual relations. Behind the “right to work” stood the June insurrection. The Constituent Assembly, which in fact put the revolutionary proletariat hors la loi, outside the law, had on principle to throw the proletariat’s formula out of the constitution, the law of laws; had to pronounce its anathema upon the “right to work.” But it did not stop there. As Plato banned the poets from his republic, so it banished forever from its republic the progressive tax. And the progressive tax is not only a bourgeois measure, which can be carried out within the existing relations of production to a greater or less degree, it was the only means of binding the middle strata of bourgeois society to the “respectable” republic, of reducing the state debt, of holding the anti-republican majority of the bourgeoisie in check.”
Kim Stanley Robinson goes old school and proposes instead a job guarantee, which IMNSHO is better than UBI, but the issue is that actually, in abolishes the labour market outright, and the appeal to MMT is dangerous social credit crankery, effectively, it is a socialist revolution, because the jobs would have to be regulated/planned somehow.
However, as Charlie put it:
“The right to work was first advanced by Fourier, <sup class=”enote”>[6]</sup> but with him it is realised only in the phalanstery and therefore presupposes the adoption of the latter. The Fourierists – peace-loving philistines of the Démocratie pacifique, as their paper was called, disseminated that phrase precisely because it sounded innocuous. The Paris workers of 1848 – with their utter confusion in theoretical matters allowed this phrase to be palmed off on them because it looked so practical, so non-utopian, so readily realisable. The government put it into practice – in the only way capitalist society could put it into practice – by building nonsensical national workshops. In the same way the right to work was realised here in Lancashire during the cotton crisis of 1861-64 by building municipal workshops. And in Germany it is also put into operation by establishing starvation and flogging colonies for the workers, which are now arousing the enthusiasm of the philistines. Put forward as a separate demand the right to work cannot be realised in any other way. One demands that capitalist society should make that right effective but this society can do that only within the framework of its conditions of existence and if one demands the right to work in this society one demands it subject to these definite conditions; hence one demands national workshops, workhouses and colonies. But if the demand of the right to work is supposed to include indirectly the demand for the transformation of the capitalist mode of production, it is a cowardly regression in comparison with the present state of the movement, a concession to the Anti-Socialist Law, a phrase that can serve no other purpose than to confuse and muddle up the workers with regard to the aims they have to pursue and the sole conditions under which they can achieve their aims…”
Paul Mason makes the interesting point, after last night’s letters from the military top brass, that the police may be the bigger threat than the military:
https://twitter.com/paulmasonnews/status/1268539086702358530
It’s worth bearing in mind, Pinochet’s lot had to assassinate the chief of staff and remove another constitutionalist general before they could get him into position.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AghfXFnKYe4&feature=youtu.be
Varoufakis on Universal Basic dividend…
Oh, and at the risk of derailing my own thread, this seems to be the official view of the BoE now:
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/knowledgebank/how-is-money-created
But, I think this is the key line for us:
“This also means as you pay off the loan, the electronic money your bank created is “deleted” – it no longer exists. You haven’t got richer or poorer. You might have less money in your bank account but your debts have gone down too. So essentially, banks create money, not wealth.”
So, banks are financial intermediaries after all….
Paul Mason has been touting this bizarre article:
https://www.ubilabnetwork.org/blog/the-marxist-case-for-basic-income
“First we have those, like the New Economics Foundation (NEF) and UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP), who see basic income as too individualistic. They want to meet people’s needs, but needs as they define them and as they provide for them; this is why they prefer the idea of Universal Basic Services (UBS), for it maintains existing power structures and it enables a centralised definition of public good. Historically this was the position adopted by the Fabians, the Left eugenicists and ultimately by Lenin himself, and we might think of it as aristocratic Marxism.”
That totally misses the UBS case, and betrays certain prejudices on the author’s part (and how liberals would attack a concerted UBS case).
Rutger Bregman in his Utopia for realists (ah, the Chapter is online:
Likewise:
Speenhamland, automation, and Basic Income: A response
Torry, Malcolm
Renewal : a Journal of Labour Politics, 2018, Vol.26(1), pp.32-35“[Speenhamland] … was an extension of poor relief to the working poor. The supplements paid out of the rates guaranteed a net income. They were definitely not a ‘Basic Income’. The difference is crucial. A guaranteed minimum income is a minimum income level below which a household’s income is not allowed to fall, and the payment made is designed to bring a household’s net income up to the specified level. The modern equivalents are Working Tax Credits and so-called Universal Credit. In Speenhamland the supplement paid out was designed to fill the gap between the worker’s earnings and a specified minimum income that was related to the size of the family and to the price of bread. The supplement was a means-tested benefit.
“A Basic Income is entirely different. It is an equal payment to every individual of the same age. The difference is clear. The Speenhamland payments fell if earnings rose, and rose if earnings fell. A Basic Income remains the same whatever the individual’s earnings. This means that the effects are very different. The Speenhamland supplement functioned as a dynamic subsidy. It rose if wages fell, so employers who cut wages knew that the supplement would make up for the wage cut. A Basic Income would be a static subsidy: that is, it would not rise if wages fell, so both employers and employees would know that if wages fell then employees’ families would be worse off. Both collective bargaining and the National Living Wage would be even more important than they are now, and the effort to maintain them would intensify.”
If anything, a basic income is worse than a guaranteed income…
Indeed, that’s just the book I’m reading, and it specifically mentions the demographic economics the Nazis pioneered.
This all has contemporary resonances:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/51560120
Patel claims there are 8.5 economically inactive potential workers in the UK, but if the Tories are determined to restrict immigration and compel British citizens to come out of retirement, then an Aufheben style ‘refusal of work’ campaign becomes a sensible strategy.
Finally, I’d just like to mention democracy and communism.
Just to underline the importance of understanding and contesting notions of “productivity”, I’m just ploughing through a history of the Holocaust which notes that notions of “overpopulation” and productive population predominated in the Nazi ideology regarding moving (and reducing the population of Europe: essentially for what we would call primary accumulation). They even managed to classify informal and household labour as unproductive mouths to feed, because it didn’t contribute to capital accumulation and savings. And, of course, this notion of “overpopulation” and optimum productivity was itself a means of masking the real underlying cause of poverty in capitalistic production relations (they did, however, look to Stalin’s forced collectivisation as a model of how to resolve the ‘rural crisis’).
Of course, this is the apogee of alienation, of seeing people made to fulfil the abstract ecojnomic model, rather than looking to human need.
As to productivity and surplus value, it is worth noting that as capitalist relations of production develop, so prices diverge more and more from value, and a given firm will be realising surplus value produced at an entirely different firm, as production, productivity and division of labour become more pronounced it becomes impossible to say who contributed what to the economic output, and this gives grist to our mill of abolishing the need for money and pricing altogether, replacing it with co-operative production for needs.
Finally, I’d just like to mention democracy and communism.
To briefly expose my ideology, I am a Jethroist Tullist Flautist, and the main tennets of Jethroism Tullism Flautism are famous and need no further elaboration.
I think the obvious answer of who finds the work unproductive and useless is the people doing that work, and as for alienating workers who do useless work, Shirley, the useless work itself should be a motivation for socialism and we should help clarify that there is a means to end that toil? Demonstrating that although a type of work might be profitable for capitalists it might not contribute to neither the happiness of the worker nor anyone they know’s also adds grist to the scrocialist mill.
Clipping out the bits where I actually go back to the basic concept to explain that to then claim I’m arguing by authority is hardly friendly discussion, especially when that is the exact opposite of what I was doing.
As for:
“So, are you saying that the political purpose of employing the term ‘unproductive labour’ is to persuade academics, who regard themselves as ‘middle class’, to change their political and ideological views?”
No, I’m saying the swans fly over Vienna at midnight, I thought that was plain enough.
Productive and unproductive are useful concepts when discussing useful work versus useless toil, and especially when we can show that productive labour is useless,
To go back to Charlie’s original concept: when a direct producer was going to market, or doing their accounts, they weren’t making anything, that was sunken time away from production of wealth.
Now, part of that may have been an attempt on Marx’ part to demonstrate that the capitalist class itself was not productive, and did not add value, so even where agents/employees do the work of the capitalist, going to market and doing accounts, they must remain unproductive.
This is attractive to those who want to talk of a ‘middle class’ and thus exclude those who do not directly produce surplus value from the working class.
Perhaps by way of analogy we can clarify the situation: chattel slavery is built on the extraction of surplus, not surplus value, that surplus gets transformed into value in the market later. The slaves in the fields produced the crop that would be sold, the house slaves most certainly did not, indeed, they did not produce any surplus. they were still essential to the slave holders operations, and they could not have run the plantation without the house slaves.
Nonetheless, the house slaves were still slaves, and still exploited by the slave system.
Who determines what counts as ‘makes a profit’? An individual capitalist? The capitalist class as a whole? A sector of capital? A nation? These would all have differing views, depending upon their varying interests.
Exactly.
And why would any socialist accept a bourgeois definition?
To criticise it.
Some try to adopt it, on the basis that they see the law of value continuing into socialist society, but it is best IMNSHO used as part of a criticism of how capitalism is not run in our interests. tehre may be some element that can be used in decadence theory.
Part of the productive (for capital)/unproductive critique is in enabling criticism of capitalism.
Maria Mazzucato in her ‘The Value of Everything’ take a look at national accounting (where the state is by definition unproductive, and things like housework don’t appear), she also has looked at the role of the state in R&D and how much real value it is worth. The problem is, from the POV of the owners of capital, that which does not make them a profit is unproductive, so the same type of labour, say a nurse in a state hospital and a nurse in a private hospital and unproductive and productive respectively.
I think Mattick is worth reading on this:
“To pay off its debts and the attendant interest, the government has to use tax money, or make new borrowings. In other words, the products which the government “purchases” are not really purchased, but given to the government free; for the government has nothing to give in return but its credit standing, which, in turn, has no other base than the government’s taxing-power and ability to increase the supply of credit-money. However the credit expansion is brought about, and however it is dealt with in the course of an expanding government-induced production, one thing is clear – that the national debt, and the interest on it, can be honored only as a reduction of current and future income generated in the private sector of the economy. ” [My emphasis]
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1969/marx-keynes/index.htm
Other reasons why it is relevant can be seen here:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch06.htm
For the capitalists, the costs of administration are things they would like to shrug off because they are a sunken cost, likewise transportation. We can look at the tenacity by which leftists want to nationalise railways, which are an unproductive sector, and leave productive sectors alone. Indeed, in the context of HS2 it is doubtful the railways (except for land swindles) have ever been directly productive for capital.
