In his recent article for Catalyst, “Labor Under Socialism,” Nick presents a moral framework for how to think about motivating people to work in a postcapitalist society. In our latest Left Notes podcast, Nick and Neal talk through the arguments of the piece: why people will have a duty to work under socialism, the importance of allowing people to choose their own occupations, and how labor markets can be part of a vision of a feasible and desirable socialism.
You can listen to our full conversation above. The below transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
The Duty to Work
Neal: I’m glad you’re doing this, because I think that there is such excitement now around democratic socialism and the idea that there might be an alternative to neoliberalism and to capitalism. But we still haven’t really fleshed it out. We haven’t built a democratic socialism for the twenty-first century in a full sense; I think we’re still stuck in the “socialism equals libraries and Social Security and Medicare for All” phase of things, which — these are good demands. These are important things to fight for. But hopefully our vision goes far beyond that.
So I really like this piece for that reason. And it’s part of a growing cottage industry of people talking about what socialism might look like. There’s the new book The Blueprint by a few Jacobin folks. Their book talks about how market socialism might work, and you’re making a good intervention here about how we could actually get people to work.
We could start by talking about why people should work. It sounds like a sort of preposterous question on the one hand, but actually it is kind of an important intervention to make. You and I are basically the same age; when we were in our twenties, the anarchist, libertarian left milieu was quite popular. I remember, as I was getting politicized, people talking about how people should have the right to be lazy, that we want to live in a postwork future. What’s interesting about your article is, you’re making an argument that actually people should work. People have a duty to work.
Nick: I’ll have something to say about these advocates of postwork socialism or postwork communism, but first, on this idea of a duty to work: I think it’s very intuitive to most people. In order to produce the things that we need, individually and collectively, we have to engage in labor. That means oftentimes doing things that we don’t want to do, or spending our time in ways where we would rather be doing something else. It means exercising our capacities for particular ends to serve social needs. So it is a kind of burden, a very significant burden, that is placed on people.
My argument is basically trying to develop the intuitive idea that there are duties of fairness to other members of society. Insofar as you’re able to work — you’re not significantly disabled, or we can make accommodations for people to work — we all have an obligation to contribute to society through our labor.
Now, maybe the more interesting questions about a duty to work are about how we might implement it, which is what a lot of the paper is trying to discuss. Also, people have a lot of objections to the idea that there’s a duty to work based around very valid worries, or even revulsion, at the way a kind of work-ethic discourse is deployed in our actual capitalist society, which of course is brutally unjust — where oftentimes the reason people are not working is not because they don’t want to, or because they’re just lazy or something like that, but because they’re actually excluded from the labor market; there’s not enough work to go around. Or, because they aren’t provided adequate educational opportunities, or they’re in very poor health, or because of previous work-related injuries or poisoning, that kind of thing.
I’m not trying to make the argument that, in our actually existing society, people who aren’t working are somehow being immoral, or that we ought to shame people who are unemployed or anything like that. Rather, the argument is: if we were to construct a fair society, where people have basic economic security, where everybody has equal access to high-quality education, where there are institutions that really do give everybody who can work a shot at getting a good job that pays well and treats them with dignity — in that ideal situation, we should expect everyone to contribute.
Neal: So, this is very much a conversation about the obligations we have to each other in a future society, not the current society. You’re not going to be joining the stereotypical Republican uncle at Thanksgiving talking about how poor people need to just get a job or something.
Nick: Right. As I put it in the article, this is an argument in what philosophers sometimes call ideal theory, about the principles that would apply in a society that is basically just.
Freedom to Choose an Occupation
Neal: Part of that conception of justice that you have regarding labor is this idea that people should have a right to choose their occupation. Maybe you could say a little bit more about why people have the right to choose their occupation. And then, what’s the contrast you’re thinking about? Are there societies where that’s not the case?
Nick: I think this is another idea that is intuitive to most people, but it’s important to articulate it clearly. Because when we start trying to come up with a detailed vision of what socialism might look like, it’s important as a North Star to block certain authoritarian possibilities, I would say.
The idea of freedom of occupational choice is based in the notion that individual freedom, or autonomy, is an overriding value. This is something that’s common ground between the Marxist socialist tradition and the left-liberal philosophical tradition, chiefly including people like John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, who I draw on a lot in this article. The idea is that it’s very important that we be able to choose how we spend our time and how we exercise and develop our productive, creative, and intellectual capacities. Part of how we do that is through the traditional civil liberties: freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, the kinds of things people are familiar with from the US Bill of Rights.
But freedom of choice of occupation is really important too. In formulating an idea of how I want to live my life, I’m crucially thinking about how I want to contribute to society. What sort of productive capacities do I want to develop and exercise? Do I want to be an engineer or a mechanic, an artist or a writer? I think these are fundamental to people’s identities in contemporary society. And that’s a kind of liberty that we should hope a socialist society would not just preserve but maximize.
When it comes to the contrasts or alternatives I have in mind, I’m thinking of societies where people are either prevented from taking on certain occupations or forced to take on certain jobs or occupations in an extensive way, where there’s not much room for people to set their own course in life.
There’s the sort of formal legal discrimination, when employers were allowed to discriminate openly on the basis of race or sex — saying, you know, black people aren’t allowed to take certain jobs, for instance. That obviously is a major violation of freedom of choice of occupation. Again, most people in contemporary society would already agree with that; the right to freedom of choice of occupation protects against it.
But it also protects against a vision of a more coercive or Stalinist-style socialism, where you have some sort of central authority, or even a more diffuse conception of “the community,” assigning people to certain jobs because that’s where people are supposedly most needed. I want to protect against that forcing of people into jobs.
Neal: And you briefly mention that in the article — that’s not even how these societies actually handled the labor obligation problem. People had freedom to choose their occupation to a certain extent in a lot of these societies as well.
Nick: That’s right. These societies did have what were called parasite laws. In the Soviet Union and a lot of state socialist countries, the constitutions enshrined a duty to work, and also they had laws on the books that would criminalize not working. If you refused to work at all, you would be punished. But in general, they didn’t tell people they had to work in certain occupations. This is more of a theoretical possibility than something that was actually implemented on a large scale. We can talk about some of those theoretical proposals in a bit.
Neal: I had a funny experience this summer that maybe illustrates this idea quite well. I was at a museum about life in East Germany, in Berlin, in July. There was a little video clip of one of the people who was the victim of one of these parasite laws; he had refused to get a job in the DDR, and he was assigned to be a gravedigger.
I think this was in the late 1980s, because there was enough freedom of the press that people could do a video with him and interview him. He’s talking about how he’s been forced to work as a gravedigger in this church, and he’s talking about what would be better. If he lived in the West, he could just do whatever he wanted to. He could hike in the forests of Canada for two years, and that’s his dream, to just be able to go hike in the forests of Canada for two years.
I was thinking about that in relation to your article, because it illustrates the two things that are not possible or not desirable in a model for socialist labor. We don’t want a world in which people are forced to be gravediggers. But we also recognize that it’s not possible to have a world where everyone can just go hike in the forests of Canada for two years. And we recognize the fact that that’s not how capitalism works — it’s not the case that in the free, wonderful world of the West, people can just go do whatever they want.
That’s what’s great about the framing of your article: you set up two considerations we should take into account as we think about how a labor market might work in a better and more just society. Recognizing the reality that people have to work, and then recognizing the desirability of having a society where people can choose their own jobs. You’re basically asking, how do we build a model for socialism that can account for both of these things?
Can a Basic Income Free Us From Work?
Neal: The way your article is set up, you set up these goals, and then we walk through a couple of models that you disagree with, that you critique, and then move to your desired option. The first one is what people will probably be most familiar with, which is the universal basic income (UBI) idea. So maybe you can talk a little bit about this. What is the idea here? How could this possibly work?
Nick: To be clear, I’m not arguing against the universal basic income as a policy. I think something like a UBI would be an important part of a socialist institutional framework. What I’m arguing against is precisely the idea that a UBI could free people from the need to work, which is how postwork theorists present it. People might still work out of the goodness of their hearts, or intrinsic joy in certain activities, but there would be no compulsion, or no duty or necessity, to work.
Here I’m drawing on Alex Gourevitch, who had a great piece in Catalyst a few years ago arguing against this postwork idea at length. The basic idea is, if nobody’s working because everybody is just taking a UBI, then no one is producing the goods that people would buy with the UBI. So it’s a fantasy that the UBI could free people from having to work.
One argument that some of the postwork people emphasize is that automation can come in, the robots can come in, to do all the work that was formerly done by humans. That’s how we could have no one working and everyone just taking the UBI, because the machines are producing everything we need. I started working on this project before AI was at the top of everyone’s minds, and maybe now a lot of people think it’s more plausible that at least a lot of kinds of work are going to be automated out of existence in the foreseeable future.
I still think — and here again I agree with Gourevitch — that we’re always going to have some people working. Crucially, we’re always going to need people to be making decisions and overseeing the machines that are doing labor. I also think there’s lots of kinds of work, especially care work, or what some people have called connective labor, that seems to essentially involve human-to-human interaction: whether that’s health care or childcare or therapy, or the kind of interactions that we take for granted at, say, a bar or a restaurant or a coffee shop, where under capitalism a lot of those workers are horribly exploited and not paid enough. But I don’t think an ideal socialist society would get rid of service work. I think those kinds of jobs can and should persist under socialism, and workers should just be paid better and treated better and have more say over their working conditions. So even if AI and automation get rid of a lot of work, I think there will always still be work to do, and we need to have an idea of how we’re going to divvy that up and get people to do it.
Neal: Yeah, we might look back on this in twenty years and laugh. But right now, it feels clear to me that there are some things that AI can do pretty well, and there may be some amount of jobs that will be automated away in the near future. But the idea that we’re headed toward a postwork world in our lifetimes, and probably in the foreseeable future — it seems hard to imagine that that’s the case. So I think it’s right to be thinking about a model for socialism that is still rooted in the reality that we’re living in.
So your first point, is that if we don’t accept the idea that we can just do away with work tomorrow, then we cannot accept this idea that a UBI will cover everybody’s income and people will just work out of the goodness of their own hearts. That’s not a viable model.
Can Moral Motivation Do the Job?
Neal: Then the second argument you take on is this idea that moral motivation can be a substitute: that people should be exhorted to work harder, to do these jobs, and that in a socialist society these kinds of moral appeals will be sufficient to get people to do the work that’s necessary. What problems do you see here?
Nick: A natural thought is that, if people have to work and we accept that there’s a duty to work, in a socialist society, we don’t want people to be motivated by the threat of force or by “the dull compulsion of economic relations,” as Karl Marx put it — where if you don’t work, you’ll starve. Instead, the idea is that we all come together, we democratically decide what work has to get done, and then, because we all see the value in contributing to the social project, we’ll all be motivated by the goodness of our hearts, or our sense of duty, to do what needs to be done.
My view is this seems to imply a very big change in human motivation from what we see today, and there’s an unrealistically altruistic or moralistic conception of human nature and human psychology at play. Again, to go back to the original argument for a duty to work: work is often something that we don’t want to do. It imposes significant burdens. So in choosing to work, I’m often choosing to do something where, if I’m left to my own devices, I would rather do something else.
So, the idea that you’re going to use these kinds of intrinsic moral motivations across a whole national or international economy, bringing together people who have no connection to each other, or maybe even historical conflicts with one another, or historical enmities — that you’re going to get them all to work out of a sense of duty — I think is just unrealistic. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But I want to say, in setting forward a vision of socialism, we shouldn’t rely on assuming unrealistic changes in human psychology. We should present something that is feasible given human beings as we know and understand them.
Neal: I find this way of approaching thinking about socialism really liberating. I think it makes socialism seem much more realistic; it’s something that’s actually achievable. We don’t have to assume that all humans will be altruistic saints. We don’t have to assume that the robots will replace all drudgery for us. Maybe these things are possible in the far, far future, but I want to think about a socialism that we can realize in our lifetime. For better or worse, we’re probably not going to be able to achieve these utopian leaps into the future, but we can still think about a socialism that will work, even with all of the flaws that we know are endemic in our society today. Of course, a better society, a more equal society, will reduce those problems.
Coercion and Compulsion
Neal: Before we move on to your positive argument, I wanted to go back to that coercion conversation. You’re not saying that all attempts to get people to work are necessarily immoral or wrong or unjust. There are cases where some amount of compulsion may be necessary, and you acknowledge that.
Nick: I want to separate two questions here. One goes into the positive case I make for labor markets, but we can imagine a just society in which people are motivated in part by monetary gain. So there’s not necessarily anything wrong with trying to realize compliance with a duty to work by having a basic income, or some social minimum that everyone is guaranteed, but then saying, hey, if you want to make more than that, you do have to work, and then you have different jobs that are paying people different amounts of money. But I’ll come back to that.
The other issue is there might be certain jobs that, for various reasons, not enough people want to do, even if you pay them a lot of extra money — either because they require rare skills or talents, or because they involve a lot of drudgery, or because they’re especially hazardous. The classic example is sanitation workers. Maybe the robots will solve that one day; they don’t seem to be doing it yet. But until then, we’re still going to need people to collect and sort garbage. It’s drudgery, and it’s also very hazardous work. We don’t necessarily just want to allow the market to assign that to whoever happens to want to take those jobs.
So, I’m very sympathetic to recent proposals by folks like Lucas Stanczyk and Jan Kandiyali that people might be forced to take these jobs. I’m especially sympathetic to this idea when it comes to a kind of limited rotation. Maybe everyone should have a year or two of national civil service where they have to work as a sanitation worker, or they have to work cleaning hospitals, or something like that — work that involves more drudgery or is more hazardous. That’s a way of fairly sharing more extreme burdens of work. It’s also a way of inculcating a sense of civic duty and solidarity, that we’re all in this together.
Where I would draw the line is when it gets to a point that you’re really interfering with freedom of choice of occupation, where you’re forcing people to work for long periods of time, where you’re no longer allowing them to autonomously set the direction of their lives and decide how they want to develop and exercise their creative capacities. So, there’s some room for a kind of coercive work regime in the kind of socialism I’m envisioning, but it has to be limited so that we still respect freedom of choice of occupation.
Neal: And we should note, this is precisely what capitalism does. Capitalism says, these are the jobs that are hardest, that force people to take on the most risks, and a certain number of people should be forced to do these jobs for decades of their lives — and if they don’t do them, they should starve. And it’s important to say, no one’s picking on these jobs. These are actually the jobs society should respect the most: people are making a huge sacrifice to do these things.
One of the interesting questions, when thinking about the difference between a socialist society and a capitalist society is: What kinds of jobs do people need to be incentivized to take? Under capitalism, the assumption is people need to be incentivized to take jobs that require a lot of training, or a lot of autonomy and decision-making, or a lot of organizational skills, people skills. . . . These are jobs that, in a socialist society where there was greater equality of opportunity, a lot of people would have the opportunity to get and would want to take. You can think of a whole list of occupations today that people get paid a lot of money to do that have their own intrinsic rewards besides the financial incentive. Under socialism, I would imagine those jobs are not going to pay a lot, because a lot of people are going to be willing and able to do them.
The jobs that are going to pay a lot are going to be the ones that require a lot of physical labor, that put you at risk, that are onerous or undesirable for many reasons. There’s going to be a kind of flipping of what needs to be incentivized, I would think, in a transition from capitalism to socialism.
Nick: That’s how I’m thinking about it. If you have an institutional framework in which firms are collectively owned, where people have equal opportunity in terms of access to high-quality education and society is really trying to make jobs available to everyone, and also you do have a generous welfare-state social minimum, so that when people are unemployed it’s not an absolute personal disaster — they have that extra leverage. They can walk away from jobs; they’re not desperate to take the first offer that comes into view. We wouldn’t expect as many people to be forced by the market into the more difficult jobs.
The Case for Labor Markets
Neal: We’ve cleared out some of the alternative ideas about how to handle this work problem in a better society. You come to the conclusion that labor markets have a really important role to play. So maybe you could define what you mean by labor market, and why you think they’re actually an important part of a vision for socialism.
Nick: By a labor market, I mean that you have firms — whether they’re public sector firms or cooperatives that are owned by, or at least managed by, their workers — where people can be attracted to those positions by the offer of a certain wage, and they take those jobs because they offer a certain wage. There can be pay differentials to attract people to jobs and firms where they’re most needed. So, this fits into a broader vision of market socialism.
The core case for this is provided by the moral arguments we mentioned at the beginning, and also the negative case against the alternatives. Because there is a duty to work — people need to work, and they ought to do so, and we ought to share that burden equally — and because people’s freedom of choice of occupation should be respected, the best way of realizing both of those principles is a labor market.
To clarify what I have in mind: Again, this is a socialist society. Obviously, we all have a lot of objections to the way labor markets work under capitalism, which we’ve already talked about. People are forced to take certain jobs because if they don’t, they’ll be on the street; they’ll starve. Also, when they take those jobs, they’re submitting to the tyranny of a boss who is not accountable to them in any way, who is following their own unconstrained profit imperatives. So again, I’m imagining a situation in which the relevant employers are democratically worker-managed firms, or public sector enterprises that are democratically accountable to the public, and where workers have strong collective bargaining rights and protections.
Once you have those things in place — and once you have a strong social minimum provided by a welfare state: decommodified health care, free high-quality education, something like a universal basic income, so even if you’re not working you have money to spend on clothes, shoes, etc. — I don’t think there’s any objection per se to a labor market.
Now, there are practical concerns that you might have about how this all works that I talk about in the paper. One of them is: if you have a really generous welfare state, or a generous basic income, what’s the incentive going to be for people to actually take jobs? We already said we’re not legally forcing people to take certain jobs. If that dull or mute compulsion of economic relations isn’t there, is this really feasible?
I point to the evidence from actually existing generous social democracies, in the Nordic countries, for example, that seems to show that having more generous welfare states, having more generous unemployment benefits, doesn’t negatively affect people’s participation in the labor force — or economic growth, economic dynamism. So, we have good reason to be optimistic that having a very generous social minimum is compatible with a dynamic labor market.
That said, I would acknowledge that if you make that social minimum too generous, then at some point you will lose that motivation that’s provided by offering people extra pay to take certain jobs. So, there’s always going to be some sort of balancing act. Probably, in our ideal socialist society, we’re going to have to do some trial and error to find where exactly that ideal social minimum lies. But I’m confident that we can ensure everyone a dignified existence.
Neal: You’re imagining a future socialist society where people have their health care, their home, basic nutritional and other needs met. But if they want to take big trips, or go to the opera, or go to the movies every week —
Nick: Well, you should have some decommodified art. . . .
Neal: Of course. But obviously, a million people can’t show up to the opera every day, so you have to ration access to that to some extent. So, there’s nothing wrong with having a little bit of an incentive for people who are going to work more to show up to these things.
I think people might ask, well, what about those people who can’t work, for whatever reason, or who retire? Presumably they would be offered a higher-than-minimum income.
Nick: Yeah. Again, actually existing welfare states point in the direction of what a socialist society should do too, which is: if people have disabilities that prevent them from working, or — we obviously want to have retirement in our postcapitalist society — if they’ve reached retirement age, they get an additional stipend above and beyond what they would get if they were working age and not judged to be disabled. I think that’s a fair way of managing things: to think that there’s some population we define as working age and “able-bodied,” or whatever language we want to use there, that gets that basic dignified social minimum. But there also is an economic pressure to join the labor force.
Neal: One thing that might be worth also clarifying here is that in your version of socialism, this idea of a labor market for socialism, there would have to be a maximum income. We’re not talking about the kind of society we live in, where there’s no limit to the amount of income that someone can accumulate. The idea is to have a much more egalitarian wage structure.
Nick: Definitely. My thought is that you want to allow inequalities insofar as that is necessary for providing everyone the means to flourish. I’m not coming down hard on an exact view about what the most just income distribution looks like. But I do think something like John Rawls’s difference principle is really compelling: you allow for inequalities in wealth and income insofar as those benefit the worst off.
Now, I imagine that the kinds of inequalities that would exist because of pay differentials to get people to take certain jobs are going to be way, way smaller than exist under capitalism. And there are a lot of reasons for that. One is that I do think people will be somewhat more intrinsically motivated in a society that is more solidaristic, where there’s more equality of opportunity. I think that when more of the economy is under public ownership and less driven by the profit motive, when you have collective bargaining regimes in place that guarantee workers certain minimums and sectoral benchmarks, as we’ve seen in places like Sweden, you’re just not going to see the kind of runaway pay for executives. We’ve gotten rid of the capitalist class, so you don’t have capitalists hoarding wealth as individuals. So, there’s still inequality, but way, way less.
