Subjection Depends on the Consent of the Subjects

Stoney Bird is a retired corporate lawyer. He currently serves on the Whatcom Transit Citizens’ Advisory Panel and was one of the leaders of the campaign for a Bellingham City Community Bill of Rights in 2012. Since 2002 he has gotten around by bicycle and bus. He ran for a position on the County Charter Review Commission on a platform that includes proportional representation.

Part 7

This essay began with the January 2014 issue of Whatcom Watch. For an overview of the series, see that issue.

“From the 1950s on, American culture’s gloss on the purpose of life became assurance of full employment: jobs.” – Jane Jacobs1

“You know what? It doesn’t matter. None of this — this so-called ‘money’ — really matters at all. It’s just an illusion.” – Ben Bernanke, former Chair of the Federal Reserve2

In what is often referred to as the prime of life, I worked as a corporate lawyer. I worked long hours, made lots of money (not part of the 1 percent, but certainly in the 10 percent) and helped big businesses thread their way through the legal system so as to avoid taxes, get contracts by fair means and foul, influence legislatures and administrative agencies and in general pile up the dough. From the start, I had fairly frequent insights that what I was doing was wrong, both for me and in a broader sense, and that I was wasting my life away. I kept at it because it was “my job,” because it was fun to be foxier than the next guy, and because I wanted to show that I could “make it.”

But by the time I reached my 40s, I realized that if I kept going I would surrender my whole life. That would have been a bad deal. So I started thinking …

What is a job?

When you have a job, someone else tells you where to be, when to be there, what to do while you are there, what to say and what to wear. Quite often, they even claim the right to regulate all these things even when you are not at “work.”

How is this different from slavery?

In substance, it isn’t very with the exception being you can “freely” choose a different employer — who might well impose the same constraints.

When you go home, you leave what you made at work, and your employer reaps the profit. There’s a “wage,” but it’s as small as your employer thinks he can get away with. Beyond that, the benefit of your work — the profit — goes to the employer.

In doing our jobs, we are instructed to be “professional,” an attitude of voluntary submission. The social and ecological wreckage caused by the job system as a whole must not be mentioned, nor must the extra-mural effects of corporate (or our own) decisions — what economists call “externalities.” Emotions other than the ones that lead to the “job” being accomplished are banned. In this way our lives are controlled — and diminished.

Jobs are a means of social control in a much broader sense. Political expression is inhibited both on the job and off. This is partly a matter of lack of time, but it is also a matter of censorship by employers. To select just one example, I have a friend, a fellow Green, who ran this year for the state legislature. He ran in part on a platform of $15 Now, a $15 minimum wage. Because of this element in his campaign, his employer fired him.

And think of the relationship between jobs and the environment! Jobs that aren’t directly damaging and destructive aim at producing income so that you can buy the useless consumer clap-trap made by those that are.

There is much talk about “green jobs” these days. Perhaps some jobs really are green, but many so-called “green” jobs are just less black. That’s an improvement, no doubt, but the net effect still causes environmental harm. I say all this not to disparage either the advocates of green jobs or those doing them, but to keep us being honest with ourselves.

This is the system that we’ve lived with for the last 200 years. For much of that time, it was thought “just” to let someone starve to death if he or she didn’t have a wage-earning job. It was thought “necessary” to bring out the bulldozers against Mother Nature. It was a time when all other human relationships had to surrender to the “job,” when the meaning of life was defined by one’s earning money and then spending it to fulfill the essence of one’s duty to society. That’s also when people became commodities.

There’s a good deal to say about the job system, and the great thinkers of the last 200 years have spilled a great deal of ink doing just that. I’ll leave much of the relationship between the job system and the money system to a future essay. For now, I’ll only address how the job system came to be, describe what its character is, and suggest that life doesn’t need to be that way.

Hunger Teaches Obedience and Subjection

Just before the job system really took hold in the early years on the nineteenth century, thinkers in England were worrying about how the right people would be able to continue to exercise control. There were slaves in much of the British Empire, but the slaves kept rebelling, and it was expensive to keep sending in the troops to restore the “order” that the slave-owners thought was their due. In France and the United States, there was widespread talk of the “Rights of Man”3 — and people were actually acting on them!

In England, a second great wave of enclosures meant that families could no longer support themselves from the share of the commons that generations had lived from. The complex relations of rural mutual dependence and security were smashed,4 forcing masses of people to move to the squalor and nightmarish misery of the new industrial cities — read any of Charles Dickens — and the “thinkers” were worried that these rootless masses might get uppity.5

One such was Joseph Townsend. In his “Dissertation on the Poor Laws” of 1786 he declares:

Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjection, to the most perverse. In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them [the poor] on to labor. … Legal constraint is attended with much trouble, violence, and noise, creates ill will, and never can be productive of good and acceptable service; whereas hunger is not only peaceable, silent, unremitting pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry and labor, it calls forth the most powerful exertions; and, when satisfied by the free bounty of another, lays lasting and sure foundations for good will and gratitude.6

Townsend tells an apocryphal story illustrating “The Invisible Hand” theory of market self-regulation made famous by Adam Smith. The story is of goats and dogs on the island of Juan Fernandez, a parable subsequently retold by other classical economists including Malthus and Ricardo.

The only inhabitants were goats and dogs, which had both been placed there by men. The goats arrived first, intended as a source of meat for passing sailors, but with natural increase they proceeded to eat all the greenery, thus creating a desert. The dogs were introduced to keep the goats in check. In time the goats and dogs reached a natural balance in their populations. The goats were able to maintain themselves in smaller numbers by retreating to mountain crags where the dogs could not follow them.

This was laissez-faire in action. There was no need for the troublesome work of planning or maintaining order: order and balance would establish itself through the action of “natural” forces. In human affairs, the same principle would operate. If some were wrenched into misery or even starved, it just proved that the system “worked.” The survivors, not to speak of those who profited vastly, were not responsible for anything but their own “success.”

Making People, Nature and Money Articles of Commerce

One of the core works for understanding how our current job system came to be is Karl Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation.” 7 The system arose during the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. Specifically, three things came to be viewed as commodities – land, labor and money. None of them had been created by the industrial-commercial system. Each was required to be available for purchase – or discard – at the will of the business concerned, and any other role was made subservient.

Regarding the new “commodity” of labor, Polanyi wrote:

“Hobbes’ grotesque vision of the State — a human Leviathan whose vast body was made up of an infinite number of human bodies — was dwarfed by the Ricardian construct of the labor market; a flow of human lives the supply of which was regulated by the amount of food put at their disposal.” 8

The next commodity — land — is the locus of humanity’s natural surroundings, the biological and ecological foundation making human life and welfare possible. Turning land into a commodity subject to speculation compromises this core character. Each mine dug, each piece of trash thrown out, each forest cleared, every industrial process by-product spewed upon the land, air or water makes someone money or saves it.

But it steals from the common store of nature’s wealth and poisons all life – and these facets of the transaction are unaccounted for.9

Money, the third commodity, has intrinsic value as a medium of exchange. The system created by bankers and economists, however, introduced “interest,” a way to make money from the selling and speculation of money instead of producing goods. Money as a neutral medium of exchange introduces stability and integrity in the buying and selling of real goods; but the commerce in money produces no physical goods but periodic financial booms and busts. And it creates what we’re hearing all too loudly today — a giant sucking sound of wealth away from the middle class into the hands of the rich through the interest mechanism.10

We are now reaping the social and ecological devastation of these three commodifications. They are part of the complex of policies and institutions developed over the past two centuries that produced unparalleled material plenty and a booming human population. They are also the story of our growing ecological catastrophe and incorrigible social dislocation. For now, our focus is on the commoditization of just one of the three: labor.

“Just Get a Job!”

As adults, our “jobs” consume our time. Americans now work longer hours than any other people in the world.11 In most families, both adults work, leaving little or no time for self-care, family care, social relationships and participation in the public life of their communities. Life is diminished, reduced to chasing the colorful images of movie stars and sports celebrities on TV and other electronic gadgets.

In the 60s, social scientists projected that within 30 years the productivity of American workers would double — this did happen — promising that working hours would be cut in half while maintaining an already pretty good standard of living. And they also promised that farm workers and people of color would see their fortunes rise.

Instead, two things happened. First, women entered the work force in increasing numbers, creating what Friedrich Engels called the “reserve army of the unemployed” which increased in numbers and put pressure on wages. Second, employers took advantage of this oversupply of labor to keep average wages not significantly higher now than they were in the 70s, appropriated an ever higher share of corporate incomes for themselves — and claimed that their ever higher pay was the result of their “brilliance” and “hard work.”12

Getting the Coercion Out of Basic Living

There is a way out. Because it requires such a departure from current ways of thinking and acting, I’ll only let out a bit of a tease in this essay. After we’ve dived into the money system in my next article, we’ll see that the idea that I’m describing below isn’t so fanciful.

Here is the basic idea. During the course of the twentieth century, one thinker after another began to envisage a financial system which would leave people free to choose how they spent their time. The core idea was that everyone would have a basic income which would supply the needs of food, clothing and shelter. They would get this whether they were “working” or not.

Different writers have given the concept different names. For simplicity’s sake we’ll call it a “universal basic income” (UBI). Not the least remarkable aspect of the UBI is that it has been supported by people on all parts of the political spectrum. These include Martin Luther King, Jr., Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith, Pres. Richard Nixon, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Bertrand Russell, George McGovern, Milton Friedman (and four other winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics), and the Green Party of the United States, among many others. Friedman argued that if everyone did have an income covering the necessities, it would allow removal of all sorts of highly bureaucratized (and therefore expensive) government social programs.

I won’t go into it any further at this point, but will return to it after my next essay or two leaves the workings of the money system lying on the table in front of us in plain view. Then it will be clear that a Universal Basic Income really is a) achievable, and b) desirable. And we don’t have to treat one another like goats and dogs in the wild.13

End Notes

1 Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead, p. 57. The quotation comes from the chapter on the degeneration of university education into credentialing (for the purpose of supplying businesses with the “human resources” that they perceived that they needed in the short term) instead of education in the broadest sense for the long-term benefit of society (and the businesses in society).

2 From “The Onion,” U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion, ISSUE 46•07, Feb 16, 2010, http://www.theonion.com/articles/us-economy-grinds-to-halt-as-nation-realizes-money,2912 viewed Aug. 30, 2014.

3 Both a concept and the title of what was perhaps the most popular book of the century in both England and the United States, Thomas Paine’s “The Rights of Man”. There are many editions, one recent one was published by CreateSpace in 2014. The English aristocrats in power wished to prosecute Paine and he had to flee to France.

4 As Karl Polanyi has noted, “the final stage was reached with the application of ‘nature’s penalty,’ hunger. In order to release it, it was necessary to liquidate organic society, which refused to permit the individual to starve.” Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 1944, Beacon Press ed., 1957, pp. 164-5.

5 Along with the rush of enclosures, there were nowhere near enough jobs in the factories. It became official policy to “transport” those without a job. This meant yanking them away from friends and family a second time, not only out of the community where they had grown up, but onto a new continent (the thirteen North American colonies and then later Australia), where they were under the coercive system of indentured servitude. See Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 – Present, Harper Perennial, 1995, Chapter 3, entitled “Persons of Mean and Vile Condition”.

6 Townsend, Joseph, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, 1786, ed. Ashley Montagu (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), quoted in Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 1944, Beacon Press ed., 1957, pp. 113-4.

7 Polanyi, op. cit.

8 Polanyi, see Note 2, p. 164.

9 A future essay will go into our large-scale economic statistics like GDP and show how misleading they are.

10 I will explore the realm of money in much more detail in a future essay, but for now let us only recall that money - in our system as it stands - comes into existence through debt, which is to say through the capricious decisions of banks to lend or not to lend, and the equally arbitrary decisions of borrowers (businesses and individuals) to borrow or not to borrow. Assessments of the overall effect on the medium of exchange or the financial system do not come into play in these decisions, and the great regulator of these matters, the Federal Reserve, is influenced much more by a perceived need to preserve the wealth of creditors – the possessors of financial wealth built up in the past – than by the need to procure general well-being, present or future. See, e.g. William Greider’s stunningly detailed and perceptive description of the operations of the money system and the Fed, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, Simon & Schuster, 1987.

11 Thomas Piketty, a French economist, has described the strong tendency of capitalism over the centuries to concentrate wealth and income in the hands of the few – precisely because of the institution of interest. At various time, and in some countries, public policy has constrained this tendency through progressive taxes and other measures. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press, 2014.

12 According to the Take Back Your Time website, “The U.S. has the longest working hours in the industrial world. The average European puts in nine fewer weeks on the job each year than Americans do. While the Chinese have a mandated three weeks of paid leave, Australians four, and Europeans 4 to 5 weeks, the U.S. has no minimum paid leave law.” Nor does it provide for maternity (or paternity) leave. See http://timeday.org/takebackyourtime/blog-newsletters viewed July 27, 2014.

13 Professor Richard Wolff describes this evolution of lower pay for workers and sky-rocketing pay for CEOs with panache and incisiveness in his video lecture entitled “Capitalism Hits the Fan,” which can be viewed at http://www.rdwolff.com/content/capitalism-hits-fan-movie viewed Aug. 28, 2014. In joining the workforce, women achieved a certain financial independence (though not from their employers!), but removed from our collective lives the one group of people who had had time to participate in the voluntary associations (PTAs, for example) who could provide the informal glue in society and the means for overcoming the brutalizing tendencies of the “market”.

14 For more on the Universal Basic Income and its proponents, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income_Earth_Network both viewed Aug.29, 2014.

15 One of the new, exponentially growing sources of coercion in our society is student debt. Looking into that will also have to wait on a future essay.