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Job Guarantee as Historical Struggle with David Stein
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Scott Ferguson: So on this podcast we're really interested in the humanities and what the humanities can bring to the study of political economy, and specifically through a neochartalist lens. Much of this story and the way it's playing out now, the big actors are politicians, economists, as you said, policy wonks, certainly organizers and activists of various stripes, but clearly there's also a place and a role for us humanists, right? You in particular, you're not just studying what's going on. You're participating in your own way, whether it's with Fed Up or just on Twitter. I'm curious if you can speak to your own role in how this is playing out and how the study of history and maybe the humanities approach more generally is important for this fight?
David Stein: Yeah. I think I have a few different answers to that question. And I'm glad you asked this early on in case anyone tunes out later. I think there are two key lessons that I would say are really important going forward. The first one is that, if we think about how this was a key goal of the civil rights movement—one of the most powerful social movements I know of to ever exist that broke the U.S. apartheid system—that movement was not strong enough to fully achieve a governmental Jobs Guarantee. I think if history provides a guide for us, it's that our movements may or will need to be stronger than that, which I think is a really daunting task and a humbling task. But I also think, from having studied social movements, that an appropriate power analysis is a key starting point for any struggle. I think that's one lesson.
The other key lesson is that, in the post-1948 era or so, I can think of about a four year span when winning these sorts of proposals could have been possible had the movement's been strong enough. That's the years 1964 to 1966 and 1976 to 1978. I think you could make an argument that, had the movements appeared in 2008 to 2010, they might have been legislatively possible. Yet, the movements were not anywhere there during 2008 to 2010.
And so, I think what that lesson shows us is these openings can appear quickly and they can disappear just as quickly. And we don't know when they're going to return again. Back to the first question, one of the things I've been most excited about right now is that I think and I hope we're preparing for that opening that might occur between 2020 and 2022. I think that we need to be ready when that opening appears because we don't know when it's gonna appear again. Those to me are the two key lessons that history teaches us.
David Stein is a Lecturer in the Departments of History and African American Studies at UCLA. He co-hosts and produces Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast with Betsy Beasley.
[photo by Joshua J. Cotten]
