EMPLOYMENT generation, the main agenda of the new Trabaho Para Sa Bayan Act, is a double-edged sword. It can mean expanding the labor market to rein in the twin problems of unemployment and underemployment. Or it can mean generating jobs on a massive scale to serve the needs of capital, regardless of the quality of the jobs created and agnostic of the working conditions of those given employment. A case in point was the international exposé on the AI support centers in Mindanao that paid workers starvation-level wages if they were paid at all for services rendered. Job expansions, even in the field of technology, as the exposé showed, do not automatically mean the uplift of the conditions of the working man.

Work in service of capital has been, from time immemorial, a source of exploitation. Marx offered to the world his revolutionary governing doctrine based on the irresoluble conflict between labor and capital and the need for labor to end these conditions and set up government cum utopias led by the proletariat. In 1917, after the fall of the tsar in the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was swept to power on the compelling arguments of Marxism. Of course, the dream of a workers' utopia never came; the grand ideal of Marxism segued, post-Lenin, into the murderous rage of Stalin and his band of dour-faced apparatchiks.