Responses to Fred Block

Responses to Fred Block

Two responses to “The Problem With a Job Guarantee.”

Our Fall 2024 issue features an article by Fred Block on “The Problem With a Job Guarantee.” Below are two responses to the article, along with a reply from Block.

Jobs Are a Source of Meaning

Fred Block has written an admirable critique of the job guarantee idea from the left. He raises valid concerns about the technical weaknesses of certain job guarantee proposals, and he offers a number of laudable alternative policies that he finds preferable. Yet according to the criteria he uses to judge the job guarantee, none of his alternatives are any better.

For instance, increasing permanent public-sector work (a great idea) does no more to challenge the notion of “market justice” than a job guarantee does. Allotting funding for training (another great idea) does not help us acknowledge the reality “that human beings depend on complex networks of caregiving” any more than a job guarantee does. Shortening the work week (one of the very best ideas) does not seem any less likely to provoke unified business class opposition than a job guarantee does.

What gives? The deeper problem for Block, it seems, is not technical but philosophical, concerning the role of work in modern society. He believes that the political exaltation of work results in the ideological affirmation of capitalism.

According to Block, the job guarantee fails as a political demand in large part because it does not challenge the idea that “labor is just another commodity,” and it reinforces “the belief that the market produces inherently just outcomes.” But is this so? Examined another way, the demand for guaranteed work is a demand to contribute to society despite the obstacles imposed by the market. Those revolutionary workers in 1848 were not demanding to be treated like commodities to be bought and sold like “steel or wheat.” Instead, they reasoned that if the government guaranteed employment, the market would lose its role as the primary mechanism through which work was distributed.

The same year, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels demanded the “equal liability of all to work.” Surely, the authors of the Communist Manifesto were not interested in reproducing the logic of “market justice,” as Block accuses job guarantee advocates of doing. They did not see the demand for jobs as affirming the notion “that any would not work, neither should he eat.” Instead, they sought to realize the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”

Jobs matter. Work matters, and not just as a source of income. Jobs provide a major source of meaning in our lives. In 2005, L. Randall Wray and P...