On the demands: #occupywallstreet

So the discussion of demands is underway, stimulated by a serious, specific proposal from the demands working group. It's a good position to think about, to frame discussion. I have a number of concerns about it, though. The most general is: does this demand change our current discussion of the economy? Does it rupture the discussion of the economy in the same way the occupations themselves have ruptured our sense of the possible? I think the ultimate answer is no. And because I think these demands too easily fit into business as usual, I think we need to engage, criticize, and rethink them.

First, the jobs for all plan too easily reiterates Obama's rhetoric and proposals: infrastructure, clean energy, education, health. In fact, the Obama administration could say that it actually began some of these efforts (although it would of course concede that 'we can do more') with its (pathetically weak) stimulus program last year.

Second, and accordingly, the Obama program failed in part because the money was never distributed, the programs were implemented in a half-assed way, and they got trapped within other deals and regulations. As described by the demands committee, the jobs program can be inserted directly into such a slot. One can imagine an implementation that gives money to states for road construction (existing program) and mass transit (which some states moronically refused to accept earlier this year).

Third, the program too easily resembles Clinton's moves from welfare to workfare. One way the demands as currently formulated seek  to avoid that is by inserting 'union wages.' That's good--but why not just say unionized jobs? Or quality, creative, and flexible unionized jobs? I add creative and flexible because we don't want the sort of jobs Perry created in Texas (sub-minimum wage) nor do we want people forced into meaningless drudgery. If the jobs suck, then the plan is no better than the forcible creation of a class of workers completely alienated from their work.

Fourth, the plan omits from consideration the lives of people outside the paid workforce--retirees on fixed income, those with disabilities, children, people responsible for caring for everybody else. Once these folks are brought into the picture, we have to deal with transportation and childcare/eldercare issues.

What might be preferable? To begin with the recognition that creative production is a common. From this follows the idea of a guaranteed minimum income separate from work. A guaranteed minimum income or social wage acknowledges that each, albeit differently, contributes to the social whole. It also recognizes that there are technological conditions that make many kinds of labor redundant and unnecessary--but people still gotta it. 

A further implication of the idea of common creative production is that it makes us recognize different sorts of work and have to determine which ones are good places for our energies and which ones are not--I don't think it makes sense for social energies to be expended in financial speculation, in the creation of bizarre financial instruments, in secondary and tertiary forms of insurance. I do think it makes sense to to expend social energies in teaching and learning, in mending and caring for our common world, in proper stewardship over our environment.  

But maybe the jobs for all ultimately does this. That is, maybe the concerns I raise are ill-founded because the very idea of universal healthcare, housing, education, and transportation ruptures the market logic of insurance, subprime mortgages, privatization, and car culture in which we are drowning. Maybe jobs for all is a radical break with what we have and not a prescription for a mandatory works program that forces people to spend their time in uncreative and unrewarding ways. Maybe it has just enough impossibility (to those who think in the old way) to break the constraints of the possible.

Comments

[spectralcat]

I share some of your concerns about this demand, but it's important to make clear that the demands group has always been explicit that they see this as merely the first in a series of demands, and that this demand does incorporate a wide-range of separate smaller demands the group came up with. It is also considerably more radical than anything the Obama administration would willingly touch (but the fact that a militant grass roots movement might be able to force the state to adopt it seems to me to be a strength, not a weakness). Your suggestion about the "living wage" demand is a powerful alternative, but I'm not sure that it would sound as compelling to the unemployed guys standing in front of my apartment building, and these are also the people most severely impacted by NYC's cutbacks in public services. But I've come to see the real strength of this demand as the hostility it's provoked from many of the central actors in OWS. I was at the demands meeting last Tuesday evening, and I watched a group of college-educated, young, (predominately) white men shut down the demands meeting (by filibustering it). These guys red-baited the demand supporters and openly mocked the idea of government programs distributing aid to poor people (as "Obama socialist crap"). There is zero chance that this demand will pass through the OWS general assembly (90% consent is required and few people who are not sleeping in the park have the time to participate in that vote), and that simple fact is evidence of how profoundly anti-democratic and elitist the occupation itself is. Having left-wing organizations working under the OWS umbrella strikes me at this point as really problematic. While I think it's important for these groups to maintain solidarity with OWS, and for the OWS general assembly to represent the beliefs of the people actually living in the park (in this respect the open-source group's competing proposal strikes me as pretty good), we should not allow the OWS general assembly to set the agenda for the broader left movement.

[Joepdx]

I want to affirm your idea of a productive commons and a basic income guarantee (BIG). I would only want to suggest that we dis-abuse ourselves of the "not for work" frame the plagues some discussions of BIG, which takes for granted certain ideas about the usefulness and worth of work not operating on a basis of exchange. Your idea of a productive commons already anticipates it, but BIG supports people doing work, but not necessarily making (exchange) values. The really radical potential of BIG is that it helps us realize work beyond any conditional exchange relations, something which I think haunts even much historical socialism. Despite what Graeber says about Marx being taken in by "the myth of barter", he was also beating back the productivity-fetishists in Critique of the Gotha Programme.