JOBS FOR ALL

...And he added a little later, "Priority is given to the development of jobs, in the private sector...

...it is also profoundly conservative even though many conservatives are too entranced by their abstractions to realize the fact...

...Or that Penn-Central was more efficient than a nationalized rail system might have been...

...Hawkins-Humphrey holds that he or she has a right to a job...

...But it is not only the workers and the poor who have suffered...

...So there is discontent Left, Right and Center...

...Secondly, tijcre is no teal mechanism for democratic discussion and debate...

...When Henry Ford and Felix Rohatyn talk about national economic planning they are speaking about a corporate-dominated system which will provide better data for the corporations, socialize many of the losses of the private economy but keep the profits private, and absorb the human rejects from big business...

...government need only bring savings and investment into phase at a full employment equilibrium...

...Before describing those current proposals, a word of introduction is in order...

...but it must be supported in a way which pushes it to its Left limit and clearly states the necessity of going beyond that limit as soon as possible...

...Within the System First of all, the planning now under discussion involves at the very most a structural transformation within the capitalist system...

...The President is required under the act to make an annual report, revised after six months, which totals the amount of jobs estimated to result from the planned outlays of both the private and public sectors...

...The proponents of the bill may have felt required by political realities to stand in the center of the road...

...That Keynesian perspective contained a lot more of Adam Smith than most people knew, particularly the big-business ideologues who are the most hopelessly sectarian thinkers in the land...

...Mounting unemployment disciplines the labor force and reduces wages, the inefficient producers are driven out, the profit margins start up...

...But that does not change the basic fact...

...The AFL-CIO and the UAW, for hh stance, are for various versions of most of these amendments...

...In the 1890s, the corporations and the trusts triumphed over the laissez jaire market, and the liberals and progressives managed to get some regulation and even a commitment, honored in the breach for more than half a century, to anti-trust...

...And that requires raising the popular consciousness, educating people as to the limits of even the best incremental victory...

...Therefore if planning is going to begin to operate in a humane manner, it cannot be superimposed upon, a fundamentally irrational and antisocial structure...

...That does not mean that I reject these bills out of hand...

...They therefore offer a framework for mobilization, debate and amendment For all of then- inadequacies, I take them as a serious point of departure...

...The two most glaring deficiencies of Hawkins-Humphrey and Humphrey-Javits--both of them clearly related to the ideological-political limits of capitalist society itself- are the failure to provide for a democratic socialization of investment, a conscious shaping of the macro allocations of the society, and, on the other hand, an unwillingness to call for genuine democratic participation at every level of decision-making...

...Then comes the salvation of disaster...

...Full employ* meat should be rfte goal and price stability should be pussoed in ways which do not compromise it...

...The structure itself must be changed...

...Related increases in welfare, fire and police protection and all the other indices of social malfunctioning are not so easy to quantify even though they are very, very real...

...Humphrey-Javits gives "price stability" equal standing with "full employment" That has been the reactionary dodge for thirty years for it gives contradictory instructions to the planners the plan...

...I need not answer such obviously rhetorical questions...

...The Board would draw up a long-range plan (it would determine how long-range), identify federal, state, local and corporate actions needed to fulfill it and "recommend legislative and administrative actions necessary or desirable to achieve the objectives of the plan...

...The conventional wisdom of the Thirties, which held that the government need only juggle the macro figures for investment and demand leaving the rest of the decisions to the corporate sector, was triumphant Now, a scant seven years since Johnson proclaimed in his final economic message to the Congress that economic life was no longer "a relentless tide of ups and downs" there have been nothing but ups and downs...

...Some, but by no means all, big businessmen therefore have begun, to consider planning as a possibility...

...Boom and bust are still very much inherent in the capitalist economy and stable full employment therefore contradicts the workings of the system...

...Of course, if you act en that proposition-for instance by giving the Post Office an impossible task and United Parcel Service an easy one-you can manufacture data to prove that it is tine...

...It argues that "conflicting and erratic short-term economic policies without in many cases providing long-term solutions" as well as "basic structural deficiencies in the United States economy" are among the main causes of our current woes...

...From Burns'-and Ford's-point of view, this analysis of capitalist instability leads to a predictably reactionary conclusion...

...But that cannot be accomplished if one assumes that the corporate mechanisms are the basic instruments for allocating resources and defining new possibilities for investments...

...Thirdly, Humphrey-Javits does not allocate credit but allows for "recommendations" as to money supply growth* credit needs and interest rates...

...they would mean significant alterations within it which could provide the point of departure for much bolder action in the future...

...That right, everyone must realize by now, will not be spontaneously recognized by the private corporate economy...

...There are, to be sure, counter-tendencies...

...To be sure, the Marx-Burns model has to be modified in some of its details: administered prices do not go down even with unemployment near 10 percent on the official scale, a fact that caused Burns to worry hi December that the system didn't seem to be working...

...The Employ* ment Act of 1946 said that the citizen should have a job...

...Daring the Kennedy-Johnson years, as Lyndon Johnson newt tired of pointing out, there was the longest sustained boom in American peacetime history (I say "peacetime" despite the horror of Vietnam because the economy was not mobilized in wartime fashion...

...the democratic Left does not, and must not, do so...

...Still, it is clear that planning is going to be debated in a more relevant way than in any time during the past forty years...

...There were structural changes within American capitalism on two previous occasions...

...I assume this last point means that the public employment cannot be as good as most private employment...

...Burns, for example, told an Athens, Georgia, audience last September that the "bask...

...If planning is not to be capitalist window-dressing on the one hand, or a prdude to bureaucratic authoritarianism on the other, this aspect is clearly crucial...

...The compatibility of my suggestions with the best of the liberal tradition is, in a nation in which the mass Left goes no further than liberalism, an advantage to be welcomed by the socialist Left without the least embarrassment...

...As Congressman Hawkins put it at hearings held in 1974 to introduce the bill, "The President is required to develop a national full employment and production program, eeowjmb activity, which is de-sigaed to promote sufficient employment opportunities through normal channels so that the activities of the U.S...

...Or rather, that is the ideal...

...Let me try to sort out this rather dialectical view...

...Among other things, it conflicts with the capitalist structural necessity of periods of joblessness...

...For in addition to fighting for the Left wing of what is now possible, one must strive to redefine the possible further to the Left...

...It is not, and will not be, radical...

...Indeed, I can generalize this brief survey and critique of full employment planning in terms of this point...

...There is a remarkable agreement upon this fact, stretching from Karl Marx to Arthur Burns...

...That it is better to over-build Florida condominiums and Nevada casinos while the housing of the poor rots...

...The minimal meaning of planning is that this assumption is challenged...

...A federal commitment to restore decent rail service through nationalized railroads operating in the context of a national transportation plan would be a marvelous device for generating a tremendous amount of employment, yet it cannot be planned or implemented at the community level (even though there must be community power over the local decisions about that rail network...

...What are the basic deficiencies of the planning proposed by Humphrey-Javits...

...In the 1930s, the United States backed into a welfare state-the last industrial democracy to do so- and adopted a Keynesian full-employment philosophy, which was then also honored hi the breach for forty years...

...With a little intelligent Keynesian fine-tuning, it was said, and particularly with the politically painless strategy of tax-cutting, it would be possible to achieve both full employment, price stability, and balanced, healthy growth...

...That, to be sure, is a relative fact: GM made almost a billion in profits in 1974...

...That gave rise to the euphoric illusions of the New Economics in the mid-Sixties...

...Unemployment has soared to the highest levels in a generation-and if we used a realistic method of counting the jobless, those percentages would be double digit right now-and poverty, which declined modestly in the Sixties, is on the increase...

...The problems of the system at the moment of recession can be summarized by saying that profits, which are the engine of accumulation and new investment, are going down...

...Specifically, an expansion of the area in which government-through public ownership, credit allocation, fiscal and monetary power-actually directs resources to decent use...

...The auto industry has seen recession, inflation and energy crisis produce some of their worst years in recent history...

...I recently pointed out-the New Republic, November 19-that this view is based on bad statistics and analysis, but I will not go into that point here...

...The "Equal Opportunity and Full Employment Act" -Hawkins-Humphrey-is much more of an immediate political possibility than Humphrey-Javits...

...It assumed that the basic corporate mechanisms for allocating resources and accumulating capital were sound...

...the latter can only fee developed sensibly and democratically if there is the widest possible local participation...

...This function would be carried out by an Economic Planning Board hi the Executive Office...

...In the Church hear-iags on the multi-nationals we learned how corporations which had received tens of billions in subsidies Wfused to tell'the government what they were doing...

...The federal and local functions should not be counterposed, even though they obviously will involve tensions...

...My answer borrows unashamedly from an excellent, unpublished critique by Nat Weinberg, one of the best labor economists I know, although, as the saying goes, I alone am responsible for the use I have made of his work...

...Moreover, this cruel waste of human beings is extremely expensive to maintain...

...If full employment planning is to work it must be composed of both...

...He or she" then determines the levels of expenditures, both public and private, needed to yield full employment...

...In addition, there will be a Standby Job Corps which will enroll the unemployed for work on community public service projects...

...Liberate can clearly support such proposals and Left liberals would do so enthusiastically...

...In the middle class there is greater reason for unease...

...These things would not add up to a basic (socialist) change in the system...

...But whatever the specific causation of the economic roller coaster ride from 1969 to 1976 it has left almost everyone in the society sick to the stomach...

...All of the "natural" tendencies of our economy and society will work to keep that change within the narrowest possible limits...

...Thirdly, although the community control emphasis is absolutely essential and must be strengthened, it cannot be allowed to obscure the need for some truly national projects...

...Therefore, they conclude with a certain perverse logic, government policy will serve the common good by bidding profits up and, which is the other side of that coin in a basically antagonistic society, holding wages, public social spending and the like down...

...The chief feature of Hawkins-Humphrey is that, reverting to the concept urged by Franklin Roosevelt in 1944, it declares "that all adult Americans able and willing to work have the right to equal opportunities for useful paid employment at fair rates of compensation...

...Hawkins, whose work I very much admire in this area, is thereby making concessions to the ubiquitous mythology of a nation which pretends to be intensely practical: that Private is Good and Public is Bad...

...It is not a matter of indifference to the Left that such planning could get worker and public participation on the board of directors of major corporations, some democratic decision-making on the plant floor, increase the public sector and the resources democratically allocated for social purposes and in general work toward making economic decision-making transparent rather than managerially opaque...

...However, even as I insist upon utilizing these possibilities to their fullest, I want to emphasize the limits...

...In part this was the result of the spectacularly incompetent economic management of the Nixon-Ford administrations...

...trade unionists, who have been officially in favor of it for over a decade, have started to take it seriously...

...Significant local participation is only possible in the framework of a national full employment policy...

...In short, to use national economic planning for liberal purposes pushes society in a radical direction...

...What, for example, is the price tag for a blighted generation of black or Hispanic youth...

...In France, the taw grants workers much more of a statutory right of participation than Humphrey-Javits, but then social reality, which denies the workers the technical expertise which management buys in abundance, annuls that provision...

...The workers and the poor have, as usual, borne the brunt of the disaster...

...The cycle can begin again...

...In practice what has been proposed falls far short of what is needed...

...In New York City, for instance, some 35,000 security and commodity brokers lost their positions between 1969 and 1974...

...But at the height of a boom this prosperity becomes unbearable...

...So the capitalist economy, like one of its prize acbtevemorts, the automobile engine, moves fey v#ay bi explosions...

...its anguish was a matter of comparing that figure with the $2.4 billion bonanza of 1973...

...all of them are located on the Left wing of possibility...

...The Humphrey-Javits "Balanced Growth and Economic Planning Act" is the broader, and less innovative, of the two bills raising the issue of planning...

...Thus it is that the administration has asked for frugality from the people and better tax breaks for big investors...

...So Humphrey-Javits is a most moderate bill whose main feature is to socialize some data-gathering, which might then influence government or even trickle down and affect corporate decisions...

...Capitalism, it must be stressed, is as a system hostile to full employment, and its periodic crises, insane as they are in any social calculus, are functional for such an economy...

...The most basic feature of Hawkins-Humphrey-the guaranteed right to a job-is such an enormous advance in American society that the bill should clearly be the focus of-democratic JLeft efforts...

...Can one...

...And there ate two bills in the Congress-the Humphrey-Hawkins "Equal Opportunity and Full Employment Act" and the Humphrey-Javits "Balanced Growth and Economic Planning Act"-which seek to articulate this new mood in specific legislative terms...

...Profits are cut by rising wages and other costs, investment tapers off and the capital goods industry turns down, and so on...

...That, of course, only calculates some of the most obvious and direct deficits...

...The democratic Left answer .moves, of course, in the opposite direction: putting the millions back to work satisfying the myriad unfulfilled needs of the society...

...But there are other possibilities even within the limits of capitalist planning...

...Therefore Hawkins-Humphrey rightly says that "it is the responsibility of the Federal Government to enforce this right...

...One widely circulated figure computes that every percentage of unemployment costs Washington $16 billion in lost revenues and new obligations for things like unemployment compensation and food stamps...

...Such a capitalist reform must not be rejected simply because it does not go far enough...

...the PhD has been subjected to indignities which were unthinkable during the golden age of higher education spending in the Sixties...

...I-would argue, for instance, that federal research funds should be provided to any serious groups (and indices of seriousness could be developed to obviate the abuse of such a provision) to develop a Kernate plans...

...There is no reason why a similar process cannot take place on the Left...

...Far from it They-and in particular Hawkins-Humphrey-have focused some of the most critical issues of these times...

...has been quite compatible with Gaulh'ste and Giscardian orthodoxy (although it should be noted that French conservatives do not have Adam Smith on their backs and can therefore be much more comfortable with dirigisme...

...Secondly, the local planning councils under CETA were not structured to get democratic participation and have not achieved it...

...Its attention, however, is not directed to the "structural deficiencies" (which are not defined) but toward collecting the information which will allow "the formulation of long-term economic goals, the identification of available and potential labor, capital and natural resources, and recommendations for policies to reconcile goals and resources [which] would enable the Federal Government to determine and rationalize its own impact on the national economy...

...Why...

...But in joining the broad democratic Left to campaign for such measures, I think so*-cialists have a unique job to do: constantly to demonstrate the necessity of going beyond the amelioration of a life in a basically flawed capitalist system as soon as possible...

...Those mechanisms require higher profits as the source for the new investment funds and they demand that those investments be made in terms of profitability, not need...

...Those disagreements are hi the process of being ironed out right now (which means that some of the provisions I cite might change somewhat, but not the basic thrust of the Bill) and Carl Albert is said to have promised passage by this Spring...

...it is even to become "an employer of last resort...

...One of the most important is the attitude of disillusionment with any and all government action which is currently pushed by ex-liberals, like California's Jerry Brown, as well as by conservatives...

...Most fundamentally, the society has to begin to challenge the assumption that private profit and allocation must be the way to achieve growth...

...Proposed by Augustus Hawkins, a very talented, hard-working ciufornian and a leading member of the Black Congressional Caucus, and Hubert Humphrey, it was stymied for a long time because the AFL-CIO refused to endorse it...

...That is why it is important to be clear about what is involved...

...Fourth, the planners are not given subpoena power to get the facts from the corporations, i.e., the bill respects managerial prerogatives which are as outmoded as, and somewhat amilar to, the divine right of kings...

...maladjustments" of the American economy-high wages and prices, overly abundant credit, managerial sloppi-ness-"have been worked out of the economic system by a painful process...

...in part, as will be seen, it was the reassertion of forces which were not quite as idyllic as the New Economics imagined and which would have tormented liberal Democrats as well as conservative Republicans...

...In 1945 and 1946, Congressional conservatives basically altered what Was to be the Full Employment Act- and what became the Employment Act-of 1946...

...None of them requires that one declare for a basic socialist reorganization of society...

...As a result, I propose that the democratic Left seek to amend these bills, eves while accepting them as an extremely useful framework, by calling for an increase in the public sector (a TVA-type gas and oil company, a nationalized rail system* credit allocation) and for worker and public involvement in the economic choices of the society, from the neigh* borhood and factory floor through the corporate board of directors up to the national plan itself...

...Hawkins-Humphrey still fundamentally assumes that public employment is a kind of last resort...

...On the upswing, the system generates a capital goods boom, reduces unemployment and makes labor more militant as a consequence, which raises wages, bids up the price of money and allows marginal, inefficient producers to survive or even prosper...

...Yet, if the democratic Left were to organize to introduce amendments changing it in the direction of much greater democratic participation and allocation of resources of the kind I have indicated, it might be transformed in the process...

...That means taking utterly seriously an ideal which liberals and socialists share, but which socialists follow to its basic conclusion: that economic power must be democratized throughout American society, that the age of corporate power, of an industrial feudalism hi which tiny elites make fundamental and intolerable social choices on the basis of private profit, must now be brought to a close...

...This means that the Left-the broad democratic Left as well as the smaller socialist Left in America-must approach the subject with considerable sophistication...

...Firstly, the bill subordinates the planners to the Budget Office when the Budget Office should be subordinated to the planners...

...The college degree has been devalued...

...This involved the "self-corrective forces internal to the business cycle...

...Full Employment Service and the Standby Job Coips are reduced to a minimum...

...But here again, those efforts should seek to transcend the overly-narrow limits in which this excellent idea is now constrained...

...Therefore it is critical that the Left understand that capitalist planning is not one thing, but a range of possibilities extending from outrageous corporate domination on the Right to serious democratic and participatory openings toward the Left...

...This would be regularly paid work at the minimum wage or better and compensation is required to be related to skill and also provide incentives to leave the Corps...

...In what follows, I win make criticisms of Hawkins-Humphrey (which is being rewritten at this very moment) and Humphrey-Javits...

...Washington is supposed to take a somewhat more interventionist role in actually shaping the Gross National Product...

...The theory is-and it is obviously taken from the experience of French "indicative" planning -that the very existence of the plan, plus the fact that the government would be required to follow it, would motivate the private sector to conform to it voluntarily out of its own self-interest It should be noted that French planning took social objectives seriously on only one brief occasion-under a Mollet Socialist government hi the Fifties which, in other respects, was a catastrophe -and...

...really assume that Exxon has made 3 better use of resources, both human and material, than the TVA...

...In the case of a shortfall the Job Guarantee Office under a newly renamed United States Full Employment Service would refer job-seekers for placement in a reservoir of projects, both public and private, drawn up by Local Planning Councils (which have already been set up under the Comprehensive Employment Training Act of 1973...

...That is something more than mere monetary and fiscal management...