Rosa Janis responds to Amber A’Lee Frost’s recent article “Andrew Yang and the Failson Mystique,” arguing for a socialist vision that looks beyond UBI liberalism or social-democratic communitarianism in favor of a Workers’ Republic that can address sexual alienation.
Jacobin has been on a roll in terms of publishing insultingly stupid articles, singlehandedly pioneering the new clickbait genre of “this boring consumer product is actually socialist” with mind-numbingly beautiful article titles like “A Popeye’s Chicken Sandwich Under Socialism” and “Socialism, a Queer Eye Makeover for the Masses.” Amber A’Lee Frost’s “Andrew Yang and the Failson Mystique” continues this losing streak in a bold new way. She begins by assaulting the reader with her special brand of smugness, chattering on about her Brooklyn socialite friends and using dated lingo to relay a baffling comparison between being a UBI NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) and a housewife. This comparison miserably falls flat on its face, given that raising a family is one of the monotonous and difficult forms of labor under capitalism. Frost acknowledges this, but somehow entertains the notion that they have plenty of excess free time, a claim that seems utterly laughable to anyone who’s ever talked to a full-time housewife. Being a housewife is brutal, specifically because you do a great deal of work (domestic labor) that is never acknowledged as valuable. It’s simply expected of you, and you’ll never be paid for it. It is quite obvious how this is different from the “NEET” fantasy of living alone and not having to work.
However, behind the smugness and bad comparisons, the article touches upon an actually interesting debate between pseudo-radical liberalism and social-democratic communitarianism. This debate is found in many conversations surrounding UBI, FALC (fully automated luxury communism), and the welfare socialism of the neo–social democrats. We need to overcome both frameworks by returning to a republican tradition within Marxism that values labor, redefines freedom, and pushes for radical social progress that unites humanity.
The Value of Work
Frost is correct that UBI and FALC are boring fantasies because the only freedom they offer is the freedom to consume. It’s a fantasy all about being able to sit around smoking weed and binge-watching Netflix, all day every day, without any meaningful limits. It’s the same kind of freedom that economists like Milton Friedman (an advocate of UBI) go nuts over, the freedom to pick between thousands of consumer options. It’s not meaningful freedom because, as Frost rightfully points out, there is no power behind it. Recipients of UBI are at the whim of the government and its impersonal bureaucracy. A more apt comparison would have compared it to being a spoiled child or a wealthy wife who doesn’t work. There’s a classic Roman play in which a slave taunts the audience with how free he is in comparison to people in the audience. This was meant to be a joke because the audience would instinctively understand that even though the slavemaster was kind, the slave was was still a slave.1
Frost does not elaborate on how work will be made meaningful under her vision of socialism. It is simply taken for granted that work is more meaningful under socialism than it is under capitalism. It could be true that under a social-democratic/socialist regime labor would be freer, in that one would be directly involved in the decision-making behind one’s work through economic democracy. However, this alone would not make the work meaningful as there would still be bureaucrats and specialists ruling over the workers. She also neglects to talk about reducing work hours, something Marxists have been advocating for years now.
What separates labor under a communist society from that of a social-democratic society is that under communism specialists/bureaucrats are minimized through a variety of measures such as term limits, living conditions equal to that of workers and a free education system, preventing them from constituting a caste ruling over the workers. Alongside these measures, hours of work would be drastically reduced through everything from increased automation to full employment. This is the point of a famous quote in The German Ideology where Marx describes labor in a future communist society:
For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.2
The above subject’s freedom is not located in the absence of labor. In fact, they do all kinds of labor, even hard labor. Yet, they are no longer wage slaves because they are free to perform any number of different forms of labor without being relegated to one job, and they live in a society unburdened by the domination of specialists and bureaucrats. Additionally, because the overall amount of labor needed for the continuation of society has been reduced, the subject has free time to invest in intellectual and artistic pursuits. This goal of removing the mental/manual division of labor is a key aspect of the divergence between Marx’s vision and the social-democratic vision.
“Freedom” vs “The Community”
The conception of freedom that is at the heart of both UBI and FALC fantasies is a liberal one that can be traced back to the writings of Jeremy Bentham. This conception of freedom, to put it in the most simplistic way possible, is based on non-interference, meaning you are free so long as no one gets in the way of what you want to do. While there are more complex conceptions of freedom within the liberal tradition, this hyper-simplistic political philosophy proved to be useful in rationalizing the destructive tendencies of capital. In this philosophy, everything in society from welfare to basic social values (such as having empathy towards the poor), interferes with the freedom of individuals. Thus, in periods of capitalist offensive such as the Gilded Age and the age of neoliberalism this liberal conception of freedom proved to be ideologically hegemonic among almost all political actors. While UBI and FALC supporters (we will call them FALCists) see themselves as outside-the-mainstream, their conception of freedom is fundamentally tied to the dominant ideology of capitalist liberalism. They both desire a world in which there is little that impedes the freedom of consumers, whether it be the welfare state for UBI or the limits of actually existing capitalism for FALCists.
What separates your average UBI supporter and FALCists is that FALCists believe UBI is only a stepping stone towards realizing a fantasy world in which work is automated away, a story found in the work of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Unfortunately, like all good stories, this is never going to be reality. The capitalist class is not going to hand over power through the non-reformist reforms that FALC left accelerationists want to pass. If FALCists manage to do anything beyond putting out mediocre literature for the bargain bin of Verso books then they will be useful idiots for neo-liberal wonks looking to find technocratic solutions to tweak a collapsing system without expanding welfare bureaucracies. Furthermore, the communism of FALC is a “communism of consumers”, where freedom is defined as the free pursuit of limitless consumption, Milton Friedman’s “freedom to choose.” A genuine communism must be a “communism of producers”, where freedom is defined by humanity consciously transforming the word through production in free associations of labor.
Communitarianism is a common response to the excesses of Liberalism. It stands in stark contrast to modern liberals’ Benthamite conception of Freedom by rightfully rejecting the necessity of such Freedom in favor of the abstract community. Communitarians’ philosophical opposition to liberalism sometimes leads to an opposition to neoliberalism, but there are, of course, major exceptions to this such as third-way politicians Tony Blair and Bill Clinton who were indirectly inspired by communitarian thought.
One particular communitarian (although he himself would reject the label) thinker who had such a critique of capitalism is the famous American social critic Christopher Lasch. Lasch laid out a critique of radical liberalism and social progress that focused on the extent to which hyper-individualism made people neurotic in the psychoanalytic sense, suffering from narcissism and alienated from others. The cause of this neurosis was the bonds between people, such as the family, being violently broken by a combination of know-it-all social reformers (such as feminists) and the forces of market capitalism. While Lasch, in theory, sympathized with the rising neo-conservative movement of his time he could not support them because, in practice, they were no less destructive than their liberal counterparts. Lasch believed that this trend of liberal capitalism destroying America could only be reversed through a rediscovery of America’s populist movements that existed outside the elite ruling classes’ political discourse. Only then could the creation of an America that was truly at peace with itself through family, faith, and folk.
The work of Christopher Lasch influenced paleoconservatives of the ’90s and 2000s, and his name continues to linger on in those circles. But the more recent devotees of Lasch are, surprisingly, hip Brooklyn social-democrats. If Lasch were alive today he would probably be baffled at the sight of these thirty-something cosmopolitans grabbing onto and referencing his work in between drunken coke binges instead of the hard-working Americans that he sought to win over with his books. The New York-based publication, The Baffler, of which Amber Frost is a writer and editor, has continually cited Christopher Lasch’s work as a major point of reference in their articles. Along with this is the cult podcast Red Scare which also constantly references Lasch, with Frost being a regular guest. Even if she does not admit it outright in her article, it would not be shocking if Frost takes influence from Lasch. While still maintaining a good level of distance from glorifying the nuclear family and supporting relatively socially progressive positions such as being pro-choice, Frost suggests that the nuclear family was a form of community that helped people. She reveals her preference for the nuclear family in her article, suggesting that the patriarchal dependence of the housewife on the husband is preferable to dependence on the impersonal welfare state bureaucracy:
….there is something fundamentally different about being “kept” by a husband than being “kept” by the state. Even at first glance, this objection is merely a distinction without a difference. But as someone who has been both a housewife and on the dole, I assure you that housewives have far more political and economic leverage than welfare recipients…A capitalist state that holds the purse strings is far less accountable to its dependents than a husband. If he annoyed me or didn’t give me enough money, I had immediate recourse due to both the value of my labor and my proximity to him. Such is not the case with the distant and opaque bureaucracy of the welfare office
She even goes so far as to end the piece with a coy line about women loving a “working man”, further revealing a nostalgia for the Fordist family wage that if revived by a welfare state will give men employment so they are no longer condemned to being incel failsons. Frost sees her welfare socialism not only as a route to economic prosperity but a solution to sexual alienation. While the quip may seem like a joke, the combination of Lasch’s influence with a desire for “normie socialism” reveals that behind the pseudo-Marxist posturing we often see from Amber’s crowd is a weird form of soft conservatism that seeks to re-establish older social bonds through a revival of social-democracy.
We can also see this sort of Social Democratic conservatism in the most recent attempts at historical revisionism regarding the New Deal. Jacobin has attempted to erase the dominance of Southern Democrats in the New Deal coalition whose influence led to discrimination against African Americans in the implementation of New Deal reforms. There is no reason for actual socialists to be invested in defending FDR’s co-option of socialist demands and the New Deal’s crushing of radical labor. This defense of and nostalgia for the New Deal reveals their latent conservatism.
On its face, it is strange that the people in the vanguard of this micro-movement would be New York socialites, given their own lifestyles are completely at odds with their supposed values. However, it fundamentally makes sense that they would find their lives alienating and unsatisfying given their declining career prospects, as academia has not been able to secure them a comfortable petty-bourgeois existence. Thus, through the combination of social democracy and soft social conservatism, they reject the liberal order that has created such difficulties for them. Since this micro-movement is popular among white women who would be affected things like banning abortion or having their gay friends locked up, this social conservatism is, ultimately, a soft one.
What makes this pseudo-Marxist communitarianism fundamentally undesirable is that it allows for the domination of people by traditional relations of dependence. While liberal capitalist societies are defined by a trend that crushes social bonds, these pseudo-Marxist communitarian societies would be defined by traditions that crush individuals. A new generation of neurotic housewives, closeted queers, and discriminated against minorities will be born under this “socialism” if it were to become reality.
The Workers’ Republic
Political philosopher Philip Pettit, drawing on Roman political philosophy, defines the republican conception of liberty as one of non-domination, freedom from arbitrary forms of power. Pettit divides liberty into two categories: freedom from tyranny (from being dominated by the arbitrary rule of a king) and freedom from slavery (from other individuals dominating each other). To achieve this one would have to be involved in the creation of the laws which governs one’s own life while also being protected from being enslaved by others. This understanding of freedom is based on the idea that to be free one has to be a sovereign over oneself, owning their own freedom as property. Freedom is conceptualized as the property of property owners. Of course, this idea was never completely realized in ancient Rome itself as Rome transitioned from a Republic to an Empire, but property owners were generally freer than anyone else in the history of Rome. This is what we call classical republicanism.
The classical republican tradition would be carried on later by the Papal States of the Renaissance to the American Revolution of the Enlightenment. The fundamental conception of non-domination in this tradition says the basis of freedom would be upheld for the property-owning classes of these societies in the face of regressive monarchical forces. A pragmatic shift in the way freedom was conceptualized in the republican tradition happened with the French Revolution. What separated the French Revolution from previous bourgeois revolutions was that there were multiple revolutions within the singular event. The republican rhetoric of the bourgeois class not only mobilized their own class against the monarchy but also mobilized the developing urban proletariat and the peasantry, universalizing the republican conception of liberty.3 François-Noël Babeuf in particular used the republican ideology of the Jacobins to argue that private property was a form of slavery and demanded its abolition alongside the implementation of full democracy. With these demands, the radical republican tradition, encompassing everything from communism to anarchism, was born.
The radical republican tradition continued to develop throughout the 18th and 19th centuries with the rise of utopian socialists like Robert Owen who connected the values of republicanism to the struggles of the growing British proletariat, and the great revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui, whose Neo-Jacobin ideology would inspire the Paris Commune. The greatest theorist of this tradition was Karl Marx, who went well beyond all previous attempts at philosophizing freedom as non-domination, contributing the most substantial innovations in the grander republican tradition.
The contribution of Marx was a comprehensive critique of capital which went deeper than earlier utopian socialist attempts to moralize about the evils of merchants or even the capitalist class in general, analyzing the domination of workers by the social relations of capital itself. Shedding the remnants of Christian morality, which stood alongside republicanism as an influence on the early growing communist movement, it allowed the communist movement to understand that the domination the worker suffered was impersonal rather than a conspiracy of an elite group. The worker and even the capitalist class itself was being dominated by abstract value which structured capital. These impersonal structures also alienated workers from their labor and forced them to compete against their fellow workers for survival, alienating them from the rest of humanity. These structures reduced men to slaves. Wage-slavery is one of the most brutal forms of slavery that have ever existed, leaving most of the world in chains and slaughtering all those who resist capital’s need for raw resources in the horrific genocides of indigenous peoples. Capital in the abstract was the ultimate slave master. Therefore, to realize republican freedom would require the abolition of capital.
Along with a strong critique of capital, Marx began to formulate the basis for the future Workers’ Republic and communist society by dissecting Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and analyzing the Paris Commune. In his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx works through the implications of the divide between the state and civil society. Capital divides society into the State, a means of maintaining class rule by force, and Civil Society, composed of private institutions of the bourgeoisie which play the role of socializing people. This divide exists as a form of specialization that keeps the proletariat from governing itself through maintaining the undemocratic structures of the State (the executive and judicial branches which are not in the hands of the people), leaving the role of governance to unelected bureaucrats. Civil Society encourages the atomization of individuals through the abolition of organic communities formed under previous modes of existence and reduces social issues to personal issues. The structure of capitalism corrupts the State, keeping it from ever being democratic. This divide between the State and Civil Society would have to be overcome in order to realize a society in which all men were sovereign. Marx’s analysis of the Paris Commune led him to believe that it was necessary for the “Republic of Labor” to abolish the standing army, slowly eliminate bureaucracy, and destroy capital. Only a republic of the laboring class, the proletariat, could carry out such a task, as they were the heart of the system, providing it with its lifeblood of value.
From these innovations, we understand that the Republic of Labor or the Workers’ Republic is a form of governance which is based on a social contract of sorts between society and individual. The individual provides their labor to the maintenance of society and in exchange, the laborer becomes free from state oppression and the exploitation of wage slavery. This is what is meant by the famous line “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.
Dealing with Incels and Housewives
Once we have gotten past the liberal conception of freedom and the domination of capital the horizon for social change becomes vast and overpowering in its glorious light. The collapse of the divide between governments and civil society not only allows for the rational planning of the economy through the abolition of private property, but also the democratic rational planning of social relations. Under these new horizons, we can eliminate the forms of alienation that dominate our lives. This includes the sexual alienation that Frost points to at the beginning of her article.
Many people have struggled to find meaningful romantic and sexual relationships under capitalism due to the destruction of the sexual commons (gay bars, bathhouses, and communal mating rituals) under a brutal dialectic between the prudish remnants of Christian morality that keep us in the dark about the scientific realities of human sexuality and the commodification of sex that is the basis of the sex industry (porn, prostitution, etc). What the Workers’ Republic will offer them is a realization of Reichian-Foucaultian Sex-Pol which is centered on the liberation of libidinal desire from the constraints of capital and reified sexuality.
The basis of this liberation will be a thorough sex education program that will start at a young age to break the remnants of Christian morality that linger on in the treatment of children. Children will be taught that there is nothing wrong to experiment among themselves, although they should remain hostile to adults that seek to sexually exploit them. Along with this education, there will be an overarching theme that human sexuality is not tied to particular identities such as straight or gay, but rather is something fluid, changing through the lives of people along with societal norms. Gender norms will be challenged at an early age.
When these children mature into adults they will be let into the sexual communes of the Workers’ Republic, creating the same sort of vibrant scene gay scenes that existed during the ’70s, though without the state repression, for the whole of humanity. There will be bars, bathhouses, spas, and sex clubs where one can go to fulfill one sexual needs through consensual fucking all created by the Republic. Porn will be replaced with completely consensual erotica liberated from the evils of the profit motive. Prostitution will not exist under the Workers’ Republic as there will be no need for such vile modification of human sexuality given that libidinal desire is freed from traditional patriarchal restraint with the absence of the profit motive that commodifies human sexuality.
There will still, of course, be victims of sexual assault and harassment to protect, and they will be protected to the fullest extent of the law. The Republic will make sure to provide rape kits to investigators and fair trials for the victims of sexual assault along with extensive therapy. Most of all the patriarchal structures that facilitate the mass rape of women and men will be dealt with through the social engineering capabilities of the Republic.
Women who give birth to children will be given every service available for them and their children’s needs. This will include full paid leave, daycares, healthcare, schooling, and the automation of household tasks. Along with these benefits for more traditional families will be experiments in new forms of child-rearing. Communes of 50–500 people will voluntarily engage in forming new kinds of families that are more communal in nature, like a larger extended family. Children will also be given more extensive rights than they have under capitalism, protecting them from corporal punishment, verbal abuse and other egregious violations of their autonomy through social rearing centers which will take care of abused and unwanted children.
While one can dismiss this as pure speculation (which, to a certain extent they would be right to do) there is still value in imagining how the problems of the current day can be dealt with in a rational manner under a Workers’ Republic. We are expanding what we mean by freedom when we talk of communism, moving beyond the narrow discourse that currently defines politics. We must look beyond the family wage of the Fordist welfare state for solutions to the alienation that defines modern life. The discourse between timid social democrats and antisocial neoliberals limits the possibilities of humanity to the soul-crushing confines of capitalism.
- For more on this point, see this lecture by Phillip Pettit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqyAr6MQgWE&feature=youtu.be
- Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845), accessed here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
- Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, ed. and trans. by R.R. Palmer (United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 2005), 2