November 8, 2010
Workfare, Slavery, Libertarians and History
Don Paskini demonstrates how unworkable the Coalition’s “workfare” plans will be in practice. Yet thinking philosophically about the implications of “workfare” – i.e. the state forcing people to work – can also be fruitful.
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State minimalist libertarians are fond of arguing that taxation is a form of slavery. Apparently, if you pay 30% of your income in tax, then allegedly 30% of your working time is owned by the state, and that allegedly means you’re enslaved for that period. Although intricately fancy, such arguments are in fact relatively straightforwardly refuted.
But if anything looks prima facie like state-imposed modern slavery, it’s forcing some group (e.g. the unemployed) to work for nothing. Indeed that description might appear a plausible candidate for a starting definition of slavery. Yet appearances can be misleading, so let’s consider the obvious objection that “workfare” is not a form of slavery: that unemployed people will not work for nothing because they will receive unemployment benefit which will now be conditional upon the aforementioned work.
Viewed from a careful philosophical and historical perspective, however, this argument may generate more problems than solutions – for libertarians in particular.
Firstly, benefits are – by their very nature – not a form of remuneration for labour undertaken. The whole point of out-of-work benefits is that they exist to support those who would otherwise be destitute. Benefits are a safety-net, a source of income for those without other means of support.
Secondly, benefits have never been part of some 20th century egalitarian revolution, the tides of which are being turned by making benefits “conditional”. Unemployment benefits (in particular) are a pragmatically-evolved political response in the post-war era to the realisation that leaving people to the mercies of capricious market forces will – in times of economic hardship – push the destitute into the “solutions” of desperate political extremism, like fascism, Nazism and communism. Benefits are a safeguard against the extremist politics that grow in the fertile soils of disempowerment and economic hardship. That is – historically – a major reason for their existing as precisely unconditional supports, supplied by the state and financed from general taxation.
Out-of-work benefits are thus not – and never have been – remuneration for labour. To make them such entails that they are no longer benefits. In turn, to threaten to take away such now-conditional “benefits” from those who do not undergo state-prescribed work placements is to effectively force people to labour for (barely) subsistence remuneration. It’s: work-for-the-state, or be destitute in the gutter.
To re-iterate: if “benefits” become dependent upon work, then that work becomes – for those who would prefer not to starve in the gutter – enforced labour extracted by the power of the state. Accordingly, that now starts to look rather like a form of state-enforced slavery in the context of societies that have developed legal structures and norms that previously provided for the unconditional protection of the most vulnerable. The more general point being that these sorts of issues cannot properly be analysed out of the relevant historical context.
A switch to benefit-conditionality cannot, as a basic fact of reality, happen in vacuo. Its impact upon state-citizen relations must be understood against the background of what has gone before. Hence: if people were previously guaranteed a basic subsistence minimum, and now they will only get that if they work for the state, there is a strong case for saying they are now being forced to work for the state. And forced work is, at some level, at least analogous to slavery.
I’m happy to admit that the analogy with slavery will not hold anything like all the way down, however. The psychological and moral dimensions of actual slavery – the rendering of thinking, feeling human beings into mere property, left wholly at the mercy of owner-dominators – are deeply objectionable, and put slavery-proper on a different moral and political plain to the Government’s “workfare” proposals. But having said that, “workfare” may look a lot closer to slavery-proper than the polemical libertarian suggestion that paying tax (via a developed and established legal-social structure, ratified democratically, and backed by rule of law) is akin to slavery, because of the alleged appropriation of worker’s labouring time by the coercive extractive power of the state.
Unless, of course, you’re a libertarian. Then, your response is likely to be: the state is not forcing anybody to work via “workfare”-type proposals, because if people would rather not work they can forego their “benefits” and starve in the gutter; it’s their choice.
What I want to end by suggesting today is not simply the usual charge that this is a bizarrely brutal political outcome to advocate, and which strikes most ordinary people as abhorrent and very possibly mad. (After all, the proposition that the worst-off should be abandoned so as to “protect” the property rights of the already more fortunate, who would allegedly be “enslaved” if they were forced to pay tax to fund wider welfare support systems, looks blatantly bonkers to especially the non-philosophically minded majority).
To that oft-repeated observation, I would add two further points however. Firstly, that the libertarian response is defective insofar as it refuses to engage withthe reality of a preceding practical context against which to understand the state-citizen relationship in something like “workfare” reforms.It is just not good enough to attempt to analyse political interactions and changes in vacuo – at least if one wishes to produce a serious and rounded analysis. Changes and power structures happen in concrete political and historical contexts; abstracting from those tells you only about your abstraction, not about the world people actually must live and interact in.
Secondly, that much libertarianism is astoundingly historically ignorant, insofar as it does not pay attention to why systems of benefit support have evolved in our societies. And in turn libertarianism is naive, insofar as no attention is paid to the empirical evidence that when people are left to the capricious mercies of the market they do not sit around picking their noses, but agitate for (often violent) forms of political extremism to address social and economic short-comings.
Thus, the irony: because libertarians are generally historically ignorant and naive, they advocate likely self-defeating political programmes. In the short term, the newly-established Republic of Libertopia would see benefits (etc) withdrawn and taxation drastically reduced to defend the (alleged) property rights of the better-off, so as to prevent their “enslavement” through “coercive” taxation. Yet in the longer-term, the inevitability of economic strife at some point* would push the destitute and abandoned to seek-out radical political solutions that would not only over-turn the libertarian arrangements of the status-quo, but (if the 20th century is any guide) risk instituting forms of political organisation that would be drastically more antithetical to the aims and desires of most libertarians than the oh-so wicked tax regimes of western liberal democracies. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Adolf Hitler was rather more of a threat to people’s liberty and property-owning prosperity than Clement Atlee or FDR.
Perhaps it is therefore fortunate – for want of a better word – that most libertarians in practice don’t actually go Galt at all. They just live in affluent American suburbs, and vote Republican.
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*To those who would reply that under the (Austrian?) economic system of state-minimalist Libertopia there would be no economic crises or hardships, we simply reply with the derisory silence this sort of self-assured refusal to engage with reality (by living in imaginary sky-castles of convenient a priori theory) deserves.
Tim Worstall said,
November 8, 2010 at 8:23 am
To address the point of historical ignorance….who said this?
“These ideas make one focus on the intense need which many unemployed people have for
active help to overcome the barriers to employment. The main kinds of “active labour market
policies” that can be used are these:
• Job-search assistance, advice and matching to the available vacancies. Good
controlled experiments in Sweden show how unemployment has been reduced in
areas where the job centres have more staff.
• Training. This has a mixed record but the right education and training can clearly
set a person on a new path in life.
• Employment subsidies. These can induce employers to give a chance to hard-toplace
workers and thus expand the size of the effective workforce. A good
example is the Jobstart programme in Australia.
• Work experience. Where no job can be found with a regular employer, work on
publicly-useful projects can help improve people’s work habits and give them
work records which help in finding regular jobs.
These programmes can help and have been around for a long time, though usually on
a small scale. But unless they are universal, they tend to be used by people who already had
the best chance of finding work.
Thus the big new idea in Labour’s New Deal is this. We ought to offer everybody
on the threshold of long-term unemployment a choice of activity for at least a period.
And when that happens we should remove the option of life on benefit.”
Anyone? Who said that the long term unemployed should be shunted off into work experience, if other approaches fail, at the risk of losing their benefits if they refuse?
http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/occasional/OP015.pdf
Richard Layard, Labour peer, when defending the Welfare to Work scheme in 2001.
Again, on this subject of historical ignorance: what does the near entirety of the study of long term unemployment have to say about what we can and should do about long term unemployment?
That we need to nag, cajole, carrot and stick, the long term unemployed back into some form of contact with the labour market.
I’m not, at this point, trying to defend the implementation of this scheme: it’s far too early for us to know the details and I’m well aware that governments have a propensity to fuck things up.
But the basic idea, that the long term unemployed should be both tempted and forced back into the labour market, yes, even to take make-work jobs at the cost of losing their benefits, is a standard approach to hte problems of long term unemployment.
There really are structural issues here that need to be addressed, it simply isn’t that we’ve an overhand of cyclical unemployment (technically, the analysis is that long term unemployment shifts the Phillips Curve and only these sorts of workfare schemes can shift it back again).
but then those who were historically ignorant wouldn’t know that, would they?
That Guy Montag said,
November 8, 2010 at 10:11 am
I was unlucky enough not to be able to make most of last Friday’s conference on the humanities at Birkbeck. I will eventually hopefully give the podcast a listen but I did manage to catch the last half of Kate Sopel’s talk and she said something I’ve been mulling about for a while.
Now it’s been argued before that there’s something perverse about this whole perpetual growth model of economics and I agree something seems really strange about the idea that economic growth can carry on perpetually. It’s my, frankly largely uninformed opinion, formed partly by having to listen to a lot of business news that that seems to be a rather big problem with economics, not that there is no money, but that no one knows where to put it to get “growth”. So far so Marxist. Part of what makes this model so perverse is that it ends up creating a very specific conception of what it is that actually constitutes contribution. Frankly the more I think about call centres, payment protection insurance, double glazing salesmen and burger flippers, the more I think the idea that that is what constitutes a person’s contribution to society is just as bonkers as the view that society can magically continue to grow forever.
This is where Kate Soper’s talk struck me as she essentially made the case that we are in fact the benficiaries of a vaste amount of free time and the failure of society, and the promise of the Humanities, is precisely in its ability to create value out of free time. Clearly this value can’t be a simple economic value, but we’re living in a stunted society if we think that money is the only value we have available to us.
Which is where I come to my objections to your suggestions Paul. I could suggest for instance that there’s something equally strange about the idea that we provide benefits in order to prevent civil unrest and not because it is a fundamentally shameful thing for a society to let its citizen’s starve. I would however like to make the slightly broader suggestion that I think this suggests, that it’s on the community level that this debate needs to be had.
We do in fact have a real problem that is far more to do with how people engage in living a fulfilling life and in that sense the government proposal is on the right track Where it goes wrong is an almost classic Conservative and Libertarian failure of imagination, an inability to conceive of other forms of value that a group of people can provide. Me, I’d like to see instead of say necessarily work details, a broad range of options that would enable entitlement from studies to volunteering to community art projects and yes maybe work details. The goal here is not only to extract “value for money” but to fix a genuine deficit in people ideas of what actually constitutes a good life.
Thomas Kealy said,
November 8, 2010 at 12:01 pm
“abstracting from those tells you only about your abstraction, not about the world people actually must live and interact in.”
I find this strange: physics is full of abstractions which tell us important facts about the physical world, and it turns out so is economics (regarding the economic world).
And for some credibility to my arguments, a quote from an essay by Paul Krugman:
“You can’t do serious economics unless you are willing to be playful. Economic theory is not a collection of dictums laid down by pompous authority figures. Mainly, it is a menagerie of thought experiments–parables, if you like–that are intended to capture the logic of economic processes in a simplified way. In the end, of course, ideas must be tested against the facts. But even to know what facts are relevant, you must play with those ideas in hypothetical settings. And I use the word “play” advisedly: Innovative thinkers, in economics and other disciplines, often have a pronounced whimsical streak. ”
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/hotdog.html
Of course, abstraction is sometimes a vice – which the irrepressible Simon Blackburn adresses in his essay “Desire and the Meaning of Life.” I’m sure you’ve read it.
As a matter of interest, I don’t support these plans, but also believe that work would be better than long-term unemployment. But then, I’ve no better solution for the problem.
Chris Brooke said,
November 8, 2010 at 12:24 pm
“such arguments are in fact relatively straightforwardly refuted…”
– If the reference is to a book which took a ferociously intelligent man a significant chunk of two decades of his life to write, it’s not obvious that the refutation is especially straightforward…
Paul Sagar said,
November 8, 2010 at 12:36 pm
Chris,
I dunno, I always thought that what Cohen really wrestled with was the concept of self-ownership and its complex relationship to justice. Now, I suppose within that there is the problem of whether taxation=slavery. But my reading of S-O,F&E finds the refutation of the t=s slavery components quite straightforward, but what is difficult is reconciling this refutation with Cohen’s wider (and eventually, largely repudiated) Marxism.
If you’re not a Marxist (or a Libertarian) seeing that equating taxation with slavery is a bit bonkers isn’t particularly problematic. I mean, the basic observation in the OP – which Cohen finally gets round to making in the last Chapter of S-O,F&E – that the moral and psychological (not to mention legal and political) dimensions of slavery-proper are worlds away from systems of taxation in democratic liberal societies, gets you a lot of the way there. Cohen’s real trouble is not the realisation that taxation does not equal slavery, but that he was committed to an untenable conception of the person and of ownership.
Having said all *that*, it’s also clearly the case that it’s much easier to see these things after somebody of Cohen’s outstanding ability has hacked out a path for us to follow him through the undergrowth. So whilst it may not have been straightforward first time around, I take it that now the groundwork is done (and done so well and so extensively), this particular libertarian nugget is done and dead – that Marxists end up being casualties too is not something that particularly troubles me because a) I have no dog in that race and b) I’m generally in favour of leaving Marxism in the 20th Century no matter how interesting an intellectual programme it undoubtedly was (and is thus still worthy of *study*, but more as a historical intellectual phenomenon than as method of continuing intellectual exploration).
John Meredith said,
November 8, 2010 at 1:09 pm
“Cohen’s real trouble is not the realisation that taxation does not equal slavery, but that he was committed to an untenable conception of the person and of ownership.”
As are all Marxists of course. Cohen was clear eyed enough to recognize that Nozickian ideas of self-ownership are implied in any Marxist or socialist objection to capitalist relations of production. If you don’t own your labour what wrong is being done you if the man in the silk hat takes a chunk of it? Others tried to wave away the difficulty but Cohen was made of tougher stuff, although he never really managed to argue the problem away. Of course Marx saw the difficulty too eventually and shifted ground but again could not really explain how the ‘social’ appropriation of labour was morally acceptable while the private appropriation of labour wasn’t. He would have had worser headaches if he had had a theory of public choice problems too, of course, and had therefore understood the degree to which ‘social’ spending is inevitably captured for private ends.
grrl said,
November 8, 2010 at 1:36 pm
fancy some historic-contextualist pondering from Austria? [written in waltz tempo, because we don’t do
researchpolitics, but arts - surely al of you have grown tired of it, but repetitio is a good hammer]Austria tried once a simple economic system – or solution! – based on the known principle ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’. The Good had no work, The Bad had the Money, and the (moustached) Ugly sugested they gas the Bad, and give the Money to the Good. But there was some hither and thither and the Austrian decided they’d better leave the Germans holding the baby. As far the historic context.
Nowdays, of course, Austrians live happy in sky-castles of convenient a posteriory theory, where you drink beer and dance walz, all for free (better say, Gastarbeiter pay for it, via taxation).
[this comment comes from austrian shores, although not from a genetically austrian commenter :-) … ]
Dan said,
November 8, 2010 at 3:08 pm
I remember thinking that the argument of Cohen’s (presumably Chapter 10 Section 2) you point is remarkable ineffective, so I went back and had a look – and sure enough, it is. Cohen first builds up what he thinks is the “polemically operative sequence” which, as a matter of fact, no even moderately sophisticated libertarian would endorse (the relevant complaint about redistributive taxation is not that it places the person being taxed in a relation of slavery vis-a-vis some other individual, since it is fairly clear that no such individual exists in modern democracies, but rather that the taxpayer’s condition is relevantly like a slave in that his control over his own powers and person is considerably diminished).
After beating around the bush for a while, Cohen does gets to the plausible libertarian argument. But then, at last, he rejects it for two reasons which amount to little more than ad hominem attacks against Nozick. First he points out that Nozick cannot make this argument, since Nozick himself is committed to allowing taxation to fund the minimal state. This is true, and perhaps fair as a criticism of Nozick, but it does absolutely nothing to support Cohen’s point. At best, it shows that Nozick is committed to something tantamount to slavery also. Secondly he argues that Nozick cannot legitimately complain about slavery, since Nozick himself countenances voluntary slavery contracts. And again, this does nothing to establish Cohen’s point – at best it shows Nozick’s position to be unstable. And that’s it for the counterarguments to the plausible libertarian position; I hope I’m not the only one who finds it pretty uncompelling.
Anyway, as to your central argument, it goes wrong for a couple of reasons. One is that you seem to be assuming that slavery consists in having your income-per-hour-worked reduced past some normatively relevant baseline, which seems to me highly dubious (although perhaps can be made good with the right normative baseline in play). Another is that you seem to think that the normatively relevant baseline is merely the statistical one, the one that people are accustomed to, the one which exists in the relevant historical context. But that can’t be right – imagine a society where there are legal structures and norms which exploit (by whatever standards of exploitation you care to name) group A for the sake of providing group B an income. Then imagine a reformer who comes along and says that members of group B have to perform some work in order to receive that income. Is the reformer really proposing a version of slavery?
Workfare « Peter Risdon said,
November 8, 2010 at 9:02 pm
[...] different reasons, Paul Sagar reached a conclusion that agreed with 50% of the above: [Workfare] work becomes – for those who would [...]
Shuggy said,
November 8, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Adolf Hitler was rather more of a threat to people’s liberty and property-owning prosperity than Clement Atlee or FDR.
Uh huh – but for the wingnut fraternity, even edging towards the polcies of the New Deal makes you Hitler.
Having said that, FDR has been subject to more hagiographies that any other President in American history, with the possible exception of JFK. His public works, often seen as a sort of proto-Keynesianism, were nothing of the sort. Underlying the policies of the New Deal was the felt need to get the poor to perform ritualistic acts of work, to genuflect towards the Protestant work ethic. Most of the criticisms that Donpaskini makes of the coalition’s proposals were levelled against FDR’s New Deal.
Mark said,
November 9, 2010 at 2:30 am
But I thought the able-bodied unemployed wanted to work?
As far as I can see, in this context, “slavery” is just being used to mean morally objectionable work.
While most people accept that some degree of taxation is an absolute necessity for a functioning society, it’s not completely unreasonable to suggest that our current level of taxation might be too high and that it is neither necessary or beneficial. That it is morally objectionable to be made to pay for things which are of no broader benefit.
So, whether or not taxation is morally objectionable depends on the level of taxation. To say that all taxation is morally objectionable would be an extremist position.
Likewise, unfortunately, it isn’t feasible for all of us to take an indefinite holiday – it is possible for some of us to do so, but this cannot practically be given as a universal right to all able-bodied adults. This means that we have to work. Whether or not this work is morally objectionable depends on the content of the work – having to work 18 hours a day cutting asbestos with no mask, for a pittance, would be objectionable. Having to do some gardening, less objectionable.
But the idea that able bodied adults have the right not to work at all is an extremist position, the same as the man calling for no taxation. It’s hard to see how it can work without massive “free-riding” and exploitation of morally sound workers.
From a normal persons perspective both of these extremest positions are wrong.
“libertarianism is astoundingly historically ignorant…the inevitability of economic strife at some point* would push the destitute and abandoned to seek-out radical political solutions”
Is there a history of such things happening in the Anglosphere?
PS – Isn’t it ironic that 299 page paperback book, given it’s supposed content, sells for 29 pounds?
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captain swing said,
November 11, 2010 at 5:49 am
““libertarianism is astoundingly historically ignorant…the inevitability of economic strife at some point* would push the destitute and abandoned to seek-out radical political solutions”
Is there a history of such things happening in the Anglosphere?
There is certainly a history of a fear of such things occurring in the UK being a motivator behind social reforms.
One of the reasons behind the Liberal government of 1906 social security reforms was that the Liberal Party recognised the threat the newly formed Labour Party posed to its traditional support in many working class areas. To counter the threat from the socialist and Labour movement, the Liberals realised that they had to instigate social reforms, or risk losing political support from the working classes.
There were many motivations for the formation of the welfare state and the NHS by the post-war Atlee Government, one of them was undoubtedly fear of the growth of communism in the UK. The popularity of the Soviet Union, our war time ally, was at an all time high and membership of CPGB was at a peak with two Communists elected as MPs.
The right’s view that the welfare state is just there because of paternalistic liberal reforms and a social democratic push for equality is very simplistic and warped. They ought to read some history, but they won’t.
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