Work Emancipation and Human Creativity: The Wage-for-Life Alternative

Abstract

The crises of the present call for us to envision a communist alternative aiming at emancipating work and liberating human creativity: a mode of production for which wealth is the development of the “universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures,” of “creative potentialities” and “all human power” (Marx, 1993, 488). For this purpose, the wage-for-life system, built off the proposal of the French economist and sociologist Bernard Friot, can play a crucial role. Friot conceived a communist mode of production based upon expansion of the wage socialization mechanisms of the welfare institutions and the constitution of an alternative measure of wealth. Imagining a radically different mode of production and set of social relations, Friot's model addresses the need for subverting the category of value itself, making it the starting point for the conception of a new society in which work can be autonomous, creative, free.