Recently, I spoke to someone with a viewpoint on unemployment which is widely and uncritically held as “common sense” where I live (in the US): that unemployment is "voluntary." She genuinely believes that the unemployed simply "aren't trying hard enough" to find a job, and that if they spent a lot of time each day job searching they should be able to find one. She does not mean unemployed people who are young, old, sick, disabled, or have anything that prevent them from working, but healthy adults capable of work. If unemployed people who are the latter cannot find a job, she believes, they either just aren’t trying hard enough, are trying to find too much to find the best one, or are simply “spoiled,” especially among those who live in cities where she assumes there are plenty of jobs available. Then she went on to say that the welfare system is something that “many people take advantage of,” that to her unemployment is the result of the unemployed deciding to live on welfare rather than work as it’s only “human nature.” I tried explaining that there are simply far fewer jobs than there are unemployed people, that the unemployed do try hard to look all the time (since most want to survive), and that politicians often try to use the issue of welfare to put the blame on them, but she rejected what I said out of hand.
Now I think this argument is plainly absurd, as any other communist would also think. But, given how widely this view is held (at least in the US), I feel that it is important to devote at least some attention to critiquing it, to unmasking the ideology, and understanding why unemployment is actually involuntary.
I found some articles on this site which partly do (such as here: http://libcom.org/blog/nation-scroungers-18102010), but they sometimes come across to me as newspaper opinion pieces or polemics, rather than an analysis coming from a theoretically rigorous framework, which is what I’m looking for. Out of curiosity, I looked at the Anarchist FAQ’s section on unemployment, and I thought it was interesting to find that it has a subsection on precisely this question (here: http://infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQSectionC9#secc94). But, while the subsection does have some good observations and arguments, it still seemed to me theoretically weak. The subsection, and the section in general, draws from Keynesian or other “left wing” capitalist economists to a large extent (and not merely from data-oriented studies they've done). I felt that the authors too often counterpoise "conservative," "right wing neoliberal," "free market" capitalism to "liberal," "left-wing Keynesian," "welfare state" capitalism. Marxist theory is neither drawn on nor hardly mentioned at all: Marx is mentioned once or twice briefly in the entire section, I believe, and Paul Mattick is criticized for “echoing the right” by allegedly distorting and misrepresenting Keynes on the question of whether cutting real wages reduces unemployment.
So, not being too well-versed in theory, I am hoping you could suggest any books, articles, or other material that delves into a critique of “voluntary” unemployment from a consistently communist perspective (preferably perspectives drawn from Marx’s theory, but class struggle anarchist theory, too). Again, I am looking for more of a theoretically strong critique, and not anything like a moralistic or psychological perspective which, I think, only mirrors capitalist ideology. If there’s anything on this site that you know of – articles, threads, anything really -- I would most appreciate if you could point me to it as I’ve tried looking. Or, of course, if you would just like to give your own critiques or comments, that would be quite nice as well.
) This is why I cannot understand why certain radicals (like the authors of the Anarchist FAQ's unemployment section) seem to be cheerleading Keynes. Of course, it may be better to have some social security rather than, well, death without social security by the capitalist class (which happens anyway), but to rather rigidly counterpoise the two seems false to me. As the Wobbly T. Bone Slim said of charity, I think social security is like throwing a life jacket into a drowned man's coffin.
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