Abstract: Among DIY musicians, one often hears support for a Universal Basic Income on the logic that if rent and food are covered, one could spend more time on music. In some formulations, a cultural job guarantee aims at this explicitly: liberation of creative energies through guaranteed employment. However, technological innovations that allow the nearly zero cost creation and transmission of recordings have moved gatekeeping downstream from production to publicity and audience development. In order to address this, and implicitly challenge the anti-democratic notion that individual preferences are best expressed through markets, any culturally-focused Federal job guarantee must include provision for popularization. Starting from both Michal Kalecki’s proposition of a “political business cycle” and Alan Lomax’s idea of “cultural equity,” I argue that a cultural job guarantee must be a self-consciously left project to restructure the social system of cultural production. I follow Fred Lee’s assertion that consumers choose from available goods, rather than making production decisions. I also affirm Modern Monetary Theory’s vision of money as a boundless public utility. With these in mind, I argue that a cultural job guarantee should democratize American culture, rather than provide the private sector culture industry with a reserve army of unemployed artists. Instead of making it possible for anyone to become a Taylor Swift, a cultural job guarantee should look to the models of Smithsonian Folkways and John Peel to dismantle the cultural form of Taylor Swift itself.
Keywords: Job Guarantee, Cultural Equity, Independent Media, Gatekeeping, Labor Discipline, Digital Media
JEL codes: B50, B51, B52, D49, E61, J58, Z11
