Peter Frase has an essay at The Activist arguing that the Left’s focus on “jobs” as a political demand is wrongheaded. He’s even so bold as to headline his piece: “Stop Digging: The Case Against Jobs.” Frase’s underlying point is straightforward: the Left at its best has always opposed alienated labor, so there’s something paradoxical about the demand that lots more of it be created. What people really need is income — not jobs — he says, and we should keep our eyes fastened on a politics of basic income, work-sharing and free time rather than demands for more bossed drudgery. In these respects, Frase’s view is quite close to Chris Maisano’s in his recent Jacobin piece “Take This Job and Share It.”

What should we make of arguments like these? I have more to say about the Frase-Maisano view than can fit in this blog post. (Even the internet in its great infinitude imposes some limits.) But what I’ll say here is this: Although Frase is right to reject a left vision whose goal is forever squeezing out more per capita units of consumption, the politics implicit in his argument are fundamentally perverse. For the fact is that the working class is never more obsessed with jobs than in a period of joblessness, and never less obsessed with jobs than in a time of full employment. The only viable route to a mass politics of post-productivism is a permanent plenitude of paid, alienated work. If that seems like a contradiction, it is not. It is simply a paradox. And it is borne out by history. (And lest we get tangled in words, let’s remember what full employment means and has always meant: simply that all those who want a job can get one.)