Peter Frase

Sent on a whim while I was killing some time in Troy, New York, [this](https://twitter.com/pefrase/status/807339363155791872) appears to be my most popular tweet of all time. (Not that there's much tough competition.) Explaining a tweet seems sort of like explaining a joke, but I'm going to make a run at it anyway.

"Class war trumps hate."

The reference, of course, is to those squishy liberal "Love Trumps Hate" bumper stickers. As though warm feelings are enough to combat the bigotry of the Right.

As for my alternative slogan, maybe part of its appeal was its ambiguity. In one reading, I'm saying that the way we respond to the haters is not by embracing them, but by fighting them in the streets. And when it comes to hipster fascists like [Richard Spencer](https://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2016/11/calling-them-alt-right-helps-us-fight.html) and his ilk, I couldn't agree more. We should all admire anti-fascist street fighters like [this guy](http://www.spunk.org/texts/antifasc/sp000832.html), my favorite of Keith Ellison's clients from his days as a leftist lawyer in the Twin Cities. (And that's a story I hope I can tell at greater length sometime in the future.)

But that wasn't actually what I was thinking about when I wrote that tweet. What I *was* thinking about was the picket line I had just visited with Jon Flanders, near Troy in upstate New York. Jon is a veteran socialist, a veteran unionist (former Machinist local president), and the mastermind of the wonderful [James Connolly Forum](https://jamesconnollyforum.wordpress.com/), a non-sectarian lecture series that I visted for a discussion of my book.

Jon took me to see the workers who have been on strike at [Momentive](http://labornotes.org/blogs/2016/11/thanksgiving-picket-lines-momentive), a chemical manufacturer and former GE subsidiary where the workers have suffered a decade of brutalization from the company's private equity owners. "Picket line" isn't even the right word; the vast Momentive complex stretches on for perhaps a half mile, and each entrance is staffed by a small crew of workers, with a tent for shelter and a large pile of broken-up pallets to be burned for warmth.

They were a range of ages, but mostly men, mostly white. Some of them, Jon told, me, would have voted for Trump: "Drain the Swamp", he said, was a sign he had seen from some younger strikers. But out here, they were just union brothers and sisters, so I said to them what I would say to anyone fighting a similar battle: *solidarity with your struggle*, the verbal equivalent of the stream of supportive honks from the passing truck drivers. The little spark of joy I noticed whenever I said that was heartwarming, but also a depressing indicator of just how little solidarity these workers have received.

Which brings me to the inspiration for that tweet. Jon told me a story about a particular form of strike support that he had helped facilitate. The Capital District Coalition Coalition Against Islamophobia organized a visit to the strikers by three women from the local Islamic Center. They brought food, and introduced themselves to the workers on the picket. Jon himself was apprehensive beforehand, concerned about potential bigotry and Islamophobia coming from the strikers.

In the end though, the strikers were grateful for the support--they know they are in a fight for their lives, and they know better than to refuse an ally. And their visitors learned something about a labor struggle that had been obscure to them. "I can't honestly say that I knew much about strikes or have ever visited a picket line, so I learned a lot today", one of them wrote on Facebook. "I'm pretty sure most of the strikers had never met a Muslim before but they all thanked us profusely for taking the time to give them some support."

It's a small thing, this one little act. But small acts like that are the elements of any sustainable reconstruction of the Left, one that is "intersectional" in practice, not just in rhetoric. So that was what I was thinking when I wrote that tweet, just after getting my picture taken with the statue of Irish revolutionary legend and onetime Troy resident [James Connolly](https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/): class struggle trumps hate. That is, a solidarity forged in struggle can overcome the abstract indoctrinations of race hatred. Which is not to say that the realities of imperialism or white supremacy can simply be ignored or left in the past. Merely that the overcoming of those systems begins where people are thrown together in common struggle.

Every second Facebook post I see today is seemingly about Philando Castile, and rightly so. It hits me all the more that he was shot down in my homeland, the Twin Cities. Between this and Jamar Clark, a lot of white people are being rudely awakened to the nasty racist underbelly of Minnesota "nice". And not a moment too soon.

But sometimes it's good to get out of your social and political bubble. And as a Minnesota sports fan, I sometimes tune in to internet streams of the local sports radio. Today, Paul Allen of KFAN decided to dedicate a segment of his show to talking about the shooting. For this I can only commend him--he resisted the usual flamers who insisted he just "stick to first downs", because he recognized that this was the most important thing going on in the cities right now, and his show was as good a place as any to talk about it. As he said on Twitter, "I control an environment for people to react, and few are thinking about 'first downs ....' right now."

But the call-in segment I listened to was remarkable for how callous and out of touch it was, in discussing the murder of a man who, by all accounts, was killed for doing nothing more than putting his hand in his pocket to reach for his wallet.

An enormous amount of time was taken up debating various details of Castile's behavior, particularly related to the--legal--gun he was carrying, and which he attempted to inform his killer about. Did he reveal his armed status at the right time? Should he have had his hands outside his vehicle sooner? Various callers insisted that they would have done this, or that, or been more compliant, or done something to prevent the officer from shooting. On and on it went.

Towards the end of the segment, one guy calls in to object to this line of reasoning, and offers that he sees no more reason to trust a police officer than any other random person who might approach his vehicle.

At which point Allen reacts in immediate disagreement, saying that one of his best friends is a police officer in the Twin Cities suburbs, he knows many officers, greatly respects them, and so on.

This was where I was really pulled up short by the cognitive dissonance running through the whole discussion. Allen and his callers' obsessive focus on minute details of Castile's reactions seems to imply that police officers are, in fact, wildly undisciplined and violent animals, who go into every situation prepared to commit murder at the slightest provocation. And yet the same people who talk this way, will turn around and talk about these same police as brave professionals deserving of our infinite respect.

The question to be posed to people like this is, which way do you want it? Are the police responsible professionals who have earned our deference? Or are they lawless killers who will shoot at the first wrong move? To want it both ways suggests either deep denial or an intensely fascistic mindset.

Politics is full of surprises of late, as both a resurgent left and an atavistic right win one surprising victory after another.

One peculiarity of the conjuncture is that the rising social democratic left in the English-speaking world has produced two oddly similar, and similarly odd figureheads: Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.

Both, of course, fit a similar style profile, as old and somewhat disheveled white men, seemingly a bit out of touch with the contemporary culture that has propelled them to unprecedented levels of political success. Hence the inherent humor of something like Corbyn's [arrival](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3pacMThWVE) on talk show *The Last Leg*, or [Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash](https://www.facebook.com/groups/berniesandersmemes/). Each exploits the incongruity of these men's nebbishy affect when contrasted with their youthful supporters.

But I don't think it's quite an accident that it was men like these who ended up in this position, in this particular moment.

Our political period is characterized by a rising, but still largely disorganized left, arrayed against a moribund but still institutionally powerful neoliberal order that uses its accumulated power to compensate for its complete lack of compelling answers to contemporary political questions. In order to contest state politics at the highest level--the presidency of the United States, the Prime Minister of the UK--someone had to be found, within the higher echelons of power, who could serve as a figurehead.

After decades of reaction, few such people were available. But what we found was people like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.

And so the interesting question is, how do we characterize politicians like them? I'd suggest that they are best summarized as *survivors*. They are people who lived through a period of reaction, during which their leftist peers generally burned out, faded away, or reinvented themselves as neoliberal hacks. Whereas people like Sanders and Corbyn managed to hold on to something resembling traditional social democratic politics, while remaining in proximity to the highest reaches of power within the capitalist state. They managed to survive a period of reaction without either being driven out of politics or becoming reactionaries themselves.

Although Sanders and Corbyn were immersed in the left during its high points in the 1960s and 1970s, nobody would have considered them great figures for the history books until recently. Sanders participated in the civil rights movement as a student, and in left-wing electoral projects in Vermont, but was essentially a minor figure. Corbyn [attended](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/15/jeremy-corbyn-world-supporters-mentors-influences) discussion groups with luminaries of the British left like Ralph Miliband and Tony Benn, but was mostly remembered as a quiet and unremarkable figure, peripheral to the movers and shakers on the left of that era.

So what distinguishes people like Sanders and Corbyn is that they survived. Not just in the literal sense that they're still alive, but in the sense that they were in a position to contest the Democratic presidential nomination or the leadership of the Labour Party from the left, when nobody else was.

People like that have, I would say, three important characteristics.

First, and most obviously, some level of idealistic and ideological commitment to social democracy or left-liberalism. This is the aspect that the lazy press tends to harp on--look at these doddering hippies, with their "values" and their "ideals"! See how out of touch they are with the cynical compromises with capitalism that, as all savvy observers know, are the essence of politics.

And of course it's true that Sanders and Corbyn had to have some kind of principled commitment in order to avoid giving up their ideals in favor of what would surely have been a better dispensation, had they conceded to Clintonism and Blairism.

But to portray them as merely hippy-dippy idealists is to leave out two other, and equally important parts of their political persona.

The first is that they are, in fact, extremely pragmatic, strategic, and at times ruthless politicians. How else, after all, could they have survived for so long, in an environment where even their own ostensible party-mates and allies rejected their positions?

At the apex of the Bernie Sanders campaign, the *New York Times* ran an [article](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/us/politics/bernie-sanders-campaign-history.html) entitled "Bernie Sanders’s Campaign Past Reveals Willingness to Play Hardball." It detailed some of the tactics that Sanders used to win and maintain power in Vermont, sometimes with harsh attacks on his opponents. The subtext of the coverage seemed to be that such tactics were at odds with Sanders' program or his image. But all the article really demonstrated was that the media's portrayal of Sanders as a genial hippie grandpa was at odds with his real nature as a political survivor, someone who was always interested in merging principle with power.

The final distinguishing characteristic of these left-wing survivor politicians, who have been thrust into leadership, is that they tend towards an individualistic, lone-wolf approach to politics. Bernie Sanders has spent decades as the only party-independent member of congress (despite caucusing with Democrats). Corbyn was content to tend his London district until he reluctantly agreed to pursue what he [thought](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/15/jeremy-corbyn-world-supporters-mentors-influences) would be a doomed protest candidacy for Labour leader. And what other course would have been available, during a period when New Labour and the Democratic Leadership Council were loudly and fiercely denouncing the politics of a Corbyn or Sanders as out of date, out of style, and beyond the boundaries of respectable politics? (This is, perhaps, a neglected interpretation of Sanders' initial difficulties when confronted by Black Lives Matter activists: it wasn't just that he had some blind spot about racism, but that he was generally not used to being held accountable by a mass movement.)

And so it is that we enter a period of renewed left organizing with men like this as our figureheads. Their particular combination of idealism, ruthlessness, and iconoclasm made them well suited to the dark years of "lifeboat socialism" that they survived. These traits do not, however, make them particularly well-matched to the period we are now entering. And so we will need to find new leaders from the ranks of organizers who have been radicalized over the past decade.

In the meantime, however, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to war with the social democratic politicians you have. Which means Bernie Sanders, who took his campaign farther than anyone could have reasonably expected, and Jeremy Corbyn, who will hopefully hold on against the inept and despicable attempts of his parliamentary peers to depose him. And hopefully we will all look back at their improbable moments in the spotlight, and see them as the early days of a better world.

Patrick Iber and Mike Konczal have an essay at [Dissent](https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/karl-polanyi-explainer-great-transformation-bernie-sanders) in which they use the Bernie Sanders phenomenon as an opportunity to explain the theories of Karl Polanyi, and what they mean for the future of progressive politics.

Polanyi was a Hungarian emigré to Vienna and later England and the United States, a veteran of the interwar period that gave us the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. His most famous work, *The Great Transformation*, was written in the 1930's and 1940's. In it, he attempted to diagnose the failures of the free-market capitalism of his time, which in his view had given rise to the reaction and war he lived through.

His central point, and the one which has been most influential on contemporary liberals, is that there has never been any such thing as an unfettered or "natural" free market. Rather, all really-existing social formations involve complex ties between people based on a variety of norms and traditions. As Iber and Konczal put it, "the economy is 'embedded' in society--part of social relations--not apart from them." For this reason, the attempt to establish unfettered and unregulated markets is doomed: "a pure free market society is a utopian project, and impossible to realize, because people will resist the process of being turned into commodities."

This is an important insight, and to this point there's not much about it that I can disagree with. The problem arises when one tries to derive a complete political strategy from this analysis. This is where I part ways with the Polanyian analysis that Iber and Konczal offer.

They suggest that the vision of "socialism" offered by Polanyi, and also by Bernie Sanders, ultimately just involves subjecting capitalism to some humane and democratic limits. They quote a passage in which Polanyi defines socialism as "the tendency inherent in an industrial civilization to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society." Polanyi does not seem to think that markets or capitalist property relations could be superseded (although the later parts of *The Great Transformation* introduce some ambiguity on this point.) Capitalism will only be humanized and controlled. Iber and Konczal attribute something like this idea to Bernie Sanders: "people use democracy to change the rules governing our national political economy."

There is a long tradition, especially associated with Leninism, that rejects this program on the grounds of "reformism." According to this view, the Polanyi perspective is inadequate because it embraces reforms that ameliorate capitalism. This is taken to be a distraction from the need to build a revolutionary force that can seize state power, overthrow the ruling class, and reconstruct property relations. This is a perspective that Iber and Konczal quickly dismiss: a "traditionally Marxist idea of having the state seize the means of production" which, they say, "has been abandoned even by most who identify as socialists."

I consider myself a socialist and a Marxist, although a questionably "traditional" one. My objection to the Polanyian analysis is somewhat different, however, from the one Iber and Konczal adduce. I am very much a "reformist" in the sense that my day to day politics involves working for things like universal health care or stronger unions or a less corrupt local government. (This, it should be noted, was also true of many historical communist militants, even if they looked forward to the seizure of power as their horizon.) Where I part company with the Polanyian left--and in some ways, also the traditional Marxist left--is in where I think such struggles ultimately lead.

Some time ago, I [wrote a bit](http://www.peterfrase.com/2014/12/beyond-the-welfare-state/) about the way Polanyian ideas influence advocates and defenders of the welfare state. In response to sociologist Daniel Zamora's attack on the theory of Michel Foucault, I noted that for many left critics of neoliberal capitalism, the project of the left is conceived in Polanyian terms, and is therefore limited to the struggle to "cushion workers from the vagaries of the market, while leaving the basic institutions of private property and wage labor in place." Thus there can be nothing beyond "a welfare state that protects the working class from the workings of an unfettered market."

There are two distinct objections that I would raise against this project. One is basically normative: a world of somewhat humanized wage labor isn't the one I want to live in, even if it would be better than the one we live in now. This is rooted in the [anti-work socialist](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/) tradition, which insists that the ultimate goal of socialist politics isn't to make wage labor nicer, but to abolish it altogether. Since I've written extensively about that elsewhere, I won't repeat those arguments here.

The second objection has to do with the long-term viability of Polanyian welfare capitalism as an equilibrium within capitalism. The fundamental distinction I would make, between Marxist and Polanyian social democracy, does not have to do with debates over "reform" or "revolution". In other words, I accept the proposition that in the near term, the socialist project unfolds through incremental struggles that win material gains for workers, within the context of capitalism.

But the end point of Polanyi's socialism is really the regime that the theorist of the welfare state, Gøsta Esping-Andersen, called *welfare capitalism*. That is, it is still a society in which the means of production are privately controlled by a small elite, and most people must sell their labor to survive. It differs from unfettered capitalism because of the presence of things like unions, regulations, and social safety net programs, which partially--but never totally--[decommodify](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/06/de-commodification-in-everyday-life/) labor.

It is at this point that we discover the divide between the Polanyian perspective and the Marxist alternative I'm proposing. It all turns on the question of whether this regime is *viable*.

What is viability? A concise definition comes from the sociologist Erik Olin Wright--who comes from a Marxist background, but whose work has strong Polanyian overtones. He has worked extensively on defining ["real utopias"](https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Published%20writing/Presidential%20address%20--%20uncorrected%20page%20proofs%20--%202012.pdf) that could be offered as alternatives to the present system. He argues that any such utopia must satisfy three criteria: desirability, achievability, and viability. The first two are what they sound like: is this where we *want* to go, and can we get there?

As noted above, I think the Polanyian vision is somewhat lacking in terms of desirability. But it would still be a step forward. And on the question of achievability, I have no real quibbles: I support reformist struggles for the welfare state because I view them as achievable, compared to the alternative strategies of building an insurrectionary communist party, or writing sectarian polemics and waiting for capitalism to collapse on its own.

Viability is where all the problems arise. Wright defines the viability question as follows: "If we could create this alternative, would we be able to stay there or would it have such unintended consequences and self-destructive dynamics that it would not be sustainable?"

Recall the definition of Polanyi socialism as the situation in which "people use democracy to change the rules governing our national political economy." Is that a stable equilibrium, acceptable to both capitalists and workers? Or is it an inherently unstable situation, one which must break toward either the expropriation of the capitalist class, or the restoration of ruling class power?

Unlike the Polanyians, I think the welfare state is, in Wright's terms, *not viable*. Unlike Wright, however, I do not think that this invalidates it as a goal. Rather, I think that socialist politics is inevitably a task of "building the crisis." And the great tragedy of postwar socialism was the perverse division of political labor it gave rise to, between revolutionaries who refused to engage with reformist politics, and reformists who were unable or unwilling to deal with the crisis that their victories inevitably produced.

So, what makes social democracy non-viable as a stable system? For this, we need to turn to the Polish economist Michal Kalecki, and his famous 1943 [essay](http://gesd.free.fr/kalecki43.pdf) "Political Aspects of Full Employment." The core insight of that essay is that economic struggles between workers and bosses are ultimately not about the size of the wage, or the stability of employment, or the generosity of benefits. They are about power.

It is possible to construct arguments showing that putting unemployed workers back to work would be good for capitalists too, in the sense that it would lead to faster growth and more profits. But as Chris Maisano explains in his [exegesis](https://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/maisano080610p.html) of Kalecki, "the biggest barriers to the maintenance of full employment are primarily political in nature, not economic."

This is because in a situation of low unemployment, workers are less afraid of what Kalecki called the "power of the sack". As they become less afraid of the boss, they begin to demand more and more of the capitalists. Unions and social democratic parties strengthen; wildcat strikes [proliferate](http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6768/when_workers_fought_back_1970s_rebel_rank_and_file). Eventually this dynamic calls into question not just profits, but the underlying property relations of capitalism itself. Welfare capitalism thus reaches what we could call the "Kalecki point," where its viability has been fatally undermined.

In that situation, employers become willing to take drastic action to get workers back into line, even at the expense of short term profitability. This takes many forms, including state-led [attacks](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/opinion/reagan-vs-patco-the-strike-that-busted-unions.html) on unions and the refusal of capitalists to invest, a ["capital strike"](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/09/the-rights-favorite-strike/) in which money is moved overseas or simply left in the bank, as a way of breaking the power of the working class.

David Harvey, in his [*Brief History of Neoliberalism*](http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harvey/dp/0199283273), essentially portrays the right wing turn of the 1980's as a reactionary resolution of this crisis: a move away from the Kalecki point that entailed a restoration of capitalist class power rather than a leap into socialism. Jonah Birch provides a useful [case study](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/francois-mitterrand-socialist-party-common-program-communist-pcf-1981-elections-austerity/) of France's Mitterand government during this period, which pushed the boundaries of the social democratic compromise and was finally forced back by the power of capital. The failure of the [Rehn-Meidner plan](http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/12/22/a-visonary-pragmatist/), which was essentially a gradualist scheme to socialize the means of production in Sweden, provides a similar example.

So far I've argued that the social democratic class compromise is inherently non-viable, and tends toward conflict and crisis. But another way to look at it is that welfare capitalism can be *made* viable, but only in a way that subverts its socialist promise. This is because "the power of the sack" can be reconfigured into other kinds of disciplinary power, depending on the nature of the particular welfare capitalist regime we're talking about.

Recently, I discovered (via [Mariame Kaba](http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/)), the work of [Elizabeth Hinton](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737235). Hinton's work focuses on Lyndon Johnson's 1960's "Great Society" expansion of the welfare state, and its connection to the construction of the carceral state--the rise of mass incarceration and militarized policing. She shows that while the Great Society was expanding access to things like income support and health care, a simultaneous "War on Crime" was subjecting the poor, and especially the black poor, to increased surveillance and state repression. Her analysis indicates that this was not an accidental juxtaposition, but part of a cohesive reconstruction of the relationship between the state and the working class.

This is easily comprehensible in terms of the contradictory nature of the welfare state and the problem of the Kalecki point. Without the welfare state, workers are disciplined by the power of the sack--or, in situations where workers are sufficiently organized and cohesive to resist the boss anyway, by private [militias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Matewan).

In the era of the welfare state, however, the partial decommodification of labor creates a great danger to capital, because it enhances the autonomy of workers, whether employed or not, to make demands on capital and the state. It was just this recognition that drove organizers like [Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward](http://www.thenation.com/article/weight-poor-strategy-end-poverty/) to organize welfare recipients in the late 1960's.

Police violence, drug wars, mass incarceration, onerous requirements on benefit recipients: these are all ways of disciplining the worker in the era of the welfare state, in the absence of the power of the sack. This also means that struggles against police oppression and incarceration are not parallel or ancillary to class struggle and the movement for socialism, but are fundamental to it: they attack the disciplinary regime that maintains the stability of our particular regime of capital accumulation.

For the the more Polanyi-ish, and Pollyana-ish, it's possible for us all to get along in a world where workers have comfortable lives and the bosses still make money. That's the vision that seems to animate Iber and Konczal's explainer. The alternative Marxist argument is that capitalism is defined by the power struggle between workers and capital, and the Polanyian version of socialism attempts to elide that contradiction in favor of a vision of harmonious co-existence.

Where this vision fails is not in the short term but in the long run. It leaves the left ill-equipped to address the inevitable crises that a successful reformist program generates, and I would argue that the belief in the possibility of permanent class compromise contributed to the defeat of the left and the victory of neoliberalism.

So the problem isn't that we can't win reformist victories for workers. History has shown that we can. The problem is what comes *after* victory, and we need a theory of socialism and social democracy that prepares our movements for that phase.

How high is too high, for the minimum wage?

Dylan Matthews, in his [wrap-up](http://www.vox.com/2016/4/15/11436488/hillary-bernie-winners-losers-cnn) of the Democratic primary debate, says that his "off-the-record conversations with left-leaning Democratic economists" indicate that many of them "express grave concern about the $15-an-hour figure, about the danger that this time we might be going too far." His Vox colleague Timothy Lee is tagged in to make the [same argument](http://www.vox.com/2016/4/15/11436868/hillary-clinton-fights-for-15) in another post.

This despite the fact that Hillary Clinton has now apparently joined Bernie Sanders in endorsing the $15 minimum, going back on her previous unwillingness to go above $12.

And you know what? I think they might be right. It might be the case that a $15 an hour minimum wage is, as Matthews put in a (https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/720786520509165568), "dangerous". To which my response is: that's awesome!

The reason that bourgeois economists tend to think a high minimum wage is "dangerous" is because they think it will lead to reduced employment. This is for two reasons.

First, because if it becomes economically infeasible to hire people at $15 per hour for certain jobs, the employers may just go out of business, reducing the demand for labor. There is a large body of literature suggesting that this objection is overblown, dating back to [Card and Krueger](https://www.nber.org/papers/w4509) in the early 1990's. But it's hard to dispute that there is *some* level at which higher minimum wages will lead to reduced employment.

The second thing that could reduce employment, even if the minimum wage doesn't force any businesses to go under, is automation. If it costs $15 an hour to pay a burger-flipper at McDonalds, perhaps it will become more appealing to turn to a burger-flipping robot, of the sort offered by [Momentum Machines](http://www.businessinsider.com/momentum-machines-burger-robot-2014-8). This is a retort often thrown at living wage advocates by conservative critics: joke's on you suckers, raise your wage and we'll just automate your job!

Together, these arguments amount to a radical case *for* high minimum wages, not against them. Because they both get at the underlying political principle that should motivate any argument for higher wages: people need more money. That's completely separate from the question of whether things like low-wage fast food jobs should exist at all, which they probably shouldn't.

In other words, if $15 an hour makes it a little easier for a McDonalds worker to survive, that's great. But if it leads to some of those jobs disappearing entirely, then that forces us to confront an even bigger and more important question. Namely, how do we separate the idea of providing everyone with a decent standard of living from the idea of getting everyone a "job"? I've argued before that job-creation is a hole that we should [stop digging](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/stop-digging-the-case-against-jobs/).

The fight for 15 *should* be dangerous. I hope it is! I hope it leads to [shorter hours](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/05/eight-hours-for-what-they-will/), and a [universal basic income](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/05/curious-utopias/). That's what I'd call some real [disruptive innovation](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine).

Bernie Sanders will probably lose the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton, after his impressive but inadequate showing on March 15th. But the left still won that night.

The Sanders campaign has energized and galvanized a big chunk of people, especially young people. And it has made it routine to talk about "socialism" in polite company. So as someone who has been out in the wilderness talking about Marxism and socialism for 20 years, I can't but love it for those reasons.

But inevitably, there's a layer of inexperienced activists who have such an affective investment in the campaign that they lose sight of the bigger picture. They make out this one politician to be more significant than he is, while at the same time misunderstanding his real value. Not just because Sanders' "socialism" is no more than what would, in many other contexts, be considered a tepid kind of European welfare capitalism. To really appreciate the significance of Sanders, you have to see his candidacy as something other than just an electoral campaign, something that's about more than just the ability of one guy from Vermont to win a certain number of delegates and prevail at a convention.

Recently, Corey Robin [wrote](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/03/michigan-primary-bernie-sanders-nomination/) about the campaign and encouraged Sanders supporters to keep up the fight. Rather than "get too caught up in the question of delegate counts," he advised, we should "educate, agitate, and organize the body politic." And we should specifically do that through the Sanders campaign because while "the Left loves social movements," such movements are "not immune to the mood and medium of electoral politics," which he portrays as a way of concentrating and focusing the Left's energy.

I'd put it a bit differently. The Sanders campaign *is* a "social movement," and it would be a mistake to put too much emphasis on the fact that this particular movement is occurring through the medium of electoral politics. Certainly at the level of [infrastructure and personnel](http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/bernie-sanders-2016-inside-213692), Sanders draws on the remains of prior organizing around politicians like Howard Dean and Barack Obama. But Bernie as an unexpected social phenomenon and [dank meme](https://www.facebook.com/Bernie-Sanders-Dank-Meme-Stash-962428640512586/) inspiration is just as much a successor to recent non-electoral movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter.

It's in the ebbing and flowing of these interconnected movements that we can see the evolving components of a resurgent left, a nascent challenge to capitalism that takes multiple forms, some electoral and some not. Partisans of political candidates, especially presidential candidates, have a tendency to [hype up](http://harpers.org/archive/2014/03/nothing-left-2/) every election as the key turning point upon which all politics depends. But it's probably better to see things like the Sanders campaign as part of what the Italian ["workerist"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workerism) Marxist tradition called the process of "class composition."

Class composition, as the [historian](http://www.amazon.com/Storming-Heaven-Composition-Struggle-Autonomist/dp/0745316069) of workerism Steve Wright puts it, deals with "the relationship between the material structure of the working class, and its behaviour as a subject autonomous from the dictates of both the labour movement and capital." The activists who developed the concept, like Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti, where struggling with an old Marxist problem: transforming a working class "in itself" into one "for itself." That is, how can atomized individuals, exploited in capitalism, become part of a self-conscious [collective](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/11/an-imagined-community/), with a shared [identity](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/stay-classy/) linked to social transformation?

For the original workerists, class composition was closely tied to the experiences of industrial workers in the factory. But later users of the concept, including [Antonio Negri](http://www.elkilombo.org/archaeology-and-project-the-mass-worker-and-the-social-worker/), began to expand the concept more broadly. They insisted that the experience of class reached out into the city, and into the family, so that the process of class composition had to take into account the fullness of a worker's life rather than just his or her experience in wage labor itself. Which means that the forces of class composition can include not just the minimum wage you make at McDonalds, but the police officer who harrasses you on the way home from your shift.

To take this all back to the concrete, and to the voting on March 15th, it's most illuminating to look not at the presidential primary, but to [something else](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/chicago-primary-black-lives-matter) that happened in Illinois and Ohio. In Illinois, state's attorney Anita Alvarez lost her primary by a huge margin, while at the same time Tim McGinty was losing his race in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which includes Cleveland. Like the Sanders phenomenon, neither of these were expected results until very recently.

What linked Alvarez and McGinty was their connections to notorious recent police murders: Alvarez waited 400 days to file charges against the officer who killed 17 year old Lacquan McDonald, and McGinty failed to indict the officers involved in the death of 12 year old Tamir Rice. Both of their losses are being seen, [correctly](https://www.facebook.com/malaya90/posts/10206961940499797), as wins for Black Lives Matter and related movements that have agitated and organized against state violence against people of color.

Chicago, in particular, is instructive, and really needs a detailed case study far beyond what I can offer here. To use the workerist terms, the class composition in Chicago is far more advanced than what's found almost anywhere else in the country. From afar, it's difficult to even untangle all the various strands. But they range from black feminist formations like [Assata's Daughters](http://www.assatasdaughters.org/) (who were central to the anti-Alvarez campaign) to the Chicago Teachers Union, whose successful [strike](http://www.versobooks.com/books/1569-strike-for-america) in 2012 made them a powerful institutional force for the broader Chicago left.

Even in Chicago, the left hasn't yet won its big prize, the removal of mayor Rahm Emanuel. But that may be yet to come, as the working class there gains power and coherence. And that should be a source of reassurance for Sanders supporters as well, giving confidence that his campaign isn't the end, but only one step in a much longer process.

So it seems that a Trump-related mania has led some of the leading lights of the American right to take off the gloves and reveal that it isn't just non-white working class people they hate, it's all of you dirty proles. [Kevin Williamson](https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/432569/father-f-hrer):

> The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

The proximate cause may be Trump, but there are deeper forces at work. What seems to be dawning on the right wing of our ruling class is that the people who they long ago made economically superfluous may now be politically inconvenient as well. And in that case, what good are they? A few years back, I [put it](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/) like this:

> The great danger posed by the automation of production, in the context of a world of hierarchy and scarce resources, is that it makes the great mass of people superfluous from the standpoint of the ruling elite. This is in contrast to capitalism, where the antagonism between capital and labor was characterized by both a clash of interests and a relationship of mutual dependence: the workers depend on capitalists as long as they don’t control the means of production themselves, while the capitalists need workers to run their factories and shops. It is as the lyrics of “Solidarity Forever” had it: “They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn/But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.” With the rise of the robots, the second line ceases to hold.

For a newer rendition of that argument, in more terrifying detail, you can order [my book](http://www.amazon.com/Four-Futures-after-Capitalism-Jacobin/dp/1781688133), which I will now commence shilling with tedious regularity.

Many of us have found ourselves in jobs where there just wasn't much work to do. We spent days sitting at desks surfing the Internet, while using innovations like the [boss key](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key), in case we needed to show our boss some pretense of being "busy." This is ultimately a demoralizing and demeaning existence of pseudo-leisure, time which is not our own but is not being used for any purpose.

Anyone who has had that experience no doubt smiled at the story of Spanish civil servant Joaquín Garcia, employee of a municipal water company. When he was considered for an award for 20 years of service, it was [discovered](http://www.thelocal.es/20160212/spanish-civil-servant-takes-6-years-off-work-no-one-notices) that he had not in fact shown up for work in 6 years, while continuing to draw his paycheck.

Garcia insisted that there was simply no work for him to do, and that he had been put in the job in the first place as political retaliation. Other sources [contested](http://metro.co.uk/2016/02/13/this-guy-didnt-show-up-to-work-for-six-years-and-no-one-noticed-5680048/) the original report, claiming that he did show up to work but merely spent his time reading philosophy---becoming an expert on Spinoza, according to Mr. Garcia---which would make him just another case of dreary workplace pseudo-leisure.

But it was the original vision, of a man simply walking away from the pointlessness of his work, that gave the story its viral appeal. It punctured the mystification of "work," that oppressive abstraction that I've tried to break down many times [before](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/02/work-it/). Garcia rejected the "work" of dutifully showing up for a job that had no reason to exist, in favor of the self-fulfilling "work" of reading philosophy. What might we all do if we could do the same?

The "work to rule" action is a popular labor tactic, an alternative to going on strike. It involves carefully and literally following every rule in the contract, which in most workplaces has the practical effect of slowing work down to a crawl. But perhaps we need something like the opposite: "work to need." If everyone with a pointless, wasteful, or destructive job simply refused to show up to it, we would learn a lot about how much of our time is taken up with "work" that has everything to do with our dependence on wage labor, and nothing at all to do with the things we need to run a decent society.

It never fails that when I get around to writing something, I'm immediately inundated by directly related news, making me think that I should have just waited a few days. The moment I commit bits to web servers about the [robot future](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/new-yorker-lingerie-automation-frase/), I see the following things.

First, the blockbuster *New York Times* [story](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html) about Amazon and its corporate culture. The brutality of life among the company's low-wage [warehouse](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor) employees was already well covered, but the experience of the white collar Amazonian was less well known. The office staff, it seems, experiences a more psychological form of brutality. I couldn't have asked for a better demonstration of my point that "the truly dystopian prospect is that the worker herself is treated as if she were a machine, rather than being replaced by one". To wit:

> Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,” said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system.

On to number two! Lydia DePillis of the *Washington Post* [reacts](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/minimum-wage-offensive-could-speed-arrival-of-robot-powered-restaurants/2015/08/16/35f284ea-3f6f-11e5-8d45-d815146f81fa_story.html?postshare=6371439925549885) to efforts to raise the minimum wage in exactly the way I mentioned in my post: by raising the threat of automation. She notes various advances in technology, while also observing that in recent times "the industry as a whole has largely been resistant to cuts in labor . . . the average number of employees at fast-food restaurants declined by fewer than two people over the past decade". But, she warns, that could all change if the minimum wage is raised to $15.

Liberal economist (and one-time adviser to the Vice President) Jared Bernstein responds [here](http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/minimum-wages-and-capitallabor-substitution/). He makes, in a slightly different way, the same point I did: "one implication of this argument is that we should make sure to keep wages low enough so employers won’t want to bother swapping out workers for machines . . . a great way to whack productivity growth." (Not to mention, a great way to make life miserable for the workers in question.) He then goes on to argue that higher wages won't really lead to decreased employment anyway, which sort of undercuts the point. But oh well.

Finally, we have the *Economist* [weighing in](http://www.economist.com/node/21661017). This little squib on "Automation angst" manages to combine all the bourgeois arguments into one, in a single paragraph:

> [Economist David] Autor argues that many jobs still require a mixture of skills, flexibility and judgment; they draw upon “tacit” knowledge that is a very long way from being codified or performed by robots. Moreover, automation is likely to be circumscribed, he argues, as politicians fret about wider social consequences. Most important of all, even if they do destroy as many jobs as pessimists imagine, many other as yet unimagined ones that cannot be done by robots are likely to be created.

So, to summarize. The robots won't take your job, because they can't. Or, actually, the robots *can* take your job but they won't, because we will make a political decision to disallow it. Or no, never mind, the robots *will* take your job, but it's fine because we will create lots of other new jobs for you.

This summarizes the popular approach to this problem well, from a variety of vantage points that all miss the main point. Namely, that if it *is* possible to reduce the need for human labor, the question becomes: who benefits from that. The owners, of the robots, or the rest of the working masses?

The current issue of the *New Yorker* has a story about the odd phenomenon of Chinese [lingerie merchants](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/learning-to-speak-lingerie) in Egypt. These immigrant entrepreneurs are apparently ubiquitous throughout the poor, conservative districts of upper Egypt, where they dispense sexy garments to the region's pious Muslim women. The cultural and geopolitical details of the story are interesting for a number of reasons, but I was struck in particular by a resonance with some debates that have recently flared up again about labor and automation, for reasons I'll get back to below.

"Robots will take all our jobs" is a hardy perennial of popular political economy. Typical of the latest crop is Derek Thompson of the Atlantic, who wrote an article (in which he quotes me), speculating about a ["World Without Work"](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/) in the wake of mass adoption of robotization and computerization. Paul Mason gives a more leftist and political rendition of [similar themes](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun).

As I note in my recent Jacobin [editorial](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/automation-frase-robots/), this kind of thing is not new, and is in fact an anxiety that recurs throughout the history of capitalism. Two decades ago, we had the likes of [Jeremy Rifkin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work) and [Stanley Aronowitz](https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-jobless-future) musing about the "end of work" and the "jobless future".

And these repeating waves of robo-futurism call into existence the same repeated insistence that robots are not, in fact, taking all the jobs. Doug Henwood was [on this beat](http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Jobless_future.html) twenty years ago and remains [on it](http://lbo-news.com/2015/07/17/workers-no-longer-needed/) today. Matt Yglesias, [likewise](http://www.vox.com/2015/7/27/9038829/automation-myth), calls fear of automation a "myth".

One of the specific things that people like Henwood and Yglesias always cite is the productivity statistics. If we were seeing a wave of unprecedented automation, then we should be seeing rapid rises in measured labor productivity---that is, the amount of output that can be produced per hour of human labor. Instead, however, what we've seen is historically low productivity growth, compared to what happened in the middle and late 20th Century.

All of which leads commentators like Yglesias and [Tyler Cowen](http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Stagnation-Low-Hanging-Eventually-ebook/dp/B004H0M8QS) to fret that the robots aren't coming fast *enough*. Typical of most writers on this subject, Yglesias just worries vaguely that increases in productivity won't happen for some unspecified reason.

I've argued a number of times for an (http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/03/technological-grotesques/) that connects the question of automation and productivity growth directly to wages and the general condition of labor. The basic idea is very simple. From the perspective of the boss, replacing a worker with a machine will be more appealing to the degree that the machine is:

* Cheaper than the human worker
* More convenient and easier to control than the human worker

This implies that if workers win higher wages and more control over their working conditions, their jobs are more likely to be automated. Indeed, arguments like this frequently crop up among critics of things like the [Fight for 15](http://fightfor15.org/) campaign, which demands higher wages for fast food workers and other low wage employees. Prototypes for automatic [burger-making](http://momentummachines.com/) machines are cited in order to warn workers that their jobs are at risk of being automated away.

I regard such warnings not as arguments against higher wages, but arguments for them. Workers, in the course of fighting for their interests, drive the [dialectic](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/02/the-dialectic-of-technology/) that forces capitalists to find less labor-intensive ways of producing. The next political task, then, is to make sure that the benefits of such innovation accrue to the masses, and not to a small class of robot owners.

What I fear most is not that all of our labor will be replaced with machines. Rather, like Matt Yglesias, I worry that it *won't*---but for a slightly different reason. Again, bosses prefer workers to machines when they are cheaper and easier to control. Hence the truly dystopian prospect is that the worker herself is treated as if she *were* a machine, rather than being replaced by one.

Which brings us back, finally, to the Chinese lingerie merchants. The article's author, Peter Hessler, speaks to one such merchant, and asks him to comment on the biggest problem facing Egypt. To his surprise, his subject, Lin Xianfei, has a quick answer: gender inequality.

But the point turns out not to be that Lin is some sort of secret passionate feminist. Rather, his perspective turns on the exigencies of capital accumulation. For it turns out that while one kind of patriarchy is an impediment to business, another kind can be quite valuable to the shrewd businessman.

The problem, from Lin's perspective, is that Egyptian women in his region don't work in wage labor at all, or if they do they only do so for short periods of time, before marrying and retreating into the home. Even worse, local norms about proper female behavior preclude taking women out of their homes to live on site in massive dormitories, as might be done in China. Thus it becomes unfeasible to run factories on 24-hour production cycles.

Hiring men, meanwhile, is out of the question---another man, Xu Xin, tells Hessler that Egyptian men are too lazy and undisciplined for manufacturing work. Hessler goes on to note that "at the start of the economic boom in China, bosses hired young women because they could be paid less and controlled more easily than men".

He proceeds to comment that female Chinese workers turned out to be "more motivated", as though he is identifying something distinct from their weaker power position relative to men. But it is really the same thing. "More motivated", here, refers to the motivation to work hard for the boss, for someone else's profits and someone else's riches. To behave, in other words, like obedient machines. The Chinese capitalist objects to the patriarchal structure of rural Egyptian society not because it is patriarchy, then, but because it is a form of patriarchy that is inconvenient to capital accumulation.

And sure enough, faced with recalcitrant humans, the textile magnates of Egypt turn to the same solution that the Chinese electronics firm Foxconn [adopted](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/05/05/foxconns-robot-army-yet-to-prove-match-for-humans/) in the wake of worker uprisings there. Wang Weiqiang echoes the other industrialists' complaints about Egyptian labor: the men are lazy, the women "will work only during the daytime". As a result, "he intends to introduce greater mechanization in hopes of maximizing the short workday".

Greater mechanization and the maximization of a short work day might seem tragic to the capitalist, but it summarizes the short term goal of the post-work socialist left. Ornery, demanding workers work to drive technological developments that further this goal. And the socialist-feminist rendition of this project insists that we can prevent workers from being treated as machines not by shielding them with patriarchal and paternalistic morals, but rather by insisting that men and women alike can recognize their paid and unpaid labor in order to better [refuse it](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/).