Peter Frase

A recent article in the New York Times reports an encouraging victory for the workers at Foxconn, the gigantic Chinese manufacturer that makes products for Apple and many other companies:

The announcement by Foxconn, which said that it would raise salaries as much as 25 percent, to about $400 a month, came after an outcry over working conditions at its factories. In recent weeks, labor rights groups have staged coordinated protests in various countries after reports that some of Apple’s Chinese suppliers operate harsh, abusive and dangerous facilities. To stem criticism, Apple hired a nonprofit labor group to inspect the plants it uses.

It seems that this move came in response to the efforts of the workers themselves—including the martyrs who committed suicide in protest against Foxconn’s labor practices—and increased awareness among consumers. Mike Daisey’s report for This American Life, in particular, deserves credit for raising consciousness. This victory, if it holds up, is an encouraging example of how trans-national labor solidarity can work.

In a follow-up, however, the Times carefully avoids the class struggle at the heart of this story: as Ned Resnikoff observes, the story goes through remarkable linguistic contortions to avoid ascribing agency to the Foxconn workers themselves. We are told that for higher wages to be sustained, companies “must convince consumers in America and elsewhere that improving factories to benefit workers is worth the higher prices of goods.” The fate of Chinese workers is thus placed in the hands of corporate marketers and beneficent consumers rather than, say, the workers themselves.

Mobilizing consumers has its place in a labor organizing campaign, but I’m dubious that the altruism of atomized consumers on its own is a durable basis for increasing wages. The market is simply too good at obscuring the true relations of production, except when rare instances like this one break into the open; ethical consumerism can easily be subverted by companies that sell a false sense of moral purity by marketing themselves as virtuous capitalists. A better model for the role of consumers in labor struggles are things like the California Grape Boycott, which was initiated and led by the United Farm Workers.

There are a couple of other interesting things about the Foxconn story, which actually ties together a lot of my preoccupations. One thing to note is that in this case, the struggle over time was at least as important as the fight over money. In addition to higher wages, Foxconn is pledging to reduce overtime—the punishing 14-hour days and 7-day weeks have been reported as a major factor behind the wave of suicides. Given how much of 19th Century labor history in the West was devoted to the fight over the working day, it’s not surprising that the same struggle is being recapitulated in China.

The other thing that jumped out at me is the last paragraph of the Times story, which is tacked on almost like an afterthought:

And worried that the old model is dying, Foxconn has announced plans to invest in millions of robots and automate aspects of production.

Just last week, I wrote a post where I described the relationship between worker bargaining power and technical change as follows:

Suppose, for example, that employers had to pay much higher wages for work outside of standard hours, for irregular schedules, and for last-minute re-schedulings. In the short run, this would increase the income of some workers, which is good. It would also make employers more reluctant to use employees in this manner, unless it made them enough money to pay the higher wages. But in the long run, it would create stronger incentives for employers to simply use fewer workers, perhaps by replacing their labor with machines. This might sound like a dystopian scenario in itself—we win higher wages, and the end result is that we just get replaced with robots! But the alternatives are, in my view, even worse.

If Foxconn follows through on its wage and hour concessions, and on pledge to automate, it will fulfill this dynamic perfectly.

Moreover, this case demonstrates that the disappearance of human labor in manufacturing is not just a rich-country phenomenon, and the data suggests that Foxconn is not anomalous. Recently, Felix Salmon came up with data showing that the absolute number of manufacturing jobs is declining, not just in the United States and other rich countries, but even in China. Some of this may be a result of production shifting to even lower-wage countries, but it also lends support to my longstanding contention that the most important story behind deindustrialization is technological change rather than outsourcing. If even China isn’t growing manufacturing employment, this suggests that the global economy is going through a gradual transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, much as rich countries made the transition from being predominantly agricultural to a stage where farming only makes up a tiny percentage of jobs and GDP. Going back to a manufacturing dominated workforce doesn’t seem much more plausible—or, when you think about it, much more desirable—than reverting to a situation in which most people worked on farms.

That’s not to say manufacturing doesn’t matter. Jared Bernstein had a good post the other day that describes the ways that a strong manufacturing sector benefits a national economy. But direct job creation is only a minor component of the case for manufacturing, and the declining employment in the sector means that a revival of manufacturing is unlikely to play a large role in reducing the unemployment rate. Matt Yglesias gets to the central issue here:

But even in China, job growth is coming primarily from the service sector. It’s not a nation of factory workers and it likely never will be. But China has been de-ruralizing very rapidly. And it turns out that one way to characterize the “good old days” of rapid income growth in the United States is as not a move to factories but off of farms.

To Yglesias, this implies that growth in the service sector is the key issue for global economies in the future. But to take this a step further, one way to characterize what is happening in the United States today is not a move to the service sector but out of manufacturing. And it’s true that, if you want the aggregate amount of employment to grow in step with the growth of the population, you are committed to creating a whole lot of service jobs. But as I have argued before, this implies a strong normative judgment about the socially-optimal level of commodification.

As Ursula Huws has pointed out, the creation of service sector jobs often entails “a socialisation of the kinds of work which are also carried out unpaid in the home or neighbourhood”, things like “health care, child care, social work, cleaning, catering and a range of personal services like hairdressing.” Insofar as people experience these tasks as unpleasant drudgery, it is desirable to reduce the need for them to performed unpaid—particularly since unpaid work is done disproportionately by women. But just as in manufacturing, there are more and less labor intensive ways of replacing domestic labor. As Cat Valente observes in her fascinating post on gender-biased technological change in Japan, innovations that reduce the need for household labor can be at least as significant as iPhones or assembly-line robots. This is the alternative to the system in which one privileged group of workers hires another group of workers for the domestic tasks they no longer have time or inclination to perform.

To what extent do we deal with de-industrialization by turning more and more of human activity into paid work, and to what extent do we try to decrease the total amount of wage labor by reducing the work week and allowing people to spend more time out of the labor force? That is one of the key questions facing us in the 21st century, as the jobs that currently form the basis of our economy begin to disappear.

I was surprised and pleased to see that Bhaskar had decided to put Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex up on the Jacobin blog, as it’s one of my favorite pieces of Marxist-feminist writing. In spite of its occasional outlandishness, it does two things exceptionally well. The first is to extend Marxist analysis into the realm of sex and gender by simply taking Marx and Engels’ own framework to its logical conclusion, which they themselves were too blinded by the patriarchal assumptions of their time to recognize. The second is to see modern technology as an indispensable element of women’s liberation, going so far as to argue that “Until a certain level of evolution had been reached and technology had achieved its present sophistication, to question fundamental biological conditions was insanity.”

My recent writing has, I think, created an impression in some people’s minds that I’m reflexively pro-technology. I even jokingly refer to myself that way sometimes. It’s true that I will sometimes treat a certain kind of technical change as an unexamined premise, and that I tend to be skeptical of arguments that are centered on the criticism of technology and its effect on labor. But it isn’t so much that I think more technology is always good; I just think that arguments for or against certain technologies often begin by asking the wrong question.

Via Aaron Bady’s indispensable Sunday Reading, I found this post from Richard at the blog “The Existence Machine”, which I hadn’t previously known about. Richard quotes, and objects to, a passage from the journalist Paul Mason asserting—and attributing to Marx—the notion that a classless society “must be based on the most advanced technologies and organisational forms created by capitalism itself.” His objection is that this naturalizes technology and prevents us from being critical of its effects and its sustainability. But that’s not the only way to interpret that formulation, and I think it somewhat misconstrues what the argument is about. The question is not whether technology, or capitalist production methods, are good or bad. Technology mediates social relations, and it is those social relations that should be the object of critique.

It is possible, however, to interpret Mason as saying that “advanced technologies and organizational forms” have an existence independent of class relations. To get into the technical weeds for a moment, this way of thinking reflects a dualism between what Marxists call the “forces of production” and the “relations of production”. The forces of production are the machines, factories, and techniques that make large scale industrial society possible, while the relations of production are the human inequalities between the mass of workers who have nothing to sell but their labor power, and the handful of bosses who control the means of production. Taken to its extreme, the forces-relations dualism implies that we can keep the economy pretty much the way it is now, but just change who’s in charge of it through some combination of worker ownership and government planning. I find this to be inadequate—even if it’s possible, it doesn’t really address some of the worst aspects of life in a capitalist society. And in the past, I’ve critiqued both market socialism and pension fund socialism on this basis.

The forces-relations dualism can also lead to a crude kind of technological determinism, in which technological changes somehow automatically lead to social transformation when they become incompatible with capitalist social relations. That’s how this passage from Marx’s 1859 Preface is sometimes read:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

The most famous modern version of technological-determinist Marxism is probably G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. But while I think there’s a grain of truth to this reading, pure technological determinism is untenable as social theory, and politically it leads either to quiescence or to something like accelerationism. Indeed, part of my purpose in writing “Four Futures” was to demonstrate how the same technical conditions could be made compatible with very different social relations.

Yet for all that, I find myself sympathetic to Mason’s formulation: socialism “must be based on the most advanced technologies and organisational forms created by capitalism itself”. That’s not because I think it’s possible to build a classless future while keeping the capitalist forces of production exactly as the are. It’s because, on the contrary, I think that altering relations of production inevitably leads to transformations in the technologies of production. So my amended claim would be that the successor to capitalism must begin from the capitalist forces of production, but it will not leave them unchanged. There is a critique to be made of technology, but it’s the one that comes from workers themselves, and it is enacted in the workplace and in the labor market. The answer to the dehumanizing qualities of technology under capitalism is to attack the inequalities of class power that make them possible.

A concrete example of what this means can be found in a recent report on retail work in New York City, which I heard about from Nick Serpe. Nick alerted me to the following passage:

Surveyed workers reported erratic scheduling that could change hourly, especially with the use of computerized or online scheduling systems that can track projected sales and adjust labor costs daily. A JC Penney worker stated, ‘They switch the schedule around a lot and they expect that you look on the computer every half hour to know your schedule. They change my time and if you didn’t print your schedule that week as evidence of the change, they will disregard your complaint.’ The practice of hour-to-hour scheduling adjustments means that workers expect to be nearly always on call.

This is a clear example of technology being used to intensify worker exploitation, in a way that makes it appear to be both a force and a relation of production. And here is where I would distinguish my perspective from technological utopianism, which Mr. Teacup glosses as “good things are technologically determined and bad things are socially determined.” I reject this position because I reject the idea that technology can be separated from society in this way, which is just another version of the forces-relations dualism. I begin from the premise that technologies reflect, embody, and arise in the context of social relations, and can never be socially or politically neutral; the forces and relations of production dialectically determine one another.

So I accept that technology can have negative effects on labor, and the passage quoted above is a good example. But labor also affects technology—that is, the form that technological change takes is shaped by the strength and organization of workers. I usually avoid writing in a way that directly criticizes technology, not because I’m a techno-utopian, but because I’m more interested in approaching the dialectic of worker and machine from the other side. The trouble with writing critiques of technology is that it tends to lead into either outright Luddism, or else Frankfurt School-style cultural pessimism that’s not clearly connected to any collective agent or political project. The most plausible answer to the negative consequences of technology for workers, I believe, is not to denounce the machines but to strengthen labor so that it is able to contest the path of technical development on more favorable terms.

Being subject of the whims of a scheduling computer that can shift your hours around at any moment is, to be sure, not a pleasant situation. And if approached from the standpoint of critiquing technology, it’s tempting to view this as a testament to the hollow nature of “progress”, proof that the development of better machines only allows workers to become more immiserated, precarious, and exploited. But I read this not so much as a story about technology, but a story about the noxious interaction between technology and a weak, underpaid labor force.

Consider that most research shows that workers prefer to work regular, standard hours rather than having rotating or off-hour schedules. Yet most do not make any more money than they would doing the same job in a standard 9 to 5, at least in the United States. This strongly suggests that workers are unable to resist the desire of employers to impose non-standard work schedules, or to demand higher wages in return for taking them. The technology described in the passage above intensifies this dynamic, but is not the primary cause of it. The technology wouldn’t have such baleful effects if not for the weak bargaining position of the workers. What is at issue, to use mainstream economics terms, is whether technological change tends to be labor-saving or labor-complementary.

What would happen if workers were in a better position to resist these kinds of crappy scheduling policies? Suppose, for example, that employers had to pay much higher wages for work outside of standard hours, for irregular schedules, and for last-minute re-schedulings. In the short run, this would increase the income of some workers, which is good. It would also make employers more reluctant to use employees in this manner, unless it made them enough money to pay the higher wages. But in the long run, it would create stronger incentives for employers to simply use fewer workers, perhaps by replacing their labor with machines. This might sound like a dystopian scenario in itself—we win higher wages, and the end result is that we just get replaced with robots! But the alternatives are, in my view, even worse.

There are two primary mechanisms by which capitalist enterprises make themselves more profitable. The first is to exploit their workers harder, by extending their hours or by paying them lower wages. The second is to produce the same amount of stuff with fewer workers, by adopting new production techniques and new technologies. (If you want the long technical explanation, these are what Marx calls the absolute and relative forms of surplus value, and the relevant chapters of Capital are roughly chapters 7 through 12.) Since the two ways of increasing profits are to some degree substitutes, closing off one avenue tends to push the capitalist in the direction of the other.

If the absolute exploitation of labor is not an option—because the workers, for whatever reasons, are capable of demanding high wages—then the incentive to innovate in labor-saving ways will increase. Indeed, some technologies that aren’t economical in an environment of low wages will become so when wages are high. This is the main argument of my post about the connection between low wages and technological stagnation. On the other hand, if labor-saving technological innovation isn’t an option—whether because it’s directly barred or because there’s a great stagnation on—then employers will focus on exploiting their workforce ever more intensely.

The final possibility is that both strategies are closed off: workers are powerful enough to maintain high wages, and labor-saving innovation is either prohibited or impossible. The result will just be a stagnant, low-growth economy. Some might view this as the best case scenario, since it would heighten the contradictions and make calls for an alternative to capitalism more convincing. But the evidence suggests that economic stagnation is not conducive to building a powerful and successful Left—often it’s quite the opposite, as Doug Henwood and Duncan Foley have argued. So until it’s possible to make a radical break with capitalism, even socialists need to make their peace with economic growth—the question is whether that growth happens primarily on the basis of hyper-exploiting labor, or is instead predicated on using it more efficiently.

It’s this way of thinking, perhaps, that leads me to be occasionally sympathetic to the cluster of ideas some of us refer to as left neoliberalism. To me, the core of left-neoliberalism (or globalize-grow-give progressivism) is growth-maximizing deregulation plus redistribution, as an alternative to directly intervening in the labor market to assure broad-based high wages. Where I part company with this school of thought, however, is in my emphasis on the need to strengthen the overall bargaining power of labor. This doesn’t need to be brought about entirely through labor unions of the traditional sort; as Chris Maisano notes, their prognosis remains rather grim, and they have major drawbacks as presently constituted. But it does imply the need for some combination of unions, state regulations, full employment, and basic income. Ultimately, of course, a powerful and confident working class will tend to provoke a crisis for Kaleckian reasons, but that is a development I would very much welcome.

I stress the importance of strengthening labor precisely because I’m not a techno-utopian. Technological change may be almost inevitable—and in any case, I think it’s very desirable—but the form that change takes is very much a question of social relations. As the early Mario Tronti had it, “it is the specific, present, political situation of the working class that both necessitates and directs the given forms of capital’s development.”

I’ve spoken only about the relation between technology and labor. Equally important are the ways that technology intersects with the environment, and with everyday life outside of the workplace. But a fuller consideration of those issues will have to wait for a future post.

Recently on the Jacobin blog, Alex Hanna wrote some reflections on the relationship between Occupy movements and the police. He concludes with the provocative argument that the cops “can be the most ruthless, corrupt organizations, but they can be on our side. In the US, trying to battle them is often going to blow up in our faces.” This kind of argument always grates on me, maybe because I’m a child of the ’90s whose views on the cops were shaped by gangsta rap and crust punk. But it’s a form of hand-wringing that crops up all the time on the liberal-left, so I’m going to attempt to actually formulate a rational critique of what Hanna is saying. Although you can find a more complete theorization of why the cops aren’t your friend in this post by Richard Seymour, I’m just going to try to explain why the notion of getting cops “on our side” is such a problem from the perspective of radical mass movements. The main point is that police repression is a reality whether or not activists “provoke” it, intentionally or not, and recognizing that reality should change how we think about the relationship between protests and police.

Hanna’s post begins by blurring together two very different questions: whether mass protests should intentionally provoke violent conflict with the police, and whether movements should actively seek to maintain conciliatory and friendly relations with the police. The conflation occurs in the first two paragraphs. The opening refers to John Pike, the University of California Davis’s infamous pepper spray cop; the second paragraph asks, “what does provoking police actually accomplish towards the ends of Occupy?” Yet what made the pepper spray cop so shocking was precisely that his brutality was so clearly un-provoked. He casually inflicted agony on a line of seated demonstrators—and with copious photographic documentation, the university administration was left scrambling for the bizarre claim that peacefully disobeying a police instruction (i.e., civil disobedience) now constituted a form of violence.

Hanna uses a comparison between Egypt and Wisconsin to argue that activists must pay close attention to the legitimacy and institutional history of police forces, in order to determine whether confrontation will be effective. Given differences between police forces, “it’s a matter of tactics”, he says, “whether we choose to chant ‘Join us!’ at police or face them black bloc-style”. Not only does this reductively narrow the menu of possible approaches to police power, it inverts the whole problem we face as radicals. Hanna implies that the legitimacy of the police in the U.S. calls into question the wisdom of confronting them. But recent conflicts over Occupy illustrate that this legitimacy is itself a prop for repression and a major obstacle to mass organizing, one which needs to be attacked directly.

After correctly noting that police repression and brutality were important factors in the pre-history of the Egyptian uprising against Mubarak, Hanna downplays the extent to which this was also true of Occupy. Part of this is due to his choice of example: using the Wisconsin anti-Walker protests as a case study in American policing is misleading at best, at least if it is meant to generate lessons for the Occupy movement. In Wisconsin, protesters dealt with an unusual and idiosyncratic mixture of capital police and state troopers; the most prominent occupations in New York and Oakland, in contrast, are dealing with some of the most arrogant and brutal examples of police power in urban America. Examples of the NYPD’s thuggishness and authoritarianism abound; these range from the almost comical sight of police boorishly defending their colleagues’ right to fix tickets, up to more malevolent behaviors like framing suspects and conducting pervasive surveillance of Muslims. And of course there is the long trail of Patrick Dorismonds, Abner Louimas, and Sean Bells, which calls into question just how clear the contrast is between the New York cops and their Egyptian counterparts. In Oakland, the parallel with the Egyptian revolution is even clearer: the crucial prelude to the eruption of Occupy Oakland was the protests over the police shooting of Oscar Grant while he was face down on a train platform.

Even granting all this, one could still accept Hanna’s argument that Occupy should avoid conflict with the police, in order to avoid offending the sensibilities of observers who are still inclined to give the cops the benefit of the doubt in any confrontation. After all, consider this scenario:

About 400 people were arrested and three police officers were injured after a weekend protest by members of the Occupy movement in Oakland, Calif., turned into a violent confrontation with law enforcement officers that led to an assault on City Hall.

The clashes began about 3 p.m. on Saturday when protesters marched toward the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center and began to tear down construction barricades, and the violence extended into early Sunday. The Oakland Police Department said in a statement that the crowd was ordered to disperse after protesters “began destroying construction equipment and fencing.”

“Officers were pelted with bottles, metal pipe, rocks, spray cans, improvised explosive devices and burning flares,” the police statement said. Officers responded by firing smoke and tear gas canisters and beanbags, and they initially arrested 20 people.

Several hours later, some protesters broke into City Hall, the police said, although some of the demonstrators said they found the building’s door ajar. Mayor Jean Quan surveyed the damage there on Sunday, and the city administrator, Deanna J. Santana, said at a news conference that the protesters had broken a window and damaged a historic model of the building. Flags were stolen, she said, and one of them was burned in front of City Hall.

Surely this reflects badly on the protesters and hurts the movement, certainly in contrast to something like this:

The police kettled the marchers — contained them in one area with no way to leave — twice. The first time, they declared an unlawful assembly, but provided no escape route, and then shot tear gas into the crowd, sending people into a panic and forcing them to escape by tearing down fences around a lot, by the park, where they were contained.

Occupy [protestors] did not storm or attempt to take over the YMCA [as reported]. Employees there opened the doors for people begging to be saved from a kettle and mass arrest action where 300 to 400 people were taken down — including myself and other journalists. There are also several reports that Occupiers broke into city hall shortly thereafter. Property was definitely vandalized, but several people have told me they did not break in — that the doors were actually open.

The punchline, of course, is that these two passages are describing the same event, and in the second version it’s unclear what the protesters did to “provoke” anything. Some people might be inclined to give credence to the first version, which comes from the New York Times, over the second account from freelance journalist Susie Cagle. But as Aaron Bady points out, the Times and other mainstream outlets often lazily cobble together their stories by regurgitating the Oakland Police Department’s press releases. Cagle, meanwhile, is one of the few journalists who has been on the scene reporting on Occupy Oakland from the beginning, getting arrested twice for her efforts. But people who aren’t deeply involved in these movements aren’t likely to know that they should be reading Susie Cagle and not the New York Times. And so, if they’re willing to give the police the benefit of the doubt, they’ll likely go along with the Times story and shake their heads at those irresponsible and infantile protesters.

This is where Hanna’s argument unravels, once we correctly distinguish between not intentionally provoking the police, and actively trying to propitiate them. It’s backwards to regard the legitimacy enjoyed by the police as something that ought to motivate Occupy activists to avoid conflict with them. This is not to say that provoking fights with the cops should be a goal of protests—this, I agree, is generally a tactical mistake. But it is also a mistake to think conflict can always be avoided, if only protesters are perfectly polite and peaceful and obedient. Attempting to avoid such conflict at all costs leads to a cycle in which whatever protesters are doing is continually redefined as “violence” in order to justify crackdowns, even as activists themselves accept more and more restrictions on their freedom to act. Rather than fretting about the public relations consequences of the police attacks on Occupy, we need to fight back hard against the rhetoric that defines all resistance to power as impermissible violence, whether it’s UC Davis students sitting on the sidewalk or Palestinian kids throwing rocks at armored battalions of Israeli soldiers.

So long as the police—and more importanly, the politicians who control them—can define the limits of permissible protest and lie to the public with impunity, they are free to take whatever repressive measures they wish, all the while blaming everything on the actions of the protesters. The legitimacy of the police is a cause of police violence, and therefore the only way to ultimately reign in the cops is to tear away their veil of public support. It’s worth remembering that when the tide turned in the Egyptian revolution, it wasn’t because the cops stood down in the face of mass protests; it was because they were literally chased off the streets.

Delegitimizing police is one possible good outcome of the Occupy movements. My sense, at least from anecdotal evidence, is that some of the folks who participated in or observed the Occupy protests were genuinely shocked by the authoritarianism and brutality of the cops. Perhaps just as significant are the indications that the media, at least in New York, is starting to get tired of being pushed around by the police department. For me, it can be hard to avoid being a little blase about all this—although I’m a straight white male from an upper middle-class background, and thus not objectively a regular target, I did grow up going to urban public schools, alongside non-whites, poor kids, punks, skaters, and other undesirables. So I learned pretty early on the value of hating and fearing the cops. If Occupy can help teach that lesson to a bit more of white America, so much the better.

Today is a day of protest against SOPA and PROTECT IP, two proposed pieces of legislation which are being promoted as necessary responses to copyright infringement, and which threaten to impose serious restrictions on Internet communication. Big sites like Wikipedia and Reddit—and small but dear to my heart sites like the Marxists Internet Archive—have gone dark to register their opposition to the legislation. Stopping legislation like this is very important to me, because the continual escalation of intellectual property enforcement is the foundation of the incipient rentier dystopia I’ve explored in much of my previous writing. But since I’m not important enough to make much of an impression by shutting down, I’ll instead provide something topical to read until those sites return.

While SOPA and PROTECT IP aren’t dead, they look significantly less threatening now than they did a couple of months ago. Some of the worst provisions of the bills have been removed or softened in response to organized opposition, and SOPA (the House version of the bill) seems to be dead for the time being. The fight is not over, however, and the current version of the bill still has a lot of disturbing implications. See here for a detailed explanation. One of the worst provisions, for people who care about censorship on the Internet, is one that would allow Internet service providers to block users as long as they can claim to be acting “in good faith” to combat piracy. This is likely to give rise to a situation where risk-averse companies pre-emptively block users in response to the claims of the big copyright owners, even where the claims are baseless. Worse, this provision creates an opening for governments or private actors to censor political expression under the guise of enforcing copyright. It’s not hard to imagine the governments of New York or Oakland issuing bogus takedown notices for images of police brutality against Occupiers; indeed, this isn’t entirely a hypothetical scenario, as Google has already reported receiving precisely this kind of questionable takedown order from a law enforcement agency.

The resistance to SOPA and PROTECT IP has been stronger and more effective than I expected, which is encouraging. And the coalitions that have lined up on each side of the issue cut across the normal partisan divisions in American politics, as explained in this article by Zach Carter and Ryan Grim. But while it’s tempting to read the backlash as an example of grassroots mass movements fighting back the corporate power of the copyright cartels, it’s at least equally important that these bills have exposed a deep division between two factions of big Capital—and forced Leftists and liberals to decide which faction they side with.

In the House, SOPA was introduced by right-wing Republican Lamar Smith, a member of the Tea Party caucus. But among the bill’s cosponsors are a number of liberal Democrats—including John Conyers, Jr., lately a fan of liberals due to his full employment jobs bill. On the other side, an equally motley crew of representatives quickly came out against SOPA and PROTECT-IP, with Democrats like Zoe Lofgren and Anna Eshoo standing alongside Ron Paul and even Michelle Bachman.

It’s tempting to see this as reflecting some kind of libertarian-statist divide that cuts across typical partisan cleavages. But it’s more likely that the surprising coalitions in congress reflect an equally unusual division among the corporate interests that move policy in Washington. A number of big corporations and industry groups have come out strongly against SOPA and PROTECT-IP, including Facebook, Google, and the Consumer Electronics Association. That helps explain why Lofgren—whose district covers an area around San Jose, California—has taken the lead in opposing the bills in congress. And it’s easier to see how Conyers found himself on the same side as the Motion Picture Association of America, Pfizer, and Mastercard, once you know that the legislation has also received support from the AFL-CIO.

The presence of labor union support may tempt some liberals into supporting this legislation (and not for accelerationist reasons). They could nod along to journalist Robert Levine, who calls technology companies “digital parasites” bent on demolishing the economic foundations of media creation. Conyers has promoted the laws, implausibly, by claiming that they will “protect jobs” in creative industries. This is a canny move, since working writers and artists are a sympathetic group when contrasted with big media companies parasitically making money by copying their work. But that’s not really what this fight is about—rather, it’s a struggle between two different fractions of Capital.

The basic divide at work here is between those capitalists that make money by selling access to content, and those that make money by controlling the content distribution networks. For content sellers like the music business, extremely harsh intellectual property laws are desirable because they create the artificial scarcity upon which their whole business model depends. Companies like Facebook and Google, in contrast, still mostly make their money by controlling the platforms on which people distribute various kinds of media, and selling access to their user base to advertisers. For them, looser copyright laws don’t pose a threat to profits, and in fact they facilitate the business model: by increasing the amount of copying and sharing, they increase the popularity of the distribution networks, which in turn makes them more valuable to advertisers.

One of the hallmarks of Marxism (at least my version of it) is that it regards capitalist development not as an unambiguous evil but as a simultaneously progressive and exploitative phenomenon. In the traditional view, capitalism develops the forces of production which are the precondition for socialism, but eventually becomes an impediment to both economic rationality and human well-being. This implies that while the capitalist mode of production is a historically limited form that must ultimately be superseded, there are situations in which capitalism—or some aspect of capitalism—has a progressive aspect that is preferable to those reactionary forces that would prefer to maintain the status quo. Hence it’s worth asking whether things like SOPA/PROTECT-IP amount to “bailouts of dying industries” “at the expense of the future”.

To be sure, trying to pick and choose between progressive and reactionary factions of capital can get you into some squirrelly situations. In the Communist movement—particularly among Maoists—it was once common to distinguish between a reactionary “comprador” bourgeoisie and a progressive “national” bourgeoisie in peripheral countries. While the compradors were dependent on and politically allied with international capital, it was argued, the national bourgeoisie and the working class shared an interest in resisting imperialist control and developing an independent national economy. This analysis was sometimes used to justify Communist support for bourgeois governments on the grounds that they were based on the national bourgeoisie rather than the comprador elite. In practice, this led to some unfortunate political errors, with Communists issuing apologetics for various unappealing regimes in the post-colonial world.

But despite these pitfalls, picking sides between capitalists is sometimes unavoidable if you want to avoid the self-serving and moralistic cop-out of dogmatic third campism. Some might argue that the network capitalists are worse than the more old-fashioned content capitalists. The old media model at least pays some wages to creators, after all. This the vibe I get, for example from Mr. Teacup, whose posts often critique the radical potential of peer-to-peer and open source production from an apparently anti-capitalist direction. This post, for example (which I discussed here), argues that the whole idea of voluntary, non-waged production networks is actually a key part of the ideology of neo-liberalism.

But in the context of the current debate over intellectual property, I would argue it is the capitalists who control the networks and distribution channels—like Google and Facebook—who represent the more progressive segment of the bourgeoisie. Which is not to say that they’re either admirable companies or, in the long run, friends of the Left. It’s certainly true that they are, in one sense, parasites: they profit from the labor and creativity of users who make, remix, upload and share content for free. But their great virtue, in contrast to the pro-intellectual property side, is that they at least accept the existence of a cultural milieu based on sharing and access to knowledge, rather than trying to restrict it by tightly controlling access to information. As the French economist Yann Moulier-Boutang says in a recent interview, Google poses a threat to “the united front maintained by the intellectual property advocates” because “they have built an economic model that meshes with this free-use era.” He goes on to say:

Google represents a huge step forward. It forced the gaps wide open and caused a crisis, or at least an awkward predicament, for those supporting the proprietary system. This is why I believe it is strategically sound to create an alliance with Google to dismantle old, archaic models, even though I feel we simultaneously need to be ready to fight it, because Google’s goal is to make money, and the company could, in any case, be bought out by Chinese pension funds or anyone else at any point, which could easily lead to problems, especially around the issue of privacy, since Google uses personal data.

The idea of an “alliance with Google” might sound fanciful or silly. But in practice, things like the SOPA fight force everyone to be in an alliance with Google or an alliance with the MPAA. This is the sort of thing I think about when I see people making critiques—often sensible ones—of the exploitative social network capitalists, and then going on to suggest that we should actively dismantle emerging commons and systems of peer production—that “rather than advancing the bounds of the beachhead, we should turn back and destroy it—not just the new forms of peer production and social enterprises that are emerging, but the traditional system of charitable giving and volunteering and the ideal subjectivity of sharing, altruism and cooperation that supports both”.

People making this critique may believe that they are staking out a left-wing alternative to a nefarious new form of postmodern capitalism. But this critique strikes me as an un-dialectical, abstract negation of capitalism, which fails to recognize the way a post-capitalist future can, and must, develop out of capitalism. And given the current balance of class forces, I worry that rejections of peer production and the commons mostly serve to shore up the ideological legitimacy of the most reactionary and ossified parts of capitalism—the same elements that make up the vanguard of rentism.

Commenter JKudler alerted me to one of the less well understood aspects of Martin Luther King’s legacy. I knew that MLK had described himself as a democratic socialist, but I didn’t know that he said this:

In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing — they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.

I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

Naturally I agree, and I encourage you to read the whole thing, which ends on the note I quoted in the title. It’s something to ponder as you go about marking the occasion of MLK day—or, as Ron Paul calls it, Hate Whitey Day—in whatever way you find appropriate.

With all the writing I do about our encroaching dystopia of artificial scarcity and rentier elites, it’s always slightly embarrassing when my writing is trapped behind a paywall. Fortunately, both of my contributions to the new Jacobin have entered the digital commons, now that my editorial on working time and feminism has been posted online. This web version preserves the print and PDF formatting, so it also shows off the work of our fantastic new designer, Remeike Forbes.

My editorial isn’t particularly radical, especially in contrast to the speculative reveries of my main essay in the issue. But I felt like it was worth taking the time to say that if we’re to talk about reducing working time—something that’s a central political concern of mine—we have to be clear that paid work isn’t the only kind, and that reducing time in waged work can sometimes be in tension with equalizing the gender division of labor.

I do wish, though, that I’d said a little more about the institution of the nuclear family, which functions as a kind of unstated premise of my whole editorial. Just after I wrote it, I read this essay by Jenny Turner on recent feminism, which draws out a great point from Toni Morrison by way of Nina Power:

‘Sometimes the things that look the hardest have the simplest answers,’ Nina Power writes towards the end of her chapbook, One Dimensional Woman. She then hands over to Toni Morrison speaking to Time magazine in 1989. On single-parent households: ‘Two parents can’t raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community … The little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for white people or for black people. Why we are hanging onto it I don’t know.’ On ‘unwed teenage pregnancies’: ‘Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can … The question is not morality, the question is money. That’s what we’re upset about.’ On how to break the ‘cycle of poverty’, given that ‘you can’t just hand out money’: ‘Why not? Everybody [else] gets everything handed to them … I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network. That’s the shared bounty of class.’

What about education? If all these girls spend their teenage years having babies, they won’t be able to become teachers and brain surgeons, not to mention missing out on cheap beer, storecards, halls of residence. To which Morrison, with splendour, rejoins: ‘They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons. That’s my job. I want to take them in my arms and say: “Your baby is beautiful and so are you and, honey, you can do it. And when you want to be a brain surgeon, call me – I will take care of your baby.” That’s the attitude you have to have about human life.’

Leaving aside the point about “just handing out money“, which I obviously love, this point about the nuclear family struck me just recently, because I was writing an entry for an academic encyclopedia on the topic of the “24/7 economy”—that is, the fact that 40 percent of employees in the United States don’t work Monday to Friday 9 to 5 jobs, but instead work evenings, nights, weekends, or rotating shifts. Scholars of these “non-standard” work schedules often point out that they tend to make child care logistically difficult, but usually this is posed as a contrast with the “normal” situation of a couple working standard hours. Workers with non-standard hours are much more likely to rely on their relatives for child care, for example; but rather than viewing this the way Morrison does, as an opening onto a more humane and realistic way of organizing care work, it is instead portrayed as a problem and a burden, something which threatens to strain relations between family members.

As long as single and dual parent nuclear families are the norm, it makes sense for the Left to demand policies that at least ease the burden of unpaid work on women, which is what my essay was about. But I’d very much like to reclaim the old socialist-feminist idea that, as Turner puts it, “any politics worth having has to start with the nuclear family: its impossibility, its wastefulness, its historical contingency.” I wouldn’t ultimately be satisfied with reforming the current relations of re-production any more than I just want to humanize the relations of production—the point is to overturn them.

Tom Slee linked this danah boyd post which posits that Facebook is a “social utility”, and hence is likely to end up being regulated like a power company or a cable provider. Slee hopefully predicts that in 2012, “boyd’s view that ‘Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated’ will become mainstream”.

This would definitely be a step in the right direction, and until recently I would have completely endorsed the sentiment, since I’ve thought this way about big Internet companies for a long time. Even before Facebook, it always seemed to me that Google’s search engine, for example, was an immensely important and valuable social utility, and one that’s too important to be left in the hands of a single private sector company. So my suggestion, only a bit joking, would be that we ought to nationalize Google and Facebook.

But I’ve started to wonder if this is the best way of characterizing what Facebook is, and what it does. Is it a company that delivers a necessary good to its customers, or is it an intermediary that facilitates transactions between its customers? Or to put it another way: is Facebook more like a utility, or is it more like a bank?

The most important distinguishing characteristic of utilities is that they tend to be natural monopolies. Because of the huge capital investment involved in laying down things like power or sewer lines, there are huge barriers to entry for competitors and one company tends to dominate. In order to prevent such utilities from extracting huge rents from their monopoly position, the government either has to heavily regulate them, or else take them over and run them directly.

Facebook doesn’t have the kind of massive physical infrastructure of traditional utilities, but it has another kind of barrier to entry: since a social network is valuable in proportion to how many people you know who are already on it, Facebook’s very size tends to draw in new members and dissuade people from jumping to alternative, smaller networks. As boyd points out in her post, a lot of people feel like they need to be on Facebook for social or professional reasons, even if they dislike the company’s approach to to its users’ data.

But it should already be clear from the above that while Facebook’s position resembles that of the traditional utility monopolist in some ways, it isn’t quite the same. Facebook’s power comes not from controlling a lot of expensive infrastructure, but from the fact that people want to communicate and share with as many of their friends as they can, and they need to be on Facebook to do that. But what if it were possible to connect and share with someone on Facebook without joining Facebook?

To explain what I mean by that, I need a different analogy. Instead of a utility, compare Facebook to a bank. Banks operate as part of a larger national monetary system, in which the government regulates commerce, and the Federal Reserve creates money. The banks are repositories for that money, which they are allowed to take in as deposits and send out as loans. In order for the overall financial system to function, there have to be regulations that ensure that customers at different banks can easily deal with each other. For example, the Uniform Commercial Code specifies that if I write a check to a someone and they deposit it at a different bank, my bank is obligated to transfer the funds. So Citigroup isn’t allowed to say that I can only write checks to other Citigroup customers.

This is where the analogy with Facebook comes in. The “stuff” that flows through Facebook’s network—the shares, connections, messages, etc.—is a sort of currency, less like the electricity that you get from the power company and more like the money that’s exchanged between bank customers. An electric company actually creates electricity, but Facebook doesn’t create its content any more than banks create money. (Yes, I know, banks kind of do create money, just bear with my simplification for a moment.) So the paradigm we need is not necessarily a single regulated or nationalized social network, but a tightly regulated social networking system that allows people to communicate across multiple social network institutions.

Imagine that there was a standard social networking protocol, which specified the general things you want to do on a social network: connect your account to the accounts of other people, post status updates, send private messages, post photos, send event invitations, and so on. Now suppose that you’re on Facebook and I’m on Diaspora*, and you want to friend me. In a regulated social networking system, Facebook would be obligated to accept the connection between my Diaspora account and your Facebook account, and to deliver whatever messages or media I chose to share with you. Since the account wouldn’t be on Facebook’s servers, they wouldn’t necessarily know anything about me, I wouldn’t be subject to their ever-changing privacy settings, and the only information they would have about me would be whatever I chose to share with my Facebook-using friends.

Of course, being able to monitor the flow of sharing between Facebook and non-Facebook users still gives Facebook a lot of marketable data, and still raises privacy concerns. But this isn’t an insurmountable regulatory problem, nor is it that different from what happens in the financial system. Credit card companies collect a lot of personal information about us too, after all, even though people seem less inclined to make a fuss about that than they are to fret about Facebook.

This is all a sort of half-formed thought, and it probably doesn’t work for some reason I haven’t thought of yet. And to turn this back around again, the way retail banking is currently structured may not even work very well for banking, much less as a model for social networking. As Ashwin Parameswaran has argued, there’s a good case for replacing federally-insured private banks with a public bank to take retail deposits, something like the postal banking system. So maybe we’re back to nationalizing Facebook after all. I certainly wouldn’t be sorry to see Mark Zuckerberg expropriated.

I didn’t really stop to think about it until the last few weeks, but this has really been a hell of a year, for me personally and for the world in general. A lot of things were really different on January 1, 2011, and a lot of things didn’t go at all as I expected. So pardon me if I get a little verklempt. A year ago…

Mubarak and Ben Ali and Gaddafi were in power, and nobody believed that the protests then underway in Tunisia were going to lead anywhere.

The Wisconsin anti-Walker protests and Occupy Wall Street were unimaginable, nobody was talking about inequality, and political debate revolved around congressional obstructionism and deficit fearmongering.

I didn’t know what the rest of my graduate education was going to look like or whether I was going to have funding; now I’m just back from 3 months in Luxembourg thanks to the support of the Fondation National de la Recherche Luxembourg.

Jacobin was just a quixotic little magazine project that my friend Bhaskar started and that I agreed to write for; now I’m a co-editor, we’ve seen faster growth than I could possibly imagine, and the latest issue has better content, better design, and better attention from people I respect than I ever hoped for.

And this blog was just a place for me to vent my thoughts and practice my writing, with no particular expectation that anybody would read it (except John, of course). Thanks to everyone who’s read and commented here—I get more from you than from most anonymous academic peer reviewers.

In keeping with what appears to be a new Internet tradition, these were the five most-read posts on this site (this doesn’t include traffic to my cross-posts at the Jacobin blog, which would probably change the rankings):

The Partisan and the Political. One link from Talking Points Memo was all it took to get 11,000 people reading this one in a day. It was an argument I’d been meaning to write down for years, but I guess I’m glad I waited.

Anti-Star Trek. The gift that keeps on giving. This post wasn’t even written in 2011, but nobody read it until it got launched into the blogosphere in July. My vision of a rentier dystopia led to countless posts on artificial scarcity, as well as what I think is my most complex and original contribution to Jacobin thus far.

Cheap Labor and the Great Stagnation. This is the great thing about the Internet. I raise a critique of blog-star Tyler Cowen’s book, and the next thing you know Cowen himself is linking to it. This was one of those that I thought almost too obvious to bother writing down, but I guess it really needed to be said.

Capitalism Without Capitalists One of the first posts of mine that ever got attention from a noteworthy blogger, laying out a sort of tricky argument that I still go back to now and then.

The Basic Income and the Helicopter Drop. In this one I got to bang the drum for the Basic Income and pretend I understand the finer points of Federal Reserve monetary policy. And I don’t think I even made too much of an ass of myself!

This year, my ideas and arguments have spread to a wider audience than I ever expected, and I’ve encountered lots of interesting people along the way. If you had told me that Charles Stross would tweet a link to my essay, and that one of my faulty arguments would get corrected by Cosma Shalizi, dayenu. But in addition:

• Bhaskar Sunkara, Seth Ackerman, Mike Beggs, and the whole Jacobin crew are awesome and helped create something I’m really proud of.
• Mike Konczal gave me way more exposure than I deserve, and he’s that rare liberal who takes Marxists seriously. And I even got to make friends with him IRL!
• Aaron Bady is another guy who gave me undue props, and he impresses me by thinking way harder about the role and responsibility of small, non-institutional bloggers than I ever did.
• Henry Farrell has been a thoughtful interlocutor and a consistent promoter of Peter Frase/Jacobin content.
• Rob Horning is always fun to argue with, even if he’ll never be able to abide my relentlessly optimistic techno-futurism.
• Matt Yglesias, whatever my disagreements with him, deserves credit for being the first person to link to both “Capitalism Without Capitalists” and “Anti-Star Trek”, starting me on the path to whatever small amount of Internet attention I now enjoy.
• On a similar note, I’m grateful to Reihan Salam if only because now I can say that my ideas were denounced by the website of the National Review. It’s kind of like in college when all I wanted was to be personally denounced by the right-wing campus paper.

I could go on like this forever, so apologies to all those I’ve omitted.

Back when I didn’t have readers, I didn’t worry too much about letting the blog lapse for weeks or months when I didn’t feel the urge to write. Now I feel a little more pressure to produce, but the discipline of posting regularly is good for me…so I’ll be back for more in 2012. Resolutions include: more statistical graphics, more engagement with female writers, and more veiled references to unspeakably nerdy topics.

It’s the end of a fucked up year, there’s another one coming:

There’s a good article in LA Magazine about UCLA parking theorist Donald Shoup. Shoup has made a name for himself (among urban planning nerds) by showing how urban land use practices systematically over-produce free and cheap parking, leading to all sorts of undesirable consequences for everyday life.

As Matt Yglesias says, Shoup’s views on parking can be reduced to two themes. First, “that governments should not force real estate developers, store owners, and other businessmen to build more parking than their own calculation of what the market balance of supply and demand is.” This is just the straightforward point that the state shouldn’t force the creation of things that have negative externalities and disproportionately benefit the already well-off. More interesting is the second theme, “that governments shouldn’t underprice street parking in a way that leads to Soviet-style shortages of available spaces and elaborate rationing rules about how long you’re allowed to stay in a given spot.” Yglesias, and Shoup, portray their position as a free-market alternative to the evils of central planning, surely a canny move for liberal audiences. But there’s something else going on here; consider this experiment in LA, as described in the LA Magazine article:

This spring the DOT plans to introduce an $18.5 million smart wireless meter system based on Shoup’s theories. Called ExpressPark, the 6,000-meter array will be installed on downtown streets and lots, along with sensors buried in the pavement of every parking spot to detect the presence of cars and price accordingly, from as little as 50 cents an hour to $6. Street parking, like pork bellies, will be open to market forces. As blocks fill, prices will rise; when occupancy drops, so will rates. In an area like downtown, ideal for Shoup’s progressive pricing, people will park based on how much they’re willing to pay versus how far they are willing to walk to a destination.

There are two points I want to make about the two bolded phrases, one directed to my left and one to my right. (See? I’m an even-handed centrist.) To Leftists, this talk of subjecting parking to “market forces” sounds like the usual neo-liberal claptrap, in which public services are thrown open to private avarice. And it’s understandable that we’re all wary of talk of the market, which has become a kind of universal solvent for putative reformers looking to batter down the welfare state; as Tom Frank remarks, faith in the market has a utopian fervor on the right, as the free play of capitalism is presented as the magical solution to all problems.

But rather than accept the ideological representation of The Market as all that is competitive and efficient and bounteous and true about capitalism, it’s worth reflecting on just what the Leftist objections to the market traditionally were, and whether they fit the case described here. There are two that I think are most important. The first is a narrowly economic argument, to the effect that under the “anarchy” of capitalist competition, the pursuit of private profit leads to unjust and irrational results: luxury goods are produced while the poor starve, inventories pile up that no-one can afford to buy, factories lie idle while thousands are looking for work, the environment is despoiled, and so on. In Trotsky’s Transitional Program, there are repeated references to this kind of market anarchy, which will inevitably be superseded by a superior form of rational, conscious, worker-controlled planning. Indeed, says Trotsky, “The necessity of ‘controlling’ economy, of placing state ‘guidance’ over industry and of ‘planning’ is today recognized – at least in words – by almost all current bourgeois and petty bourgeois tendencies, from fascist to Social Democratic.”

But is someone like Donald Shoup trying to introduce the anarchy of the market, or suppress it? Consider:

Parking had never crossed Shoup’s mind when he left Yale for L.A. in 1968—his focus was public finance and land-value theory. In 1975, he stumbled onto a master’s thesis by two USC students who had worked their way through school parking cars for a man named Rex Link. “Link,” says Shoup, “was annoyed that county workers were offered free parking downtown when federal workers had to pay. ” Link’s student employees proposed a study. “They found that 72 percent of county workers drove to work alone,” says Shoup, “but 60 percent of federal employees carpooled, took public transportation, or even walked. These were workers in the same professions, driving to the same location.” When forced to pay a practical value for their parking, drivers were twice as likely to carpool—traffic congestion was halved, carbon emissions were halved. “The more I thought of that,” says Shoup, “the more I thought there was a perfect storm here. No one can tell you why parking prices are set as they are. But when people pay comparatively little for something that’s expensive to produce, the result is collective irrational behavior.”

The Market has been so mystified by its apologists that we no longer recognize a planned economy when we see it. It’s true that that last sentence is, in some ways, redolent of old pro-market critiques of Soviet planning: when prices are arbitrarily decreed by the state rather than equilibrated in competitive markets, irrational and suboptimal outcomes are the result. But Shoup’s alternative is not merely to unleash the anarchy of the market, in which private firms somehow compete to offer parking at the lowest price. The ExpressPark experiment, as described in the first quote, is an exemplary case of central planning. The city begins by decreeing a production target, which in this case is maintaining one empty parking space on each street. The complex system of sensors and pricing algorithms is then used to create price signals that will meet the target. The key point here is that the capitalist market’s causal arrow has been reversed: rather than market price fluctuations leading to an unpredictable level of production, it is the production target that comes first, and the prices are dictated by the quota. What this reminds me of, more than anything, is some of the abortive experiments in economic planning that happened in the USSR under Kruschev, as fictionalized in Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty. Mathematicians and economists, including the Nobel prize winner Leonid Kantorovich, attempted to use the mechanism of prices, not to restore capitalism, but to make central planning work better. Consider this exchange, which Spufford invents between Kantorovich and his academic critics:

‘But what about the evident similarity between your “valuations” and the market prices of a capitalist economy?’ asked Boyarskii, who was sounding rather strained.

‘It’s true that there is a formal resemblance,’ said Leonid Vitalevich. ‘But they have a completely different origin, and therefore a completely different meaning. Whereas market prices are formed spontaneously, objective valuations – shadow prices – must be computed on the basis of an optimal plan. As the plan targets change, the valuations change. They are subordinate to the very different production relationships of a socialist society. Yet, yet, the scope for their use is actually bigger under socialism. The capitalists actually agree with you, Dr Boyarskii, that the mathematical methods we’re talking about should only be applied on the small scale, on the level of the individual firm. They have no choice: there is no larger structure, in the economy of West Germany or the United States, in which they can be set to work. They have had some success, I believe. I’m sorry to say that, since George Danzig and Tjalling Koopmans made their discoveries of “linear programming” in America during the war, the techniques have been adopted there far more eagerly, far more quickly, than in the Soviet Union. Linear programmers in the USA calculate routes for airlines, and devise the investment policies of Wall Street corporations. But we still have an opportunity before us which is closed to the capitalists. Capitalism cannot calculate an optimum for a whole economy at once. We can. There is a fundamental harmony between optimal planning and the nature of socialist society.

This seems much closer to what Donald Shoup is doing than the traditional liberal conception of the free market. The same might be said of various “market based” solutions to climate change, which begin by setting price on carbon or a limit on total carbon emissions and then allow the rights to emit to be traded. Once again, the plan targets come first and the prices come second.

There is a second line of argument against markets, however; that they are not merely anarchic and inefficient, but also induce ideological mystifications that perpetuate capitalism and exploitation. Bertell Ollman puts the point as follows in his criticism of market socialism:

One major virtue of centrally planned societies, then, even undemocratic ones, even ones that don’t work very well, is that it is easy to see who is responsible for what goes wrong. It is those who made the plan. The same cannot be said of market economies which have as one of their main functions to befuddle the understanding of those who live in them. This is essential if people are to misdirect whatever frustration and anger they feel about the social and economic inequality, unemployment, idle machines and factories, ecological destruction, widespread corruption and exaggerated forms of greed that are the inevitable byproducts of market economies. But to the extent this is so, only a critique of market mystification will enable us to put the blame where it belongs, which is to say—on the capitalist market as such and the class that rules over it, in order to open people up to the need for creating a new way of organizing the production and distribution of social wealth.

This attack, too, fails to land a blow against the LA parking experiment. Despite the presence of price signals, and a market, it is no mystery who is responsible for the new regime of fluctuating meter prices: the city of Los Angeles, urged on by its academic homunculus Donald Shoup. Indeed, it is the very visibility of the planners that makes projects like this so controversial among those who take their right to free parking for granted, and who oppose policies like congestion pricing that would mitigate traffic by charging drivers for entering busy areas. This is also part of what makes cap-and-trade climate policy vulnerable to right-wing attack; whatever its “market based” costume, everyone knows that the policy begins with government lawmakers and bureaucrats.

Which is not to say that all opposition to these schemes is unfounded. There’s a blind spot that characterizes many proponents of things like the re-pricing of parking, particularly those who we learned to call “left neo-liberals” this summer. It’s captured in the second phrase I bolded in that first passage: “people will park based on how much they’re willing to pay versus how far they are willing to walk to a destination.” In just three words, “willing to pay”, we have swept away the inequality of wealth and power that any attempt to turn market mechanisms toward planned ends must confront. Willingness to pay, of course, is also a function of ability to pay, and a market mechanism implicitly attributes worth to a person’s desires in proportion to the money they have to spend.

Thoughtful neoclassical economists know this, but they usually choose to ignore it, presumably because the consequences of confronting it would be too politically uncomfortable. Their own theories tell them that, due to the decreasing marginal utility of money, an extra dollar is worth more to the poor than to the rich. It follows that asking an extra dollar for parking hurts the well-being of the poor far more than the rich, and systematically privileges those who don’t need to think twice about paying six dollars for a parking space. To which a good left neo-liberal would no doubt reply that the issues of rational pricing and wealth redistribution are logically distinct and should be thought separately. But politically, this means that redistribution is the lonely last instance that never comes.

All of which is enough to make a good progressive recoil from such a thing as “the market price for street parking”. But this position is not nearly audacious enough. Rather than a rejection of market relations, this is merely a rejection of a novel form of planning, in favor of the older, more obscure, more unfair and more inefficient methods of planning the use of public space. We could say instead that what’s needed is a direct assault on the inequalities of wealth and income that subvert the functioning of prices, and thereby impede the realization of the plan.

Now that the new Jacobin is live, I can point out the essay I’ve been teasing for a while in my posts. It builds on the thought experiment I carried out in my “Anti-Star Trek” post, in which I imagined a fully automated economy where class and profit was based entirely on intellectual property. In the new piece, that hypothetical is just one of four possible futures—two egalitarian utopias and two class-divided dystopias. It’s an attempt to think more systematically about the interaction between automation, ecological and resource limits, and class, and it’s available to read online.

A side issue in the essay, as well as a number of my blog posts, is that I often gesture at things like open source software and other kinds of peer-to-peer (P2P) production, as prefigurations of what labor might look like when freed from its oppressive form as capitalist wage labor. But there are others on the left who see P2P as a negative development, or at least one without much liberatory potential. Take the anonymous Mr. Teacup, whose archives I’ve recently been reading through with great interest. He (I’ll use that pronoun since the alias is male whether or not the blogger is) recently put up a two-part post on “The Peer-Production Illusion”.

The first post argues that “in practice, the open source software movement is compatible with and influenced by capitalism”, which “casts doubt on overly optimistic claims that peer production is intrinsically anti-capitalist.” Teacup shows that much of what looks like voluntary non-waged peer production really isn’t, because most of the work is done by employees of private firms which pay them to work on open source projects. He compares things like the Apache web server software to physical infrastructure: just as capitalists pay taxes that go to build things like roads and sewer systems through the medium of the state, so too firms will collectively fund the development of software that they all use, but from which none of them derives a comparative advantage.

I find little here to disagree with—clearly, P2P isn’t inherently anti-capitalist, and the analogy with physical infrastructure is an astute one. But the second post in the series goes on to to criticize a slightly different view:

The establishment of gift economies, even if they grow profits right now, might contain the seeds of eliminating capitalist production altogether. I’m going to call this the Beachhead Hypothesis: in the vast territory controlled by capitalism, P2P creates autonomous spaces free from exploitative wage labor that can be expanded to encroach further on enemy territory.

I disagree with this hypothesis because I don’t think we took this territory, I think it was created by capitalism.

I believe something quite close to the “Beachhead Hypothesis”, even though I also agree that the P2P space was in many ways created by capitalism. I don’t think this is a contradiction: capitalist relations first arose within a feudal context, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t ultimately point beyond feudalism. The crucial point is that the same set of relations can have a very different meaning depending on the larger social context in which it’s embedded.

While the first “Peer Production Illusion” post argued that much apparently P2P labor was really just capitalist wage labor organized at a supra-firm level, the second post employs a very different line of argument against the Beachhead Hypothesis. Teacup claims that even where “real” peer-production is done by people who aren’t paid for it, it still isn’t promising or liberating. Rather, peer production is actually an integral part of the ideology and practice of neoliberalism, which is built on a “civil society” in which unpaid acts become a source of private profits. Just as the ethic of charity can obscure the need to change structural inequalities, “the altruism of individuals participating in P2P gift economies obscures their role as free labor for capitalism.”

The implication here is that anyone who embraces the P2P ethic is kind of a sap, tricked into doing free labor for the man when they should be demanding a wage for it. Which in a way is true, because the problem with P2P as it exists now is that it is embedded in a society that’s still organized around wage labor. Everyone is still expected to support themselves by working for pay, but capitalists who profit from the work of the P2P economy are evading the fundamental bargain between capital and labor: I, the worker, will do work from which I am alienated and from which someone else profits, and in return you, the capitalist, must pay me a wage.

One response to this is to denounce P2P and other forms of free labor, in an attempt to shore up the wage. This is the direction in which Mr. Teacup seems to tilt. But another answer to this untenable situation is that the problem is not with P2P but with the institution of wage labor itself. If we are all, more and more, producing economic value even when we aren’t at work, this strengthens the case for a “social wage” paid to everyone—i.e., something like my perpetual hobbyhorse, the Unconditional Basic Income. This, indeed, is the direction that post-Autonomists like Hardt and Negri ultimately went. Another way to put this is that the rich need to pay a tax in order to support a piece of social infrastructure that they depend upon: the P2P economy.

But you obviously can’t take that position if you think P2P production is an inseparable part of a neoliberal capitalism that’s even worse than the order that preceded it. The alternative that remains is basically to go back to mid-20th Century social democracy, and to try to restore a real, pure capitalism in which all value-creating labor is rewarded with a wage (although as David Graeber points out, actually-existing capitalism has always depended on lots of labor that doesn’t fit the archetype of contractual wage labor).

A better strategy, I think, would be to learn from those moments when the working class responded to new forms of exploitation not by shoring up the old status quo, but by making a counter-move that advanced the economy forward to yet another new stage. When industrialization threatened traditional craft skills, one response of the labor movement was a craft unionism that tried to preserve the privileges of a small subset of skilled workers. But it was the more radical industrial unions that ultimately helped make possible the social democratic compromise that neoliberalism later undermined—a compromise based on accepting certain kinds of productivity-enhancing, deskilling technological changes in return for a share of the resulting rise in output. Just as craft unions were inadequate to an industrial age, the logic of class struggle in the factory is unlikely to be adequate to a post-industrial context. The question then, isn’t whether P2P is or isn’t capitalist, but whether we can get its capitalist integument to burst asunder.