Peter Frase

I've been putting off this post, waiting for the Libyan revolution to reach some kind of decisive conclusion to its military phase. But it looks like that could take a while: the game of "Where's Muammar" may go on for a while, and in the worst case scenario his loyalists could mount a [prolonged insurgency](http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/09/us-ecb-stark-idUSTRE7883DF20110909). But despite that it's pretty clear that the rebel forces are going to take some sort of tenuous command over the country. So it's worth looking back on the war for Libya, and NATO's participation in it.

When Tripoli fell to the rebel forces, I was glued to Al Jazeera as one neighborhood after another fell, and various Gaddafi family members were captured by the rebel army (or [not](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8718761/Libya-rebels-we-let-Gaddafi-son-Saif-al-Islam-escape.html)). In some ways, the moment was much like the fall of Mubarak, which I memorialized in rather [sentimental and grandiose](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/02/the-right-to-the-unknown/) fashion. But I find my feelings about Libya to be a bit more complicated.

That's not just because the next steps for the Libyan rebels are so unclear, nor only because the "Transitional National Council" currently moving into Tripoli is stuffed full of dodgy former-regime elements, nor just because of the unpleasant [undercurrent](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903532804576564861187966284.html) of [racism](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/30/libya-spectacular-revolution-disgraced-racism) among some of the revolution's supporters. One of the major things that sets Libya apart from what happened in Egypt--aside from the far greater level of death and destruction, obviously--is that the activists in Tahrir Square were clearly making their revolution against the preferences the United States, the Arab despots, and the rest of the imperialist power structure; the U.S. only turned on Mubarak when it became clear that his position was untenable. In Libya, by contrast, the rebels have come to power backed by six months of relentless NATO bombing raids.

I didn't welcome US participation in the war in Libya, but that was as much for American reasons as Libyan ones. I was worried about intervention both because the lack of congressional approval seemed manifestly illegal and set yet another precedent for future executive lawlessness, and because I was skeptical that war would lead to a good outcome. I still don't think those positions were wrong; as Glenn Greenwald [points out](http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/22/libya), the fall of Gaddafi is by no means enough to vindicate the decision to go to war. And even if things have turned out a bit better than I expected, surely Iraq has taught us that "victory" can quickly degenerate into insurgency and civil war.

Yet it remains the case that the rebels look like they will succeed in deposing the vile Gaddafi, and they have done it with NATO support. That's a hard thing to process for somebody like me. As a leftist and an activist, I cut my teeth on anti-imperialism; by chance, the other day I stumbled across this photo of 17-year-old me speaking at a protest against the sanctions on Iraq, circa 1997 or 1998:

Back then, we had to organize against the bombing of Iraq at a time when most people didn't even realize we were still [bombing Iraq](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Southern_Watch).

My experience in the anti-sanctions movement, combined with the [repeated discrediting](http://www.versobooks.com/books/307-the-liberal-defence-of-murder) of the humanitarian-warmongering arguments of the ["decent left"](http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Politics/Waltzer.htm), made it very hard for me to cheer on the NATO-backed Libyan rebels. I've learned the hard way that optimistic liberal claims for US warmaking in the post-Cold War era have been consistently and catastrophically wrong: in Haiti, in Somalia, in Kosovo, in Afghanistan, in Iraq. But I've been forced to conclude that what happened in Libya is something rather novel, which we shouldn't reflexively interpret through the lens of those earlier wars. And if we aren't willing to change our theoretical framework when the world changes, then we're not much better than the liberal hawks, living in the dreamworld of their [perpetual 9/11](http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=532).

Richard Seymour has a more hardline anti-interventionist [post on Libya](http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/08/no-tears-for-qadhafi-no-cheers-for-nato.html) which, while it makes a number of important points, nevertheless seems to me like it strikes rather the wrong note. Seymour observes that "The rebel army is commanded by someone who is most likely a CIA agent", and goes on to predict that the US and its allies will quickly move to set up a pliable regime pro-Western "liberals" who will go along with the designs of neoliberalism.

I agree with this, as far as it goes. But Seymour goes on to say that "I don't think we're witnessing a revolutionary process here." This strikes me as far too simplistic. The leadership of the TNC may not be revolutionaries, but they appear to have only the most tenuous control over the forces that actually defeated Gaddafi, like the Berber units in the Western mountains and the dozens of [privately organized militias](http://www.arabist.net/blog/2011/8/22/libya-can-the-rebels-rule.html). Recall that it was just a few weeks ago that the rebels looked to be too busy [assassinating one another](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/29/abudul-fatah-younes-assassinated-power-vacuum-in-libya-s-rebel-ranks.html) to make any military gains. The usual bourgeois foreign-policy types [are warning](http://spencerackerman.typepad.com/attackerman/2011/08/the-end-is-not-the-end.html) of splits and "instability" on the rebel side, because what the US and NATO want most is a stable and cooperative regime. But the [fractiousness and disorganization](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/06/libya-national-transitional-council) that so terrifies the Western foreign policy intelligentsia is precisely what may yet allow a revolutionary dynamic to emerge.

Here's what I think we lefty anti-imperialists ought to recognize about Libya. First, there was a real revolutionary insurgency on the ground that started long before NATO got involved; that makes the situation completely different from Iraq or Afghanistan. Second, while we should certainly be wary of the attempts of the imperialist powers to control the outcome of events in Libya, we need to acknowledge that *they would have made such attempts even if they hadn't intervened militarily*. And in that case, the interference would have been entirely at the level of covert operations and diplomatic back-channels, and hence harder to expose and criticize. Note that this also means that trying to separate a good Egyptian revolution from a bad Libyan one entails fetishizing military force: it's clear that U.S. pressure on the Egyptian army played some role in pushing Mubarak out of power in the end, but that doesn't invalidate the work of the Tahrir protesters.

It's impossible to know whether the rebels could have won without NATO--which, if it was possible, would have been a preferable outcome. On that score I'm not nearly as certain [as Gilbert Achcar](http://www.zcommunications.org/libya-a-legitimate-and-necessary-debate-from-an-anti-imperialist-perspective-by-gilbert-achcar) that NATO involvement was a necessary evil. But what is certain is that the fall of the house of Gaddafi was not something NATO did *for* the Libyan people; ultimately, it was Libyans who did the fighting and dying on the ground. We should recognize and respect that sacrifice, rather than immediately reducing the rebels to a passive tool of imperialism.

Ultimately, I think the right tone on the Libyan situation--cautious, critical, but hopeful--is the one [struck by Lou Proyect](http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/notes-on-libya/). Lou is certainly no humanitarian imperialist--I first came across him when he was eviscerating the proponents of the war on Serbia in the late 1990's. But in the past few months he's been doing thankless rhetorical battle against the tired pro-Gaddafi arguments of the vulgar anti-imperialist "left", and he recognizes that there's more to the Libyan rebels than the stooges speaking to the cameras in Benghazi.

The position I'm trying to stake out, I guess, is that capitalist wars are never good in and of themselves, since they aren't undertaken for good reasons, but that doesn't mean they can't ever have good consequences, nor does it mean that the enemy of my enemy is always my friend. Given the overall horrible track record of recent U.S. wars, my prior is still to be against intervention in almost all circumstances, and Libya hasn't changed that. But I'm still willing to admit that this time things haven't turned out as badly as usual.

As it stands today, there still aren't any significant NATO ground troops, and the TNC is so far holding firm on the position that there won't be any. Meanwhile, the toppling of Gaddafi is leading to unpredictable outcomes and new embarassments for the U.S. and its allies, such as the [revelations about Gaddafi's close cooperation](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=U8R8YM-K2J8) with the CIA and MI6 in subjecting Libyans to rendition and torture. If the Bush administration taught us anything, it's that imperialist war planners don't always know what they're doing; there's no reason that Libya can't end up diminishing Western power as well.

As [I argued](http://jacobinmag.com/archive/issue2/frase.html) in the second issue of *Jacobin*, the revolutionary upsurge in the Arab world signifies, among other things, the waning grip of American imperialism. (So too does the Obama administration's desperate and ridiculous scramble to stop the Palestinian statehood bid at the UN.) In Libya as in Egypt, the imperialist powers were following behind events, rather than making them. If we fail to comprehend that, we risk attributing a false omnipotence to the United States and its allies, and thus missing a real anti-imperialist victory when it's right under our noses.

And if all of that doesn't convince you, how can you hate on rebel forces that roll like this?

It somehow became a convention of modern blogging that you should periodically throw up a post of links to stuff that you think is interesting, but aren't going to write a whole post about. Some of the pros do one every day, while the amateurs usually do one weekly. If you do it weekly, my understanding is that Friday and Sunday are acceptable days for linkdumps. You're also supposed to have a clever title of some sort, but for now I'll settle for a reference to a great Ice Cube vehicle:

*Friday* came out in 1995. Today, there are a whole lot more people who ain't got no job, though sadly they probably still have shit to do. Anyway, here goes; this edition guaranteed to be 100% 9/11-free.

- Jon Huntsman has [complicated opinions about Captain Beefheart](http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2011/09/06/jon_huntsman_passes_the_captain_beefheart_test.html). Being something of a philistine, I prefer *Doc At the Radar Station*.

- Around the world, ruling parties [lose when the economy](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/09/07/313623/the-comparative-politics-of-the-great-recession/) is bad, regardless of ideology. Which implies that even if the voters are (http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_07/public_opinion_and_keynesian_e031008.php) in theory, they're right in practice: if you don't get results, they'll throw you out.

- Trying to stimulate the economy purely by monetary means might just end up [inflating asset bubbles](http://theamericanscene.com/2011/09/07/monetary-stimulus-and-speculative-bubbles).

- People in their 20's are [mad as hell](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/profiles-of-the-jobless-the-mad-as-hell-millennial-generation/244552/), but seem like they're going to continue to take it for a while longer. The mixture of righteous anger and ideological confusion on display here is fascinating.

- The U.S. economy has about the same number of jobs now as it did [in 2000](http://www.businessinsider.com/), despite a much bigger population. Just imagine what things would be like if we had dealt with this by decreasing hours rather than shedding jobs, and if the income growth of the past ten years had gone to increasing wages instead of swelling the incomes of the top 1%.

- The rise of the [gig economy](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/the-freelance-surge-is-the-industrial-revolution-of-our-time/244229/) is good reason to expand the welfare state and decouple its benefits from employment.

- Ladies and gentlemen, the Internet: [Jack White and the Insane Clown Posse collaborate on a single built around a Mozart sample](http://pitchfork.com/news/43861-jack-white-teams-up-with-insane-clown-posse/). The song is entitled "Lick me in the arse".

- It's impossible to know what really went down in [the crazy battle over the Innocence Project](http://www.chicagomag.com/core/pagetools.php?url=%2FChicago-Magazine%2FOctober-2011%2FWhat-Happened-Between-David-Protess-and-Medill%2Findex.php%3Fcparticle%3D2%26siarticle%3D1&mode=print) at Northwestern's school of journalism. But my inclination is to come down against the servile and morally bankrupt culture of "objective" journalism, and in favor of a project that, whatever its errors, demonstrably saved the lives of people wrongly condemned to the state of Illinois' machinery of death.

- As I've [noted before](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/against-jobs-for-full-employment/), sometimes "job killing" policy is a [very good thing](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/09/08/314310/creating-jobs-by-making-peoples-lives-worse/).

- Peter Dorman [speculates](http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2011/09/political-economy-and-financialization.html) about the incentives and ideology of the elite in finance capitalism, and why it's so hard to pit one segment of big business against another.

There's a perpetual argument, among people who care about intellectual property law, about whether unauthorized copying (downloading mp3s, say) is properly called "stealing", and whether it's morally equivalent to taking a physical object from someone. There are powerful forces that want to draw an equality between copying and stealing, as we recently saw in comical style in the [Aaron Swartz](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/artificial-scarcity-watch-arrested-for-downloading-from-jstor/) case. The contending positions in this debate reflect fundamental differences of opinion about how we should view the circulation of immaterial goods like musical recordings or software; I want to draw out some of these differences by contrasting three recent posts from three different authors on the copying-versus-stealing issue.

[Matt Yglesias](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/09/01/310455/copy-digital-files-still-isnt-the-same-as-stealing-physical-objects/) recapitulates the standard argument of intellectual property critics, which is the one I've always been most sympathetic to: copying and stealing are totally different things. This position turns on the distinction between what economists call "rivalrous" and "non-rivalrous" goods. A good is rivalrous if you can't give one person access to the good without reducing someone else's access to it. If I walk into a store and take a pair of shoes, for example, then I have more shoes than I had before, but the store has less shoes. With non-rivalrous goods, on the other hand, you can expand access without reducing anyone's ability to enjoy the good. So if I copy an mp3 file, then I have one more mp3 than I had before, but nobody else has less mp3s. The upshot of this argument is that it doesn't make sense to restrict the distribution of non-rivalrous goods unless such restrictions are necessary to encourage people to create the non-rivalrous goods in the first place. That latter rationale is the one written into the part of the constitution that permits copyrights, but IP critics today hold that copyright has expanded far beyond this original purpose.

Yglesias was responding to a post from [Gavin Mueller](http://jacobinmag.com/blog/?p=1465), which stakes out the position that copying and physical stealing are basically the same. But rather than take the IP lobby position that copying is stealing, Mueller basically argues that stealing isn't really stealing either, because things like mass-produced shoes aren't scarce in the way the theory of rivalrous goods requires. I have some problems with Mueller's argument, so let me reconstruct it in a form that I think is more defensible.

In a capitalist economy, manufactured commodities aren't "scarce" in the narrow sense. That is, the quantity of shoes in the world isn't fixed. There are factories around the world that could ramp up production of shoes if they wanted to, especially in a recessionary period like this one. What constrains the supply of shoes at the margin is the lack of *demand* for them. But if some people go and steal some shoes from a store, then the owner will have to order more shoes sooner than she otherwise would have, and as a result there will be more shoes in the world than there would have been otherwise. As long as the amount of shoplifting is small relative to the amount of shoes that are sold, the result will not be to put the shop out of business; rather the loss will be absorbed through some combination of reduced profits or higher prices for paying customers.

You could therefore make the argument that a certain amount of shoplifting is welfare-improving for society as a whole, particularly if the owners and paying customers are richer than the shoplifters, and thus able to afford absorbing the cost of the shoplifted loot. Moreover, shoplifting is good Keynesian stimulus! The problem, of course, is that it's heinously unfair to decide who gets free shoes on the basis of who's crafty and daring enough to be a good shoplifter--but that's a different kind of argument, a *moral* argument, and I'll get to that below.

For the third position in this debate, we have [Kevin Drum](http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/09/it-stealing-or-sharing), who also takes the position that copying and stealing aren't so different--but he touches down close to the IP lobby position that copying is like physical stealing, and both are always wrong. Drum bases his argument on the monetary cost of copying or stealing. If you steal shoes from someone, you've deprived them of the retail price of the shoes (or perhaps somewhat less than that if the shoes were bought on discount, old and worn, etc.) Likewise, if you copy somebody's album, then "his loss is the royalty payment he won't get on the album you didn't buy."

The problem with this line of argument is that Drum has redefined "stealing" in a way that makes it almost infinitely expansive: whether you steal a person's shoes or copy their album, he says, "in both cases, you're causing [them] to take a financial loss." But the right not to take a financial loss is not a right that capitalist societies have traditionally recognized--indeed, the notion that property owners should be guaranteed a revenue stream from their property is a [rentier logic](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/slouching-towards-rentier-capitalism/). It's a bogus argument when it's made by German banks demanding full payment on their [crappy loans](http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/12/the-questionable-prudence-of-the-savers/), and it's equally bogus in this context.

By the "financial loss" criterion, all kinds of things that we think of as legitimate constitute "stealing". If I badmouth a bad auto mechanic on the Internet and reduce his business, I'm "stealing" his reputation. If Apple introduces a really popular new iPhone that causes people to switch from Android, it's "stealing" Android's market share. Drum recognizes this and admits that "there are lots of ways of causing people to take a financial loss, and not all of them come under the rubric of stealing." But he doesn't make a real case for why copying is more like shoplifting than it is like posting negative Yelp reviews. Instead, he blows off the whole argument by saying that "it mostly seems to be a way of avoiding the very real fact that you've caused someone a financial loss by appropriating something you haven't paid for." But this just begs the question: the whole issue under debate is about *what it's legitimate to make people pay for*.

My take on all of this is that these issues can't be resolved by appeals to economics or financial damage. This argument is really about two conflicting sets of values about how culture and knowledge should be treated, or two different "moral economies". The term "moral economy", as used by historians, refers to the beliefs people hold in common about what constitutes legitimate and proper behavior by economic actors, and what is unacceptable even if it is legal or profitable. As E.P. Thompson said in a [famous essay](http://libcom.org/history/moral-economy-english-crowd-eighteenth-century-epthompson) about English bread riots in the 18th century:

> It is of course true that riots were triggered off by soaring prices, by malpractices among dealers, or by hunger. But these grievances operated within a popular consensus as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking, etc. This in its turn was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community, which, taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor. An outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation, was the usual occasion for direct action.

Thompson goes on to observe that at this time, "bakers were considered as servants of the community, working not for a profit but for a fair allowance"; hence their behavior was constrained not just by what was legal or profitable, but by what was considered morally right.

Moral beliefs about what is legitimate economic behavior are not unique to early capitalism, but exist even in a hyper-marketized age like our own. As Karl Polanyi [argued](http://www.scribd.com/doc/24760408/Karl-Polanyi-s-Concept-of-Embeddedness-Fred-Block), all economies are embedded in a broader set of social relations. And moral economies are very much in play in the debate over copying and stealing. In the Aaron Swartz case, for example, a lot of the outrage was about a moral assumption: that academic work done mostly for free, by professors who are often supported by taxpayer money, shouldn't be locked up behind an incredibly expensive paywall.

In the general debate over intellectual property, I discern two antithetical moral economies, which I think lie beneath many of the contending positions.

The first views the wealth of human culture and knowledge as something that is the shared cultural wealth of all of us. It recognizes that all new works of art and science are built on the foundation of older works, and go on to influence future works in their turn. It regards sharing, adapting, and improving older works as a positive value, and restricting access to existing culture as a negative value. Thus, in this moral economy, it is of the utmost importance that we be able to share and copy freely. Any restriction on the right to share and copy must be rigorously justified and shown to be in the interest of increasing our cultural wealth overall--as in the U.S. Constitution's statement that copyright is allowed if it serves "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." While it isn't inherently incompatible with intellectual property, the trajectory of this moral economy is to create a new kind of [class struggle](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=586463) and to put us on the road to [dotCommunism](http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/dcm.html).

The contrasting moral economy holds that when someone participates in generating a new work of culture or knowledge, then that person has the inherent right to control the distribution and reuse of that information, and to receive payment for any profitable use to which that information may be put. Far from seeing pervasive restrictions on copying as a necessary evil, it sees them as exalting and honoring the hard work and creative genius of those who make new art and science. In this moral economy, to appropriate the creations of another is to violate the creator. But that way lies [anti-Star Trek](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/).

I think the debates about intellectual property would be a lot more productive if we recognized that they are fundamentally about two different and competing moral orders. I know that whenever I talk about these issues with normal people--i.e., not geeks who are obsessed with IP law--they aren't very interested in arguments about economic efficiency or rentier capitalists. They're interested in what's *right*, and views about that range from the demand that culture should be [free as in freedom](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) to the insistence that above all else, you must [pay the writer](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE).\*

\* *Which, to be clear, I'm in favor of. I just have other ideas about how [the writer should get paid](http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-artistic-freedom-voucher-internet-age-alternative-to-copyrights/).*

Today, of course, isn't the real [labor day](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers_Day), merely a fake American version with origins in the machinations of [anti-labor politicians](http://curiousnewyork.blogspot.com/2011/09/origins-of-labor-day.html).

Still, we can celebrate any day that's a holiday. It may be true, as [this *New York Times* op-ed says](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/sunday/do-happier-people-work-harder.html?ref=opinion), that "Labor Day is meant to be a celebration of work". But as the same article goes on to say:

> The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which has been polling over 1,000 adults every day since January 2008, shows that Americans now feel worse about their jobs — and work environments — than ever before. People of all ages, and across income levels, are unhappy with their supervisors, apathetic about their organizations and detached from what they do. And there’s no reason to think things will soon improve.

Rather than celebrate work, I'd prefer to celebrate *workers*. And the best way to truly pay respect to the workers of the world is not to glorify the [misfortune of labor](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/03/undercover-boss-and-the-misfortune-of-labor/), but to celebrate those temporary moments of freedom from wage labor that the workers' movement has managed to win.

Here are a couple of relevant passages on that theme. [Via](http://jacobinmag.com/blog/?p=1473) Malcolm Harris, I was recently reminded of [this passage](http://operaismoinenglish.wordpress.com/2010/09/29/struggle-against-labor/) from Mario Tronti that makes that's still relevant after nearly 50 years:

> The contemporary forms of workers’ struggles in the heartlands of advanced capitalism unmistakably reveal, in the rich content of their own spontaneity, the slogan of __the struggle against wage labor as the only possible means of striking real blows against capital.__ The party must be the organization of what already exists within the class, but which the class alone cannot succeed in organizing. No worker today is disposed to recognize the existence of labor outside capital. __Labor equals exploitation: This is the logical prerequisite and historical result of capitalist civilization.__ From here there is no point of return. __Workers have no time for the dignity of labor. The “pride of the producer” they leave entirely to the boss.__ Indeed, only the boss now remains to declaim eulogies in praise of labor. True, in the organized working-class movement this traditional chord is, unfortunately, still to be heard – but not in the working class itself; here there is no longer any room for ideology. Today, the working class need only look at itself to understand capital. It need only combat itself in order to destroy capital. It has to recognize itself as political power, deny itself as a productive force. For proof, we need only look at the moment of struggle itself: During the strike, the "producer" is immediately identified with the class enemy. The working class confronts its own labor as capital, as a hostile force, as an enemy – this is the point of departure not only for the antagonism, but for the organization of the antagonism.

> __If the alienation of the worker has any meaning, it is a highly revolutionary one. The organization of alienation: This is the only possible direction in which the party can lead the spontaneity of the class.__ The goal remains that of refusal, at a higher level: It becomes active and collective, a political refusal on a mass scale, organized and planned. Hence, the immediate task of working-class organization is to overcome passivity.

And then there's this, from André Gorz's misunderstood classic [*Farewell to the Working Class*](http://books.google.com/books?id=7wxpl7sYYCYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=gorz+farewell+working+class&hl=en&ei=Nb5jTpqyF6rv0gG1heGKCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false):

> For workers, it is no longer a question of freeing themselves within work, putting themselves in control of work, or seizing power within the framework of their work. The point now is to free oneself from work by rejecting its nature, content, necessity and modalities. But to reject work is also to reject the traditional strategy and organisational forms of the working-class movement. It is no longer a question of winning power as a worker but of winning the power no longer to function as a worker. The power at issue is not at all the same as before. The class itself has entered into crisis.

So enjoy the beer and barbecues folks, and revel in your power not to function as a worker.

Here's something timely for Labor Day: a couple of my colleagues at CUNY have produced a report on the state of union membership--focused on New York State and City, but with national numbers included as well. (I did some work on the report as well, but my role was limited to designing the layout, so I can take no credit for the writing or data analysis.)

The broad findings will not be surprising to those who follow these things: the percentage of workers who are members of labor unions has fallen at a fairly rapid pace in the past ten years, and has continued to fall during the recession. This trend is driven primarily by the decline in private sector unionization--union density in the public sector is both much higher and fairly stable over the past decade.

There are lots of other interesting details in the report, which includes breakdowns by age, gender, race, education, industry, and immigration status. You should [go read the whole thing](http://www.urbanresearch.org/news/second-annual-state-of-the-unions-report-released-in-commemoration-of-2011-labor-day), but here a few semi-randomly chosen facts that I found interesting:

- People with at least a 4-year college degree are the most likely to be union members.
- This is probably because the sector of the economy with by far the highest unionization rates is education, which is also one of the biggest sectors. It's not surprising to see teachers bearing the brunt of anti-union attacks, when you realize what a huge portion of American union members they constitute.
- In the U.S. as a whole, men are more likely to be union members than women. In New York City, though, women are actually more unionized--largely because they tend to work in the highly-unionized public sector. Women are the future of the labor movement, if it is to have one.
- Blacks and whites are unionized at roughly equal rates nationwide, but blacks are much more highly unionized in New York, again probably because blacks are more likely to work in the public sector.
- It's true, as you might expect, that immigrant workers are less likely to be unionized than native born workers. But that's really just a small subplot of the broader story of declining unionization: workers who immigrated recently are much less unionized than those who immigrated earlier, just as young workers are much less unionized than older workers; people who immigrated before 1990 are unionized at a higher rate than native-born workers.

For more analysis, and lots of graphs and tables, go [check out the report](http://www.urbanresearch.org/news/second-annual-state-of-the-unions-report-released-in-commemoration-of-2011-labor-day).

These facts about unions bear on some of the recent [discussions](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/policy-politics-and-strategy/) of [theories of politics](http://crookedtimber.org/2011/07/19/20991/) and the political basis of progressive politics under neoliberalism. Leftists and liberals still don't really have a credible strategy for building a winning progressive coalition that isn't centered on the labor movement. The decline in union density, and the transformation of the labor movement from a private sector to a public sector institution, force us to ask some hard questions. Either the labor movement has to be revived, or we need a new institutional basis for the left. I tend to be pessimistic about reviving labor in anything like its traditional form, since we really only have one historical example of sustained union strength, and that was based on an industrial economy that [isn't coming back](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/04/the-united-states-makes-things/).

But there are obviously a lot of things that would help labor to recover at least a bit (EFCA, sigh). I'll close with one thing that's based on a personal observation, from on my experience as a member of a union bargaining committee that recently [negotiated a first contract](http://psc-cuny.org/new-union-contract-cuny-research-foundation-workers). I'm convinced that severing the connection between health care and employment would be really good for unions, despite the labor movement's opposition to [some of the moves](http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/15/nation/la-na-health-congress15-2010jan15) in this direction. A huge amount of our negotiating time was taken up with a fight over how the cost of health insurance would be divided between employer and employee, in the context of premiums that are accelerating rapidly for reasons neither workers nor bosses can control. The need to hold down our members' health care costs sucked up a huge amount of bargaining time and money that could otherwise have gone to providing raises or addressing other aspects of the work environment. If there were a real, quality public option for health care, I would have considered trying to sell my fellow members on a radical idea: let's propose phasing out employer-provided insurance, getting people onto public plans, and putting those employer savings into big wage increases. But for now, that's just a dream for the future, and instead the best I can tell those members is that we successfully fought for their health care costs to skyrocket less rapidly than their non-union counterparts.

It's pretty cool to discover that someone likes your writing enough to translate it for free. So I'm happy to report that my [most popular post of all time](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/) is now available [in German](http://www.systempunkte.org/article/anti-star-trek) at systempunkte.org, which was described to me as "a blog platform with a broadly left-libertarian and anarchist focus."

Thanks to Chris from systempunkte for doing the translation. If any of my readers happen to be Deutsch-speaking, let me know what you think of it.

Yesterday I saw Doug Henwood [interview](http://lbo-news.com/2011/08/22/me-interviewing-david-graeber-2/) the anthropologist David Graeber about his new [book about debt](http://www.mhpbooks.com/book.php?id=308). It was a fascinating discussion, and it made me decide that I'm going to have to read the book, despite it coming in at 500 pages and being a bit overpriced in its e-book edition.

One of the themes that came up a lot in the discussion was the way that debt has historically functioned as the foundation of economic domination in a lot of different social formations. As Graeber wryly put it, conquering invaders will happily tell their new subjects that they now owe a debt that must be repaid for the cost of conquering them. And rulers in various times and places have canceled debts as a way of keeping the peace, as in the tradition of the [Jubilee year](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(Christianity)).

Graeber cited the historian Moses Finley, who [identified](http://books.google.com/books?id=qryPvhlXlSIC&pg=PA80&lpg=PA80&dq=finley+revolutionary+program+antiquity&source=bl&ots=XXxFnTew1P&sig=dxokevFInfWf5C7CAiBEWVvQnsE&hl=en&ei=_UFVTu2ENsnc0QHSntnCAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false) "the perennial revolutionary programme of antiquity, cancel debts and redistribute the land, the slogan of a peasantry, not of a working class". And as Mike Konczal (who was also there last night) [notes](https://twitter.com/#!/rortybomb/status/106417920141295616), "The balance-sheet recession policy for USA is basically: 'abolish the debts, and redistribute the land.'".

But if we seem to be returning to a millenia-old politics of debt, that only highlights the anomaly of the past two centuries. In at least some places, "cancel the debts, redistribute the land" hasn't been the primary slogan. Rather, the demands were for ["eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest"](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day), and later for more jobs, or higher wages, or more job security.

These demands, of course, all presuppose a society of generalized wage labor, in which people think of it as normal or inevitable to work for a boss in order to procure the means of subsistence. And it is the presence of generalized wage labor--and therefore, of capitalism--that marks out the 19th and 20th centuries as anomalous. When we think about this in relation to debt, we can see that one of the distinctive features of capitalism is that it is a system that can, in principle, control the exploited classes *without* pervasive debt relations. That is, the archetypal wage laborer does not necessarily have any debt. But they also don't have the means of production to produce for themselves, hence they are forced to work for a wage. Thus, [the worker is](http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm) "free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power."

In practice, of course, individual debt has always been an important part of capitalism, and debt and credit are indispensable to other parts of the system as well. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is something significant about the increasing [importance of debt](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/its-the-household-debt-stupid/2011/08/12/gIQApqWcZJ_blog.html) in our political economy. It may be indicative not merely of a short-term debt bubble, but a longer-term shift away from the canonical form of capitalism I just described. This is related to my previous [discussions](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/slouching-towards-rentier-capitalism/) of rentier capitalism, since one of the problems I've spent a lot of time thinking about is how one could maintain relations of class power if it becomes possible for people to survive outside of wage labor. I've mostly been concerned with the way in which the state can create artificial scarcity through intellectual property laws and the like (e.g., [anti-Star Trek](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/)). But debt is an equally important part of the picture, and one which I think I've tended to overlook.

This suggests one source of the left's political confusion today. Leftists and liberals are used to viewing issues of jobs, hours and wages as the core problem facing workers. And insofar as most people are still wage laborers, that still appears to be the case. Yet it seems to me that we could easily arrive at a situation where it is technically possible for people to opt out of wage labor (due to the wonders of the Internet, [3D printers](http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page), small-scale [communal production](http://www.julietschor.org/2010/05/welcome-to-plenitude/), and so on) but where people are still compelled to work for bosses in order to pay off their debts. (And we can only guess at what new forms of debt will be concocted to cement this system in place. Perhaps we will all one day be born with debt, for the privilege of being born in America?) In that situation, it might appear that the fundamental problem was inadequate demand, or low wages, or something else to do with the labor market. But the real problem would be the existence of all this inviolable debt.

Indeed, widespread and large debt loads are one of the most important ways in which [my generation](http://books.google.com/books?id=9NcOLMKJxKsC&lpg=PT2&ots=7A0xNx0EKm&dq=kamenetz%20debt&pg=PT2#v=onepage&q&f=false) differs from those that immediately preceded it. The need to service debts--chiefly student loan debt, but also credit card debt in many cases--shapes every decision people make in their early adulthood. People who might otherwise want to sacrifice some income in order to pursue their goals are forced into corporate careers in order to pay off their debts. This has direct implications for the left: more than once, older comrades have noted to me that it has become much more difficult to live in the kind of bohemian poverty that sustained an earlier generation of young radicals and activists.

As a matter of political consciousness, it's important to drive home the point that insofar as we are burdened with debt, we are not free people--not even in the impoverished sense in which Marx spoke of the "free" laborer. In the spirit of Corey Robin's [call](http://www.thenation.com/article/159748/reclaiming-politics-freedom) to reclaim the politics of freedom, it's time to demand freedom from debt.

And there may be some advantages to a politics centered around debt rather than wage labor. The problem confronting the wage laborer is that they are, in fact, dependent on the boss for their sustenance, unless they can solve the collective action problem of getting everyone together to [expropriate the expropriators](http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Marx/mrxCpA32.html). Debt, on the other hand, is just an agreed-upon social fiction denoting an obligation for some act of consumption that has *already occurred*. The only way to make people respect debt is through some combination of brute force and ideological legitimacy--a legitimacy that we can only hope is [starting to slip away](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/obama-goes-all-out-for-dirty-banker-deal-20110824).

Jared Bernstein [recently posted](http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/miles-to-go-before-we-sleep/) the graph of U.S. Vehicle Miles Traveled released by the Federal Highway Administration. Bernstein notes that normally, recessions and unemployment don't affect our driving habits very much--until the recent recession, miles traveled just kept going up. That has changed in recent years, as VMT still hasn't gotten back to the pre-recession peak. Bernstein:

> What you see in __the current period is a quite different—a massive decline in driving over the downturn with little uptick since.__ Again, both high unemployment and high [gas] prices are in play here, so there may be a bounce back out there once the economy gets back on track. But it bears watching—__there may be a new behavioral response in play, with people's driving habits a lot more responsive to these economic changes than they used to be.__

> Ok, but what's the big deal? Well, I've generally been skeptical of arguments about "the new normal," thinking that __much of what we're going through is cyclical__, not structural, meaning things pretty much revert back to the old normal once we're growing in earnest again. __But it's worth tracking signals like this that remind one that at some point, if it goes on long enough, cyclical morphs into structural.__

Brad Plumer [elaborates](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/why-are-americans-driving-less/2011/08/18/gIQAUv7tNJ_blog.html):

> __What could explain this cultural shift? Maybe more young people are worried about the price of gas or the environment.__ But—and this is just a theory—technology could play a role, too. Once upon a time, newly licensed teens would pile all their friends into their new car and drive around aimlessly. For young suburban Americans, it was practically a rite of passage. Nowadays, however, __teens can socialize via Facebook or texting__ instead—in the Zipcar survey, more than half of all young adults said they'd rather chat online than drive to meet their friends.

> But that's all just speculation at this point. As Bernstein says, __it's still unclear whether the decline in driving is a structural change or just a cyclical shift that will disappear once (if) the U.S. economy starts growing again.__

Is it really plausible to posit this kind of cultural shift, particularly given the evidence about the [price elasticity of oil](http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/04/raw-data-everyone-loves-oil)? As it happens, I did a bit of analysis on this point a couple of years ago. Back then, Nate Silver wrote a [column](http://www.esquire.com/features/data/nate-silver-car-culture-stats-0609) in which he tried to use a regression model to address this question of whether the decline in driving was a response to economic factors or an indication of a cultural trend. Silver argued that economic factors--in his model, unemployment and gas prices--couldn't completely explain the decline in driving. If true, that result would support the "cultural shift" argument against the "cyclical downturn" argument.

I wrote a [series](http://www.peterfrase.com/2009/05/attempt-to-regress/) [of](http://www.peterfrase.com/2009/05/predictin/) [posts](http://www.peterfrase.com/2009/05/one-last-time/) in which I argued that with a more complete model--including wealth and the lagged effect of gas prices--the discrepancies in Silver's model seemed to disappear. That suggests that we don't need to hypothesize any cultural change to explain the decline in driving. You can go to those older posts for the gory methodological details; in this post, I'm just going to post an updated version of one of my old graphs:

The blue line is the 12-month moving average of Vehicle Miles Travelled--the same thing Bernstein posted. The green and red lines are 12-month moving averages of *predicted* VMT from two different regression models--the Nate Silver model and my expanded model, as described in the earlier post I linked. The underlying models haven't changed since my earlier version of this graph, except that I updated the data to include the most recent information, and switched to the 10-city Case Shiller average for my house price measure, rather than the OFHEO House Price Index that I was using before, but which seems to be an [inferior measure](http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2008/01/house-prices-comparing-ofheo-vs-case.html).

The basic conclusion I draw here is the same as it was before: a complete set of economic covariates does a pretty good job of predicting miles traveled. In fact, even Nate Silver's simple "gas prices and unemployment" model does fine for recent months, although it greatly overpredicts during the depths of the recession.\* So I don't see any cultural shift away from driving here--much as I would like to, since I personally hate to drive and I wish America wasn't built around car ownership. Instead, the story seems to be that Americans, collectively, have experienced an unprecedented combination of lost wealth, lost income, and high gas prices. That's consistent with graphs like [these](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/07/18/271412/the-consumer-bust-and-the-inevitability-of-politics/), which look a lot like the VMT graph.

The larger point here is that we can't count on shifts in individual preferences to get us away from car culture. The entire built environment of the United States is designed around the car--sprawling suburbs, massive highways, meager public transit, and so on. A lot of people can't afford to live in walkable, bikeable, or transit-accessible places even if they want to. Changing that is going to require a long-term change in government priorities, not just a cultural shift.

Below are the coefficients for my model. The data is [here](http://www.peterfrase.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/silver_driving_2011.csv), and the code to generate the models and graph is [here](http://www.peterfrase.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/silver_driving_2011.R.txt).

Coef. s.e.

(Intercept) 111.55 2.09

unemp -1.57 0.27

gasprice -0.08 0.01

gasprice_lag12 -0.03 0.01

date 0.01 0.00

stocks 0.58 0.23

housing 0.10 0.01

monthAugust 17.52 1.01

monthDecember -9.21 1.02

monthFebruary -31.83 1.03

monthJanuary -22.90 1.02

monthJuly 17.84 1.02

monthJune 11.31 1.03

monthMarch -0.09 1.03

monthMay 12.08 1.02

monthNovember -10.46 1.01

monthOctober 5.82 1.01

monthSeptember -2.73 1.01

---

n = 234, k = 18

residual sd = 3.16, R-Squared = 0.99

\* *That's important, since you could otherwise argue that the housing variable in my model--which has seen an unprecedented drop in recent years--is actually proxying a cultural change. I doubt that for other reasons, though. If housing is removed from the model, it underpredicts VMT during the runup of the bubble, just as Silver's model does. That suggests that there is some real wealth effect of house prices on driving.*

I've been making an effort to read and engage more with blogs written by women, because the recent online conversations I've been involved with have been oppressively dude-heavy. I've also been meaning to write about gaming, because I think people who love games and take them seriously should be out of the closet about it, and not give in to the stigma that still tends to relegate games to a status below that of other art forms. Fortuitously, I spotted an opportunity to hit both targets at once.

Alyssa Rosenberg is writing about [her experience playing *Portal*](http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2011/08/12/294109/video-games-and-fear-of-death/). It's a wonderful game, which I may have more to say about later, but what caught my eye was something more general about games. Rosenberg says that one thing holding her back in that game, and in games in general, is a discomfort with dying:

> I’ve figured out one of the things that kept me from playing games regularly for a long time: I find dying in-game incredibly stressful.

And,

> I’m surprised that there isn’t more conversation about what dying in game makes us feel about our own deaths.

I completely agree that constant player death is both a central feature of video games, and one that gets insufficient discussion. But either Rosenberg just reacts to games differently than I do, or else she has yet to get past something that I eventually dealt with when I was getting back into video games. Because while I understand the first sentiment I quoted, I think that the second is really pointing in the wrong direction in terms of helping us (or at least me) understand the meaning of video game death.

I got back into games a couple of years ago, after hardly playing them at all since the 16-bit era. And I initially struggled with in-game death as well, but I would characterize the issue a bit differently. As strange as this seems, I don't view video game death as a signifier for real world death at all; rather, death in games is a metaphor for *failure* in life. After all, death in games is unlike real world death in the only way that really matters: after you die, you get to go back and try again.

This argument sort of relates to a long-running debate in games criticism between so-called "narratologists", who treat games as vehicles for story and character and hence tend to take the story elements of the game more literally, and "ludologists" who view games chiefly as formal systems and ludic experiences (see for instance this [this debate](http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2011/02/tom-bissell-and-simon-ferrari-on-games-criticism.html) between Tom Bissell and Simon Ferrari). But I think it cuts across it in some ways.

I really came to terms with the nature of in-game death when I was playing through the *Mass Effect* games, which are some of my favorites of recent years. Being bad at games and out of practice, I wasn't very good at the action portions of the games. And yet I didn't want to turn down the difficulty to "easy" just to get through the story--that felt wrong, unsatisfying, and cheap. I wanted to beat the game on one of the higher difficulties, in order to feel like I had really mastered it, and really overcome a challenge.

But doing that meant dying. A lot. And I eventually realized that what I disliked about that wasn't that dying somehow reminded me of my own mortality, but that it dredged up my fear of failure. It was as though the game was constantly reminding me how inept I was, how far my abilities fell short of my ambitions. And so the only way to get myself through the experience, and to accept repeatedly dying, was to recontextualize what failure meant. Dying no longer meant that I was bad at the game (although, proximately, it did mean that). Instead, dying meant that I had the game on a high enough difficulty level. Dying was proof that I was challenging myself, putting myself in situations where I would be forced to get better, forced to learn new ways of getting through each level.

In that way, I came to see dying as a positive sign over the course of those *Mass Effect* play-throughs. In fact, if I went too long without dying, I would take this as a sign that I needed to turn the difficulty slider up to the next level. I even coined a motto that I'd repeat to myself, in order to ward off complacency: *If you're not dying, you're not learning*. And if playing games has any positive value for the rest of my life, it's summed up in that slogan. One thing that I think has tended to hold me back in a lot of areas--and I think this is true for a lot of people who are used to being successful and precocious--is a fear of trying something and failing, and thereby being exposed somehow as an incompetent or a fraud. Games helped me get a little bit better at accepting failure as a natural part of the learning process, a way of figuring out what you need to do to be successful in the future.

That's an important thing to internalize, whether you apply it to submitting papers to journals, applying for jobs, asking people out on dates, or suggesting guitar parts to your band. Which isn't to say that games have to be ["moral vitamins"](http://www.long-sunday.net/long_sunday/2006/07/shivering_lives.html) in order to be artistically legitimate, just that in this particular case they did sort of work that way for me.

Now I just need [Horning](http://www.popmatters.com/pm/blogs/marginal-utility/) to tell me how I'm actually brainwashing myself into neoliberal subjectivity...

Sometimes, I read a couple of apparently unrelated blog posts in quick succession, and immediately spot a connection between them. I'm never sure whether I'm being insightful, or just giving in to the incorrigible tendency of the primate *homo sapiens* to find patterns in everything. Anyway, take this for what you will.

Kevin Drum [points us](http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/08/rich-and-their-legal-teams) to a particularly galling story of the rich using lawsuits to push people around and get their way, in this case by harassing hot-air balloon operators for disrupting their "Moorish fortress castle" for "ultra high net worth individuals".

This made me think of [this recent post](http://coreyrobin.com/2011/08/16/one-less-bell-to-answer-further-thoughts-on-neoliberalism-by-way-of-mike-konczal-and-burt-bachrach/) by Corey Robin, also discussed by [Mike Konczal](http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/08/14/examining-the-limitations-of-a-neoliberal-safety-net-romneys-unemployment-insurance-savings-accounts/) with follow-up [here](http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/unemployment-insurance-savings-account-as-a-purposeful-way-of-making-ui-more-difficult-cumbersome/). They're talking about Mitt Romney's new proposal to replace Unemployment Insurance with individual UI savings accounts, instead of the pooled public insurance fund we have now.

See Konczal's first post for an explanation of all the ways in which private accounts are inferior as a way of dealing with unemployment. What I'm interested in is that managing a personal UI account would be much more cumbersome than just having UI paycheck deductions go into a general fund, and that this is part of a more general neoliberal phenomenon where, as Corey Robin puts it, "all of us are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping track of each and every facet of our economic lives".

This is where I made the connection with the balloonist lawsuits. The underlying theme here is that in a highly unequal society, greater complexity in the institutions of the state will generally favor the interests of the rich. The more complex the law is, the more victory in court comes to depend not on who is legally in the right, but on who can spend more money on their legal team. The value of a personalized UI account will be greater, and the associated hassle smaller, for those who can afford to pay someone to professionally manage their assets. The other great example of this is the tax code, since only the rich can hire accountants to take advantage of its many intricacies and loopholes--which is why I suspect that the Republicans will never really be interested in the "lower the rates, broaden the base" genre of tax reform, even if they like to pay lip service to it.

The right has gotten a lot of mileage of out of the demand for small government. Maybe it's time for the left to make a bigger deal out of *simple* government.