How Fromm’s Ideas Resonate Politically as well as Philosophically: The Contemporary Case of Guaranteed Income

ABSTRACT

Erich Fromm is not generally associated with policy positions and politics. Yet, Fromm was an early proponent of guaranteed income as an important practical entitlement necessary if greater human freedoms were to be realized. The article traces the development of the idea of basic (or guaranteed income) in US social movement history going back to the 1960s and including the writings of Erich Fromm on this topic. It argues that the concept of guaranteed income flows easily from, and is consonant with, Fromm’s humanistic philosophy overall. Four reasons are offered, including those that are politically, ethically and pragmatically oriented, as to why providing basic income to all citizens has major advantages over the kind of economic precarity and anxieties that many people currently experience. Lastly, after making a multi-dimensional case for guaranteed income, the article responds to a common objection – namely, if basic income became universally available, people would not wish to work. Quite to the contrary, and as empirical experiments have shown, Fromm’s ideas suggest that guaranteed income would encourage people to work with increased commitment and passion and that more positive than negative consequences would ensue from the concept becoming a widespread and much more generally accepted public policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Guaranteed income
• entitlements
• humanism
• Fromm
• policy
• freedom

In “The Psychological Aspects of the Guaranteed Income,” published in a volume devoted to this subject, Erich Fromm writes with characteristic eloquence that “The most important reason for the acceptance of this concept is that it might drastically enhance the freedom of the individual.” As Fromm elaborates in the context of then-active social movement activism, “A guaranteed income … could for the first time free man from the threat of starvation, and thus make him truly free and independent from any economic threat. Nobody would have to accept conditions of work merely because he otherwise would be afraid of starving – a talented or ambitious man or woman could use new skills to prepare himself or herself for a different kind of occupation. A woman could leave her husband, an adolescent his family. People would no longer be afraid, if they did not have to fear hunger” (Fromm, 1966).

This topic represents at least the second time Fromm’s work has bequeathed extraordinary inspiration to me at levels both political and biographical. Fromm’s Escape from Freedom influenced my book Sadomasochism in Everyday Life: Dynamics of Power and Powerlessness (1992). Here, clear to me again is that Fromm’s essay on guaranteed income is at once kindred and different, but closely in intellectual alignment with an essay I wrote on the same topic in 1997 entitled “Benefitting from Pragmatic Vision: The Case For Guaranteed Income,” approximately thirty years after Fromm’s analysis (Chancer, 1997; Chancer et al., 2018).

But why return in 2022, at another thirty-year interval later, to the topic? Several reasons come to mind. One entails the fact that from the 1960s through the present, guaranteed or “basic” income has been an idea that ebbed and flowed in the distinctly American context. In the 1960s, as Fromm wrote, guaranteed income seemed possible in an age of affluence. Yet, as the brief history below attests, even in our contemporary context of heightened inequalities and grave socioeconomic anxieties and insecurities, the concept is equally if not more resonant in the 2020s than it was in either the 1960s or 1990s. Well-known politicians, including Andrew Yang and labor leader Andrew Stern among others, have popularized the idea more than previously and, even in the individualistic United States, several locales including the State of Alaska and the small city of Hudson New York have by now experimented with actual (if very small) basic income plans (Reibstein & Stern, 2018).

Thus, I would argue that a fine rationale for returning to this subject is that Fromm’s ideas about guaranteed income are exceedingly relevant to the present time. This could be said to be part-and-parcel of what Neil McLaughlin has called, in an outstanding intellectual examination of Fromm’s public sociology, a resurgence of scholarship and renewed interest in Fromm’s body of work (McLaughlin, 2021). But at the heart of this first rationale is also that the case of guaranteed income points to the importance of grasping that Fromm was an important thinker both theoretically and – perhaps relatively less explored – politically as well. Humanistic philosophy is not simply imaginative and utopian but has pragmatical and realizable implications; it does, and ought, apply in concrete political contexts.

Here then, a second reason for returning to this subject is that whether or not the idea of guaranteed income takes hold politically is likely to be affected by circulating philosophical understandings of the idea’s significance. In other words, remembering Fromm’s theoretical concepts may go hand-in-hand with maximizing (or not) the chances of some of his ideas’ actualization. One might even say, extending the feminist adage, not merely that the *personal* but, as in this case, the *philosophical is political.* Third, and last, my interest in revisiting Fromm and guaranteed income is motivated by wishing to explicitly acknowledge my debt to this (for me) inspirational thinker as, in the pages below, I integrate my own thinking with several core notions drawn from Fromm’s own lexicon.

The ensuing section briefly summarizes the history of guaranteed income in the United States, including but not limited to Fromm’s work on the subject. Immediately afterward, I develop four main arguments that can be made in favor of guaranteed income as a practical political measure imbued with deeply humanistic justifications and consequences. These “in favor” arguments fall into four categories elaborated one-by-one below: technological/political; social; moral/ethical; and psychic/libidinal. Next, I turn to two objections that can and have been made to these advantages, answering each in ways I believe consonant with Fromm’s theorizing. My interest is to show the kinds of arguments that need to be answered if guaranteed income is to be more widely embraced alongside and in addition to – not instead of – efforts at job creation and provision. Finally, I offer brief concluding remarks aimed at the future on the basis of the past.

A brief history

Interestingly, the humanistic enthusiasm expressed by Robert Theobald, a British economist, as well as by Fromm, as a German psychoanalyst and social theorist, comprised only two of many influential voices who accorded guaranteed income legitimacy in the 1960s and 70s (Theobald, 1963). Interest spanned the political spectrum from right to left, and included economists, social workers, academics and American presidents. According to Premilla Nadasen, contemporary accounts have been marked by a tendency to stress mostly the conflictual character of the 1960s, thereby overlooking the striking degree of consensus that then existed – if remarkable from our 2020s standpoint – about the need for some kind of income plan to eliminate burdens of poverty and economic insecurity of concern to all Americans (Nadasen, 1997).

For instance, looking backward reveals that in addition to Fromm, no flaming radical but conservative economist Milton Friedman introduced the idea of a floor below which no American’s income should be allowed to fall. Friedman unveiled a “negative income tax” proposal in his 1962 Capitalism and Freedom, published the same year when Michael Harrington’s The Other America appeared and influenced American President Lyndon Johnson to declare a “war on poverty” (Friedman, 1962; Harrington, 1997). Friedman’s hope was to find a cheaper and more efficient way of eliminating welfare. Similarly, relatively progressive in retrospect was US President Richard Nixon’s then-Family Assistance Plan, defeated by Congress in 1972 partly because of strongly voiced concerns from welfare rights advocates that families might be left poorer after the program was instituted at even lower funding levels than existed before. The plan was also limited in its intended scope, eligible to families and not to the many individuals who also found themselves in need of economic assistance.

Just as important to summarize is that advocating a negative income tax does not simply equate with supporting guaranteed income: sometimes these terms have been used synonymously while, at other times, they are employed to refer to separable ideas. According to Alvin Schorr, three different perspectives on income maintenance have circulated in the US context. One dates back to 1946 when Lewis Meriam proposed that a tax return establish eligibility for a basic income floor; the second perspective, within which Friedman’s ideas clearly should be classified, is that of the negative income tax (Schorr, 1966). Both the Meriam and Friedman perspectives share the characteristic of being means-tested proposals, i.e., income support would only be provided to individuals in cases of demonstrated need. This is quite different from the intention infusing the third category Schorr identifies, namely, the hope of legislating a minimal universal income support payable to everyone simply because one is human. This notion has been referred to as the demogrant and has attracted a quite different set of adherents from British social policy analyst “Lady” Juliet Rhys-Williams through Theobald, Edward Schwartz and later, in his 1972 campaign in the United States, even then-Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern. Of course, it is this third category into which the ideas of Erich Fromm about guaranteed income and its philosophical and political importance clearly falls.

Again, guaranteed income can no longer be thought of as an idea circulating only in times of affluence since it is more well-known now, amidst economic insecurities, than in previous more affluent decades. However, equally obvious is that guaranteed income is not presently at the top of political ideas discussed broadly in America by either Democrats or Republicans as the US approaches the 2024 presidential campaign. Thus, if guaranteed income is to be re-advocated, and to become a legislative and policy priority, a Frommian perspective is extremely useful for raising humanistic arguments in favor of the concept.

A quartet of advantages of furthering guaranteed income in practice and theory

• a) I commence, then, with a simultaneously technological and political advantage of guaranteed income were it to be more broadly instituted in the years and decades to come. In the 2010s and 2020s, contemporary debates abound as to whether or not rapid technological innovations, ranging from changes in artificial intelligence and the coming of “robotization” will affect the availability of “good” (read: meaningful and with good benefits) in comparison with insecure “gig economy” jobs (Aronowitz & DiFazio, 1994). Some people, including former labor leader Andrew Stern and more recently sociologist Alexandrea Ravenelle, have expressed serious fears of technology’s relationship to job displacement (Ravanelle, 2019; Stern & Kravitz, 2019). Others, including economist and journalist Paul Krugman and another sociologist of labor, Ruth Milkman, argue that even as technology displaces some jobs, it also recreates others such that catastrophic predictions are not empirically justified. It is a debate difficult to resolve in advance, especially since changes regarding automation, vaccine development, AI and other areas of scientific research tend to happen in rapid and rather unpredictable directions.

However, what can be said with great certainty is that by varied measures, from the 1990s through the present, anxieties and insecurities about the ability to have steady incomes and to find jobs of any kind without constantly having to search (and search again), are affecting people enormously and deeply, posing a fundamentally psychosocial set of concerns. Thus, academic and governmental debates over the extent to which jobs are displaced and/or recreated, and over whether new jobs appear where people need and are trained for them, are arguably subsumed by the fact that qua public policy, guaranteed income – i.e., knowing that one can survive with sufficient income regardless of how technological change unfolds – prudently anticipates and prepares for technologically uncertain outcomes in one direction or another.

Moreover, this technology-related advantage co-exists with an explicitly political one. To the extent that jobs are displaced by technological change and replaced by fewer and/or more insecure ones, the ability for workers to protest against intensifying economic insecurity and worsening conditions – at workplaces running the gamut from Amazon and Walgreens through myriad retail and other “middle level” corporate establishments – would likely be affected by the growth and widespread establishment of guaranteed income as a legitimized entitlement. As Fromm writes, at the heart of this question is the core matter of freedom – to be precise, of political freedom. For guaranteed income is arguably a precondition for people to be able to advocate on behalf of keeping, as well as providing, jobs that are satisfying and that offer good wages and benefits. It affects the ability to protest not just individually but collectively through labor unions that have become significantly weakened in the US over the same last fifty years during which the concept of basic income has been advanced. Indeed, how exactly is labor to flourish if nothing like a guaranteed income exists to cushion individuals’ typical and understandable worries, and to provide reassurance against the threat of what I have elsewhere called sadomasochistic dynamics that can bring punitive employer or governmental reactions? With guaranteed income as a socially secured right, though, people are less likely to wonder what will happen when their limited employment benefits run out. Or to fret, reasonably, about one’s own and the well-being of one’s family if taking part in a union drive that continues for longer than seems affordable with only limited protections.

• b) But there are other practical advantages, too, of instituting reasonably funded guaranteed incomes, specifically but not exclusively in the US context. Take what I would dub a “social” benefit. It is difficult to imagine that the provision of a reasonable income floor would not, over time, diminish the severity of myriad social problems with which income at first glance appears unconnected. An income level below which people could no longer fall might well affect, to some extent, the kind of desperation that can be responsible for, say, crimes committed for small sums of money and out of anger at chronic social inequities. Of course, this is by no means intended as a simplistic explanation of the multi-dimensional complexity of criminality. On the other hand, it is likewise silly to go to the opposite extreme and deny any relationship whatsoever between class-divided realities and comparative rates of crime commission. One has only to consult Elliot Currie’s aging but still extremely well-argued treatise Confronting Crime: An American Challenge to be struck by the comparative fact of how advanced industrial nations that channel far greater proportions of their GNPs into social welfare programs have suffered from far less violent crime than is the case in the US (Currie, 1985). Moreover, the point may be even more appropriate presently than in the past given that, following the long years and terrible toll taken by Covid 19 across America and other parts of the world, crime, including violent crime, has reemerged as a top social issue. In American cities like New York, widespread trauma, and economic tolls, have proceeded together since the advent of the pandemic and associated ills. Greater degrees of security provided by guaranteed income provisions could assist in redressing such pervasive social realities of loss, fear, and intensified financial concerns.

• c) A third advantage of guaranteed income can be deemed moral/ethical. This is a consideration that points to humanistic concerns of precisely the kind with which Frommian ideas are imbued. From a moral and ethical standpoint, advocating for guaranteed income, in particular, helps to legitimize the notion of entitlements, in general. By providing sufficient income so that people do not need to worry about basic survival, a huge source of ongoing human anxiety is potentially diminished or eliminated. Guaranteed income – as, in another context, Fromm contended also best illuminates love – is at once a provision that provides for oneself and others: it is an idea that points beyond choosing between one’s own and others’ well-beings (Fromm, 2006). Nor is it wishy-washy or “touchy feely,” as feminists have long been accused of sounding, to discuss questions of social policy as deeply interconnected with – rather than separable from – issues of morality, ethics and human happiness that have often been associated too narrowly only with religion(s). Rather, in this sense, Fromm’s work is close to that of other writers, including communitarian philosophies as espoused by Amitai Etzioni or Michael Lerner, as well as to writings of feminist psychosocial theorists like Jessica Benjamin and Nancy Chodorow – all of whom have tried, in myriad ways, to argue against the rampant and one-sided individualism of American culture (Benjamin, 1998; Chodorow, 1991).

But perhaps it is Fromm who has been most clear, most passionate and persuasive, about the moral benefits, at once for oneself and others, selfishly and selflessly, of eliminating chronic anxieties caused by insufficient health care, inadequate housing and certainly, of course, by lack of sufficient income just for survival. As I wrote in 1997, in harmony with Fromm, it would be a different world indeed were it no longer necessary to waste precious and scarce hours and days of one’s life fearing the consequences of suddenly being out of work, laid off and unable to make even basic ends meet. If one has ever known friends or family members in such situations, it is difficult to underestimate the toll and pain of sleepless nights spent thinking about what one will do, and who will be there (anyone?) to turn to if all else seems to fail.

This might apply, for example, to the hypothetical predicament of an older man or woman who has been laid off from a middle management position. Or, of course, such dreadful levels of anxiety affect young people facing high rates of unemployment and seemingly unbearably high rates of competitiveness in a world ever more Malthusian at its (too often) worst. (On the predicament facing contemporary youth see, for example, Chancer, Sanchez-Jankowski and Trost, ed. Youth Jobs and the Future: Problems and Prospects, Oxford University Press, 2017). What now, old and/or middle aged and/or young people wonder amidst aggravated insecurities, will I do – will the next job give me enough to make my car payments and my dental bills, and to keep the therapy appointments that people may well need now more than ever?

Like other entitlements, then, guaranteed income fulfills the simple good of relieving a form of economic anxiety over which – unlike death or dying, or the unavoidable pain of unrequited love – we *can* exert a significant degree of control. Brilliantly, Fromm also posited that unlike other entitlements, a guaranteed income also has the potential to undermine a blatant social tendency to unfairly stigmatize others. Because conceived as a right to which everyone is entitled, a guaranteed income makes it harder to find grounds for bias against one social group or another even as it is simplistic to suggest – as I do not – that an extraordinarily complex problem like social hatreds (or again, for that matter, criminality) would quickly vanish with the institutionalization of guaranteed income. But what I am asserting is that were guaranteed income to become a more widely accepted and instituted benefit, this very fact would attest to shifts in cultural and social consciousness having occurred that are consonant with Fromm’s vision of, and philosophical ideas about, a far more humanistic world.

• d) A fourth and last advantage of guaranteed income can be labeled psychic/libidinal. By reducing fears that now accompany many people in multiple spheres of their lives, guaranteed income could – by institutionalizing “bottom line” survival protections – allow people, newly fortified by a sense of (relative) social security, to psychically and to some greater “mass” extent, relax. Perhaps it is exactly such “relaxation” that psychosocially correlates with one aspect of what it means to be “rich” – i.e., a psychic/libidinal potentiality that, with guaranteed income, might extend for perhaps the first time across classes, genders, races, ethnicities, sexualities and other such often meaningful social distinctions.

With guaranteed income in place as a legitimated social policy, though, it may become possible to approach not only hobbies and creative endeavors, but also jobs taken for extra money or because socially useful, on the basis of expected pleasures rather than deeply embedded fears. This psychic/libidinal characteristic is also kindred with Frommian ideas insofar as suggesting a concrete social policy – i.e., guaranteed income, as Fromm himself intuited – that could help to actualize a *productive* social character more widely and, again, across social distinctions. The marketing character, as has been elaborated upon by Rainer Funk, is fostered by social and political situations wherein unlimited desires to acquire commodities take the place of phenomenological development, and strengthening, of a person’s inner strength and resources (Funk, 2009; Funk, 2019). Likewise, from a psychosocial perspective, narcissistic social character paradoxically bespeaks inner emptiness rather than a satisfying balance between self and other-love. Were guaranteed income more widely accepted and instituted, on the other hand, one might be able to find more time to (say) play the piano, or attend meditation or sculpture classes, or pursue an interest in literature or postcolonial political theory or write. Otherwise, time as well as money works against such pursuits as few hours exist that are not taken up with efforts just to survive, to keep up.

Here, it might also be added that in the US, the tenure system of the highly stratified American academy – currently and not coincidentally under attack in recent years – is precisely an example of the beauty of “guaranteed income.” That system is more than worth staunchly defending as it illustrates exactly the kind of “guarantee” that, as Fromm insists, is necessary for both political and intellectual freedoms to remain possible. For the strength of the tenure system in the academy is precisely its ability to protect against (economic and other) reprisals should one express an opinion about anything – whether for or against the existence of poverty, or for capitalism and against socialism, or even when debating the merits of demerits of guaranteed income itself. Otherwise, professors would not feel able to say what they mean; they/we would worry doing so could or would bring punitive reprisals from disapproval to dismissal as ramifications.

For all these reasons, I believe Fromm was correct to support and accord significance to the idea. But given this multiplicity of advantages, what are reasons commonly given to oppose guaranteed income? After all, the idea has been tried in the US but clearly not as a widespread matter of course. Why not, though, and how might a Frommian-influenced analysis answer the following, of-made and “political” objections?

Claims and counter claims: Assuaging a pair of common fears

a) A first and possibly foremost objection to instituting guaranteed income concerns whether, if such an entitlement existed, would anyone work? In the late 1960s when Fromm advocated the concept, this dubiousness motivated a three-year-long guaranteed income experiment that showed no such extreme conclusion to be warranted. But let me investigate the objection more carefully in terms of what may sustain its social psychological power. Clearly, the rational and mostly only quantitative evidence provided by the 1968–1971 OEO experiment, and published by well-regarded social scientists, has not been sufficient to dispel fears still circulating up that can result in opposing guaranteed incomes’ adoption. For a skeptic is likely to argue from strong emotional conviction that a guaranteed income would encourage laziness and indulgence: if people knew they would be supported when unemployed, why would anyone want to work? Isn’t it obvious that people would stay home unless forced by sheer necessity to show up at most of our jobs? Now the contention above – i.e., that guaranteed income would help to diminish other social problems – is reversed, and the idea becomes interpreted as a potential cause of compounded collective troubles.

Not only would guaranteed income encourage people to stay home, the objection goes, but such an entitlement would discourage willingness to tolerate socially necessary but not high status or well-paid labor. Were a guaranteed income plan to be institutionalized who, for instance, would want to work for low wages at places like McDonald’s? Who would sweep streets or work as janitors or at low-paying jobs in government offices? In the weakest version of this “practical” but now posed as social harm argument, guaranteed income is envisioned as encouraging even more widespread forms of “cheating” than existed under the “welfare as we knew it” system that then-President Bill Clinton sought to and managed to end in 1996. Taken to its extreme, and in its strongest version, this objection can be seen to bode even more drastic consequences: if anything like a guaranteed income existed, society itself might be in danger of coming to a standstill, and its ability to function effectively called into question.

By way of responding, two points come to mind, one of a theoretical and Frommian bent and the other more pragmatically oriented. Initially, let us return to the fourth potential advantage of guaranteed income – i.e., its possibly “psychic/libidinal” benefits, suggesting not that people would simply cease working in the aftermath of an instituted guaranteed income but that just the opposite trend might unfold. With guaranteed income in place as an entitlement that materially and psychically relieves concerns about survival, and even under late neoliberal capitalist conditions, people might be less rather than more likely to rebel from working.

For many people, work that is undertaken most passionately, most doggedly, and in which we persist even through unpleasant and menial tasks such work can necessitate, corresponds to efforts freely chosen from within, not imposed by fiat from without. Thus, as I wrote in 1997, pleasures and satisfactions are to be had when starting one’s own business. Then too, as is hardly an exceptionally American trait, the artist or filmmaker or cook knows well the joys of creativity, and a disciplined dialectic between control and freedom in the course of unfolding a life’s work. Then there is the person who feels hope as he or she freely works out a plan – e.g., I will work here this summer, then there next fall – in order to realize one long-cherished dream or another, quite unconcerned about counting the number of hours such envisioned exertions may entail.

One can thereby posit, in principle and on the basis of Frommian-attuned ideas, that people are likely to be drawn most, not least, toward work contexts that have not created profound resentments because forced into becoming a sheer life-and-death matter. Logically, there is nothing about a guaranteed income that stops people from pursuing the various occupations and interests that would still be found enjoyable, stimulating and compelling even after such an entitlement was instituted. Nor, for that matter, is there any reason that guaranteed income would have the slightest capacity to do away with people wanting to work for reasons that surpass motivations based solely upon survival: desires for recognition fit into this category, surely, as do immensely general human cravings for acceptance, love and status.

And secondly, in response to expressed objections of the “why would anyone want to work?” variety if basic/guaranteed incomes existed, it makes little sense to think that once an income floor was ensured, people would no longer wish to earn sums above this basic amount. No guaranteed income likely to be legislated in the near future will be high enough to permit purchasing a host of luxuries toward which people are now sensuously attracted – in other words, the marketing orientation Fromm discussed might diminish but it would hardly be eliminated by guaranteed income as a widespread public policy. Thus, certainly, some teenagers will still want to work summers at the local gas station to save money for a car, a better stereo system and/or for college. Or take the middle-aged person already imagined, of any ethnicity or race or gender, who has lost the middle management position they held for ten years but now can at least rely on a guaranteed income provision to provide a floor of basic sustenance. Of course, people in a panoply of such situations are still likely to desire additional work so as to maintain small but looked forward to luxuries previously enjoyed or experienced; nothing about guaranteed income would quell a person’s desire to eat out at a fancy restaurant now and then, or to splurge on buying one’s child a gift. Put simply, nothing much would change except that people across varied strata would no longer have to fear simply for survival.

Therefore, there seems little cause for fear based on either an extreme version of this common and “practically” oriented objection – i.e., that guaranteed income would produce a cessation of working. But what may reassure a skeptic even more than an argument in theory is a more decidedly empirical argument that can and should be annexed. Why haven’t other countries, such as Sweden or Canada, places wherein entitlement programs have long flourished and provided greater security from fundamental human anxieties, fallen apart? For whether referring to Canada or France, Norway or Germany, the level of ongoing state-ensured benefits regularly provided are remarkably generous in these countries compared to the US where the notion of entitlement per se has been, in decades of rightward-leaning years culminating in the Trump era, more in need of defense than ever (Think, for example, of conservative efforts at raising the idea of “privatizing” social security). Since many other advanced industrial nationals comparable to the US have long lived with far more generous unemployment benefits – ones that already provide a sense of security closer to the function I am arguing guaranteed income in America would fulfill – why haven’t these societies seen any kind of catastrophic consequences related to work over time? This is so even amidst political polarization that certainly transcends the US context alone, underscoring Fromm’s point that guaranteed income has the advantage of undermining work-related stereotypes and stereotypes about ethnicized/racialized “others.” Thus, empirical examples provide reassurance in advance that guaranteed income would not lead to cessation or mass exodus from work

But this brings me to a second issue that has sometimes been expressed about guaranteed income and how it might be answered vis-à-vis – again – a Frommian-indebted analysis. It is an objection that indeed has to do with work, and with whether social resources devoted to guaranteed income might be better channeled into job creation efforts. Job creation, and whether guaranteed income would distract attention from it, is a point likely to resonate for people of both left/liberal and rightward leaning persuasions, linking those of otherwise quite apparently opposed viewpoints. What we need now, someone on the right, left or in the center might argue, is jobs: there is dignity and respect to be found in and from labor; paid work provides people with important satisfactions and structure to our lives. In response, though, the question again arises as to why and how such beliefs about the value of public labor constitutes an objection to – rather than offering additional and supplementary arguments in support of – guaranteed income. For there is nothing inherently contradictory about believing both: a) that people obtain great satisfaction from socially recognized and paid labor; and b) that the character of the globalizing capitalist economy is rendering some jobs technologically obsolescent and not adequately replaced, in sufficient numbers, where and how most needed.

Both concerns – namely, job provision and guaranteed income – make sense to promote amidst the vicissitudes and uncertainties of our present neoliberal moment. Why ought not, or cannot, both beliefs be held and form the basis of public policies simultaneously? For some people, though, it is jobs that ought to be the priority; it might be perceived, as a political matter, that one cannot push for both improvements at once. But advocating jobs instead of, rather than in addition to, guaranteed income, arguably returns us to Weber’s theoretical Weltanschauung as long ago presented in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In The Protestant Ethic, Weber presciently expressed concerns about the deeply embedded ideological roots of the “work ethic” as promoted, in America by Benjamin Franklin and his symbolically “time is money” cultural mind-set. Weber quotes Franklin to bolster his theory about the anxieties that early Calvinists felt, compulsively and to obsessively, toward work if salvation beyond this life was to be attained. This may have been a religious drive for the early Protestants, Weber famously elaborated, but for those later trapped by the legacy of already established compulsions, questions of origin cease to be relevant or remembered. What does remain is a drive to which people become attached in and of itself, a will to work and an investment in labor that may become relentless and unforgiving, steering people away from the value of relaxed pleasures in this life and accustoming us to accepting and resigning ourselves to “work without end” and to a mentality of austerity, insecurity and even pain.

Could pointing to the depth of such a belief – of a work ethic (if not obsession) that there is little reason to believe does not affect people from right to left, right to poor, across ethnicities and races, genders and sexualities – bring us closer at a more profound level to illuminating why policy questions about income “versus” jobs ought not be framed as “either/or” propositions in debates over guaranteed income? Were guaranteed income to be provided in the contemporary US to all who need it, then a surplus Protestantism would not so blatantly persist; then, perhaps, we would not be trapped in the iron/cybernetic cage that Weber depressingly foresaw.

But this very analysis renders policies that allow for working or not working unfamiliar; more customary is to become used to having to work, work more, working even more once again. One need not overly romanticize cultural differences between Europe and the US to understand why many Europeans (say, for example, in France) are willing to repeatedly demonstrate so as not to be forced to retire later than has been expected and happily anticipated. By comparison, the US seems like a place where “work without end” is unfamiliar for those accustomed to greater control of time, and to partaking more leisurely of the sensual regular enjoyments of everyday life. Familiarity of long breaks from lunch that people may have become accustomed to as part of everyday life.

But if guaranteed income thus correlates with relief from the kind of endless hours of work that writers like Juliet Schor deplore in the American context, to propose “income” freed from work may potentially evoke anger and resentments at the very idea (Schor, 1993). By extension, detractors may characterize anyone who appears less driven by an unrelenting work ethic in disparaging terms, bringing us back again to biases and myths about people on welfare that led to “welfare’s” cessation in the 1990s. Yet again, as is consonant with Fromm, stigmatization may be expressed through typically asked questions such as “why should I work to fund others who are lazy and do not wish to work?” By way of this second objection, feelings of ressentiment may feed into policy ramifications that are, ironically, destructive for everyone in a society wherein economic and social insecurities affect not only people who receive benefits but in which economic insecuritization has become more “democratically” felt by all.

How can this second objection – i.e. that guaranteed income, in practice, threatens not just whether people will work less or at all, but the very “moral” value of the Weberian cultural “ethos” historically associated and interconnected with habits and necessities of “working without end”? By way of reply, a counter-claim I propose is that if a given society genuinely values work morally and ethically, it ought follow its policies would embrace rather than oppose the notion of a basic income entitlement. And, indeed, it may be the insistent determination with which we vaunt the values of work going back to the 1990s that needs, finally, to be explored.

If the dominant work ethic in the US is founded on the presumption that people will not work unless forced to do so by sheer life-and-death necessity, might this imply – rather than a belief in the value of work – possibly just the opposite conviction beneath the surface of apparency? For the very vehemence of reactions against guaranteed income – and the extent to which anger or hostility against the concept is sometimes expressed – suggests that, collectively speaking, we may not be pleased about the idea of laboring after all. If feeling compelled to work themselves/ourselves, people may be apt to project this dissatisfaction onto others as a mode of dissipating inner anxieties and tensions. To wit: I am willing to work albeit unhappily and insecurely, people may feel, why aren’t you? We may project onto others the anger, the resentment, the lack of control, as experienced in our own situations. In so doing, however, a vicious circle comes into play: as is a paradox worth repeating and an insight indebted to Fromm, by denying benefits to others, we also forego the benefits of social generosity toward ourselves.

In sum, then, it may be that many people are not now so much attached to the value of work but are engaged in what Freud, but also Fromm, might call a psychosocial “reaction formation” – here one that operates as a collective and not merely an individual defense mechanism against ongoing socioeconomic feelings of uncertainty that are being experienced, and possibly increasingly so, en masse. Thus, the seemingly conscious and explicit meaning of this second major objection to guaranteed income – that we ought to support jobs rather than income – may signify just the opposite of its seeming meaning.

If such unconscious dimensions of social life really do exist in addition to conscious ones, they cannot simply be swept under the rug. Unless unconscious meanings and the strong feelings to which they relate are acknowledged, desires to hold onto the work ethic and to stigmatize others, with or without reason, are likely to be recycled again and again. Consequently, this case for guaranteed income in principle also rests on asserting that questions of cultural motivation at conscious and unconscious levels cannot simply be separated from “policy” considerations as though the implications of one was simply irrelevant to the consequences of the other.

By way of conclusion

Overall, I have argued, drawing on and explicitly in honor of Fromm’s political as well as philosophical writings, that the issue of guaranteed income and its institutionalization connects intimately with Fromm’s beliefs about what would constitute an improved and productive – in fact a “sane” – society at individual as well as social levels in the context of contemporary neoliberal capitalism in the US and beyond (Fromm, 1955). Fromm’s work also dovetails with feminist theoretical considerations via its complex and multi-dimensional insistence on investigating both structural factors and psychic influences, materialities as well as emotions, and conscious as well as unconscious influences on daily individual and collective life.

As this essay also suggests, returning to Fromm’s clear articulation of the benefits of guaranteed income while tapping his ideas to respond objections, Fromm’s work is well worth recalling in both philosophical and political contexts. It allows for nuanced “both/and” rather than “either/or” orientations such that, as in this case, advocating guaranteed income and job creation can both be supported while rechanneling energies away from stigmatizing and oversimplistic social reactions. It is for such complex and humanistic thinking and feeling that Fromm’s work provides practical and theoretical inspiration past, present and future.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Lynn S. Chancer

Lynn S. Chancer, Ph.D., is Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and Executive Officer of the PhD Program in Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Sadomasochism in Everyday Life: Dynamics of Power and Powerlessness, High Profile Crimes: When Legal Cases Become Social Causes, and The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis (co-edited with John Andrews), as well as numerous articles on social theory, feminist theory and on Erich Fromm, criminology and feminism.