In a Capitalist Society, Your Consumption is All That Matters
I’ve written before about my distrust of the motivations behind guaranteed jobs. Ultimately, my reticence towards this policy stems from my distrust of the profit motive. Because from my perspective, the real reason why politicians want you to have a job is so that you can buy things. Lots of things.
They don’t say that though. Instead politicians depict work as the most important part of one’s life. They perpetuate a worldview where “what you do” defines your purpose and status in the world. Without a job, they tell us, you are unmoored and without dignity.
All of this worship of work merely veils the true utility of a citizen, which is that in a capitalist society your value is related to your consumption. Occasionally, politicians let this truth slip, like when President Bush implored the American people to “go shopping” after 9/11.
And to be honest, it is only because of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man that I finally saw the consumer-focused nature of citizenship. I’m only a few chapters in, but so far this excerpt, in particular, caught my interest:
For the vast majority of the population, the scope and mode of satisfaction are determined by their own labor; but their labor is work for an apparatus which they do not control, which operates as an independent power to which individuals must submit if they want to live.
Here, Marcuse is pointing out that laboring for pathetic wages cannot be the highest state of human existence, and we should do all that we can to overcome this burden.
Yet guaranteed jobs would hardly liberate citizens from the powerful “apparatus” of capitalist society. If anything it would simply thrust them back into the machine.
These aren’t exactly well-paid jobs, either. Some guaranteed jobs plans claim they will pay each American worker $36,000 a year—which is barely enough to exist, let alone thrive. That salary sounds absurd (and is absurd) when you consider that Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet’s wealth now exceeds the bottom half of the entire US population.
With wealth distribution like this, there is no excuse for the modern citizen to toil day in and day out only to barely survive.
Now, the common alternative to universal jobs is usually universal basic income (UBI), but even that policy does not replace the capitalist citizen’s primary function. After all, a citizenship stipend is provided by the government in order for the citizen to participate in the economy without necessarily being tied to labor.
So while UBI allows for the citizen to embark on purposes or labor that they might find more fulfilling, it’s not upending consumer citizenship. It’s merely removing the harsh prerequisite of labor.
Maybe that’s enough at this point in time. Endless consumption cannot last forever, though. The system which feeds this type of citizenship is ruining our planet and exploiting the labor of many other humans far from American shores. And even if, yes, a consumer world is improving the lives of many at a faster rate than ever before, we cannot let these improvements blind us to the terrible shortcomings of the current system.
As Marcuse notes:
As these beneficial products become available to more individuals in more social classes, the indoctrination they carry ceases to be publicity; it becomes a way of life. It is a good way of life—much better than before—and as a good way of life, it militates against qualitative change.
We cannot be lulled into such one-dimensional thinking. We must do our best to “transcend the established universe” and forge a system that improves the lives of many while not simultaneously suppressing the full potential of nearly all humans. Guaranteed jobs, rather than transcending the status quo, puts a bandaid over “a good way of life”—instead of aiming for something better.
