Lambert here: A dense treatment of a subject of burning concern.
By Guy Standing, Professorial Research Associate, SOAS University of London, Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences, and co-founder and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). Subjects of recent books include basic income, rentier capitalism and the growing precariat. He is a council member of the Progressive Economy Forum. Originally published at Open Democracy.
Transformations tend to go through several preliminary phases. In Britain, the ‘dis-embedded’ phase in the development of industrial capitalism involved the Speenhamland system launched in 1795, the mass enclosures that created a proto-proletariat, and disruption by a technological revolution. All this prompted a period of primitive rebels – those who know what they are against, but not agreed on what they are for – in which protests were mainly against the breakdown of the previous social compact.
Those included the days-of-rage phase that culminated in the mass protest in Peterloo in 1819, brutally suppressed by the state, and the Luddites, misrepresented ever since as being workers intent on smashing machines to halt ‘progress’, when in fact what they were doing was protesting at the destruction of a way of living and working being done without a quid pro quo.
In my A Precariat Charter written in 2014, sketching a precariat manifesto for today’s Global Transformation, I concluded by citing the stanza from Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy, written in reaction to the Peterloo massacre. Jeremy Corbyn was later to cite it in his campaign speech of 2017, which James Schneider recalls in his contribution to this debate. Shelley expressed it in class, not populist terms, as I did, in my case signifying that the precariat was evolving as a class-in-the-making. Corbyn seems to have expressed it in support of a left populism.
Until his drowning at an early age, Shelley along with Byron and other artists of that era, including Mozart, were railing against the bourgeoisie, which is why Mozart and Byron were both drawn to the Don Juan/Don Giovanni theme. The Romantics failed to arrest the march of industrial capitalism but their art put out a marker for the future counter movement.
The UK and ‘Decent Labour’
The trouble was that at the time the emerging mass ‘working class’, the proletariat, had not yet taken shape as a class-for-itself, and was not ready to do so until late in the century. Three other primitive rebel events should be read into the narrative – the pink revolutions of 1848, often called the Springtime of the Peoples, wrongly seen by some at the time as presaging the proletarian revolution, the brave prolonged activities of the Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s, which advanced the cause of political democracy despite defeat, and the upheavals in the 1890s that the left have tended to underplay.
The latter marked an enormous historical error by ‘the left’. It is why the term ‘dangerous class’ was in the sub-title of my The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, published in early 2011. Although some Marxists have used it to describe the ‘lumpen proletariat’, the term ‘dangerous class’ was used in the nineteenth century to describe those who were in neither the bourgeoisie nor the emerging proletariat. They were the craftsmen, artisans, street traders and artists, from whose ranks came the leading figures articulating a version of socialism as rejection of labourism – freedom from labour, freedom to work and to leisure (reviving ideas of ancient Greece, embracing schole).
In the 1890s, against William Morris and colleagues, including some anarchists, who championed that emancipatory vision, were the labourists, state socialists, Fabians and others who wanted to generalise decent labour. By the turn of the twentieth century, the latter had triumphed and marched forward in labour unions, social democratic parties and Leninism, even though most of the first batch of Labour MPs in 1906, when asked by an enterprising journalist what book had most influenced them, mentioned John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, not anything by Karl Marx.
So, we should interpret what Karl Polanyi was to call the Great Transformation as beginning with a period of dis-embeddedness, when the old social formation with its specific systems of regulation, social protection and redistribution was being dismantled mainly by the interests of financial capital, guided by an ideology of laissez-faire liberalism. This produced growing structural insecurities, inequalities, stress, precarity, technological disruption, debt and ecological destruction, culminating in an era of war, pandemics – most relevantly, the Spanish flu of 1918-1920, which may have killed 50 million people – and the Great Depression.
The re-embedded phase came after 1945, with European welfare states, shaped by Bismarckian and Beveridge systems of social security and the Swedish model crafted by Gosta Rehn and Rudolf Meidner. This transformation marked the triumph of labourism, of the industrial proletariat.[i] It was not marked by populism. Its political leaders and intellectual architects were as uncharismatic as you could imagine.
The Great Transformation ran into the sand in the 1970s, by when de-industrialisation had frayed the proletariat as a mass social force. The trouble was that the mainstream left were trapped by their own history. They had built what is often called, misleadingly, les trente glorieuses, but, like Polanyi himself, they implicitly had a teleological perspective rather than a dialectical one. For too many of the mainstream left, the Transformation was essentially complete. The rest was a matter of defending what had been gained and fine-tuning the welfare state and state ownership of the means of production. But labourism was increasingly reactionary, in both senses of that word.
This was brought to a crisis in the cauldron of radical ‘primitive rebel’ protests in 1968. Once again, those participating in the upheavals knew what they were against but had less unity or clarity in articulating what they were for. Again, this was not a populist moment, it reflected the breakdown in the post-1945 social compact and the protest of elements of the dangerous class that despised dour labourism as much as capitalism. The bourgeoisie looked on with horror and disgust.
The loss of public energy and unity after 1968, and growing ‘stagflation’, created fertile ground for the emergence of the dis-embedded phase of the Global Transformation, the painful construction of a globalised market society. With due respect, interpreting what has happened in terms of populism is a distraction.
From Neo-liberalism to Rentier XCapitalism
The Mont Pelerin Society that groomed the economic and political leaders of the 1980s between 1947 and 1979 could be called ‘neo-liberal’, in that they believed in free market capitalism, financial and capital market liberalisation and extreme individualism. Undoubtedly, they and their politicians, notably Thatcher, Reagan and others listed in The Corruption of Capitalism (second edition, 2021), were advocates of global capital and vehemently against the proletariat.
Many commentators forget that Thatcher was an accidental leader, who never gained the support of a majority of the electorate.[ii] Intense class conflict ensued. Key events were the miners’ strikes in Britain and the defeat of the air traffic controllers in the United States. The miners’ strike was doomed from the outset, but represented the protest of the dying class, standing up, or going down, with dignity. Those who defied the state deserve our respect.
Here we come to the first crucial point I wish to make in this article. The ideology used to break the old social formation was what we now call neo-liberalism – known in its various guises as the Washington Consensus, the Chicago School, shock therapy and supply-side economics. It corresponded to the ideology guiding the dis-embedded phase in the Great Transformation. But neoliberalism does not define the system that it forged. It was a destructive ideological tool, the hallmark of which was virulent determination to dismantle all institutions and mechanisms of social solidarity, the benchmarks of ‘the left’, on the grounds that they stood against the market.
Neoliberalism essentially died in the 1980s as a political project. By then it had done its work. It had laid the ground for financial capital to take control from national production capital. The Big Bang in the City of London symbolised that moment, although reforms in the USA and elsewhere preceded it. Multinational financial and corporate capital then forged the hegemonic system of today – rentier capitalism. This in turn, as in previous dis-embedded phases in the evolution of capitalism, ushered in a new class structure with new class tensions.
We will come to those later. First, a few words on rentier capitalism. It represents the triumph of private property rights over free market principles. Contrary to what neo-liberals claim, it is the most unfree market system ever constructed. More and more of the income flows to owners or controllers of property – financial, physical and intellectual. The income and wealth gained are forms of rent, not profits from production or wages.
Indeed, another error of the mainstream left was to think neoliberalism ushered in a ‘deregulated’ labour market. As argued elsewhere, the labour market is more tightly regulated than in the social democratic industrial capitalism era. It is just that it is regulated in favour of capital, and the mainstream left helped to make that happen.
There is no space here to go into the contours of rentier capitalism.[iii] But a key point for political action in the coming period is that a transformation can only be forged if one understands the structures one wishes to see transformed. A focus on ‘neoliberalism’ gives rentier capitalism a free pass.
Borrowing from the philosophy of science, we may say that a paradigm will not be displaced by a new paradigm until the existing one prompts questions that its practitioners cannot answer and a new paradigm exists to fill its place with a bevy of advocates and practitioners capable of implementing it.
This should remind ourselves of the nature of political transformations. Rentier capitalism is the latest form of capitalism to ‘negate’ the pursuit of Enlightenment values, encapsulated in its trinity of freedom, equality and solidarity. In that regard, Chantal Mouffe correctly refers to ‘struggles for equality and liberty’ and calls for a ‘deepening of democracy’. One should also emphasise a need to ‘deepen solidarity’, through promoting new collective bodies, as is recognised in Spyros Sofos. However, the immediate challenge is to achieve ‘the negation of the negation’. This is an ontological perspective, not a teleological one. We may not be able to define precisely what type of society we wish to create in the longer term, but we should be able to see what the near Future could be.
This point relates to another historical error of the mainstream left, that is, twentieth century social democrats. They lost a sense of the Future. They became reactionary, at best promising to restore Yesterday.
The Precariat in the Global Class Structure
This leads to the class structure generated by the combination of neoliberalism and its progeny, rentier capitalism. It is a globalised class fragmentation superimposed on earlier class structures, which always linger. Very briefly, we should define classes by three dimensions – distinctive relations of production, distinctive relations of distribution and distinctive relations to the state. It is essential to define classes in this multi-dimensional way in order to escape both from the old pseudo-Marxist dualism of the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat (or worse, working class) and the phoney dualism of crude populism of ‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’ (or establishment).
In descending order of income and state power, at the top is the plutocracy, below which is an elite, and then proficians and the salariat. These are defined in detail elsewhere. The crucial points for this contribution are that all are recipients of rentier income and all are objectively and emotionally detached from existing welfare states. It is sometimes overlooked that the salariat – those with salaried employment, occupational pensions, houses and shares – have done very well during the rentier capitalism era, gaining from one of its outstanding outcomes, asset price inflation.[iv]
All this means, in turn, that the top strata – perhaps accounting for 30% of the population – have little inclination materially to defend wages, labour standards or state benefits, unless driven by fear of losing their privileges from the rage of the advancing sans culottes.
Below those groups is the old proletariat, for whom labour and social democratic parties and labour unions were built, and whose interests were advanced globally by the International Labour Organisation. The key point for this discourse is that the proletariat was subject to proletarianization, to the disciplines of stable full-time labour, and to fictitious decommodification, in that the money wage shrank as a share of social income, with more coming as non-wage benefits and entitlements, giving them labour security. It was not real decommodification, since workers were obliged to sell labour (effort and time) in order to obtain those entitlements or be married to someone who was prepared to do so.
For the proletariat, the norm was and is to be in a stable job. There is nothing labourists love more than to have as many people as possible in jobs. They romanticise being in a job, promising Full Employment, and quietly resorting to workfare. They conveniently forget that being in a job is being in a position of subordination and fail to recall Marx’s depiction of labour in jobs as ‘active alienation’.
The hallmark of the proletariat’s relations of production was employment security, not job security, in the sense of what work or activity one does.[v.] As for their relations of distribution, those in the proletariat are, as a norm, neither rent-recipients nor structurally exploited by rent mechanisms, unless in the process of falling into the precariat.
This leads to what is the emerging mass class of rentier capitalism, the precariat, below which is a lumpen category cut off from society, without an active role. The precariat’s distinctive relations of production include having unstable, insecure labour, having to do a lot of work that is not labour, including work for the state, having no occupational or organisational narrative to give to themselves, and being exploited and oppressed off workplaces and outside labour time as much as within them.
More of them are being drawn into platform capitalism, as ‘concierge’ or cloud taskers, controlled and manipulated by apps and other labour brokers. Above all, they are being gradually habituated to precariatisation, told to put up with a norm of unstable task-driven bits-and-pieces existence.
The distinctive relations of distribution are that they must try to survive solely on low, volatile and uncertain money wages, with few if any non-wage benefits or assured state benefits, while being subject to onerous exploitation by rental mechanisms, living constantly on the edge of unsustainable debt. The insecurity experienced is unlike the norms of the proletariat, being characterised by chronic uncertainty and fragility to unpredictable but common shocks.
Those characteristics are bad enough. But it is the distinctive relations to the state that most define the precariat. The precariat are denizens rather than citizens, meaning that they are losing or not gaining the rights and entitlements of citizens. Above all, they are reduced to being supplicants, dependent on the discretionary benevolence of landlords, employers, parents, charities and strangers, showing them pity.
We should reject the idea that the era of rentier capitalism is creating generalised precarity. The etymological root of precariousness, from the Latin, is ‘to obtain by prayer’. That applies to the precariat, not to the salariat or elite. We should also avoid talking about ‘precarious work’ when what is meant is insecure or unstable labour. This leads to false political vocabulary and policy prioritising.
Now, in indecent haste, let me recall that the precariat is still a class-in-the-making, not yet a class-for-itself, in that it is split into three factions. The first is what can be called Atavists, that is, those who have a sense of grievance around feelings of a lost Past. This part is linked to the declining proletariat: it recalls that themselves, their parents or their communities had a secure Yesterday, which they want back. This fraction, unless offered an alternative progressive paradigm, listens to the sirens of neo-fascism, or pluto-populists, who present themselves as charismatic leaders, promising to bring back ‘greatness’, sovereignty and so on.
In effect, there is scope for reactionary alliances between elements of the plutocracy, the proletariat and the Atavists in the precariat. But it would be a mistake to ignore the class base of such alliances. Donald Trump epitomised the rentiers; he used anti-establishment rhetoric but jealously preserved and advanced the interests of the rent-seeking plutocracy. He never followed a neo-liberal economic agenda. He stood for mercantilism in foreign economic strategy and for rentiers eager to plunder the commons domestically, while pursuing a pluto-populist fiscal policy. It is better to see his era in Gramscian terms, a malignancy of a class-based system in deepening if not terminal crisis.
The second faction in the precariat is the Nostalgics. Made up largely of migrants and minorities, these are the real denizens, their sense of relative deprivation deriving from the fact that they lack a Present, not feeling at home anywhere. This group is suffering loss of all forms of commons – civil, cultural, social, natural and knowledge – but its frustrations only boil over on days of rage, when the pressures they endure become unbearable. Crucially, they are disenfranchised, emotionally and literally, not seeing a political movement or vision offering them a real Present. But they will not support a neo-fascist populism. They will only be mobilised by a progressive vision of a Future, in which their citizenship rights will be advanced.
The third faction is the Progressives. This group tends to be young and relatively educated. Going to school and university or college they were promised by parents, teachers and politicians they would have a Future. They emerge without one, except an insecure one burdened by debt stretching into the future and suffering from a precariatised mind, loss of control over time.
This group will not vote for neo-fascism either. But they do not long for the Yesterday of the tired left either. The most memorable piece of graffiti on a wall in Madrid in the days-of-rage events in 2011 was, ‘The worst thing would be to go back to the old normal.’ The trouble was, and still is, that the mainstream left neither attempted to understand the precariat nor offered a Future. As Beppe Grillo so memorably mocked, they were ‘dead men walking’.
So, naïve anarchism and populism took over the primitive rebels’ phase of the countermovement, in the shape of the Movimento Cinque Stelle in Italy, Podemos (‘we can’) in Spain, adopting the vacuous slogan of Barack Obama, and the Occupy ‘movement’ in many countries.[vi] The latter were the ‘primitive rebels’ phase again. Speaking in several of those Occupied meetings in several countries, it was sad to see the energy being dissipated as populism produced a muffled set of messages, of grievances, of frustrations, but not of direction.
What would the Future look like? Believing that any Transformation must be led by the needs and aspirations of the emerging mass class, and that the ‘vanguard’ must be the progressive part of that class, in 2014 I asked myself the impertinent double question: If there were to be a manifesto or charter for the precariat, what would it look like and how would it differ from one for the proletariat, had there been one, one hundred years ago?
Mainstream political parties and movements were not doing that exercise, because they had either gone atavistic – promoting warmed-up labourism and jellified Third Wayism – or had gone populist, in talking vaguely but in a PR mode of ‘we, the people’ against ‘the 1%’ or ‘for the many, not the few’. If you do not identify the emerging mass class, you are rather unlikely to identify the priority policies you should be promoting, or the vocabulary and imagery you need to be using to mobilise those who see themselves in that class or likely to be in it or having relatives and friends likely to be in it.
In framing a Precariat Charter, a fundamental understanding had to be kept in mind. The precariat are not just Victims. They are not defined just by defeat and pity. They are defined as well by interests, aspirations and passions.[vii] So many commentators focus exclusively on their victimhood. But we should always remember that an emerging class wants particular changes, which evolve in action, as the vision crystallises.
Ontologically, the negation of the negation means creating a new Today by overcoming barriers to the realisation of the aspirations of the emerging class, creating a social structure that can presage a new Tomorrow, which may not be imaginable or visible when we are in a mess. We can, realistically, only paint the Future as the next transformational stage on an unfolding journey. This is surely one of the lessons of the failed ‘left’ experiments of the twentieth century, of getting ahead of oneself, of then sliding into the optic of ‘the ends justify the means’.
Reinventing the future, in class terms, has always been the primary task of ‘the left’. So when it came to framing a Precariat Charter, it seemed appropriate to take as a guiding principle the adage of Aristotle that only the insecure man is free. That means we must not be stuck in the old sense of security, even though it is a human need to enjoy basic security.
The Precariat Charter was based on analysing the characteristics of the precariat, listening to self-declared members of it in what were over 400 presentations in 40 countries, reading the thousands of emails from readers or listeners and, above all, recognising that a Charter had to combine elements to ‘right wrongs’ and elements for institutional changes needed for an aspirational Future.[viii]
What emerged, rightly or wrongly, was a set of 29 policy or institutional reforms that were markedly different from what a proletariat charter would have looked like and from what was being advocated by either the populist left or social democratic left parties, then or now.
The Strange Death of Left Populism
In 2016, I had the privilege of being invited by John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, to be one of his economic advisers, remaining so until after the General Election of December 2019. He understood the precariat, as well as my emphasis on the centrality of the commons in a transformative vision. He repeatedly assured me that he would deploy the vocabulary and agenda all that implied. But he just could not do so. He did openly advocate a basic income, as I had urged him to do, and he publicly backed my report for the leadership on piloting basic income, as did the previous Labour leader, Ed Miliband, as well as the Shadow Ministers with the relevant portfolios. However, the Labour bureaucracy showed no interest, let alone engagement.
The left populism of which James Schneider writes in his contribution to this debate was trapped in its labourism, its diagnosis of the nature of ‘the enemy’ and a lack of awareness let alone understanding of the precariat. One problem was that leading figures in the insurgent group, Momentum, were atavistic labourists; another was that labour unions thought that the problem was reducible to reintegrating those in ‘precarious labour’ (sic) into the unionised proletariat. The team around Jeremy Corbyn were also atavistic, focusing on ‘the Preston model’, nice but strangely peripheral to the concerns and aspirations of the precariat.
John McDonnell organised an event on the commons in the Speaker’s Chamber of the House of Commons, at which I was an opening speaker. The Chamber was packed, but nobody from Corbyn’s team was there. Ironically, in mid-2020, I was invited to give a webinar on rentier capitalism with Jeremy Corbyn as discussant/moderator. He was characteristically gracious and attentive, and ended by saying he was supportive of the analysis and prognosis. The tragedy was that a good man was in the wrong job at the wrong time, and had surrounded himself with labourists and those steeped in old class analysis.
There is one point on which to end this section. The defeats for left populism of recent years, in Britain and elsewhere, must be understood as a loss of vision. I warned in speeches in early 2016 that Brexit could be won and Trump could win because the Atavists and declining manual proletariat would support them, while most of the Nostalgics were disenfranchised and while the Progressives were disengaged and unenthused. Left populists were failing to be popular enough.
What transpired is that in Brexit, the Progressives in the precariat were confronted by one side offering Remain coupled with the prospect of more years of austerity and the other Leave side promising an unedifying retreat into nationalism and bourgeois rule. Confronted by such a choice, most stayed at home. A similar pattern allowed Trump to win, albeit with a minority of the actual vote. Something similar happened in the 2017 General Election in Britain, despite Corbyn’s mobilisation of many motivated by anger and frustration, and a similar pattern happened even more strongly in the 2019 General Election.
Similar drifts into losing causes have characterised the populist left in continental Europe, with Podemos shrinking into a reformist package, with M5S mired in its unresolved class base, and with social democratic parties struggling to hold onto dwindling shares of the electorate.
The good news is actually quite encouraging. The right is winning with a dwindling share of the vote as well. In Britain, the Conservatives gained a landslide victory in December 2019 with the support of just 29% of the electorate, and with most of those elderly. Meanwhile, everywhere, the size of the Atavist faction of the precariat has almost certainly passed its peak, while the Progressive numbers are mounting every day.
The challenge before us is that if we want a Green Left Transformation we must forge a cross-class alliance built around the aspirations of the Progressives in the precariat, a revival of the commons and a green-blue vision of a sustainable balance between humanity and nature. William Wordsworth’s words from The Prelude come to mind:
“Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven.”
Put in modern parlance – everything is up for grabs.
Notes and References
[i] I have called this the era of industrial citizenship, due to social ‘rights’ being linked to industrial-style labour. This labourist model should be contrasted with an emancipatory one around occupational citizenship.
[ii] This author recalls going on a London tube in 1985 and seeing daubed in black paint along the adverts, ‘If Maggie’s the answer, it must have been a bloody stupid question.’
[iii] That is done in Standing, 2021.
[iv] This makes it problematic to claim that ‘precarisation is afflicting all’ as Azmanova suggests, whatever meaning one gives to ‘precarisation’.
[v] Although I have explained at length the difference between the seven forms of labour-based security, many writers still treat employment security and job security as synonymous, thereby missing a key factor in the debate on the precariat.
[vi] Of course, one populist party did temporarily gain office, Syriza in Greece, mentioned by Spyros Sofos and Didier Fassin. Probably, the less said about Syriza the better. Its self-centred leader, Alexis Tsipras, said arrogantly, ‘Defeat is the battle that isn’t waged…..Lost battles are battles that are not fought.’ Then, he surrendered without putting up any fight worthy of the name.
[vii] In a different context, this was brilliantly understood by the great political economist Albert Hirschmann, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph.
[viii] The Precariat has been translated into 23 languages, which has led to nearly a decade of emails from around the world. It should be stated that many of the 400 presentations came after the Charter was drawn up. They have generally confirmed the articles, although no doubt there would be differences, particularly of priorities, if the book were to be written now. Some of the themes went forward into Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth.
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“For the proletariat, the norm was and is to be in a stable job. There is nothing labourists love more than to have as many people as possible in jobs. They romanticise being in a job, promising Full Employment, and quietly resorting to workfare. They conveniently forget that being in a job is being in a position of subordination and fail to recall Marx’s depiction of labour in jobs as ‘active alienation’.”
Words to consider here at NC.
Yep, large scale wage-slavery is not something to be embraced but something to be abolished.
Indeed, per the Bible, wage-slavery was the EXCEPTION, not the rule, for Hebrews in ancient Israel with roughly equal ownership of the means of production being the rule. Yet this was NOT communism since the means of production were individually owned, and not by the State, which didn’t even exist for 400 years or so.
So accepting wage-slavery as some kind of norm is to concede way too much, Biblically speaking.
An “eved” in the Hebrew bible is not really the same thing as a wage slave. The first time slavery is discussed in the Book of the Covenant following the Ten Commandments in Exodus, the only limitation is 7 years. There was no requirement to pay the slave anything. This is modified in the “Second Law” in Deuteronomy where the master is required to pay the slave some compensation upon the end of the 7 years, but not before. And these “eveds” were only the Hebrew slaves. Foreigners (goys) were slaves for life, but since neither Israel nor Judah won many wars, there were probably never that many foreign slaves anyway.
I’m using “wage-slavery” in the more general sense that if one does not own assets (impossible for a Hebrew in Israel/Judah for more than 49 years (cf. Leviticus 25)) then one was de facto either a beggar or forced to live as a scavenger in the wilderness OR forced to work for wages.
As for foreign “permanent slaves”, this is in conflict with no Hebrew OR CONVERT(?) could be held for more than 6 years as a well-treated indentured servant to be released, well provisioned, in the 7th year. So “permanent slavery” of foreigners was plausibly, imo, a conversion strategy (see Deuteronomy 23:3-7).
Not that the Old Testament is authoritative for Christians since the New Testament but can’t we do at least as well wrt economic justice?
Though for most of the 1848-1945 period, its not really true. The proletariat of Capital and Condition of the Working Class in England had an existence as precarious as today’s precariat. Indeed, this was one of the things driving the growing militance. There was little in the way of a consumer goods industry selling to proletarians because until quite late in the 19th century the entire wages of all but the skilled and fortunate went for subsistence. And until after the changes beginning with the New Deal and consolidated in the war and postwar years, the end of a job meant the end of income, period.
@ Henry Moon Pie (7:57 am)
Sorry, but I don’t understand your point. Is it to support some version of Universal Basic Income? If so, please explain the specifics.
Lots going on here, as the author recognizes.
One take would be that he underplays the interrelationship of class identity, class aspirations, and class struggle. This comes out most clearly when he makes it seem as though mid-20th c social democracy lost a vision of the future through negligence, rather than running up against resistance from capital that was gradually getting its ideological act together after the fascist period. Strong class identity was contingent on a number of things, but one was maintaining labor militancy, MacAlevey’s “strike muscle,” and that became increasingly difficult, and not just because labor movement leadership went for business unionism.
The same applies to the present. The author seems hesitant to define what a Labor Vision should be now, and oscillates between UBI and other ideas without directly discussing the intensity of resistance from capital that different programs would set off. He might at least roll in Kalecki, as we so often do here, and with good reason. UBI will bring a very different response compared to demands that threaten to supplant capital’s control of investment decisions, the sphere of “management prerogative.” And so the author seems to be advocating fresh thinking without directly addressing what stands in its way, both the real threat of intensified class conflict and how that has been “internalized” in various ways over the last 50 or so years.
A side note: my understanding is that classical Marxism’s worry about the lumpenproletariat, aka a “reactionary mass,” was based on the observation that their services could be bought to form King and Country mobs to attack working class organizations, along with serving as pogrom foot soldiers. Part of that function was superseded by the formation of regular armies of domestic occupation, aka the police.
There is much substance here but it seems that Standing ignores the elephant in the room- the role that the age of limits (resource, environmental/climate change, economic/financial…) plays in the emergence of an era of rentier capitalism.
He says: “Reinventing the future, in class terms, has always been the primary task of ‘the left’.” But he is quick to condemn “phoney dualism of crude populism of ‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’”. By complicating basic class analysis with an elaborate class structure, with the revolution to be led by a minority of young, educated ‘progressive’ precariats, he may be setting the stage for fragmentation of the Left, and further massive losses for workers.
being drawn into platform capitalism, as ‘concierge’ or cloud taskers, controlled and manipulated by apps and other labour brokers. Above all, they are being gradually habituated to precariatisation, told to put up with a norm of unstable task-driven bits-and-pieces existence.
This is a great framing of the hoped for (by the technologists)labor contract
That passage called to mind the increasing use by universities of adjunct faculty positions, which are the very definition of precarious. In recent days the was a report of the dismissal of tenured faculty by a college in New York State, whose name escapes me.
Proposition 22(?) in California epitomizes precarity.
Quit a lot to think on here, and presented pretty clearly.
De-stranding is a part of understanding (and understanding being part of good progress)
I could see the ‘Go Fund Me’ phenom for Medical (or just groceries, etc) costs in this thought:
(my bold)
Those characteristics are bad enough. But it is the distinctive relations to the state that most define the precariat. The precariat are denizens rather than citizens, meaning that they are losing or not gaining the rights and entitlements of citizens. Above all, they are reduced to being supplicants, dependent on the discretionary benevolence of landlords, employers, parents, charities and strangers, showing them pity.
Much of this essay seems like a good diagnosis, although, after a certain point, I began to mistrust the foundations of the analysis. And there is this: “So when it came to framing a Precariat Charter, it seemed appropriate to take as a guiding principle the adage of Aristotle that only the insecure man is free. That means we must not be stuck in the old sense of security, even though it is a human need to enjoy basic security.”
The author is fudging. Aristotle was writing about a stratified society in which there were many slaves (and, yes, Mediterranean slavery was different from the Anglo-American version). The ideal was the life of leisure (scholē), which was a kind of contemplation of how to act (but untroubled by having to work, which is a distraction). The “insecure” man was either Diogenes (who was unique) or a prosperous citizen with property.
We simply don’t live in that kind of society. Yet the author keeps making the mistake of describing “labourists” and their supposedly antiquated ideas about unions and the organization of the workplace as all wet.
Current labor unrest in the U S of A indicates otherwise. Further, I happened to listened to some deeper analysis of the recent events at Smith College, and the NYTimes writer, Powell, pointed out how much unions shape attitudes (including eliminating racism), offer real protections, and teach the value of concerted action.
People like Standing, because of his position in society, can be blithe about being precarious. It is indeed a “philosophical” issue for them. Yet the current Draghi government in Italy has several members who want to remove labor protections and make more Italians precarious. Everyone will live the glory of being a U.S. style at-will employee. Hmmm. I wonder why this project still goes on among the powerful.
I must agree with DJG, Reality Czar’s take here.
The writer of this article seems to be very optimistic, celebratory even when it comes to the insecurity of the precariat. It isn’t difficult to romanticize the power and the potential of people suffering extreme insecurity when your employment and your social status are linked to the privileges of the (Left or Right) political elite, and when you are a (most likely well paid) participant in the current political system, by working closely with the leadership of one of the largest old political parties, while holding positions that come with stable income if not fungible prestige [“Professorial Research Associate, SOAS University of London, Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences, and co-founder and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN)]. The author acknowledges that a simplistic, not multidimensional understanding of class is pseudo-Marxist; why not then go back to the original texts and review the writings of Marx, Engels, Gramsci et al in order to update the concept of class, perhaps broadening what being “working class” means today? Why not trying to organize the workers, those who are precariat and those who aren’t, around the goal of “reinventing the future in class terms”, as he puts it? How will the precariat advance its own sociopolitical goals now (as “a class-in-the-making”) and later (as “a class-for-itself)”? Will it be capable of exerting any pressure and of promote real transformations without unions and without political parties?
It isn’t easy to craft an appealing political message to people you are condescending to, nor to people so busy surviving the opportunity cost of your “messaging” strikes them as not worth the time.
To craft an appealing narrative for those struggling the hardest, it strikes me as a good idea to start from positions that recognize the valor of their struggle and pay attention to what positives they experience and value.
It appears to me this is what the author is attempting, not a romanticization, nor a condescension.
The default arrangement for human intercourse is some sort of feudalism. Regardless of best intended efforts to midwife a kinder gentler world, some sort of feudal hierarchic death-wish inheres in all social efforts. It seems woven into our humanity.
Aboriginal hunter gatherers have managed to maintain a continuous non-feudal culture, even now, for approximately 50,000 years. Perhaps the precariat are heading that way?
Agreeing with Heelbiter, feudal hierarchies only emerge when there’s a surplus that can be stolen, which tempts people with power (strongmen + sycophants) to keep it for themselves. Remove either the surplus or the agreement to steal, it’s not at all universal.
strongmen + sycophants only?
Surplus also creates lasting valuable institutions which create huge social good (like Universities, Court systems, School systems, Regulatory oversight of the private sector, etc.).
Naked Capitalism commentators don’t have a concept of hierarchical nature of talents which humans have. Meaning, there are super producer humans in any field of human endeavor: sports, music, arts, mathematics, sciences, film stars, singers, painters, etc.
Why would you not expect super producer humans in economic realm (business world)?
The talent spectrum is very wide and desire and ability to take risks for a possible “first mover advantage in business” that some humans go after.
Even luck (right place at the right time) requires the ability, desire and eye to recognize talents in other humans to create a high powered team which creates truly outsized results.
Talents of some humans is thousands of times the talents of more average humans.
Our job (democracy’s job) is to get the most out of them. And I don’t mean tax them a lot. I mean channel their energies in such a way through appropriate rules (laws) so they contribute outsized social good.
Mansoor
And yet in actual, existing polities for as long as records have been kept, there’s a tendency for those with “thousand times the talents” to make off with all the surplus. Leading to, “The default arrangement for human intercourse is some sort of feudalism. Regardless of best intended efforts to midwife a kinder gentler world, some sort of feudal hierarchic death-wish inheres in all social efforts. It seems woven into our humanity.”
It appears to be the structural force of “surplus” that engages our social heuristics into self defeating and brutal heirarchies. I’m with HH & FS that the track record of egalitarianism is a great deal longer than that of material heirarchy and hasn’t anywhere threatened the ecosystems on which all life depends.
Not saying we can get out of our exploitative and self destructive rut, but that this condition is no more essential to our nature than egalitarianism.
Your super producers “talent” is making money, not producing things or goods, and right behind all of your “there are super producer humans in any field of human endeavor: sports, music, arts, mathematics, sciences, film stars, singers, painters, etc.” all are the face of a machine in the background with some unknowable tech tracking selling data collecting those are your actual producers but that isn’t good pr, we’re great at tracking people, we produce surveillance and sell people things they don’t need and support disintegrating institutions in order to undermine your quote here…
“Surplus also creates lasting valuable institutions which create huge social good (like Universities, Court systems, School systems, Regulatory oversight of the private sector, etc.).”
All of these things are being disintegrated for the benefit of your “super producer” BS as we speak. Maybe it’s not the NC commentariat that has an understanding problem.
I think as far as the religious ” concept of hierarchical nature of talents ” I think the essential workers proved who they are over the pandemic, they’re the ones who had to face risk, grocery workers, garbage collectors etc… I doubt these people are very high up in your hierarchy.
We don’t have a concept of it? Human capital theory has already been addressed here.
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2021/01/14/the-rise-of-human-capital-theory/
snippet from the linked article:
“If human capital theory someday becomes the fly on the power-theory-of-income elephant, it would signal not only a scientific revolution, but also a social one. I doubt I’ll live to see it happen. And if I do, I have no idea what type of society would emerge from the other side.”
“power-theory-of-income elephant”….You really believe this?
I consider myself well versed in the social sciences but had to refresh my vocabulary on “Gramscian terms” by going over to Wikipedia, which, in this case, the article is up to snuff on the subject.
Overall the article is tending towards a more advanced reading level than what will keep the attention span of 95% of potential readers. The extra effort required in plowing through this is well worth the effort and while I’m working through it a second time already, I’ve learned a lot. Mainly, it’s about a deeper meaning of the term precariat.
Also, Standing needs to recognize that Marxism, by at least the middle of the 20th century, was a vastly different tool for social criticism, evaluation than what Marx penned.
Open Democracy is a Soros organ. Which immediately brings to mind the aspect of our precarious position that the author does not address or even allude to: the nexus of financial, media and paramilitary power that is the “Deep State” or the Spook Apparat if you will. Having a token whack at ‘atavist’ populism is just ‘Basket of Deplorables’ put another way. The author is deeply tied to the technocratic set and the slant is clear enough. The constant manipulation through fear-based stochastic ‘war’ efforts: War on Terror, War on COVID. Always some empty and obviously fake rallying point. UBI sounds like a sensible solution if we lived in the Jetsons future the Great Reset promises. But Klaus Schwab is no Bucky Fuller. Gates, Soros and Schwab are just investors. Investors with the power to manipulate the markets. Heads they win. Tails you lose. To them, a guy like Trump is just the last echo of the Industrial age and the installation of a senile grifter the triumph of the technocracy, shielded by the CIA and MI5/6. These spy organizations were always private companies. CIA was built by Wall Street and British Intelligence is an arm of the British monarchy and has never been accountable to the public. A realignment is definitely taking place. Behind the curtain. Challenging the old guard is the nexus of more openly private intelligence organizations like that of Erik Prince and computer oligarchs like Thiel and Mercer. This is exactly who put Trump over.
Being a simple fellow I find myself asking—Okay, so what is to be done? How might these insights inform transformative social action?
Good summary of the evolution and status quo of liberalism. Liberalism being capitalism. And capitalism being profit. So there’s a conundrum: The “strange death of populism” does not equate with some strange death of survival. Survival is always with us. There were atavists seeking out remote caves even during the agricultural revolution. Maybe even George Soros’ ancient ancestors; the stone age bond vigilantes. The underlying argument here by Standing seems to be for a Basic Income. Which is OK, but maybe ahead of its time. A jobs guarantee is a better option because there is so much work to be done that can be done best by humans… it’s just that none of them are profit making. That’s the problem with all this political (aka economic) analysis. Because, for one thing, who is gonna clean the latrines? Yes, of course robots are. So then who is gonna arbitrage the robots? Who is monitoring the protection of the environment for fraud and graft? All of that will be necessary to ensure nobody is profiteering and polluting in a non-capitalist world. Labor was actually the best defense against rampant profiteering, because it was labor that was always exploited, so what will replace it? We should stick with a jobs guarantee for now. A better analysis at this point in time is not how do we live with the ruins of neoliberalism, but how do we live, equitably, without profit? It will take a while to figure that out. Clearly we’ll live by fiat, but it will have to be controlled as well. I’d just say that if the Precariat is condescendingly guaranteed a “basic income” so should the rest of society be. That controls everyone. And protects the environment, and stays focused on all the things that are now imperative.
Good investment and growth are definable as whatever investment and growth would remain if all artificial stimulants by the government and economists were removed.
The ordinary liberal is usually several steps removed from real life.
That is how he can be so foolish.
He is almost always either wealthy, or academic, or artistic, or political, or in some other way has escaped from the need to do productive work for a living.
“whatever investment and growth would remain if all artificial stimulants by the government and economists were removed.”
I totally agree we should get rid of money. In 2008 the banks should have all gone under. Your own productive worth would be zero. The assets that give you your sense of worth would have no value. Yeah, let’s do that.
Private roads only!
It’s just really weird seeing a ‘left’ site conflate ‘populism’ with ‘rightism’. As in, “representing the economically hurting bottom of 50-90% of voters is bad (because the poor, the struggling working class, and the precarious middle class peoples are obviously morally suspect – or so saith the economic elites. / heh).” No. That’s the elite’s take on populism. It isn’t the populists’ history and political stance. It’s almost like reading the elite’s dictating what the bottom 50% economic polity must agree to. (As if the top 50% (or 1%) don’t have an economic interest in guiding the bottom 50%’s away from their own economic interest. /heh )
Krystal Kyle & Friends | Thomas Frank
https://youtu.be/eLHZAGBnUhU?t=680
I didn’t get that, maybe I’ll re-read when I have a minute.
What I got was dissaggregating the struggling class into groups with common experience and history resulting in what the author called “reactionary” and I think you are calling ‘rightism’.
The basic message I got was the left can no more restore that past than can the right and when it tries it ends up bolstering the right by accident.
Much of what Standing refers to as the Precariat is basically just the Proletariat yet again. But coming to the fore in a period resembling the Victorian era in terms of security more than it resembles the short-lived triumphal period of postwar welfare state, Keynesian, social democratic capitalism.
I think he wants to expand the definitions of work and “productivity,” maybe challenging the labor theory of value, etc. This piece reminded me of David Graeber in that respect.
Now that I know it’s an Open Democracy piece, I suppose that it’s meant to soften the blow of prolonged, steep unemployment and to desensitize people to the pain of “doing more with less” (as the tippytopp rakes it in) by calling it an Arts & Leisure Society. UBI is a lubricant for privatization, although I did notice and appreciate Standing’s mention of the commons.
I must agree with DJG, Reality Czar’s and others similar take.
The writer of this article seems to be very optimistic, celebratory even when it comes to the insecurity of the precariat. It isn’t difficult to romanticize the power and the potential of people suffering extreme insecurity when your employment and your social status are linked to the privileges of the (Left or Right) political elite, and when you are a (most likely well paid) participant in the current political system, by working closely with the leadership of one of the bigger old political parties while holding positions that come with stable income if not fungible prestige [“Professorial Research Associate, SOAS University of London, Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences, and co-founder and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN)]. The author acknowledges that a simplistic, not multidimensional understanding of class is pseudo-Marxist; why not then go back to the original texts and review the writings of Marx, Engels, Gramsci et al in order to update the concept of class, perhaps broadening what being “working class” means today? Why not trying to organize the workers, those who are precariat and those who aren’t, around the goal of “reinventing the future in class terms”, as he puts it? Will the precariat succeed in advancing its sociopolitical goals as a class (“a class-in-the-making” or “a class-for-itself”) outside of organized structures like unions and political parties (not necessarily the existing, often compromised ones)?
What has happened to inequality?
Pretty much what you would expect really.
Mariner Eccles, FED chair 1934 – 48, observed what the capital accumulation of neoclassical economics did to the US economy in the 1920s.
“a giant suction pump had by 1929 to 1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing proportion of currently produced wealth. This served then as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied themselves the kind of effective demand for their products which would justify reinvestment of the capital accumulation in new plants. In consequence as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When the credit ran out, the game stopped”
With the capital accumulation of neoclassical economics wealth concentrates at the top.
A few people have all the money and everyone else gets by on debt.
Wealth concentrates until the system collapses.
What could they do?
Keynes added some redistribution to stop all the wealth concentrating at the top, and developed nations formed a strong healthy middle class.
The neoliberals removed the redistribution.
With the capital accumulation of neoclassical economics wealth concentrates at the top.
A few people have all the money and everyone else gets by on debt.
Wealth concentrates until the system collapses.
“The other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing.” Mariner Eccles, FED chair 1934 – 48
Your wages aren’t high enough, have a Payday loan.
You need a house, have a sub-prime mortgage.
You need a car, have a sub-prime auto loan.
You need a good education, have a student loan.
Still not getting by?
Load up on credit cards.
“When the credit ran out, the game stopped” Mariner Eccles, FED chair 1934 – 48
Oh yes, I remember now, it was Keynesian capitalism that won the battle against Russian communism.
The Americans could clearly demonstrate the average American was much better off than their Russian counterparts.
Today’s opioid addicted specimens might have struggled.
The arc of progress isn’t supposed to look like a U-turn.
You are supposed to keep moving forwards.
After the Keynesian era we went back to what had preceded it.
After a few decades of Keynesian, demand side economics, the system became supply side constrained.
Too much demand and not enough supply causes inflation.
Neoclassical, supply side economics should be just the ticket to get things moving again.
It does, but it’s got the same problems it’s always had.
whew boy here–The arc of progress isn’t supposed to look like a U-turn.
I like the way NC promotes thought and discussion about matters that matter.
I found this article massively interesting and relevant, especially at the same time that I’m trying to process Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public and Adam Curtis’ new documentary Can’t Get You Outta My Head. My take is that all of them are professing a sort of political realism that is opposed to what they identify as magical thinking on the left, and that’s how I take Standing’s critique of left populism.
But more importantly, I want to share a few other related resources that I found as I was digging into this more. First, Standing has a few TED talks, and this one from 2016 helped me to understand this article better.
Also, Standing’s Charter for the Precariat (linked differently in the article) is currently available on Bloomsbury open access, so you can actually download chapter pdfs of it for free with no login.
What is the problem with the class system?
Mankind first started to produce a surplus with early agriculture.
It wasn’t long before the elites learnt how to read the skies, the sun and the stars, to predict the coming seasons to the amazed masses and collect tribute.
They soon made the most of the opportunity and removed themselves from any hard work to concentrate on “spiritual matters”, i.e. any hocus-pocus they could come up with to elevate them from the masses, e.g. rituals, fertility rights, offering to the gods …. etc and to turn the initially small tributes, into extracting all the surplus created by the hard work of the rest.
The elites became the representatives of the gods and they were responsible for the bounty of the earth and the harvests.
As long as all the surplus was handed over, all would be well.
The class structure emerges.
Upper class – Do as little as they can get away with and get most of the rewards
Middle class – Administrative/managerial class who have enough to live a comfortable life
Working class – Do the work, and live a basic subsistence existence where they get enough to stay alive and breed
Their techniques have got more sophisticated over time, but this is the underlying idea.
They have achieved an inversion, and got most of the rewards going to those that don’t really do anything.
Everything had worked well for 5,000 years as no one knew what was really going on.
The last thing they needed was “The Enlightenment” as people would work out what was really going on.
They did work out what was going on and this had to be hidden again.
The Classical Economists had a quick look around and noticed the aristocracy were maintained in luxury and leisure by the hard work of everyone else.
They haven’t done anything economically productive for centuries, they couldn’t miss it.
The Classical economist, Adam Smith:
“The labour and time of the poor is in civilised countries sacrificed to the maintaining of the rich in ease and luxury. The Landlord is maintained in idleness and luxury by the labour of his tenants. The moneyed man is supported by his extractions from the industrious merchant and the needy who are obliged to support him in ease by a return for the use of his money. But every savage has the full fruits of his own labours; there are no landlords, no usurers and no tax gatherers.”
There was no benefits system in those days, and if those at the bottom didn’t work they died.
They had to earn money to live.
The classical economists could never imagine those at the bottom rising out of a bare subsistence existence as that was the way it had always been.
The classical economists identified the constructive “earned” income and the parasitic “unearned” income.
Most of the people at the top lived off the parasitic “unearned” income and they now had a big problem. (Upper class – Do as little as they can get away with and get most of the rewards)
This problem was solved with neoclassical economics, which hides this distinction.
It confuses making money and creating wealth so all rich people look good.
If you know what real wealth creation is, you will realise many at the top don’t create any wealth.
Can you believe Adam Smith said this?
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”
The classical economists, Adam Smith and Ricardo, are not what you might expect.
We got some stuff from Ricardo, like the law of comparative advantage.
What’s gone missing?
Ricardo was part of the new capitalist class, and the old landowning class were a huge problem with their rents that had to be paid both directly and through wages.
“The interest of the landlords is always opposed to the interest of every other class in the community” Ricardo 1815 / Classical Economist
What does our man on free trade, Ricardo, mean?
Disposable income = wages – (taxes + the cost of living)
Employees get their money from wages and the employers pay the cost of living through wages, reducing profit.
Employees get less disposable income after the landlords rent has gone.
Employers have to cover the landlord’s rents in wages reducing profit.
Ricardo is just talking about housing costs, employees all rented in those days.
Low housing costs work best for employers and employees.
In Ricardo’s world there were three classes.
He was in the capitalist class.
The more he paid in labour costs (wages) the lower his profits would be.
He was paying the cost of living for his workers through wages, and the higher that was, the higher labour costs would be.
There was no benefits system in those days and those at the bottom needed to earn money to cover the cost of living otherwise they would die. They had to earn their money through wages.
The more he paid in rents to the old landowning class, the less there would be for him to keep for himself.
From Ricardo:
The labourers had before 25
The landlords 25
And the capitalists 50
……….. 100
He looked at how the pie got divided between the three groups.
There were three groups in the capitalist system in Ricardo’s world (and there still are).
Workers / Employees
Capitalists / Employers
Rentiers / Landowners / Landlords / other skimmers, who are just skimming out of the system, not contributing to its success
The unproductive group exists at the top of society, not the bottom.
Later on we did bolt on a benefit system to help others that were struggling lower down the scale.
Classical economics, it’s not what you think.
William White (BIS, OECD) talks about how economics really changed over one hundred years ago as classical economics was replaced by neoclassical economics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iXBQ33pBo&t=2485s
He thinks we have been on the wrong path for one hundred years.
Small state, unregulated capitalism was where it all started and it’s rather different to today’s expectations.
When we actually start talking about creating wealth, rather than making money, the rentiers are exposed for the parasites they are.
Framing Corbyn’s election defeat as a failure to understand the needs of the “Labour” electorate, and hence supporting Standing’s premise, whilst totally ignoring the fact that Corbyn was hammered by the powers of the right, BBC, MSM, Israel etc etc is totally disingenuous and seems to me to be a case of very sour grapes. The fact that the basic income was not implemented doesn’t mean much given that there are many on all sides of the debate who do not agree with the idea. I think Standing is just pissed off because no one listened to him.