Peter Frase

I'm currently working on a longer treatment of [Four Futures](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/), my social science fictional speculation about the possible successor systems to capitalism, in a world characterized by pervasive automation and ecological crisis. That book is slotted for *Jacobin*'s [series](http://www.versobooks.com/series_collections/112-jacobin); more about that at a later date.

Four Futures was, itself, an extension of ["Anti-Star Trek"](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/), a post that still gets some love [around the Internet](http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-12/levine-on-wall-street-pigs-get-fed-fake-hogs-get-slaughtered) from time to time. The core intuition of both pieces of writing was that while we live in a world that abounds in utopian potential, the realization of that potential depends on the outcome of political struggle. A rich elite that wants to preserve its privileges will do everything possible to ensure that we don't reach a world of leisure and abundance, even if such a world is materially possible.

But one of the things I've struggled with, as a writer, is the tendency of my more speculative writing to mine a streak of apocalyptic quiescence on the radical left. To me, the story I'm telling is all about hope and agency: the future is here, it's [unevenly distributed](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/), and only through struggle will we get it distributed properly. I suppose it's no surprise, though, after decades in retreat, that some people would rather tell themselves fables of inevitable doom rather than tackling the harder problem of figuring out how we can collectively walk down the [path to paradise](http://www.amazon.com/Paths-Paradise-On-Liberation-Work/dp/0861047621).

So of the four futures I described, the one that I think is both the most hopeful and most interesting---the one I call "communism"---is the least discussed. Instead it's exterminism, the mixture of ecological constraints, automation, and murderous elites, that seems to stick in peoples' brains, with the anti-Star Trek dystopia of intellectual property rentiers running a close second.

But strip away the utopian and Marxist framework, and all you have is a grim dismissal of the possibility of egalitarian politics. You get something like [this](http://qz.com/185945/drones-are-about-to-upheave-society-in-a-way-we-havent-seen-in-700-years/#/), from Noah Smith, which echoes my account of exterminism but updates it to our present drone-obsessed times. For a lot of isolated intellectual writer types, it can be perversely reassuring to think that achieving a better world is not just difficult, but actually impossible. How else to explain the appeal of [Chris Hedges](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6BOvprpI6c)?

Another piece of news that recently aroused this sensibility was [this Guardian post](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists) about an alleged "NASA study" predicting the "irreversible collapse" of industrial civilization. Here, via [Doug Henwood](https://twitter.com/DougHenwood/status/447042624269336576), is a [critique](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/2014/03/21/popular-guardian-story-collapse-industrial-civilization/) of the study itself and the lazy media that propagated it. And another Twitterer links to [this](http://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2014/03/16/truly-inane-apocalyptic-journalism-at-the-guardian/), which is even more damning. In short, the study---which the original author didn't even bother to link to---had little to do with NASA, and was a crude theoretical model based on a handful of equations. Frankly, as far as futurology goes, I think "Four Futures" was built on a far sounder scientific foundation.

What depresses me is not so much the perambulations of a crank with a Guardian blog, such people will probably be with us forever. But many people I know and like were eager to share this thinly sourced bit of nonsense around Facebook and Twitter, suggesting that it spoke to a desire for apocalyptic scenarios among ostensibly pragmatic leftists.

This fatalism is the perfect complement to the equally inane positivity that pervades bourgeois discourse, whether it's coming in the form of self-help as [dissected](http://www.alternet.org/story/143187/barbara_ehrenreich%3A_the_relentless_promotion_of_positive_thinking_has_undermined_america) by Barbara Ehrenreich, or as the phony utopianism of silicon valley [plutocrats](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/10/delusions-of-the-tech-bro-intelligentsia/). The ruling class tells us that the future is inevitably bright, while left curmudgeons reassure themselves with the conviction that it's inevitably gloomy. We don't win from playing this game, taking our meager emotional returns while our opponents take their payment in a much more tangible form.

It seems I'm in book-announcing mode this week. Today marks the release of three books from *Jacobin* magazine's [collaboration](http://www.versobooks.com/series_collections/112-jacobin) with Verso Books. The trio includes Benjamin Kunkel's *Utopia or Bust* (slightly silly profile of Kunkel [here](http://www.vulture.com/2014/03/benjamin-kunkel-marxist-novel-utopia-or-bust.html)), Micah Uetricht's *Strike For America* (excerpt [here](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/uncommon-core-chicago-teachers-union/)), and Melissa Gira Grant's *Playing the Whore* (excerpt [here](http://www.thenation.com/article/178683/lets-call-sex-work-what-it-work)). I have my own contribution to this series planned for the future, but more on that later. For those in New York, the launch [event](https://www.facebook.com/events/1394747350786910/) is on Wednesday the 12th.

The books are all worth your time. But I want to especially highlight Melissa's which I think is an incredibly important work. I'm proud that for some time now, *Jacobin* has been consistently putting forward an alternative to the dominant narratives about sex work. I may have been [first](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/03/the-problem-with-sex-work/) to write there on these issues, but that was only opening the door to people far better versed in these issues than I, like [Melissa](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/08/happy-hookers/) and [Laura Agustín](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/08/prostitution-law-and-the-death-of-whores/).

*Playing the Whore* synthesizes a huge body of theory, research and activism by and for sex workers. But I hope it doesn't get pigeonholed as being about sex, or about sex work, or about feminism, though it is about all those things. There's a huge wealth of insight here about the meaning of contemporary labor, and the many complexities of trying to develop new identities that make class politics possible.

Crucially, the book reorients discussion of sex work in the direction of class politics more generally, and away from dehumanized narratives of victimization or the overwrought feelings of would-be middle class saviors. As Grant says toward the end of the book: "There's one critical function sex worker identity must still perform: It gives shape to the demand that sex workers are as defined by their work as they are by their sexuality; it de-eroticizes the public perception of the sex worker, not despite sex but to force recognition of sex workers outside of a sexual transaction".

Rather than attempt my own clumsy summary, I'll just tease you with more of Grant's own words. Here are some of the lines that stood out to me from each of her ten chapters, which I hope will encourage others to pick up the book and delve into the rich context that motivates them.

* **"The Police"**: "Rather than couching crackdowns on sex work as fighting crime, now some feminists appeal to the police to pursue stings against the sex trade in the name of gender equality. We can't arrest our way to feminist utopia, but that has not stopped influential women's rights organizations from demanding that we try."

* **"The Prostitute"**: "since the middle of the seventies, 'prostitution' has slowly begun to give way to 'sex work.' It's this transition from a state of being to a form of labor that must be understood if we're to understand the demands that sex work is work . . . the designation of sex work is the invention of the people who perform it."

* **"The Work"**: "All that is intentionally discreet about sex work . . . are strategies for managing legal risk and social exclusion and shouldn't be understood as deceptive any more than the discretion and boundaries a therapist or priest may maintain. But this necessary discretion warps under the weight of anti-sex work stigmas and policing."

* **"The Debate"**: "Is this the real fear then: not that more people are becoming prostitutes but that the conventional ways we'd distinguish a prostitute from a nonprostitute woman are no longer as functional?"

* **"The Industry"**: "To insist that sex workers only deserve rights at work if they have fun, if they love it, if they feel empowered by it is exactly backward. It's a demand that ensures they never will."

* **"The Peephole"**: "Surveillance is a way of knowing sex workers that unites the opportunity for voyeurism with the monitoring and data collection performed by law enforcement, by social service providers, or by researchers."

* **"The Stigma"**: "Naming whore stigma offers us a way through it: to value difference, to develop solidarity between women in and out of the sex trade. . . . Whore stigma makes central the racial and class hierarchy reinforced in the dividing of women into the pure and the impure, the clean and the unclean, the white and virgin and all the others."

* **"The Other Women"**: "Sex work informs their analysis of sexualization not because sex workers' lives are important but because sex work makes women who don't do it feel things they prefer not to feel. It is the whore stigma exercised and upheld by other women."

* **"The Saviors"**: "For those working in the antiprostitution rescue industry, sex workers are limited to performing as stock characters in a story they are not otherwise a part of, in the pity porn which the 'expert' journalists, filmmakers, and NGO staff will produce, profit from, and build their power on."

* **"The Movement"**: "Without its student liberation movement, its black liberation movement, its women's liberation movement, and its gay liberation movement I can't imagine San Francisco birthing a prostitutes' rights movement from a houseboat docked Sausalito."

Today marks the English-language publication of Thomas Piketty's eagerly awaited [*Capital in the Twenty-First Century*](http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty-ebook/dp/B00I2WNYJW). I haven't read the book yet, so I can't comment on the adequacy of its approach to the problem of capital in the twenty-first century. But I can comment on a specific problem of "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" that turns out to be illuminating.

In his review of the book, Dean Baker [complains](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/capital-in-the-twenty-fir_b_4932184.html) that Piketty's account is overly deterministic, largely due to an inattention to the details of institutional structures which shape the distribution of wealth and income, and which are potentially subject to change by political means. In particular, he draws attention to one of his, [and my](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/), recurring themes: intellectual property. Using drug companies as a case in point, Baker notes that this industry makes up 2 percent of GDP and 15 percent of corporate profits, based entirely on "government granted patent monopolies".

Drug patents may be the most egregious example, but there's plenty more where that came from. After reading Baker's review, I headed over to Amazon, with the thought of picking up an ebook edition of Piketty's book. There I found that the Kindle edition retails for a whopping $27.48, for a grand total of $1.45 in savings over the physical, hardcover edition.

Only copyright law and digital copy protections make this possible, of course---copying an ebook is trivial and nearly costless. And who benefits from that? Presumably some royalties accrue to Piketty and his translator, Arthur Goldhammer. Which I can't really begrudge, although Piketty already enjoys a comfortable faculty position at the Paris School of Economics.

But the other beneficiary is the publisher, Harvard University Press, and it's a bit harder to see how they need the money. HUP is a division of Harvard University, which, some incidental educational operations aside, is primarily an enormous [investment fund](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Management_Company) presiding over $32 billion dollars in [assets](http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/09/harvard-endowment-up-2-billion-to-32-7-billion). Which brings us around to another of Dean Baker's objections, which is that the unusual success of Harvard's investments may not simply be due to the expertise of its financial managers. He proposes insider trading as another plausible (albeit unsubstantiated) explanation: "graduates of these institutions undoubtedly could [provide] their alma maters with plenty of useful investment tips."

All of which is to say that while I laud Piketty's support for increased taxation of income and wealth, the peculiar case of his own book illustrates Baker's important counterpoint. It's a point that could equally be directed at certain Marxists and other leftists, for whom all efforts at reformist politics are doomed to fail *a priori*: "capitalism is far more dynamic and flexible than the way Piketty presents it", and thus we should pay close attention to "the specifics of the institutional structure that is crucial for constructing a more egalitarian path going forward."