Frequently portrayed as a period of political fragmentation or the rise of the conservative right, the 1970s is now coming in for a different treatment, one that emphasizes the resurgence of labor organizing, the growth of progressive social movements, and even the expansion of a socialist perspective. Not only did the early 1970s witness the renewal of rank-and-file activism, which in turn drew inspiration from the anti-war movement, but it produced what historians Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps describe as a “general turn of the New Left toward socialist ideals.” This was evident in the formation of the feminist-oriented New American Movement, the establishment of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, as well as in the emergence of community activist groups such as the National Welfare Rights Organization, which focused intensively on advancing ‘economic justice.’
Yet rather than an expression of this general tendency toward a renewed socialist perspective, the movement to achieve full employment has often been portrayed as an exclusively liberal cause or technocratic affair, one that failed to offer a plausible alternative in the search for solutions to the economic crisis of the era. My concern here is not with the tortured legislative process that produced the final draft of the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins bill, except to say that the idea of guaranteeing the right to a job proved as threatening to business interests and their political allies in the 1970s as it did in the 1940s. Instead, it is to suggest that the revival of the movement for full employment created the opportunity for working-class Americans to recover the connection between economic democracy and social emancipation. This discovery became particularly poignant for those who belonged to historically oppressed groups. For women and African Americans, democratic socialism once again became the avenue toward achieving authentic equality. Rather than a period defined simply by the rise of the right, the fracturing of the left, or the alienation of organized labor, the 1970s witnessed the coalescence of a movement propelled by elements of a new, multiracial working-class and fuelled by the democratic sensibilities of the 1960s left.
More than this, the full employment movement provided the intellectual tools and critical perspective to examine the internal contradictions of capitalism itself. From a case study of those who championed the job guarantee, we begin to see what historian Paul Le Blanc—citing Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling—describes as an “unconscious” socialist perspective percolating up out of the soil of the movement for full employment. By politicizing unemployment, the movement for a job guarantee exposed the contradictions of a capitalist system which claimed to provide adequate work, opportunity, and equality for all who sought it. Many of that movement raised objections to the most fundamental prerogatives of capitalism, positing instead the need for democratic socialism even while most avoided the term. They raised those questions because of the intrinsic capacity of the idea of full employment to demystify want amid plenty, idled capacity amid conspicuous joblessness, and the monopolization of investment for the purposes of profit rather than the advancement of a common good. In short, a multiracial movement for the idea of guaranteed work challenged the very premise that chronic unemployment was ever a social necessity. In doing so, it invariably raised the possibility of the socialist alternative.
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Spurred by the 1966 Freedom Budget, which advocated for the allocation of $185 billion dollars to the eradication of poverty and unemployment for workers across the racial spectrum, as well as by Martin Luther King’s campaign for a multiracial movement of the poor that would move the nation toward democratic socialism, the idea of a federal job guarantee returned to the public forum. In the early 1970s, it found support from among a broad alliance of labor intellectuals, progressive economists, social workers, public sector workers, anti-poverty advocates, civil rights proponents, and socialist economic planners. By February 1972, congressional representative Augustus Hawkins had convened a meeting of progressive economists and intellectuals to consider the possibilities of legislating full employment. Joined by Robert S. Browne of the Black Economic Research Center, perennial planner Leon Keyserling, social policy scholar Sumner Rosen, economist Bernard Anderson, and others, Hawkins formulated a policy directed at dismantling the economic structures of black oppression. Yet under the leadership of Coretta Scott King and progressive allies in the labor movement, the National Committee for Full Employment/Full Employment Action Council began to broaden the horizon of possibilities of those drawn to the measure.
Take for example, Irma Diamond. At the time of the full employment revival in the 1970s, she was the first president of the Bronx chapter of the National Organization for Women, a member of the Association of Feminist Consultants, the National Conference on Public Service Employment, and the associate director of the Co-Op City Campus at the College of New Rochelle. In effect, Diamond was a prototypical labor feminist of the 1970s. In the pages of The Annals of the American Academy, she penned a women’s full emancipation manifesto that encapsulated the emancipatory possibilities of full employment. In doing so, she also articulated a proto-socialist perspective that would come to permeate the movement, even if it never defined the legislation or the leadership. Even here we need to be careful, since the pronouncements of Augustus Hawkins, Hubert Humphrey, and Coretta Scott King espoused one of the central tenets of socialism: the idea of economic democracy.
For Irma Diamond, the liberal inclusiveness of the National Organization for Women (NOW) was no longer enough. Instead of merely expanding opportunities for women in an inequitable capitalist labor market, Diamond spoke of the “liberation” that women could achieve through economic planning. It was not enough to celebrate the increasing percentage of women in the labor force—by 1975, they constituted a full 40 percent of workers. To those who presided over the labor market, women’s interests remained ‘invisible.’ As Diamond put it, the absence of “life affecting programs,” particularly childcare, underlined the “caste system” that pervaded capitalism, one in which gender distinctions cut as deeply as racial divisions. Diamond was not simply advocating for equal opportunity, the central ideological pillar of liberal individualism, but for a solution to a gender-stratified labor market that made women “invisible.” Working part-time, frequently the last to be hired, treated as cheap labor, women constituted the rank and file of a new reserve army for capitalism, the source of labor market “flexibility” long before management consultants adopted the term. Civil rights legislation and employment access litigation had not erased the image of the woman worker in the popular mind, making it a more potent source of cultural control than any discriminatory job advertisement or sexist clothing requirement. “Women are viewed by many employers as people who indiscriminately drift in and out of the work force and as intruders who really belong at home with their children.” That meant that most women were “barely tolerated in the house of work,” obsequiously grateful for what employment they could find. As historian Alice Kessler-Harris explains, despite the efforts of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to stamp out gender stereotypes in job categorizations, they had become the fabric of laws, policies, and informal practices. They were calcified in “custom and tradition,” including two-track seniority systems that distinguished between men and women. “Originally developed to legitimize and rationalize traditional sex differences and to shore up the boundaries between home and wage work, they now seemed to encapsulate belief systems about gender.” As the women’s liberation movement and the drive for a job guarantee intersected, the structural inequalities built into capitalism came into sharper focus for women committed to both campaigns.
Indeed, the critique of gender segregation throughout the American economy resonated loudly in the hearings on the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill. For example, the National Organization of Women argued that, although “full employment for women and minorities would solve many of the immediate economic problems associated with life sustenance, the Act will not automatically solve problems caused by discrimination. There must be a specific commitment to developing new supplementary programs in training and counselling aimed at relieving discrimination and the channeling of workers into stereotyped jobs.” More than this, NOW repudiated the eligibility criteria in the measure that discriminated against married women, advocating instead for a 3% employment target for each disadvantaged group, not simply the aggregate labor market. The egalitarian language of the original bill, the momentum of the women’s liberation movement, and the logic of the feminist critique of the labor market propelled a more penetrating consideration of what full employment could mean in the 1970s. Paralleling the efforts of female trade unionists to democratize the labor movement, the full employment movement promoted a fundamental re-examination of American society’s most cherished assumptions.
Echoing a critique that extends from Mary Wollstonecraft to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Clara Zetkin, Simone de Beauvoir, Rosa Luxemburg, and the labor feminists of the 1930s, Diamond inveighed against the forces that made both domestic and paid labor spheres of exploitation. If women were “intruders” who “indiscriminately drift in and out of the work force,” it was because they had been funnelled into poorly paid, unskilled, unsatisfying work while at the same time being pressured to return to the home lest they be accused of being “bad mothers, unfeminine, selfish or deviant.” Perhaps unconsciously, Diamond also recapitulated a Marxian analysis of the modern woman’s predicament. “Although the employer may not be aware of it,” Diamond wrote, “he receives not only the services of the male head of household, but also the services of the employee’s wife and children, gratis, enabling both the employer and the employee to operate in the public sector.” If Diamond didn’t expressly address profit, she understood how this arrangement worked to the economic advantage of business. “This labor of virtuousness is convenient and cheap for a society that does not recognize the housewife’s labor and considers her unemployed when in the home.” Subjected to the sexual division of labor for the reproduction of labor power, they worked under social arrangements that seemed designed to limit women’s freedom.
Diamond’s entire conception of full employment stemmed from this analysis of the gender inequities of the sexual division of labor. Only through guaranteed work opportunities could women sever the connection between the valorization of paid labor as the special purview of men and the denigration of housework performed by ‘virtuous’ and powerless women. The right to employment would permit women to “escape from their invisibleness,” to dissolve the mutually reinforcing binary that assured women’s subordination in both spheres. “In such an economy, women would not be pitted against each other, for a scant few positions.” Quite simply, it would afford women the choice to work in the labor market.
Diamond was not naïve about the social transformation that would be necessary to achieve women’s genuine liberation, but this is precisely what made her vision of full employment a case for democratic socialism. “Support services such as daycare, professionalization of housework, new types of architecture, flexible work schedules, regional development of industry, good public transportation and educational opportunities are some of the needs of women as public citizens.” If the liberal exponents of full employment stressed the rehabilitation of the male breadwinner while tamping down the emancipatory potential of the measure, women such as Irma Diamond did not. In her appeal for the “professionalization of housework, she harkened back to the socialist feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. “If housework were professionalized along the lines of civil service jobs and accorded the trappings of a profession (equitable wages, status and title), it would create jobs for some women and men and allow others the time and freedom to choose other occupations (emphasis added.)” Diamond did not resolve the problem of a stratified labor market, but like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she did outline the path toward ending a workforce bifurcated by gender. She aimed at severing the connection between gender and domestic submission, between women and the indignity of unpaid housework. Diamond certainly belonged to the group of women which historian Marissa Chappell has described as “welfare mothers…labor union feminists [and] middle-class women’s organizations” who “demanded a restructuring of the country’s labor market and social support system that would enable women’s economic independence.” But she looked beyond a more inclusive labor market to a society pervaded by the principle of democratic collectivism. Invoking the example of Swedish collective apartments and their cooperative daycare centers against the isolating individualism of American domesticity, advocating “flexible work scheduling” that included a four day work weeks to accommodate the demands of child raising, advocating for a regional plan for industrial development that addressed the limited mobility of many women, and arguing for massive investments in a public transportation system that as an economic and “ecological” necessity, Diamond travelled well beyond the idea that achieving a 3 percent unemployment rate meant real progress.
Instead of some generic bromide to equal opportunity, Diamond both applauded and critiqued key provisions of the Humphrey-Hawkins bill. The provision for local planning councils would promote participatory democracy. In order to counter the conservative opinion that preserved the status quo, however, it was vital that “working mothers and feminists are fairly represented on the councils.” The Job Guarantee Office was not an exercise in utopian dreaming but a mechanism for providing invaluable assistance to those groups—racial minorities, women, the disabled—confronting historic impediments to full and fair employment. As Diamond wrote, “This section constitutes a major breakthrough for women workers by backing up the promise of employment with an actual agency designed to fulfil that promise.” Similarly, she endorsed the Standby Job Corps, which would provide adequate compensation for a pool of eligible workers who had yet to be placed in a job. At the same time, she worried that housewives might suffer from the stipulation that compensation would be based on prior qualifications and training. And while Diamond celebrated the idea of a National Institute for Full Employment, she advocated for a “women’s policy bureau” that would address the historic subjugation of women in American society and remedy the unique problems that they confronted in acquiring and maintaining employment.
Diamond expressed little sensitivity to the unique burdens facing African American and other racialized women. What she did do, however, was demonstrate how citizens involved in this broad-based campaign interpreted, modified, and democratized policy proposals advanced by liberal elites. Mirroring the intellectual struggle through which full employment came to express the egalitarian and emancipatory aspirations of the 1940s, Diamond and others throughout in the women’s liberation and new social movements of the 1970s began to interpret the bill on their own terms, investing it with expansive possibilities never imagined by its architects. Women’s organizations, civil rights groups, and progressive elements of the labor movement consciously formulated the connection between full employment and their own liberation, deliberately mapping out the path from democratic socialism to gender and race equality.
The notion that a multiracial alliance could challenge an economic system predicated on divisions and exclusions—a hallmark of modern American socialist movements—pervaded the full employment campaign. “If we are ever to transform and humanize an economic system largely dependent on the unpaid or underpaid labor of two basic groups—women of all race and Black, Spanish-speaking and other third-world men,” wrote Gloria Steinem in a 1974 editorial for Social Policy, “then we must band together in coalition.” So much for the myth of the atomizing 1970s. Steinem sounded more like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn than the caricature of privileged white feminism to which many scholars and many on the left have reduced her. “We will continue to be a cheap or surplus labor force used for the economic benefit of the few until we learn to exert the force of the majority that we truly are.” Resonating throughout the article was an understanding of how a racially divided, gender-stratified laboring class benefitted a political and economic system dominated by white males. The evidence of a broad-based coalition of the oppressed was confirmed by “establishment efforts, whether in government or the private sector, to divide and conquer; to make us expend energies struggling over 5 percent of the economic pie rather than uniting to redistribute the 95 percent controlled by the few.” So while historian Marissa Chappell correctly argues that feminists who supported the bill criticized the family wage assumptions built into the Humphrey-Hawkins bill, she underestimates the extent to which women from across the racial spectrum transformed it into something considerably more radical than the liberal imagination would allow.
Like those who advocated for a robust full employment bill in 1945, advocates of the job guarantee in the 1970s paid homage to private employment but believed that only public sector investment could remedy the crisis. Writing in 1973, economist and full employment activist Helen Ginsburg argued that the federal government “must provide meaningful public service jobs at wages that will enable workers to attain at least the BLS lower living standard if it is impossible to absorb them into the private sector of the economy.” Or, as UAW president Doug Fraser explained, “Many of the needs of our society—additional auto mechanics, weatherization and other improvements of our housing stock, the development of adequate child care services, to name just a few, could be creatively matched with the need to provide jobs for many people.” Other industrialized economies,” Fraser pointedly added, “are not afraid of channeling a much larger slice of their output through the government.” But it was Naomi Levine, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, who best articulated how the economic crisis had exposed the illusion that private sector investment could produce sufficient employment. “It borders on the absurd,” she wrote in a critique of the pro-business revisions to the Humphrey-Hawkins bill in March 1978, “at this late date and after so many years of high-level unemployment, to enact a bill which requires that still more time be spent in the illusory quest for full employment primarily through the private sector.” Only through public sector action in the form of a comprehensive job guarantee could the United States hope to reduce unemployment to frictional levels on a consistent and ongoing basis.
Yet, as avowed socialist Michael Harrington understood, the challenge was to legitimize any public- sector employment, let alone those jobs created for the express purpose of alleviating immediate economic distress. “The public sector is thought of as second rate,” he wrote, “inferior, its jobs a stopgap designed to give way to private employment as soon as possible.” It was this “irrational dogma” that hobbled even the most modest proposals for maximum employment. The related corporate antipathy for any major spending proposals, which would necessarily accompany any job creation program that aimed at more than private sector hiring incentives, meant that full employment plans would invariably sink beneath the political surface.
Rather than despair, however, Harrington saw hope. If the liberal innocence of the Humphrey-Hawkins’ supporters had exposed the ruthless zero-sum logic that governed business attitudes toward the social wage, the metamorphosis that marked so many campaigns for limited gains into movements for fundamental social reform was abundantly evident. What cheered Harrington the most was that the full employment coalition had begun to embrace the idea of “democratic social control over investment.” The calls for an end to discriminatory lending practices, for banks to provide credit to communities in decline and to support public housing initiatives, the UAW’s campaign to prevent corporations from relocating to low-wage regions in search of higher profits, as well as the efforts to achieve employee and community representation on corporate boards of directors: all seemed to illustrate the widening horizons of the full employment movement.
As Andrew Levinson documented in his 1980 The Full Employment Alternative, public opinion steadily showed support for expanding economic democracy. In contrast to the image of a uniformly conservative electorate eager to reduce social programs and government regulation, a 1976 survey by the Potomac Associates concluded that 97 percent of those surveyed supported the maintenance or increase of spending on assistance to the elderly. Similarly, 90 percent expressed support for maintaining or increasing spending on air pollution control, 88 percent for making college more affordable, 87 percent support for affordable health care, 81 percent support for augmenting assistance to the unemployed, 77 percent for improved mass transportation, and 75 percent for urban renewal. Perhaps perhaps most surprisingly, 72 percent supported “improving the situation of black Americans.” The most telling illustration of widespread support for government-sponsored job creation came from a 1975 Harris poll which tested the suggestion that, during an economic crisis when work was almost impossible to find, the only “human thing to do” is provide “productive jobs” to the unemployed so that “their families can eat.” Flying in the face of the conventional wisdom that working-class Americans had rejected ‘big government,’ a breathtaking 93 percent answered in the affirmative. What the polls indicated was not disaffection with the idea of government action but with a kind of policy that failed to produce concrete results for the working-class majority. What most average Americans seemed to want was an end to policies that only addressed the supply side of the labor equation—training, education, attacks on an alleged ‘culture of poverty’—while failing to resolve the demand side problem: adequate employment at decent wages. As Levinson noted, “The majority did not accept that more unfocussed spending by government was the appropriate solution for unemployment or that a guaranteed income, regardless of work, was the best solution for poverty.” Levinson concluded that opinion polls conducted by Harris, Gallup, CBS News and others like the Potomac Associates demonstrated a rejection of Great Society liberalism as well Goldwater-style conservatism. What average Americans sought was an alternative to austerity politics and tax-and-spend liberalism. In short, Levinson postulated, the working-class majority wanted the full employment alternative.
For Harrington, the coalition’s rehabilitation of the public sector and the evidence of widespread support for an expanded social wage underlined the movement’s capacity to challenge corporate America. The growing demand for “democratic social control over the investment process,” as he described it, was not simply a challenge to property, per se, but to the rights and privileges that accompanied ownership in a capitalist society. Sylvia Aron of the Long Island Coalition for Full Employment summarized the growing commitment to democratic planning among full employment supporters. “A commitment to full employment brings in its wake an acceptance of economic planning,” she firmly stated. It would necessarily require “the various interventive mechanisms—monetary (budget, expenditures, taxes), fiscal (interest rates, bank reserves, open market operations), loans, stimuli to investment and productivity, public employment control of inflation, public ownership,” all of which would have to be “harmonized and directed toward specific economic goals.” As Harrington understood, the full employment movement was questioning capitalist control over pricing, employment policies, plant location, investment decisions—the “bundle of rights” that allowed business to govern workers and production. “They do not challenge corporate property as such, but they encroach upon its prerogatives. On practical, non-socialist grounds, the coalition finds itself pointed in the direction of socialist structural reforms without defining them in these terms.”
Instead of an obscure issue of interest only to technocratic policymakers, then, the idea of full employment enjoyed widespread support, presenting a fundamental challenge to the prerogatives of business. In the early 1970s, as the energy crisis deepened, the movement for a job guarantee took shape as both a legislative initiative and a popular mobilization.
But it also gained traction among African American intellectuals and scholars, some of whom advanced a considerably more radical vision of what it might look like than Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph. In the pages of the Review of Black Political Economy, a group of black economists that included Marcus Alexis, Bernard Anderson, and Robert S. Browne outlined an “Economic Bill of Rights” that championed state-supported full employment. Advocating for a job guarantee, the Caucus of Black Economists, as they came to be known, challenged the dominant notion that achieving full employment should never come at the cost of price stability or contest the mechanics of the allegedly free market. Instead, echoing Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, but also the Black Panthers, they asserted the need for dignified and decent paying work for all who needed it. For these thinkers, the idea of a job guarantee provided a concrete, material avenue that they believed was indispensable to the achievement of black liberation.
Despite years of social democratic legislation, they argued, blacks continued to occupy subordinate positions in the American class structure. “Blacks have continuously been subject to the syndrome of low wages, job instability, menial work, low skills, poor job information, discrimination, and inadequate access to jobs.” While Rustin and economist Leon Keyserling sought to build bridges to the liberal establishment, Alexis and his colleagues argued that the Keynesian version of ‘full’ employment had failed to resolve the problem of black poverty and economic disempowerment.
Harkening back to the agenda of the Fair Employment Practices Committee of the 1940s, the Black Caucus addressed racial discrimination in the job market as well as at the point of production. In 1971, they argued, African Americans still found themselves “twice as likely as white to be employed in service jobs, seven times as likely to be employed as domestics, and almost three times as likely to be employed as industrial laborers.” Although wartime spending had expanded the opportunities for blacks in industrial employment, they now found themselves susceptible to structural unemployment through automation and technological innovations. Under-represented in managerial positions, they lacked influence in the determination of social policies affecting black communities. Suffering from a drastic lag in access to decent employment, African Americans became victimized by a widening income gap that only compounded their sense of economic powerlessness.
The key for the Black Caucus of Economists was to understand the vital connection between tight labor markets and black economic advancement. As the authors bluntly put it, “When labor markets are tight, the cost of discrimination rises and blacks find jobs easier to obtain.” Equally important, the federal government was indispensable to genuine racial amelioration. As Robert S. Browne explained in 1977 during the campaign for the Humphrey-Hawkins bill, “black economic progress is heavily dependent upon government policies against discrimination” as well as “public policies on education, job training, and income maintenance.” Government intervention in economic affairs had not only expanded economic growth but proven indispensable in protecting the rights of African Americans and other minorities. As the Study Group argued, those African Americans who had gained managerial positions had generally done so in the public sector.
For the authors of the special report, the answer was full employment. This could only be achieved when policy makers deliberately chose job creation over price stability. This represented nothing short of a direct challenge to the Phillips curve orthodoxy of the period, which posited that lower unemployment invariably produced higher inflation.
A class perspective informed this challenge to an economic orthodoxy that had material consequences for African Americans. “Inflation has a variable effect on the rich and the poor,” the Black Caucus argued, pointing out that periods of full employment produced opportunities for low-income workers that made them indifferent to nominal increases in the rate of inflation. Why? In short, because they were working. “The expanding job opportunities benefit the poor and the disadvantaged while inflation harms the economic position of the rich and the well-to-do.” In the absence of the kind of extraordinary crisis that soon hit the United States, the “differential impact” divided workers and wage earners from owners and rent seekers.
The price stability-full employment tradeoff was not the only illusion standing in the way of eliminating joblessness, they argued. The other was the belief that macro-economic policy alone could resolve the problem of chronic black poverty. Only an assault on black structural unemployment could begin to shift the balance of economic forces in favor of African Americans. Discrimination was not a matter of individual bigotry but of “seemingly objective institutions and systems of decision-making” that undermined the entire idea of equal opportunity. From discriminatory tests to racially biased recruitment and promotion policies, blacks paid the price of practices seemingly designed to maintain racial subordination.
Looking to remedy this predicament, the Black Caucus rejected the private sector bias favored by both the liberal architects of postwar policy and conservative adherents of Milton Friedman. “The government must act as co-equal with the private sector as an ‘employer of first resort,” they argued. “To an unemployed man seeking gainful employment, there is nothing inherently more desirable in private employment than in government.” The authors’ gendered language might suggest a sexist indifference to the realities of a new working class, but their call for a national network of childcare facilities demonstrated the egalitarian vision of full employment that they espoused. In fact, the group insisted that “full enforcement of existing legislation designed to end once and for all, discrimination against women in employment is an absolute essential to any full-employment economy.” The right to a job was the economic precondition for women’s emancipation.
What is equally striking about this study published in the pages of a journal on the margins of academe was the synthesis of black nationalism and left economic populism. If the authors devoted little attention to the possibilities of an interracial trade union alliance, they advocated for universal reforms that would attack the inequalities of wealth that lay beneath the chimera of the affluent society. From universal health care to targeted direct investment to a radically overhauled system of taxation that would mitigate corporate privilege, the authors presented an expansive vision of economic democracy that addressed the grievances of a working-class majority.
At the same time, they directly confronted the unique experience of African American oppression. “Even were racism to vanish overnight,” they wrote, “the legacy of slavery and post-emancipation discrimination would insure that the black community’s economic status would remain inferior to that of whites for many decades to come.” The origins of this persistent inequality were not to be found in the realm of popular culture or law or ideology, but in the material sphere, the space where American society produced and distributed surplus. Only an understanding of the legacy of slavery, the failed promises of Reconstruction, and the determined postwar campaign to subjugate African Americans could adequately account for growing racial disparities in the distribution of wealth.
It was on this premise that they argued for a massive redistribution of national wealth to address persistent black poverty. Calling for bloc allocations to “black communities” to fund infrastructure and foster black economic independence, they also advocated for broad-based economic remedies that would benefit all those afflicted by poverty and unemployment. Alexis, Browne, and the others united a humanistic universalism to the idiom of black power. “For too long the black community has been ruled by those who not only live outside of it, but are often hostile to its interests.” Only by “greater community control over public services and public revenues,” through greater political representation, and through a “multibillion dollar reparation payment” could African Americans build the autonomous institutions that would foster self-determination.
Emphasizing the indispensable importance of black self-determination in achieving economic dignity, the Special Study Group simultaneously harkened back to the egalitarian, class-oriented analysis of the labor and civil rights alliance of the 1940s. This was a movement that took for granted the establishment of a floor of economic security in the search for social justice.
Anderson and his colleagues did not romanticize the job guarantee: achieving it would not automatically wipe out bigotry and discrimination. They did believe, however, that it provided the only stable foundation for black progress. Without a commitment to guaranteed employment, whites would compete with minorities and women from across the racial spectrum for what was clearly a shrinking economic pie. Writing in 1975 in support of the Humphrey-Hawkins bill, economist Bernard E. Anderson encapsulated these sentiments: “In the absence of full employment, resistance to the pursuit of fair employment is certain to rise, and minorities will be forced into the position of competing with other workers in a system where limited job opportunities must be rationed.” Instead of relying on private sector employers for which jobs were at best a beneficent byproduct of investment, the Special Study Group looked to decent employment as the primary objective of economic planning.
Questioning the prerogatives of private enterprise, the authors of the Special Report pushed to the surface the discomfiting questions which the discussion of full employment invariably raised. They did so not only in the pages of mainstream academic journals, as was the case with Bernard Anderson, but through speeches, addresses, and articles in popular publications.
Perhaps no one was more prolific on this front than Robert S. Browne. In a forum on the question of whether the United States could achieve full employment without inflation, Browne, the principal founder of the Black Economic Research Center in Harlem and a key member of the Caucus of Black Economists, answered unequivocally, “Not under our existing economic arrangements.” A proponent of full employment, he was nevertheless prepared to discuss the seemingly unmentionable question of how achieving it would impinge on the prerogatives of private enterprise. He conceded that sustained full employment could generate price inflation.
This was 1976, however, the height of what historians describe as a period of “stagflation”: high unemployment and high inflation. This meant that almost any discussion of inflation proceeded from the assumption that it was destructive and should be considered the central focus of responsible monetary policy. Browne’s point was to argue for a “new set of tools” to manage full employment. These tools would invariably “require extensive transformation of the manner in which our economy operates, including a rather substantial dose of central economic planning and plan enforcement.” In short, Browne argued for direct wage and price controls. Achieving full employment through decentralized management and limited federal government intrusiveness was an illusion, he believed.
Rejecting the bogeymen of totalitarian control, Anderson argued that it was time to reign in business prerogatives in order to achieve economic security for the majority. For example, the Caucus of Black Economists argued that the program would fail if it did not pay decent wages, since those hired would invariably perform tasks which a market economy did not value or reward. Yet this would mean setting wages in a fashion that would “no longer be determined by profit-maximization criteria—a major change in our system, and one that implies state rather than private entrepreneurship.” Despite the persistent overtures to the primacy of private enterprise in countless appeal for job creation, Browne argued that the state would necessarily have to intervene decisively in the labor market. Any other option would either leave large swaths of Americans in the ranks of the unemployed or give tacit assent to the hiring of desperate workers at poverty wages under the false aegis of ‘full employment.’
Rejecting liberal appeasement of business, Browne followed the full employment argument to its logical conclusions. The government would have to become the employer of last resort or be prepared to “play a major coercive role with respect to private employment practices.” Here was the return of the socialist argument of the 1940s that any authentic program of full employment would invariably impinge on the prerogatives of capital. A genuine commitment to full employment in 1976, Browne argued, would mean something like an additional 7 million new jobs, a 50 percent increase over existing public-sector employees. After this dramatic expansion of the public sector, Browne insouciantly put it, “one might discover that the economic system had been substantially altered from its present form.” This was something about which the labor-left proponents of full employment understood in the 1940s had been considerably more candid. In Browne’s estimate, monetary and fiscal incentives could “move us toward full employment but they have not succeeded in getting us there and keeping us there.” Achieving that would require the full and frank discussion of matters that would politicize the issue and likely generate vigorous business class opposition.
By exposing the limits of Keynesian liberalism and foregrounding the class conflict inherent in any honest discussion of full employment, Browne, Anderson, and the others had revived the radical sensibilities of the 1940s labor left. Like their predecessors, Browne and his colleagues ultimately pointed to the inadequacy of any full employment program that depended primarily on the private sector. If private enterprise failed to respond to lavish incentives, or if the price was simply too high, Browne argued, the “logical solution would be for the government to go into business itself, competing with the private sector in the production of shoes, clothing, appliances, etc.” Conservatives decried this as state centralization, but for Browne and the Special Study Group, it represented the solution to the inadequacies of both liberal Keynesianism and neoclassical economic dogma. As he told the readers of The Black Collegian in 1978, “Such a policy would raise anguished cries of ‘socialism’ from certain sectors of our population, but few Blacks are likely to be frightened by that word, and in any case the alternative is clearly much more to be feared.”
What then do we make of this small group of renegade African American economists? First, it suggests that the currents of oppositional thought grounded in class and material concerns which Martin Luther King Jr. and others on the left of the civil rights movement advanced had not dried up by the 1970s. If anything, we see a deepening commitment to economic democracy, not only among these academics, but within the broader multiracial movement that fueled the drive for the job guarantee in the 1970s. But I think there is another reason why this detour into an obscure episode in economic history might matter. Asked in 2007 about the “single largest public policy question which Black economists probably would handle differently than white ones,” Bernard E. Anderson, now former assistant secretary of labor for the Clinton administration, responded this way: “Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, federal policy makers have made price stability their major priority under the assumption that inflation hurts everyone…Therefore, when we approach fuller employment, they will raise interest rates in order to ‘cool off’ the economy. Well, in the Black Community, the social consequences of long-term unemployment are far more devastating than the problems of inflation.”
The dissident perspective articulated by the Black Caucus presented an early challenge to the free market orthodoxy then in the ascendancy in the 1970s. Its near complete absence from public policy making in the intervening 40 years helps to explain why the problem of chronic black working-class unemployment became a persistent feature of the American landscape.
Yet Anderson and the Special Study Group belonged to a wider amalgam of intellectuals willing to question the undemocratic nature of capitalism while raising the prospect of a socialist alternative. In response to the crisis of capitalism in the early 1970s, intellectuals such as Anderson and Harrington joined a wider network of progressive labor unionists, policy commentators, and journalists questioning the normalization of structural periodically mass unemployment in the postwar period. Stemming from a critique of the relationship between the state and capitalist society that emerged out of the social movements of the 1960s, it would lead business to launch a coordinated response.
Despite its shortcomings, the full employment movement called in to question the capacity of the existing system to generate adequate employment for all who sought it. It also entertained the radical proposition that the expansion of the public sector might not only be necessary, but the only sensible alternative to the ravages of the business cycle. It spoke the language of economic democracy and envisioned a society in which working class people exercised greater and control over the production of society’s good and services. Above all, the movement for full employment rejuvenated a vision of socialist transformation in which racial and gender equality became inextricably connected to the achievement of a classless society. It did so by taking the question of unemployment out of the hands of economists and policymakers and placing it at the center of what became a mass movement for social change. If this moment demonstrated anything, it was the power of something so fundamental as work to raise fundamental questions about capitalist prerogatives, about a society organized around the imperatives of profit over basic human needs. For many, questioning the alleged inevitability of unemployment led them to imagine a more cooperative and collective society, one in which racial and gender equality might be something more than a distant dream.
