Modern society treats unemployment as a moral failure rather than a structural condition, and the result is predictable instability. Large numbers of people are locked out of education and employment not because they refuse to participate, but because the system has no place for them. Instead of addressing this directly, liberal states alternate between neglect and repression. A far simpler and more effective solution exists: guaranteed, low-demand employment for anyone who cannot otherwise find work. “Do-nothing jobs” would not weaken society. They would stabilize it.

The core mistake made by capitalist and liberal systems is assuming that employment exists only to extract productivity. In reality, jobs perform crucial social functions that have nothing to do with output. They structure time, give people a reason to wake up, provide social recognition, and signal that a person has a place in the world. When those functions disappear, the consequences are not abstract. People lose routine, dignity, and future orientation. Shame and resentment fill the gap. This is not a personal failure; it is what happens when survival is conditional on usefulness in a system that does not need everyone.

Liberal theory often acknowledges this problem but stops short of solutions. Feminist, anarchist, and academic analyses frequently describe unemployed or “surplus” men as a danger to society, pointing to violence, reactionary politics, or absorption into police and military institutions. What these analyses rarely do is propose material alternatives that do not rely on coercion. Blaming capitalism while offering no buffer against its effects simply shifts responsibility onto the people most harmed by exclusion. It treats volatility as an unfortunate but acceptable cost.

Historically, states have managed surplus populations in three main ways: repression through policing and incarceration, absorption into military or enforcement roles, or export through war, colonization, or migration. These methods are expensive, violent, and morally corrosive. They also fail in the long run. Repression breeds resentment, militarization normalizes violence, and externalization merely postpones collapse.

There is another option that modern societies seem ideologically allergic to: guaranteed employment that does not require constant proving of worth. Socialist states, most notably the Soviet Union, understood this at a basic level. Whatever their failures, they recognized that allowing people to be permanently idle and discarded was socially dangerous. They absorbed surplus labor through low-intensity, low-responsibility jobs that provided income, routine, and social inclusion. These jobs were often inefficient by market standards, but efficiency was not the point. Stability was.

Critics scoff at the idea of “do-nothing jobs,” but this misunderstands the problem entirely. The choice is not between perfect productivity and waste. It is between organized inclusion and unmanaged exclusion. Liberal states already spend enormous resources dealing with the downstream effects of unemployment: policing, prisons, surveillance, emergency healthcare, social decay, and political radicalization. Guaranteed employment simply shifts those costs upstream, preventing crises instead of responding to them after the fact.

Crucially, universal availability matters. When employment or support is conditional, investigative, or moralized like with welfare and disability systems, it becomes humiliating and destabilizing. People are forced to perform brokenness, compete for legitimacy, and live under constant threat of withdrawal. Guaranteed jobs send a different message: even if society does not currently need your labor, you still belong here, and you will not starve or be discarded.

This is not about rewarding laziness or eliminating ambition. People who want challenging or meaningful work will still seek it. The point is to remove desperation from the baseline. A society without desperation is calmer, less violent, and harder to manipulate. People with stable routines and secure survival are less susceptible to extremist narratives, less likely to engage in crime, and less likely to be absorbed into coercive institutions simply to survive.

Although young men are often highlighted in discussions of volatility, this approach benefits everyone. Women, disabled people, migrants, and others locked out of formal employment face the same structural exclusion and the same psychological pressure. Young men simply make the failure louder when it occurs. The solution should not be tailored to discipline one group, but to stabilize society as a whole.

A system that only values people for their productivity is brittle. When economic conditions shift, it produces surplus humans and then pretends the problem is moral. Guaranteed, low-demand employment acknowledges a basic truth that liberal ideology resists: dignity cannot be conditional. Stability is not achieved by punishment, shame, or abandonment. It is achieved by ensuring that no one is left with nothing to do and no place to exist.