If politics is about securing the means of a good life, work and employment is how most people primarily achieve this. Both are therefore at the core of the alternative centrist approach.
The average person in our society, not having a spiritual or religious tradition, neither any intellectual or cultural interests, nor any meaningful family connections, imposes order upon their lives primarily through their employment. Prosocial behaviour is taught through the need to cooperate with workmates and submit to the corporate hierarchy. Work gives many people purpose and keeps many bad thoughts away.
The alternative centrist proposal is that the order imposed by the workplace needs to be balanced by an equal proportion of freedom.
The alternative centrist agrees with Julius Evola that spirituality ought to be the primary focus of a life, and a person’s way of earning a living is less important. Productivity is the measure of slaves; happiness is the measure of free people. As such, the alternative centrist state would not indulge in the vulgar GDP obsession that characterises our merchant-ruled age. Although productivity would be important, this would only be as a means to a happy life. The alternative centrist state would constantly emphasise, in contradistinction to a Marxist or capitalist one, the relative unimportance of wealth (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Spirituality).
The problem with work and employment in the West is that we never came to terms with the fact that we now live in an age of abundance. Our economic model was founded in an age when anyone who didn’t labour was likely to become a major burden to their community. The unemployed were mostly left to starve until the advent of unemployment benefits near the beginning of the 20th Century. Now there is so much wealth that there is no need for the workamania of bygone times.
However, the drive of the employer class to pauperise their workers has remained. Hence a battle has ensued, between the representatives of capital and the representatives of labour. Resulting from this battle was a multitude of laws and regulations concerning work and employment. The reasoning is that these laws should provide for a fair balance between the needs of the employer and the needs of the worker, such that the employer gets his profit and the worker gets his means to subsistence.
Unfortunately for the modern Western worker, he has been driven into a state of wage slavery. Even if the job only occupies his body for 40 hours that week, chances are it occupies his mind for many more. Many people go to bed thinking about their work and wake up in a state of dread. Because the alternative is often destitution, homelessness or imprisonment, the worker puts up with his awful conditions.
This situation has come about by design.
The alternative centrist supports a universal basic income (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Welfare). This UBI would be enough for anyone to renounce the world. Thus it would act as a floor on the level of desperation the worker can be subjected to, and finally give him some leverage, for the first time since the advent of neoliberalism and mass immigration.
With a universal basic income, there would be no need for minimum wage laws. So in one stroke, all of the right-wing arguments about inefficiency of minimum wage laws would be accommodated. The right wing likes to argue that they should have the freedom to work for a pitiful wage if they should so choose (e.g. to gain work experience). Under an alternative centrist system with a UBI, you could employ someone for $1 per hour.
There would also be no need for worker protections when it came to security of employment. The concept of “unfair dismissals” relates to a situation where losing one’s job entails a significant disruption to one’s life. A UBI moderates that disruption. Hence an alternative centrist government sees little problem with the “hire and fire” method of employment.
The universal basic income would defeat the argument that agricultural interests need to import cheap labour to do seasonal work. With a UBI, workers would be free to live cheaply in urban areas for most of the year, and then work hard for a season in an agricultural enterprise, before returning to the cities. By this means, the needs of the citizen for income, the employer for labour, and the nation for cohesion can all be met with a maximum of order, freedom and justice.
Anyone who aspires to more than a student’s lifestyle, however, will probably need a job. Unless a person is born into money, a UBI will only pay for the barest essentials. It will cover cheap rent in an undesirable location, basic foods and utilities, some simple clothing and little more. Aristotle noted that desires tend towards the infinite, so there will be plenty of motivation for people to get work and stay employed. Those who argue that a UBI will turn the workforce into couch potatoes don’t understand how unpleasant the student lifestyle is in the long term, and how difficult it is to meet one’s natural social needs without work and employment. The vast majority of people will desire more and they will need to work to get it.
The alternative centrist government would not seek to expand beyond the existing size of Western governments. However, it would maintain a Ministry of Works. This would employ a considerable number of people in national infrastructure projects.
Beyond a Ministry of Works, the alternative centrist government would leave most employment to the free market. The goal would be to facilitate the creation of internationally competitive firms, so as to maximise the nation’s return on the investment in education and infrastructure that made the firms possible in the first place.
Regarding specific jobs, the various schools would seek to link up students to firms in the appropriate industry. In theory, the schools ought to prepare people for whatever employment currently existed in the various realms (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Education). So in the realm of clay, the schools would funnel students towards agricultural, labouring, retail and simple trades. In the realm of iron, towards military, police and security jobs. In the realm of copper, towards more advanced trades, entertainment and the arts. In the realm of silver, towards business and administration jobs. Those in the realm of gold will seldom be employed, other than to learn experience.
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This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.
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For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms! https://linktr.ee/vjmpublishing
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