France’s Bernie Sanders

You know how we sometimes refer to the Liberals, whether ironically or sincerely, as our “natural governing party”? The Parti Socialiste is arguably the French equivalent. But it has fallen on hard times. On Sunday the PS, party of reigning French president François Hollande, met to choose its nominee for this spring’s election. As far as one can tell, no one occupying any position on the French political spectrum has been happy with the uninspiring, unprincipled Hollande. Although eligible for a second term, he pulled an LBJ and dropped out of the 2017 presidential election before being pushed.

His natural successor (there’s that word again) was Manuel Valls, the former prime minister, who refers to his own governing philosophy as “Blairiste.” Alas, the French Blairistes have rather been sidelined in their own party, just as the original Blairites have been within U.K. Labour. With Valls as the prospective candidate, the Socialists were fixing to run a dismal fourth in the overall presidential race, maybe fifth. So in Sunday’s primary the party pushed Valls aside and opted for a dynamic, radical alternative: Benoît Hamon, the Breton bantam who is often called France’s answer to Bernie Sanders.

Hamon, 49, is not an outsider. He came up within the youth side of the PS and served under Hollande as minister for higher education.

But he has always been on the extreme left of the party and was never, until recently, considered presidential timber. His headline campaign promise is a universal basic income (UBI), which he proposes to fund, in part, by a “tax on robots” and on artificial intelligences that supplant human labour.

After Hamon’s victory, Valls refused to endorse his rival and slunk off to oblivion. Now Socialist parliamentarians are defecting to ex-Socialiste schismatic Emmanuel Macron. Hamon’s name may be one you never hear again. But the politics of France are still part of the whole world’s conceptual apparatus, and the implosion of the Parti Socialiste under a dithering Third Way president represents a familiar theme around the Western world.

Moreover, Hamon’s candidacy will provide a first serious electoral test of the ultra-trendy universal basic income idea.

His proposal is for a universal income of €750 a month, or about $1,050 in Canadian currency. This is none too generous an amount to live on, even granting that France is a hell of a nice place to be poor.

But without other sources of financing, such a UBI might require nearly an immediate doubling of French state revenue, even if you count the existing welfare programs France could get rid of.

Valls expended a lot of effort challenging Hamon’s math, to little apparent avail. Hamon has “plans” to raise new revenue, mostly of a hand-wavy sort that will be familiar from the worst sort of Canadian provincial election. But his tax on robots and artificial intelligences is certainly a fun new wrinkle.

On hearing of the idea, the advanced, full-blooded nerd will immediately think of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels. Herbert, finding it amusing to construct a science-fiction universe without computers, created a backstory in which humans had risen up in an enormous, ultra-violent “Butlerian Jihad” and established a pan-galactic religious taboo: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

For, after all, any machine that mimics human operations, mechanical or cognitive, takes away a potential job from a human being, or from dozens of them. That is the premise of the “robot tax”, and, by all logic, it should apply to computers. Or, for that matter, to any labour-saving device — any device that multiplies human productivity at all. Pens. Crocs. Red Bull.

This unapologetic Luddism is what passes for futurism in leftist circles these days, I fear.

The sense that automation finally went too darn far, in the year 2015 or thereabouts, finds willing hearers everywhere in communities that used to be able to count on beerbottling plants or fish canneries or automotive assembly lines. The universal basic income is of interest to future-minded politicians because that low-skill mental and physical work seems to be disappearing. Some see an approaching world in which scarcity of goods is transcended, by dint of robots and 3D printing and machine learning, and most humans have no opportunities for productive work.

The UBI, according to this account, will lead us into a world of Athenian torpor and luxury.

We will transcend work and live like art students on the dole, pursuing passions and avocations unconnected to grimy commerce, as the economy is borne aloft by robot slaves.

By another account, however, folks receiving a UBI will just keep on going to their jobs out of habit, unwilling to abandon the terrific social benefits of productive work.

Hamon, intriguingly, seems to seek no part of either scenario. He just wants the march of progress to stop. Butlerian Jihad! His France would seem to be a place where there are lots of good traditional jobs available in hand-welding car doors and adding up figures on tax returns — all combined with a modest guaranteed income, which will presumably ensure nobody ever wants to do any tiring, repetitive, clock-bound traditional job. I gotta be honest: this is just a little like the mental picture I already had of France.