Against Work.pdf

RUTH LEVITAS

University of Bristol

Against work: a utopian incursion into social policy

Abstract

This paper argues in favour of using a utopian method of thinking about

the future, rather than simply extrapolating from present conditions.

This opens up the possibility of thinking in terms of the kind of society

we want to achieve, rather than what seems immediately probable. It

criticises the Blair Government’s focus on the economic and moral

centrality of paid work, and argues, following Gorz, that the link

between ‘work’ and income needs to be broken to ensure an adequate

livelihood for all. This will entail a re-valuing of forms of human

activity, as argued by Herbert Marcuse, and more recently by Fiona

Williams. This ultimately calls in question the structures of capitalism

itself, since what is entailed is, at the very least, a step change

downwards in the proportion of the social product accruing to capital.

The paper concludes by contending that any genuinely critical social

policy must have this utopian dimension.

Key words: capitalism, Gorz, Labour Party, Marcuse, redistribution

Thinking the future

This paper began life as a contribution to a panel on the future of

social policy at the Critical Social Policy conference in November

2000. Not long after, I was asked to talk at a Harvard symposium on

the future of social protection. The similarity of these themes and my

long-standing interest in dreams of the future (Levitas, 1990), as well

as contemporary politics, led me to begin not with the obvious (and

obviously important) issue of what the future may hold, but the

question of how we think about the future. There are essentially two

ways of doing this. First, and most common, is the method of

extrapolation. This involves the identiﬁcation of key trends in the

SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol. 21(4): 449–465; 019775

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present and their projection forwards. It is concerned with what is

probable, possible, and possibly desirable, moving in small steps from

where we are. It remains rooted in the present, and tends to accept as

given the major contours of present society, such as the structures of

global capitalism, the dominance of paid work, the inequalities of the

market. It is, therefore, always as much (re)capitulation as projection

and extrapolation.

Much less respectable and more radical is the utopian method,

which not only allows but enjoins us to think ﬁrst about where we

want to be, and then about how we might get there—depending of

course on who ‘we’ are. The utopian method is intrinsically critical

and evaluative. But it is also necessary. As the French sociologist

Andre Gorz puts it, ‘it is the function of utopias, in the sense the term

has assumed in the work of Ernst Bloch or Paul Ricoeur, to provide us

with the distance from the existing state of affairs which allows us to

judge what we are doing in the light of what we could or should do’

(Gorz, 1999: 113, original emphasis). The dichotomy between the

extrapolatory and utopian methods is of course not absolute, since

even small steps must take a certain direction, and the critical

purchase of the utopian method depends upon the theoretical pos-

sibility of its prescriptions. Nevertheless, the difference in approach is

signiﬁcant. While extrapolation looks from the present to the future,

the utopian method (also) looks from a putative future to the present,

and allows us more scope for considering alternative policies and

alternative forms of social protection. In this exploration of the future

of social policy, I want therefore to look both at what is happening

and will happen ‘if this goes on’, and at alternatives that might be

pursued or even achieved ‘if only’.

The utopian method not only offers a more critical perspective on

the present. In so far as utopias are alternative holistic models of

society, they encourage us to think about the interrelationships of

social processes. This helps to remind us that sometimes the most

important social policies may be those that do not immediately look

like ‘social policy’, but which bear on the whole structure of the

(global) political economy and hence the social fabric. Central to the

current system of global capitalism is a particular deﬁnition, character

and role of work. The term ‘work’ is restricted to market-based

activity and excludes much socially necessary labour. This is under-

pinned at the individual level by the economic necessity of paid work

and by the ideology of the virtue of paid work. The work which

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capitalism offers is mostly awful, yet the consequences of unemploy-

ment are worse. This fact was well understood by Charles Fourier who

argued nearly 200 years ago that ‘[c]ivilization had not only turned

man away from his destiny by making work repulsive; true to its

usual penchant for perfecting vice, it had consistently failed to

provide enough of its repulsive work’ (Beecher and Bienvenu, 1983:

30). Like Fourier, who was implacably opposed to the work ethic, I

want to call into question the practical and moral centrality of work as

presently deﬁned and constituted. ‘Work’, I shall argue, is a greatly

overrated pastime, and a re-evaluation of theorists such as Herbert

Marcuse and Andre Gorz who have maintained this critical position is

long overdue.

Recapitulation

Work and the work ethic were central themes during Labour’s ﬁrst

term. The two ideas which have dominated social policy have been

combating ‘social exclusion’ and ‘making work pay’—policies which

are, in fact, intimately linked with one another, since social exclusion

is principally construed as non-participation in the labour market.

This is a marked shift from its meaning (at least in Britain) in the

1980s, which was the inability to participate in common social activ-

ities, chieﬂy as a result of poverty (Townsend, 1979). The appropriate

policy for tackling exclusion was therefore redistribution both directly,

through increased beneﬁts and reduced inequality, and indirectly

through increased spending on public services. A third understanding

of exclusion parallels debates about the underclass, and views it as

essentially a behavioural and moral problem. This identiﬁes two

gendered groups as particularly problematic for social cohesion and

social order. They are unemployed, unemployable and actually or

potentially criminal young men, and sexually delinquent young

women—in contemporary versions, lone parents, especially young

never-married mothers (Levitas, 1996, 1998). The earlier under-

standing of social exclusion does not play much part in government

policy. This is despite recent research which demonstrates that

poverty is its primary cause: Poverty and Social Exclusion in Britain

(Gordon et al., 2000) showed that at the end of 1999, 26 per cent of

the population, or 14.5 million people, were living in poverty.

Indicators of the extent of social exclusion showed that almost 7.5

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million were too poor to be able to engage in such common social

activities as visiting friends and family, attending weddings and

funerals, and having modest celebrations on special occasions.

The work of the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU), set up shortly after

the 1997 election, has been very much concerned with issues of social

and moral order. Its key reports address rough sleeping (but not

homelessness); truancy and school exclusions; teenage pregnancy

(including 18 and 19 year olds who are legal adults); problem estates;

and young people not in education or training. Two key groups are

targeted as socially ‘delinquent’—truants, deemed to be potential

criminals, and teenage mothers. The theme of inclusion through work

is present, not least in the emphasis on employability. But even where

poverty is identiﬁed as a causal factor, as in the report on teenage

pregnancy, the emphasis is still on changing behaviour. In some cases,

the means of achieving this are coercive. Preventing Social Exclusion ,

the SEU’s pre-election celebration of its achievements, concedes that

truancy rates have not come down despite the increased powers to

punish parents, which were enshrined in the Crime and Disorder Act

1997. But it triumphantly announces that what does work is encour-

aging the police to conduct ‘truancy sweeps’ to return children to

school. Those who fail to fall in line with the dominant morality are

stigmatised. Young motherhood is now so socially unacceptable that

‘a preference for being a young mother’ is cited as a risk factor for

social exclusion. Peer education is directed at eradicating this prefer-

ence. Young women are not allowed to be full-time mothers. Those

who cannot live with their parents or partners will be compelled to

live in ‘supported housing’ and to return to education, training or

employment—and thus to social inclusion (SEU, 2001).

The SEU has been concerned with relatively small groups whose

behaviour is deemed to diverge from the prescribed norm. The dis-

course of inclusion as participation in paid work has a much wider

currency. It is evident most particularly in the thinking behind the

New Deal, and Gordon Brown’s repeated insistence on raising labour

force participation rates and ‘making work pay’. The New Deal has

been aimed at increasing labour market participation among speciﬁc

groups. The least controversial target group has been the young

unemployed, although the accompanying coercion through punitive

beneﬁt sanctions is a matter of some concern. Other groups include

the long-term unemployed, people with disabilities, and, most con-

troversially, lone parents. More recently the New Deal has been

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extended to everyone over 25, with the over 50 age group attracting

particular attention. The policy is that everyone of working age

should be in paid work rather than dependent on the state (although

personal economic dependency is still permissible), a situation to be

achieved by a mixture of sticks and carrots. The sticks are increasingly

stringent beneﬁt conditions for all groups, ranging from compulsory

work-focused interviews for all claimants, to complete beneﬁt with-

drawal from under 25’s refusing placements. The carrot is ‘making

work pay’. This has entailed a number of measures: subsidised

employment within the New Deal scheme itself, the introduction of a

minimum wage and the Working Families Tax Credit, which, by

guaranteeing a minimum income, subsidises low wages for all families

with children where there is an adult in full-time work. In order to

make work possible for mothers, especially lone mothers, there are

both tax credits available for approved forms of child care, and the

declaration, if not implementation, of a ‘national child care strategy’.

The trouble with a policy that ‘makes work pay’ is that in order to

make people better off in work, you have, at least in relative terms, to

make them worse off out of work. This is reﬂected in what is called

the ‘better off calculation’, which advisers carry out for lone mothers

attending interviews under the New Deal, and which demonstrates

the putative ﬁnancial beneﬁts of entering paid work. This can, of

course, also be read as the ﬁnancial penalty that the government

chooses to impose on lone mothers who opt to care for their children

themselves. There is, therefore, a tension between making work pay

and tackling poverty. The Blair Government is committed to ending

child poverty (in 20 years). But though the income differential

between those in and out of work has been partially offset for families

with children by an across-the-board increase in child beneﬁt, it

cannot be removed altogether—or work will not pay. It is also com-

mitted to ending poverty among pensioners. This has been accom-

panied by a discursive emphasis on the work ethic, the moral

importance of paid work, which essentially reconstructs the line

between the deserving and the undeserving poor on the basis of

working age. Only child poverty and pensioner poverty are proper

concerns of social policy, not poverty per se, and working families are

morally more worthy than others. This is called reconstructing the

welfare state around the work ethic.

Thus the fact that ‘poverty’ has returned to Labour’s vocabulary

does not signal a return to a redistributive understanding of inclusion.

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