The Full Employment Road to Socialism: The Job Guarantee Movement of the 1970s and the Challenge to Capitalism

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 antiwar 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 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