Let’s face it: the political left is in crisis. In the UK and the US, Labour and democrats have failed to respond to far right populism with an adequate, convincing counter narrative. Meanwhile the European Union is under serious attack by “Eurosceptics”. And much like their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, the lefties on the continent are failing to deal with this move to the right. In the Netherlands, recent elections made anti-immigrant party PVV the second biggest. The other parties on the right were only able to keep their votes by copying the anti-islam rhetoric and the left-wing parties are now smaller than ever before. The far right is setting the political agenda (“culture” and “immigration” issues are dominating the political discourse whereas climate, inequality and poverty are rarely mentioned), forcing the left in a defensive stance where they can only respond to the right-wing narrative in right-wing language rather than presenting their own ideas.

So what’s wrong with the political left? What’s undermining their credibility?

I think one of the reasons (by no means the only one though) is that they’re still disagreeing about some fundamental questions about how humans work. And I mean literally work. What motivates people to work and what doesn’t? And what counts as valuable work? If the left wants to reinvent itself and join hands to finally formulate an answer to the growing far right, they will first have to agree on these basic questions.

At the moment, the left is divided up in two camps.

There’s the classical socialist camp that tells the story of workers that will be emancipated through solidarity and a heavy welfare state. The ultimate goal is to provide everyone with an honest job and a fair salary (unless you’re really unable to work).

Then there’s the more progressive and liberal camp that believes full employment is an out-dated idea (because robots are taking over more jobs than they’re creating) and argues instead that everyone should be able to enjoy a basic standard of living, regardless of whether they have a job or not. Solidarity should be organised on the basis of trust and community rather than paid work.

Classical socialists: work for your money

Recent discussions on the idea of a universal basic income clearly show the big divide within left-wing thinking. My favourite response to a question about basic income by a Labour politician (in the Netherlands): “My party is called the Labour party, not the benefits party”. That’s exactly the mentality and vocabulary of a classical socialist. Let’s dive into this idea a little further.

This is the basic argument: Everybody should have a “real job” and a decent living wage. If there are no jobs, we’ll just create new jobs, because contributing to society is always better than doing “nothing”. Basic income is a terrible idea because people will stop working and that ultimately makes them unhappy.

Part of that seems to make sense — in a good society everyone contributes something and luckily, in healthy societies, most people actually want to contribute because it makes them happy. But why is a “real” (in other words: paid) job the only way to contribute to society?

So much work that’s undeniably vital to our societies is not paid: raising kids, taking care of our families, all sorts of volunteer work and simply being a considerate, friendly and engaged citizen. No one gets paid to do these things, but if we were to “strike” and stop doing them, our worlds would surely collapse.

And reversely, there are also a lot of jobs that are paid (hence: “real”) but not necessarily useful to society. David Graeber’s piece on so-called “bullshit jobs” is probably the most convincing evidence for this case. He found that a lot of people are doing jobs that they don’t think are very useful to society. It keeps them busy and they don’t hate doing it, but they don’t feel like they’re making a valuable contribution to society — there is no sense of fulfilment. Of course there is no clear and objective measure of what is and what is not a “valuable contribution”, but if people are saying themselves that their job is worthless, something must be wrong.