David Purdy

The Concept of Power

‘Power’, as has often been noted, is an essentially contested concept — one of those concepts which inevitably involve endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users. I shall take it that the chief situations in which we wish to use the concept of power are those in which there is actual or potential conflict between agents whose interests in the outcome of one or more issues diverge. The term ‘agent’ here refers to any unified locus of decision and action, and thus embraces both human individuals and organisations with or without legal personality. The definitions of ‘issues’ and ‘interests’ are taken up below. I shall also assume, for convenience, that there are only two agents in any conflict situation.

Basic Income: Incentives, Ethics and Political Strategy

This final chapter deals with the ethical and political aspects of basic income. Section 2 seeks to defend BI against the charge that the high tax rate needed to sustain it would destroy economic incentives. Section 3 rebuts a number of moral objections to a transfer system in which guaranteed incomes are both unconditional and universal. Section 4 acts as a bridge between these abstract disputations and the political context which a transformatory strategy is obliged to address. Having noted that BI belongs to the more general class of ‘citizenship rights’, the argument draws out the tension between these rights and the logic of the market. A movement committed to the BI project could re-empower the claims of citizenship, infusing them with the moral appeal, motivational energy and political direction which are needed not just to shake off the debilitating consequences of the neo-liberal counter-revolution, but to establish an entrenched, gradualist dynamic of egalitarian transformation.

Power in the Reproduction Paradigm

This chapter has two main purposes, both of them sympathetically critical of the classical Marxist version of the reproduction paradigm. The first, pursued in Sections 2 and 3, is to examine the traditional Marxist response to what I called at the end of the last chapter the central claim of the exchange paradigm. I shall show that whilst this response has a certain force, it remains enmeshed within the same conceptualisation of power as its rival. Moreover it fails to exploit the potentialities inherent within the reproduction perspective for embracing an extended, three-dimensional view of the power relations between labour and capital. In Section 3 I illustrate some of the ways in which these relations may be structured by power in the second and third dimensions.

Capitalism, Gender and Toil

The second part of this book consists of an extended application of the conceptual framework developed in Part One. Its underlying theme is the qualitative difference analysed in Chapter 6 between projects which are contained within the prevailing relations of social reproduction, and projects which set out to transform them. The focus is the activity of work — the overall amount of time which society devotes to various kinds of work, whether paid or unpaid; the distribution of this total between different sections of society, and especially between men and women; the alternative patterns of social life, along with the distribution of power and advantage associated with different social divisions of labour; and the subjective meaning and value attached to work by those who do it.

Power in the Exchange Paradigm

The prevailing view of mainstream economists on the role of power in the labour market, and in the economy generally, probably differs little from the assessment pronounced over sixty years ago by Alfred Marshall (Marshall, 1920, pp. 521-2).

Basic Income, Social Security and the Labour Market

The key to dismantling the interlocking barriers which stand in the way of a strategy for reducing collective toil and redividing social labour, lies in the idea of an unconditionally guaranteed basic income (BI) allocated to every man, woman and child in society. Precisely what this idea involves is explained in Section 2. Section 3 argues that BI connects an old theme of enlightened social thought with certain desirable shifts in the parameters of social organisation which the evolution of advanced capitalism has now brought within the horizon of possibility. This account of the secular preconditions for basic income is followed in Section 4 by a critique of the assumptions underlying the postwar Keynes-Beveridge regime of full employment and social insurance. It is the crisis arising from the breakdown of this regime which establishes BI as an idea whose time has come. The ways in which BI answers some of the most urgent needs of our age and simultaneously opens up new prospects of social transformation are elaborated in Chapters 10 and 11.

Reduced Working Time and the Redivision of Labour

The formula for collective toil presented in the final section of the previous chapter implies that the demand for labour inputs could, in principle, be accommodated by a variety of combinations of numbers employed — n; average hours of work — h; and labour intensity — i. This chapter examines two of the ways in which reduced working time could be achieved: (1) a reduction in h, given n, could be compensated by a rise in i as of a given base value ī; (2) a reduction in h, given i and ī, could be compensated by a rise in n.

Basic Income and the Transformation of Work

The consequences of any proposal for large-scale social reform are fraught with uncertainty. Nevertheless the claims advanced in this chapter on behalf of basic income amount to more than a merely speculative prospectus. A start has already been made in charting the broad features and developmental tendencies of a BI society and in marking the boundaries of its terra incognita.1 Undoubtedly much more intellectual exploration is needed to push back these boundaries. But it should be borne in mind that theory and empirical simulations can only improve our knowledge of this new world up to a point: on some crucial issues extrapolations or predictions based on current behavioural patterns will never be a reliable substitute for actual historical experience. A case in point is the response of labour supply once the unprecedented step has been taken to convert waged work into an activity which is genuinely optional for everyone, not just for those with independent means.

Two Paradigms: Exchange and Reproduction

Since the time, some three centuries ago, when political economy began to take shape as a distinct intellectual endeavour, its practitioners have evolved two opposing theoretical approaches to the labour market. One, developed to a high degree of technical sophistication over the past hundred years by the neoclassical school, can conveniently be labelled the paradigm of exchange. The other, originating in the older classical and Marxist tradition, was long eclipsed by its rival, but underwent a certain rehabilitation following the publication of Sraffa’s seminal Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (Sraffa, 1960). It remains, however, a minority school of thought, and, as I argue later, has never performed at its full potential. Perhaps this is because, as an embattled minority, its followers have felt impelled to accept the terms of debate proposed by their adversaries. I have chosen to call this second approach the paradigm of reproduction.

Labour’s Goals and the Reproduction of Unequal Power

In the previous chapter I argued that there are no universal substantive interests which can be attributed to workers in their various individual and social roles. On the other hand, if freedom and self-determination are important values, then it is always possible to postulate a formal and negative interest in overcoming conditions which cause potential or actual interests to remain silent. Such silencing occurs when the social practices attached to workers’ various roles systematically generate an interest field which excludes significant issues (dimension 3), or disqualify some consciously held interests as candidates for action (dimension 2).