Unemployment as an act of violence

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Working societies present a system of all-round interdependence, held together in its innermost core by value-creating labour. The people are forced to make a living by means of work. Work is quasi the foremost need of life. But what if there is not enough work for all any more? The loss of values, solidarity, sense of life seems to be pre-programmed. A plea for reduction of working hours and a basic income. 

 

"(...) the demand for the easy life of the gods, liberated from toil and labour, is as old as our history. Nor is a life without work anything new; it was once one of the most naturally accepted and best secured prerogatives and privileges of the few who ruled over the many. Thus it may seem that here technical progress is merely realising that which all generations of humankind have been dreaming of without, however, being able to afford it. Yet this appearance is deceptive. In the seventeenth century the Modern Age began to glorify work theoretically, and at the beginning of our century it ended by transforming society in its entirety into a working society." Hannah Arendt

The end of the working society

Working societies, as Hegel already ascertained, present a system of all-round interdependence, held together in its innermost core by value-creating labour. The people are forced to make a living by means of work. Work is quasi the foremost need of life. It is from work that individuals gain the material means to lead their lives, and from which they have to elicit personal self-confidence and recognition, as it were - human dignity.

The creation of individual labour power is a collective endeavour of the entire society, involving much effort and considerable costs. Its totality constitutes to a great extent the wealth of a society. If a society has no need of the labour power created and allows it to degenerate or even inhibits its development from the very beginning, this leads to a destruction of this wealth and of individual biographies. 

If people find no work, then they are dependent on social welfare and have to live off a pittance which may just enable them to eke out an existence, but is not enough to allow them to participate in societal life in an appropriate manner. For this reason recognition is denied them, and they have difficulty in sustaining their self-confidence. "Unemployment is an act of violence. It is an attack on the physical and psychic-intellectual integrity, on the inviolacy of the persons affected. It is a theft and expropriation of the skills and qualities acquired in an arduous and complex education process within the family, school and vocational training (...) and which – cut off from their possibilities of societal activity – are in danger of decaying and causing severe personality disturbances."

Unemployment as societal reality

This, however, only applies as long as unemployment is regarded in public as an individual disgrace, as the result of personal failure instead of objective changes in society. It is not uncommon for those who have become redundant to feel ashamed before the outside world and to feign an activity which no longer exists. In some medium-sized companies the phenomenon has also emerged of intimidated workers punching their attendance cards at the time-clock and then returning to their place of work. Fear of redundancy means that much unpaid overtime is done willingly. Cynical as the thought may be, it does have a rational content: better to be exploited than not to be exploited at all. Better to do degrading work than to lose entirely the material prerequisite of being able to lead a dignified life. Fear makes one biddable.

Fear is a poor counsellor; as a mass phenomenon it destroys inner-societal peace. Organised political irresponsibility is at foot when the social welfare system is dismantled while at the same time clinging to the ideal of full employment on the basis of a normal employment contract. To an increasing extent waged labour seems to be becoming obsolete. In many places people have long been talking of the end of the working society. Mass unemployment is in any case not an individual problem of those affected by it; it is a structural problem since in the mechanical, automated and computerised production process the need for human labour is constantly dwindling in order to produce ever greater masses of goods.

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Reduction of working hours – a utopia?

In order to prevent a division of the population – on the one side an elite of fully-employed, privileged and protected middle-level and leading executives, on the other side a host of unprotected jobless, unskilled, unqualified or even qualified part-time helpers – it would be necessary to drastically reduce working hours and to distribute the existing workload equitably and appropriately among all those capable of gainful employment.

The reduction of working hours has been the central dream of all modern utopias – from Thomas More via Campanella, Saint Simon, Fourier, Proudhon to Marx and beyond. Already in the early 1980s, the French philosopher André Gorz came up with the idea of uncoupling the right to income from the work performed. This should be recalled with some urgency today since the former unemployment benefit, which has for example been de facto abolished in Germany with the Hartz reforms, already – albeit in camouflaged form – pointed in the right direction. " If the unemployed in the northern European countries are paid 70% of their former salary for an unlimited period of time, or if workers over the age of 55 (...) are pensioned off with 70 to 90% of their wages, then the right to income has de facto already been uncoupled from actually having a job."

This uncoupling act was camouflaged since all stops were pulled out to avoid admitting that full employment was a thing of the past. Up and into the 1990s the big multi-corporate enterprises had been using the instrument of early retirement to avoid internal conflicts and shuffle them off onto the social welfare system – this is no longer necessary as mass redundancies have long since become enforceable. Since social welfare and unemployment benefit continued to be regarded not as a kind of compensation for those who have been marginalised, it was only a question of time until the step of uncoupling, i.e. revoking the supposedly overly generous welfare-state provision for the unemployed would be implemented.

In Germany this clinging to the myth of full employment may enjoy a particular resonance due the experience with fascism and the total devastation by the World War. Yet the myth exerts its influence in all advanced industrial nations. The adherence to the norm of full employment serves the purpose of upholding a performance ethos which screens the interests of control and of specific classes. For with the radical reduction of working hours the balance of power between the workforce and capital would shift in favour of the wage-earners. Payment could then no longer be orientated to the actual working time for this would then not be enough to live off. Working hours would have to cease being the measure of value of work. A life of dignity and its requirements would be the only benchmark.

Basic income as an alternative

From these ideas there emerges the conception of a social or basic income independent of a job. This would be understood as the right of every person "to receive, distributed over his entire life, the product of the not further reducible quantum of labour necessary for society which he has to perform in the course of his life." As early as 1983, Gorz calculated the necessary number of hours for each person to perform in the course of a working life as no more than 20,000. By the present day this number must have been further reduced due to advanced manpower-displacing technologies. It could be left to everyone to decide for themselves, according to Gorz, in what stint and rhythm they balance their time account. In return they would be granted a state-guaranteed minimal income during their lifetime.

No matter how one discusses the idea of a social basic income, it is clear that one cannot avoid accepting the end of full employment and seeing in the necessary restructuring a chance of infusing more fairness and solidarity into society. The longer one denies this reality, the more eruptive may be the force of the reality which one day urges us to rethink.

 Marcus Hawel is a freelance publisher, co-founder of RightNow! and the co-editor of the Internet magazine Sozialistische Positionen

Translation: Heather Moers

Copyright: Goethe-Institut,  Unemployment is an act of violence… and the destruction of wealth, Online-Redaktion