Peter Frase

As someone who made a certain amount of my reputation by using the Star Trek universe to illustrate the [dangers](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/) of strong intellectual property law, I feel obligated to comment on the recent [court decision](http://www.scribd.com/doc/139843902/Prenda-Sanctions-Order) against the entity commonly referred to as Prenda Law. The case combines copyright battles, Star Trek, and pornography---if I can slip in a picture of a cute animal, I may be able to construct the Platonic ideal of a popular Internet post.

The case, decided in the District Court for the Central District of California, concerns a group of lawyers engaged in a particularly egregious form of copyright trolling. Their strategy was to file a large number of lawsuits accusing individuals of illegally downloading a single porn video, the copyright for which was apparently assigned to one of the lawyers' groundskeeper on the basis of a forged signature. The basis for these lawsuits was quite flimsy, but the firm had no real intention of winning the lawsuits in court. Instead, they would offer to settle---and as the court decision notes, the offer was "for a sum calculated to be just below the cost of a bare-bones defense." This, combined with the embarrassment of being publicly linked with downloading porn, was apparently enough to extort money from a significant number of people.

The tangled organizational web woven by the trolls is shown in the image below, taken from the court decision. It won't shock anyone who followed This American Life's [story](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack) about patent-trolling front companies. In this case, though, the strategy of obfuscation ultimately contributed to Prenda's undoing, as the judge concluded that its only purpose was to "shield the Principals from potential liability and to give an appearance of legitimacy."

It's also worth noting, amid concerns over [ISP monitoring](http://mashable.com/2013/02/27/isps-six-strikes/) of user traffic, that actually being able to correctly identify downloaders was superfluous to Prenda's strategy. They claimed to show that their targets had used Bittorrent to download the video. Yet the judge points out that they never bothered to "conduct a sufficient investigation to determine whether that person actually downloaded enough data (or even anything at all) to produce a viewable video." Nor did they make any effort to "conclude whether that person spoofed the IP address, is the subscriber of that IP address, or is someone else using that subscriber’s Internet access." Why bother, when they never intended to defend their claims in court? "When faced with a determined defendant . . . they dismiss the case."

All of this would be signficant enough just for providing an extreme example of the way copyright law can be exploited within the American legal system---what the court decision calls "the nexus of antiquated copyright laws, paralyzing social stigma, and unaffordable defense costs." But the author of the decision, [judge Otis Wright](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis_D._Wright_II), took things to another level entirely when he chose to write a decision littered with Star Trek references, beginning with an opening quotation from Spock in *Star Trek II*: "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few".

It only gets better from there, as Wright unloads his scorn on what he refers to as "the porno-trolling collective". An analogy to the [Borg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg_(Star_Trek)) begins by explaining why "resistance is futile" to the porn-trolling scheme, and several pages later notes that some other attorneys who colluded with the main culprits "were not merely assimilated; they knowingly participated in this scheme." In his concluding remarks, Wright observes that

> Though Plaintiffs boldly probe the outskirts of law, the only enterprise they resemble is RICO. The federal agency eleven decks up is familiar with their prime directive and will gladly refit them for their next voyage. The Court will refer this matter to the United States Attorney for the Central District of California.

Watching these scumbags get their comeuppance gives this story a happy ending. But as usual, the real scandal is what's legal. There's no happy ending for [Jammie Thomas](http://www.theverge.com/policy/2013/3/18/4119550/supreme-court-denies-appeal-of-woman-who-owes-riaa-222000), the working class mother of four who's still on the hook for $222,000 for the crime of sharing 24 songs on the Internet. And while bottom-feeders like Prenda get upbraided in court, high class patent trolls like [Nathan Myhrvold](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120811/02060619993/nathan-myhrvold-its-ok-to-kill-innovation-if-youre-also-killing-mosquitoes.shtml) get puffed up as brilliant innovators [by Malcolm Gladwell in the pages of the *New Yorker*](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell). Unfortunately, we may yet look back on Prenda Law as the real innovators, who were just a bit too audacious and a bit too far ahead of their time.

In my periodic discussions of contemporary capitalism and its potential transition into a rentier-dominated economy, I have emphasized the point that an economy based on private property depends upon the state to define and enforce just what counts as property, and what rights come with owning that property. (The point is perhaps made most directly in [this essay](http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/phantom-tollbooths/) for *The New Inquiry*.) Just as capitalism required that the commons in land be enclosed and transformed into the property of individuals, so what I've called ["rentism"](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/) requires the extension of intellectual property: the right to control the copying and modification of *patterns*, and not just of physical objects.

But the development of rentism entails not just a change in the laws, but in the way the economy itself is measured and defined. Since capitalism is rooted in the quantitative reduction of human action to the accumulation of money, the way in which it quantifies itself has great economic and political significance. To relate this back to my [last post](http://www.peterfrase.com/2013/04/the-perils-of-wonkery/): much was made of the empirical and conceptual worthiness of Reinhart and Rogoff's link between government debt and economic growth, but all such [disputations](http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/guest-post-reinhartrogoff-and-growth-time-debt) presume agreement about the measurement of economic growth itself.

Which brings us to the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis, and its surprisingly fascinating ["Preview of the 2013 Comprehensive Revision of the National Income and Product Accounts"](http://www.bea.gov/scb/pdf/2013/03%20March/0313_nipa_comprehensive_revision_preview.pdf). The paper describes a change in the way the government represents the size of various parts of the economy, and therefore economic growth. The most significant changes are these:

> Recognize expenditures by business, government, and nonprofit institutions serving households (NPISH) on research and development as fixed investment.

> Recognize expenditures by business and NPISH on entertainment, literary, and other artistic originals as fixed investment.

The essential issue is whether spending on Research and Development, and on the production of creative works, should be regarded merely as an input to other production processes, or instead as an investment in the creation of a distinct value-bearing asset. The BEA report observes that "expenditures for R&D have long been recognized as having the characteristics of fixed assets---defined ownership rights, long-lasting, and repeated use and benefit in the production process", and that therefore the BEA "recogniz[es] that the asset boundary should be expanded to include innovative activities." Likewise, "some entertainment, literary, and other artistic originals are designed to generate mass reproductions for sale to the general public and to have a useful lifespan of more than one year." Thus the need for "a new asset category entitled 'intellectual property products'," which will encompass both types of property.

What the BEA calls "expanding the asset boundary" is precisely the redefinition of the property form that I've written about---only now it is a statistical rather than a legal redefinition. And that change in measurement will be written backwards into the past as well as forwards into the future: national accounts going back to 1929 will be revised to account for the newly expansive view of assets.

Here the statisticians are only following a long legal trend, in which the state treats immaterial patterns as a sort of physical asset. It may be a coincidence, but the BEA's decision to start its revisionist statistical account in the 1920's matches the point at which U.S. copyright law became fully disconnected from its original emphasis on limited and temporary protections subordinated to social benefits. Under the [Copyright Term Extension Act](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act), creative works made in 1923 and afterwards have remained out of the public domain, perpetually maintaining them as private assets rather than public goods.

A careful reading of the BEA report shows the way in which the very statistical definitions employed in the new accounts rely upon the prior efforts of the state to promote the profitability of the intellectual property form. In its discussion of creative works, the report notes that "entertainment originals are rarely sold in an open market, so it is difficult to observe market prices . . . a common problem with measuring the value of intangible assets." As libertarian critics [like to point out](http://www.micheleboldrin.com/research/aim.html), an economy based on intellectual property must be organized around monopoly rather than direct competition.

In order to measure the value of intangible assets, therefore, the BEA takes a different approach. For R&D, "BEA analyzed the relationship between investment in R&D and future profits . . . in which each period's R&D investment contributes to the profits in later periods." Likewise for creative works, BEA will "estimate the value of these as­sets based on the NPV [Net Present Value] of expected future royalties or other revenue obtained from these assets".

Here we see the reciprocal operation of state power and statistical measurement. Insofar as the state collaborates with copyright holders to stamp out unauthorized copying ("piracy"), and insofar as the courts uphold stringent patent rights, the potential revenue stream that can be derived from owning IP will grow. And now that the system of national accounts has validated such revenues as a part of the value of intangible assets, the copyright and patent cartels can justly claim to be important contributors to the growth of the Gross Domestic Product.

The BEA also has interesting things to say about how their new definitions will impact different components of the overall national accounts aggregate. They note that the categories of "corporate profits" and "proprietors' income" will increase---an accounting convention perhaps, but one that accurately reflects the constituencies that stand to benefit from the control of intellectual property. Thus the new economic order being mapped by the BEA fits in neatly with Steve Waldman's excellent [recent post](http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/4340.html) about late capitalism's "technologically-driven resource curse, coalescing into groups of insiders and outsiders and people fighting at the margins not to be left behind."

The changes related to R&D and artistic works may be the most significant, but the other three revisions in the report are worth noting as well. One has to do with the costs associated with transferring residential fixed assets (e.g., the closing costs related to buying a house), while another has to do with the accounting applied to pension plans. Only the final one, a technical harmonization, has to do directly with wages and salaries. This is perhaps an accurate reflection of an economic elite more preoccupied with asset values than with the direct returns to wage labor.

Finally, the reception of the BEA report provides another "peril of wonkery", related to the one I described in my [last post](http://www.peterfrase.com/2013/04/the-perils-of-wonkery/). The Wonkblog [post](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/22/huzzah-the-u-s-economy-is-3-percent-bigger-than-we-thought-thanks-george-lucas/) about the report makes some effort to acknowledge the socially constructed nature of economic statistics: "the assumptions you make in creating your benchmark economic statistics can create big swings in the reality you see." And yet the post then moves directly on to claim that in light of the statistical revisions, "the U.S. economy is even more heavily driven by the iPad designers and George Lucases of the world---and proportionally less by the guys who assemble washing machines---than we thought." This is no doubt how the matter will be described going forward. But the new measurement strategies are only manifestations of a choice to *attribute* a greater share of
our material wealth to designers and directors, and that choice has more to do with class struggle than with statistics.

The economics blogosphere is buzzing about the errors that were recently exposed in an [influential](http://qz.com/75117/how-influential-was-the-study-warning-high-debt-kills-growth/) paper by Carmen Reinhart, Vincent Reinhart, and Kenneth Rogoff, which claimed that countries with high levels of debt tend to have slower economic growth. See [Mike Konczal](http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-replicated-reinhart-rogoff-and-there-are-serious-problems) for the summary or [here](http://www.peri.umass.edu/236/hash/31e2ff374b6377b2ddec04deaa6388b1/publication/566/) for the full paper by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin. In short, the original Reinhart-Rogoff paper had three significant problems, ranging from cherry-picking data, to dubious weighting schemes, to---most embarrassing of all---an Excel spreadsheet error that accidentally left out several crucial data points.

The reaction of the left-wing peanut gallery (at least to judge by my Twitter feed) has been to ridicule liberals for caring about this at all. Obsessing over the analytical missteps in this paper reeks of the preoccupation with having correct and empirically supported arguments, while ignoring the importance of power and ideology. For while this new critique of Reinhart-Rogoff just now became possible because they finally made their original data available, plenty of people pointed out earlier that the whole analysis rested on shaky conceptual foundations. It used a correlation to assert that high debt to GDP ratios lead to slower growth, ignoring the much more plausible theory that the causal order was the opposite, with slow growth leading to increasing debt loads. If the political elite in Washington failed to heed these criticisms, it wasn't because they were unaware of them, but because the claim that debt leads to slow growth fit a deficit hysteria that was already entrenched. In other words, Reinhart-Rogoff was being used as rhetorical cover for a pre-existing position, not as an actual empirical aid to decision-making.

But rather than dismiss Excel-gate as much ado about nothing, maybe we can use it as a cudgel against the pernicious rise of the "policy wonk" as a model for journalism. As Bhaskar Sunkara noted in a recent article for [*In These Times*](http://inthesetimes.com/article/14419/programmed_for_primetime/), the wonk is a new iteration of American journalism's obsession with "objectivity", in this case filtered through the predilections of the "technocrat, obsessed with policy details, bereft of politics, earnestly searching for solutions to the world’s problems through the dialectic of an Excel spreadsheet." The Reinhart-Rogoff revelations do more than just reveal the folly of relying on the wrong spreadsheets---they expose the shallowness and dishonesty that pervades much of the wonk-journalist milieu.

To return to a familiar whipping boy, let's review the initial reaction to Reinhart-Rogoff's paper last summer, over at Ezra Klein's Wonkblog at the *Washington Post* website. A [post by Suzy Khimm](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/study-long-term-deficits-are-linked-to-24-percent-lower-growth/2012/06/17/gJQAtYlLjV_blog.html) was entitled "Study: Long-term deficits are linked to 24 percent lower growth", and it simply repeated the study's claims without critique. For added truthiness, the post is embellished with a graph reproduced from the paper, demonstrating the difference in GDP growth between a group of low-debt and high-debt countries.

As we now know, that graph was based on erroneous data marshaled in support of a logically flimsy premise. But while the data errors wouldn't be revealed for months, not everyone was fooled. Matt Yglesias---a writer often lumped in with wonks like Klein--- dismissed the Reinhart-Rogoff paper as ["confused correlation-mongering"](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/06/02/kenneth_rogoff_s_confused_correlation_mongering.html), on the grounds that the reverse causal story about debt ratios and growth was far more plausible. (Incidentally, the way Yglesias approached Reinhart and Rogoff's claims demonstrates how poorly he fits the mode of the Ezra Klein-style wonk-journalist. In contrast to the wonky preoccupation with empirical studies and pretty graphs, Yglesias has argued that ["evidence is overrated"](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/02/29/empirical_evidence_is_overratedi.html), and he often offers positions based on his own ideological predilections and reasoning from first principles.)

This is an approach that can get you into trouble in other ways, but it does sidestep one of the big problems confronting the wonk. The function of the wonk is to translate the empirical findings of experts for the general public. And he is supposed to be distinguished by an immersion in the details of studies and policy papers. But if the wonk wants to cover a wide range of subjects, they will necessarily have far less expertise than the people whose findings are being conveyed. Hence it becomes necessary to make a concealed argument from authority. When Wonkblog presents the findings of Reinhart and Rogoff without comment, they are implicitly telling us, "trust these people---they're famous academic economists". This is because they don't have the ability to do what people like [Paul Krugman](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/11/reinhart-and-rogoff-are-confusing-me/) did, and actually assess the correctness of the famous economists' claims.

Performing this con on the public is dangerous enough. But insofar as the wonk gets high on his own supply, and starts to trust the findings of congenial academics without verifying, the temptation to take shortcuts can be overpowering. It's easy to read the abstract and the conclusion of a paper and trumpet its findings, without looking too closely at whatever equations or models lie in between. This isn't actually any more hardheaded than relying on one's feelings, but it's an appealing way to give one's prejudices a fact-like veneer. That's what seems to have happened to Ezra Klein's understudy Dylan Matthews, who uncritically accepted some claims about the effect of teachers' strikes on student achievement, which Doug Henwood was able to easily [pick apart](http://lbo-news.com/2012/09/17/dylan-matthews-has-a-rethink-on-teacher-strikes/) by actually reading the studies he was referring to.

This wouldn't be so aggravating if the wonks were more open about their ideological orientation. If Yglesias promoted a study finding a relationship between strict occupational licensing and slow economic growth, I'd know to look carefully into the details, since his pre-existing views on that subject are [well-known](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2010/08/18/198262/do-straight-razors-justify-barber-licensing/). With the wonks, though, close reading and an understanding of ruling class ideology are required to extract the political orientations that are guiding their judgment.

As the policy wonk has risen in prestige, we seem to have reached the point where this entire class of commentators is highly susceptible to what I'll call "Charlie Rose disease". It's a malady named for the host of the eponymous TV show, who has always impressed me with his ability to convey an impression of knowledge and gravitas to his viewer. If you watch his show and actually listen to him talk, you'll quickly notice that Rose is a shallow thinker even by television standards, and generally quite ignorant about the things he interviews people about. But everything about him---from his face to his cadence to his posture to his austere black-background set to having his show on public television---works together to produce the *image* of intellectual seriousness, even more than for most TV news hosts.

And so it is with the wonk---he needs to appear to be deeply knowledgeable about a wide range of obscure and technical subjects. But this entails concealing both one's ideological biases and one's substantive lack of knowledge, and relying on the borrowed prestige of academics and experts. In doing so, the wonk becomes the conduit for the experts, or more exactly a crucial means by which their authority is reproduced. The wonk takes the expert's pronouncements at face value because they are serious, mainstream figures, and the fact that journalists do this reinforces their seriousness and mainstream-ness. One could hardly devise a better way of policing ideological boundaries and maintaining the illusion that the ruling ideology is merely [bi-partisan common sense](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/10/the-partisan-and-the-political/).

The unraveling of the Reinhart-Rogoff "fact" about debt and growth was only unusual because the supporting research was unusually sloppy. In that sense, critics are correct that there's nothing particularly special about this one case. But the very absurdity of the episode makes it useful as a means of unmasking the entire corrupt enterprise of policy wonk journalism and its "just the facts, ma'am" pretensions.

In Sunday's *New York Times*, conservative columnist Ross Douthat [invokes](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/opinion/sunday/douthat-a-world-without-work.html) the utopian dream of "a society rich enough that fewer and fewer people need to work---a society where leisure becomes universally accessible, where part-time jobs replace the regimented workweek, and where living standards keep rising even though more people have left the work force altogether." This "post-work" politics [may be unfamiliar](https://twitter.com/JHWeissmann/status/305681756441427969) to many readers of the *Times*, but it won't be new to readers of *Jacobin*.

Post-work socialism has a proud, if dissident tradition, from [Paul Lafargue](http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/) to [Oscar Wilde](http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/index.htm) to [Bertrand Russell](http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html) to [André Gorz](http://books.google.com/books/about/Paths_to_paradise.html?id=5wTsAAAAMAAJ). It's a vision that animates my writing on topics ranging across [the contradictions of the work ethic](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/01/hipsters-food-stamps-and-the-politics-of-resentment/), [the possibilities of a post-scarcity society](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/), [the politics of sex work](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/03/the-problem-with-sex-work/), and [the connection between post-work politics and feminism](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/). Others have addressed related themes, like Chris Maisano on [shorter working hours](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/01/take-this-job-and-share-it/) as both a response to unemployment and a step forward for human freedom, and Sarah Leonard on the [pro-work corporate feminism](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/she-cant-sleep-no-more/) of Marissa Mayer.

The basic vision of the post-work Left, then, is one of [fewer jobs](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/07/against-jobs-for-full-employment/), and shorter hours at the jobs we do have. Douthat suggests, however, that this vision is already becoming a reality, and he warns that it is not a result we should welcome.

It's something of a victory that a *New York Times* columnist is even acknowledging the post-work perspective on labor politics, rather than ignoring it completely. Hopefully he's been taking [his own advice](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/opinion/sunday/douthat-how-to-read-in-2013.html), and reading about it in *Jacobin*. But Douthat's take is a rather peculiar one. To begin with, he claims that we have entered an era of "post-employment, in which people drop out of the work force and find ways to live, more or less permanently, without a steady job". But it's not clear what he bases this claim on. It's true that labor force participation rates---the percentage of the working-age population that is employed or looking for work---has declined in recent years. From a high of around 67 percent in the late 1990's, it declined to around 66 percent before the beginning of the last recession. The recession itself then produced another sharp decline, and the rate now stands below 64 percent.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that this reflects masses of people taking advantage of our material abundance to increase their leisure time. As those numbers show, most of the decline in the participation rate was due to the recession (and some of the rest is probably due to [demographic shifts](http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2012/10/understanding-decline-in-participation.html)). If the economy returned to full employment---that is, if everyone who wanted a job could actually find one---the participation rate would probably rise again. For how else are people supposed to "find ways to live . . . without a steady job", when incomes have stayed [flat for decades](http://stateofworkingamerica.org/charts/productivity-and-real-median-family-income-growth-1947-2009/) despite great increases in productivity?

The post-work landscape that Douthat discovers is therefore very different than the one you'll find surveyed in the pages of *Jacobin*. An economy in which people must get by on some combination of scant public benefits, charity, and hustling---because they are unable to find a job---is very different from a world where people are able to make a real choice to either cut back their hours or drop out of paid work entirely for a period of time. That's why, in different ways, [Maisano](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/working-for-the-weekend-2/), [myself](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/07/against-jobs-for-full-employment/), and [Seth Ackerman](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/05/the-work-of-anti-work-a-response-to-peter-frase/) have all emphasized that full employment is central to the project of work reduction, because tight labor markets give workers the bargaining power to demand shorter hours even without cuts in pay. And it's why I have especially emphasized the demand for a [Universal Basic Income](http://kboo.fm/node/52414), which would make it possible to survive outside of paid labor for a much larger segment of the population.

If Douthat's account of labor force participation is misleading, his account of working time is equally incomplete. "Long hours", he claims, "are increasingly the province of the rich." While this claim isn't precisely wrong, at least within certain narrow parameters, it obscures much more than it reveals. Douthat links to an economic study that [finds](http://www.nber.org/digest/jul06/w11895.html) longer average weekly hours among those at the top of the wage distribution, relative to those at the bottom. This is not a unique finding; the sociologists Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson found something similar in their study [*The Time Divide*](http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Time_Divide.html?id=3T1qJfLuohgC). And as it happens, I have some published [academic research](http://www.peterfrase.com/research/) on the topic as well. In many rich countries, including the United States, highly educated workers (e.g., those with college degrees) report longer average work weeks than the less educated (who also tend to be lower waged, of course).

This finding is often deployed to dismiss the significance of long hours, much the way Douthat does here. If the longest hours are being worked by those who presumably have the most power and leverage in the labor market, the argument goes, then long hours shouldn't be such a concern. But this is wrong for several reasons.

First, just because hours are longest at the top end of the wage distribution doesn't mean they aren't long elsewhere as well---in my research, I found that reported average hours among men were above 40 hours per week across all educational categories. And hours on the job doesn't cover all the other time people spend working: time spent commuting to work, time spent performing unpaid household and care work (which those on low wages often can't buy paid replacements for), and what the sociologist Guy Standing [calls](http://unionosity.com/precarity-2/guy-standing-discusses-the-precariat/) "work-for-labor": the work of looking for jobs, navigating state and private bureaucracies, networking, and other things that are preconditions for getting work but are themselves unpaid.

Second, working time is characterized by pervasive *mismatches* between hours and preferences, which are more complicated than just hours that are "too long". Jeremy Reynolds [has found](http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/81/4/1171.short) that a majority of workers say that they would like to work a different schedule than they do, but that these preferences are split between those who would like to work less and those who would like more hours---[overemployment](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/03/the-scourge-of-overemployment/) alongside underemployment.

The finding that many people report working fewer hours than they would like reflects an economy in which many [low-wage workers](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/mcjobs-should-pay-too-inside-fast-food-workers-historic-protest-for-living-wages/265714/) face uncertain schedules and enforced part-time hours that exclude them from benefits. These workers would clearly benefit from predictable hours, higher wages, and recourse to good health care benefits that aren't tied to employment, but it's far from clear that they would benefit from more work, as such.

And Douthat would almost seem to agree. In a passage I could have written myself, he says:

> There is a certain air of irresponsibility to giving up on employment altogether, of course. But while pundits who tap on keyboards for a living like to extol the inherent dignity of labor, we aren’t the ones stocking shelves at Walmart or hunting wearily, week after week, for a job that probably pays less than our last one did. One could make the case that the right to not have a boss is actually the hardest won of modern freedoms: should it really trouble us if more people in a rich society end up exercising it?

Amazingly, he follows this up by answering that last question with a resounding *yes*. And I might almost be inclined to follow him, if he based his conclusion on the argument I've just presented: that in an environment of pervasive unemployment, high costs of living, and a meager and narrowly targeted welfare state, the loss of work isn't exactly something to celebrate.

Perhaps realizing, however, that this austere vision is hardly a compelling case for the conservative worldview, Douthat tries a different tack. Having acknowledged the implausibility of the "dignity of labor" case for much actually-existing work, he neverthelsss moves right on to the claim that "even a grinding job tends to be an important source of social capital, providing everyday structure for people who live alone, a place to meet friends and kindle romances for people who lack other forms of community, a path away from crime and prison for young men, an example to children and a source of self-respect for parents." He concludes with an appeal to the importance of "human flourishing", but it's hard to see much social capital, lasting interpersonal connection, or human flourishing going on in the [Amazon warehouse](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor)---or for that matter, at [Pret a Manger](http://jacobinmag.com/2013/02/in-defense-of-soviet-waiters/).

Although it's pitched in a kindlier, *New York Times*-friendly tone, Douthat's argument is reminiscent of [Charles Murray's](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart:_The_State_of_White_America,_1960%E2%80%932010) argument that the working class needs the discipline and control provided by working for the boss, lest they come socially unglued altogether. Good moralistic scold that he is, Douthat sees the decline of work as part of "the broader turn away from community in America---from family breakdown and declining churchgoing to the retreat into the virtual forms of sport and sex and friendship." It seems more plausible that it is neoliberal economic conditions themselves---a scaled back social safety net, precarious employment, rising, debts and uncertain incomes---that has produced [whatever increase in anomie and isolation](http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/dec/20/instagame/) we experience. The answer to that is not more work but more protection from the life's unpredictable risks, more income, more equality, more democracy---and more time beyond work to take advantage of all of it.

There's been a bit of a discussion about affective labor going around. Paul Myerscough in the [*London Review of Books*](http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n01/paul-myerscough/short-cuts) describes the elaborate code with which the Pret a Manger chain enforces an ersatz cheerfulness and dedication on the part of its employees, who are expected to be "smiling, reacting to each other, happy, engaged". Echoing a remark of [Giraudoux and George Burns](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean_Giraudoux), the most important thing to fake is sincerity: "authenticity of being happy is important".

[Tim Noah](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112204/pret-manger-when-corporations-enforce-happiness) and [Josh Eidelson](http://www.thenation.com/article/172547/starbucks-tycoon-bullies-baristas) elaborate on this theme, and [Sarah Jaffe](http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/14535/grin_and_abhor_it_the_truth_behind_service_with_a_smile/) makes the point that this has always been an extremely gendered aspect of labor (waged and otherwise). She notes that "women have been fighting for decades to make the point that they don't do their work for the love of it; they do it because women are expected to do it." Employers, of course, would prefer equality to be established by imposing the love of work on both genders.

Noah describes the way Pret a Manger keeps "its sales clerks in a state of enforced rapture through policies vaguely reminiscent of the old East German Stasi". I was reminded of the Soviet model too, but in a different way. I'm just old enough to remember when people talked about the Communist world as a really-existing place rather than a vaguely-defined bogeyman. And one of the mundane tropes that always came up foreign travelogues from behind the Iron Curtain concerned the notoriously surly service workers, in particular restaurant waiters. A 1977 [newspaper headline](http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2519&dat=19770720&id=C-ZdAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Gl8NAAAAIBAJ&pg=4427,2646581) reads "Soviet Union Takes Hard Look At Surly Waiters, Long Lines". In a 1984 dispatch in the *New York Times*, John Burns reports that "faced with inadequate supplies, low salaries and endless lines of customers, many Russians in customer-service jobs lapse into an indifference bordering on contempt."

One can find numerous explanations of this phenomenon, from the shortcomings of the planned economy to the institutional structure of the Soviet service industry to the vagaries of the Russian soul to the [legacy of serfdom](http://konstantin2005.blogspot.com/2005/10/russian-rudeness.html). But one factor was clearly that Soviet workers, unlike their American counterparts, were guaranteed jobs, wages, and access to essential needs like housing, education, and health care. The fear that enforces fake happiness among capitalist service workers---culminating in the grotesquery of Pret a Manger---was mostly inoperative in the Soviet Union. As an article in [the *Moscow Times*](http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/why-russians-dont-smile/436037.html) explains:

> During the perestroika era, the American smile was a common reference point when the topic of rude Soviet service was discussed. In an often-quoted exchange that took place on a late-1980s television talk show, one participant said, “In the United States, store employees smile, but everyone knows that the smiles are insincere.” Another answered, “Better to have insincere American smiles than our very sincere Soviet rudeness!”

With the collapse of the USSR and the penetration of Western capital into Russia, employers discovered a workforce that adapted only reluctantly to the norms of capitalist work discipline. A 1990 article in *USA Today* opens with a description of the travails facing the first Pizza Hut in the Soviet Union:

> To open the first Pizza Hut restaurants in the Soviet Union, U.S. managers had to teach Soviet workers how to find the ''you'' in U.S.S.R.

> ''We taught them the concept of customer service,'' says Rita Renth, just back from the experience. ''Things that come naturally to employees here we had to teach them to do: -smiling, interacting with customers, eye contact.''

In no time, however, the managers hit on what I've [described](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/) as the third wave form of the work ethic. Rather than appealing to religious salvation or material prosperity, workers are told that they should find their drudgery intrinsically enjoyable:

> The five U.S. managers - and colleagues from Pizza Huts in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Australia and other nations - spent 12 to 14 hours a day drilling the Russians on service and food preparation, Pizza Hut style.

> As a way of ''motivating them to be excited about what they were doing, we made (tasks) like folding boxes into a contest,'' Rae says. ''When they finished, they said they couldn't believe they would ever have fun at their jobs.''

> That feeling, rare in Soviet workplaces, has been noticed. ''A comment made by a lot of customers was that as soon as they walked in, they sensed a feeling of warmth,'' Rae says.

It's the Pret a Manger approach to enforced cheerfulness (which had better be authentic!), combined with gamification, 1990-style. Along the same lines is this [blog post](http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/04/old-soviet-mentality-about-customer.html) from a business school professor, who recounts the experience of the first Russian McDonald's:

> After several days of training about customer service at McDonald's, a young Soviet teenager asked the McDonald's trainer a very serious question: "Why do we have to be so nice to the customers? After all, WE have the hamburgers, and they don't!"

True enough. But while they may have had the hamburgers, with the collapse of Communism they no longer had steady access to the [means of payment](http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/05/category-errors/).

The brusqueness of customer service interactions has typically been interpreted as an indication of Communism's shortcomings, their low quality understood as a mark of capitalism's superiority. And it does indicate a contradiction of the Soviet model, which preserved the form of wage labor while removing many of the disciplinary mechanisms---the threat of unemployment, of destitution---that force workers to accept the discipline of the employer or the customers. That contradiction comes to a head in a restaurant where both employees and customers are miserable. As the old saying goes, "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work".

In his recent [essay](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/), Seth Ackerman cautions that present-day socialists shouldn't overlook the material shortcomings of the planned economies, and he notes that "the shabbiness of consumer supply was popularly felt as a betrayal of the humanistic mission of socialism itself". But service work is a bit different from the kind of material shabbiness he discusses, since the product and the worker are inseparable. To demand what we've come to think of as "good service" is ultimately to demand the kind of affective---and affected---labor that we see throughout the service industry and especially in female-gendered occupations. Paul Myerscough is clearly unsettled by a system in which, "To guard against the possibility of Pret workers allowing themselves to behave even for a moment as if they were ‘just here for the money’, the company maintains a panoptical regime of surveillance and assessment." But 30 years ago, journalists like Myerscough were the sort
of people grousing about rude Moscow waiters.

In a system based on wage labor (or its approximation), the choice between company-enforced cheerfulness or authentic resentment is unavoidable. In other words, fake American smiles or sincere Soviet rudeness. The customer service interaction under capitalism can hardly avoid the collision between fearful resentment and self-deluding condescension, of the sort Tim Noah enacts in his opening: "For a good long while, I let myself think that the slender platinum blonde behind the counter at Pret A Manger was in love with me." Perhaps it's time to look back with a bit of nostalgia on the surly Communist waiters of yore, whose orientation toward the system was at least transparent.

I have argued many times that the essence of the social democratic project---and for the time being, the socialist project as well---is the empowerment of labor. By means of full employment, the separation of income from employment, and the organization of workers, people gain the ability to resist the demands of the boss. But the case of affective labor is another example that shows why this supposedly tepid and reformist project is ultimately radical and unstable. Take away the lash of the boss, and you are suddenly forced to confront service employees as human beings with human emotions, without their company-supplied masks of enforced good cheer. Revealing the true condition of service work can be a [de-fetishizing experience](http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/garagesale/garagesale1.pdf), one just as jarring---and quite a bit closer to home---than finding out how your [iPhone was manufactured](http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/garagesale/garagesale1.pdf). In both cases, we
are made to confront unpleasant truths about the power relations that structure all of our experiences as consumers.

As everyone knows by now, *Jacobin* [issue 9](http://jacobinmag.com/issue/modify-your-dissent/) is out (except for you print subscribers, sorry you lot). There's lots of great stuff there to dig into.

My lead editorial for this issue began its life as a blog post, and it was originally just going to be a quick response to the absurdly wrong-headed hit on Occupy that Tom Frank [wrote for the neo-*Baffler*](http://www.thebaffler.com/past/to_the_precinct_station).

It sprawled, obviously, into a larger chunk of wannabe-Perry Anderson intellectual history. But what I was originally reacting to was an essay whose false conclusions derived from one specific misbegotten premise: that Occupy was obviously and decisively a failure, and a defeat.

The encampments, from lower Manhattan to Oakland, are long gone. And hence, so is Occupy, from the vantage point of people who didn't really participate in or understand it. But the legacy of Occupy goes far beyond pitching tents in a few parks or public squares. The people who built those camps went on to build a successor politics that's ongoing, and both its successes and its failures are worth paying attention to. After hurricane Sandy, [Sarah Jaffe](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/11/power-to-the-people/) covered an iteration of this for *Jacobin*, when the afterglow of Occupy in New York City re-ignited as an impromptu relief organization that put mainstream relief agencies [to shame](http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2012/11/04/occupy_sandy_hurricane_relief_being_led_by_occupy_wall_street.html).

But Occupy's afterlife extends far beyond New York. Anyone who read my [contribution to Jacobin 3-4](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/11/an-imagined-community/) knows that I feel a special connection to the politics of Minnesota. So I was delighted that my annual Christmas return to Minneapolis coincided with an action from [Occupy Homes](http://www.occupyhomesmn.org/), which is what the Minnesotan fraction of Occupy has evolved into.

Occupy in Minnesota, as in many other places, begain with an occupation of public space. But in the upper Midwest, it was particularly pressing that activists find something else to expend their energy on that didn't involve camping outside through the long winter. As Occupy Homes activist Nick Espinosa explained to me, the focus on housing began when a foreclosure victim simply turned up at the camp and told her story. Since then, Occupy Homes has been involved in multiple foreclosure defenses, including one that resulted in (since-dismissed) [riot charges](http://www.fightbacknews.org/2012/6/30/occupy-homes-mn-protesters-charged-third-degree-riot-defending-cruz-home-foreclosure) against Espinosa and other activists.

The most recent action, pictured above, was as simple and media-friendly as it was politically powerful. We helped to move a homeless family of three into a [vacant, foreclosed house](http://www.occupyhomesmn.org/homeforholidays) in St. Paul, just in time for Christmas. The woman shown speaking above is the previous owner of the house, who is in the process of losing it to US Bank. She gave her blessing and support to the activists from Occupy Homes and Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (an ACORN successor organization) as they reclaimed the place for Carrie, Xavier, and young Caleb, shown on the left.

The activists are demanding that US Bank give the house to a community organization and take it as a tax write-off, so that it can be used to house people again instead of sitting empty. But even if the bank won't play ball, Espinosa told me that they should be able to keep the family from being evicted for at least a month, and quite possibly longer. And Occupy Homes has every intention of creating a publicity nightmare for the local authorities, if they decide to start evicting families on behalf of big banks. With luck, the action I took part in in St. Paul will be the first of many.

Getting a personal look at what Occupy activists are doing in Minnesota reinforced my conviction that the hopeful note on which I ended my editorial was the right one: "The old may still be dying, but the new is already being born. Our task is to help it grow."

The new issue of *Jacobin* will be out next week, just after Christmas, and it's full of great stuff. You should [subscribe](http://store.jacobinmag.com/) if you haven't already, or give someone else a [gift subscription](http://store.jacobinmag.com/) if you have. (You can place an order with the right shipping address, send an email to subscriptions@jacobinmag.com with your gift announcement, and we'll handle the rest.)

This issue's [cover](http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=567880103238695) is inspired by my lead editorial, which is both an appreciation and a critique of the *Baffler*, the small magazine that strongly influenced me and others associated with *Jacobin* back in its 1990's heyday, and which was recently relaunched under new leadership. I'm sure people will enjoy the salacious catfight element of sniping at another publication, but I hope they also respond to my larger purpose, which is to explain why the *Baffler* was so important and appropriate to the time of its initial run, and why I think *Jacobin* is reacting to a qualitatively different historical moment.

While you're waiting for the issue to appear, here are two things you should do. The first is to help defend University of Rhode Island professor and [Lawyers, Guns, & Money](http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/) blogger Erik Loomis. As explained in [this statement at Crooked Timber](http://crookedtimber.org/2012/12/19/statement-on-erik-loomis/), Loomis is the victim of an absurd rightist smear campaign, all because he used Twitter to metaphorically demand NRA head Wayne LaPierre's "head on a stick" in the aftermath of the Newtown school shooting. I've had my [strong disagreements](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/09/the-conservative-leftist-and-the-radical-longshoreman/) with Loomis, but this is a moment to pull together in solidarity. As an untenured professor, Loomis's job and career are at risk, and what's happening to him is a risk that all of us run when we air radical ideas in public. Read the statement for more, or just go right ahead and contact the following administrators at URI:

- Dean Winnie Brownell: winnie@mail.uri.edu
- Provost Donald DeHays: ddehayes@uri.edu
- President David Dooley: davedooley@mail.uri.edu

The second thing I would recommend for U.S. readers is to have a look at [this page](https://pol.moveon.org/fiscal-showdown-whip/index.html), which catalogs the positions of Senate Democrats on President Obama's plan to cut Social Security through a change in the way benefits are adjusted for inflation. Some have already come out against it, but many more haven't made their position clear, and a few are in favor. If your Senators are in the undecided or pro-cuts group, you can use the site to contact them and either express your disagreement, or try to pin them down on their position. Figuring out where all these politicians stand will be important in trying to beat back these cuts, just as it was in the fight over [Bush's attempt](http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/004279.php) to privatize Social Security.

***

With that out of the way, here are some other things I've published elsewhere lately that may be of interest.

I have an essay in a rather unusual venue for me: the "Garage Sale Standard", a broadsheet that was commissioned to accompany a recent staging of artist Martha Rosler's ["Meta-Monumental Garage Sale"](http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1279) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. My essay, "The Garage Sale and Other Utopias", can be found in PDF form [here](http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/garagesale/garagesale1.pdf). I attempt to place the garage sale in the context of capitalism's fetish of the commodity, and individual attempts to escape from it:

> To alter the conditions that produce things like the Foxconn scandal would require a radical, worldwide transformation of the kind of society and economy we live in. Lacking the ability to bring about such a change, consumers disturbed by what is revealed when objects are defetishized understandably look for ways to avoid implication in processes of production that they find ugly and exploitative. Two of the most popular strategies are ethical consumption and buying secondhand. But while each of these points in certain hopeful and utopian directions, each also demonstrates the limits of seeking individual solutions to a collective dilemma.

I also have an essay in the most recent issue of the *New Inquiry*, ["Sowing Scarcity"](http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/sowing-scarcity/). It's a discussion of agriculture, in which I attempt to combine my longstanding preoccupation with intellectual property laws with a richer appreciation of ecological issues:

> This is late capitalism’s inverted world, where business and government treat nature as infinite but strictly ration culture. Thus does capitalism, billed in every economics textbook as the supreme mechanism for allocating scarce resources, degenerate into a machine that introduces scarcity where it need not exist and blithely squanders the things that are in short supply.

Finally, I had a blast appearing on Portland's KBOO radio to discuss the Basic Income and anti-work leftism [with Joe Clement and Kathryn Sackinger](http://kboo.fm/node/52414) and take questions from callers over the course of an hour. You can find the audio file at the link, along with some supplementary reading. If you want to hear an explanation and defense of Universal Basic Income as a Gorzian "non-reformist reform" in audio format, I think this is a pretty comprehensive one.

People know my beat by now, so everyone has been directing my attention to Paul Krugman's [recent musings](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robots/) on the pace of automation in the economy. He moves away from his earlier preoccupation with worker skills, and toward the possibility of "'capital-biased technological change', which tends to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital." He goes on to present data showing the secular decline in labor's share of income since the 1970's.

He then notes that his position "has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism", but reassures us that this uncomfortable realization "shouldn't be a reason to ignore facts". The implication of those facts, he says, are that neither the liberal nor conservative common sense has anything to say about our current predicament: "Better education won’t do much to reduce inequality if the big rewards simply go to those with the most assets. Creating an “opportunity society” . . . won’t do much if the most important asset you can have in life is, well, lots of assets inherited from your parents."

Meanwhile we have Kevin Drum [despairing](http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/12/our-bedpan-and-canasta-future) that the coming decades will be "mighty grim", as automation means that "the owners of capital will automate more and more, putting more and more people out of work". And we have the Financial Times publishing Izabella Kaminska [arguing that](http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2012/12/10/1303512/the-robot-economy-and-the-new-rentier-class/?) "we’ve now arrived at a point where technology begins to threaten return on capital, mostly by causing the sort of abundance that depresses prices to the point where many goods have no choice but to become free." This, of course, leads to attempts to impose artificial scarcity through new forms of property rights (with dire consequences for growth and prosperity), but I've written all about that [elsewhere](http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/phantom-tollbooths/).

What I mainly find interesting is what all this interest in technology and jobless growth says about the limits of contemporary liberalism. We can all hope that Gavin Mueller's [reverie](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277548284002828288) [of](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277549350383677440) [Paul](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277549399863881730) [Krugman](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277550263462666240) [dropping](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277551124733636608) [LSD](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277552595474726914) [and](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277554156699541504) [becoming](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277555109364387840) [a Marxist](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277556050801074176) will come to pass, but in the meantime his type seems to have no real answer. Nor do those of a more labor-liberal bent, like Dan Crawford [at Angry Bear](http://www.angrybearblog.com/2012/12/paul-krugman-changes-his-mind-on.html), who laments being called a neo-luddite and scornfully says: "As if widespread use of automated systems was automatically good for us overall". As if a world in which we hold back technical change in order to keep everyone locked into deadening jobs is a vision that will rally the masses to liberalism.

In its more sophisticated form, this kind of politics takes the form of Ed Miliband's "predistribution", which Richard Seymour [glosses](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/09/predistribution-an-attack-on-the-social-wage/) as a belief that "rather than taxing the rich to fund welfare, the government should focus on making work pay more." But if the structure of the modern economy is, as Krugman argues, one which depends on increasing numbers of robots and diminishing numbers of people, this project is bound to be either ineffectual or pointlessly destructive of our potential social wealth. The idea that there is something inherently superior, either politically or morally, about raising pre-tax and transfer incomes, rather than doing redistribution, is one that has never seemed to me to be especially well grounded. At times I suspect that it stems from an uncritical embrace of the historically specific white populist identity politics of the working class, and its accompanying fetish for the point of production, that I talk about [here](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/11/an-imagined-community/).

Not to say I have all the answers either, but here on the crazy Left we at least have [some ideas](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/). Ideas that don't presuppose the desirability of keeping the assembly line of employment going at all costs, pumping out something that we can call "middle class jobs". Ideas that get back to crazy notions like working time reduction and the decommodification of labor. These days, the unrealistic utopians are the nostalgics for the Fordist compromise, who see the factory worker with a high school diploma and a middle class income as the apex of human emancipation. But as Lenin [said](http://radicalcut.blogspot.com/2009/02/conversation-between-lenin-and-valeriu.html), "One can never be radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself".

Given the [origins](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/introducing-saint-monday/) of my blog's name, I've avoided posting on Mondays. But I don't get paid for doing this, and so this was a misbegotten impulse for the reasons I explain below.

Yesterday I heard two interviews that helpfully recontextualize some common economic arguments about money and motivation, and provide another angle on the discussion of jobs in my [last post](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/11/hostess-and-the-limits-of-the-private-welfare-state/). The first is [with singer Chris Cornell](http://www.npr.org/2012/11/18/165213392/armed-with-age-and-experience-soundgarden-returns) of the recently re-formed Soundgarden, talking about what got him into music:

> I got a GED based on Catholic school seventh-grade education, really. I didn't make it that far. I have all those regrets now. ... I just kind of went into the blue-collar workforce at a really young age and discovered music, in terms of being a musician, around the same time. The good news is, I was probably 17 when I knew that's what I was going to do with the rest of my life, no matter what that meant. Even if that meant that I had to be a dishwasher or a janitor to support being in a band that I love and writing music that I love, I would be happy with that. So I feel fortunate. In spite of my lack of education, I didn't lack direction.

The second was with the writer Fran Lebowitz, on [Jesse Thorn's show "Bullseye"](http://www.maximumfun.org/bullseye/bullseye-jesse-thorn-fran-lebowitz-karriem-riggins-and-mark-frauenfelder). After Thorn asks her about the erratic appearance of her work, Lebowitz relates that she loved to write as a young woman, but developed crippling writers' block once she began to get paid to write. She posits that she is "so resistant to authority, that I am even resistant to my own authority." She later declares herself to hate work and be incorrigibly lazy, but the earlier comment hints at a more complex explanation. Transforming writing into an economic compulsion seems to have undermined intrinsic motivation, consistent with a long line of research in [behavioral economics](http://www.danpink.com/books/drive).

There's nothing particularly original or shocking about these interviews. We all know that people are motivated by much more than money. Just today, I saw two posts on this theme, from [Nancy Folbre on child-rearing](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/of-parents-puppies-and-robots/) and [Matt Yglesias on people who take reductions in income in return for job satisfaction](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/11/19/job_amenitiy_value_the_most_neglected_subject_in_economics.html). Yet according to the hegemonic common-sense form of economic reasoning, neither of these people should exist. If you want someone to do something, the common argument goes, you should give them a financial incentive. But Cornell isn't motivated by money, if we take him at his word (and even if he really wouldn't have kept at it without stardom, there are many others who do.) And Lebowitz is actively *de*-motivated to write by getting paid for it, illustrating the adage that the best way to ruin something you love is to
make it your job.

It's people like this that I'm thinking of when I say that with reductions in working time and something like a generous [Universal Basic Income](http://www.usbig.net/index.php), we would begin to [discover what work people will continue to do](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/02/do-they-owe-us-a-living/) whether or not they get paid for it. That's not to say that all work can be taken care of this way; it's hard to imagine an inverse of Chris Cornell who takes a day job as a rock singer to fund his passion for dishwashing. But we can at least start asking why we don't make an effort to restrict wage labor to areas where it actually incentivizes something.

This relates to a topic Mike Konczal brings up in his [new *American Prospect* article](http://prospect.org/article/great-societys-next-frontier), about the debate between proponents of the UBI (like me), and those like the sociologist Lane Kenworthy who prefer policies that are tied to participation in wage labor, like the Earned Income Tax Credit. Kenworthy worries about the disincentive to employment that a UBI would create, but I'm more interested in the way that it would open up space for people to do socially desirable but non-remunerated things (and also to reconsider how we distribute the burden of socially desirable but personally unpleasant work). We already have *too much* wage labor, from this perspective, so we shouldn't be so worried about getting more of it. So I agree, in a sense, with Trevor Burrus of the Cato Institute of all people, who [says we should champion](http://www.libertarianism.org/blog/bad-arguments-libertarianism-merit) "a system where productivity allows people to be artists,
record store clerks, or even bums." Of course, Burrus calls that system "the free market", where I would locate it in something rather different.

It's because of people like Cornell and Lebowitz, perhaps, that I don't worry as much as Keynes did, in ["Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren"](http://marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1930/our-grandchildren.htm), about how people will find ways to use their expanded leisure time. He posed it as humanity's "permanent problem---how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure . . . to live wisely and agreeably and well". It's a theme recently brought up anew by Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky and his philosopher son Edward, who return to ancient philosophy's preoccupation with defining the good life in their fascinating (yet maddening) book [*Enough*](http://www.amazon.com/How-Much-Enough-Money-Good/dp/1590515072). But I ultimately have a lot of optimism about what people are capable of, and I believe a socialist future would, among other things, bring us more music and literature from the Chris Cornells and Fran Lebowitzes than does the system we live
in now.

Hostess Brands, maker of the Twinkie, [announced its liquidation](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/hostess-brands-says-it-will-liquidate/) today. This provoked a wave of [now-more-than-everism](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-recoverydeficit-reduction-deal-the-two-parties-should-but-wont-strike/2011/05/19/AGxljgOH_blog.html), as both liberals and conservatives rushed to use the company's failure as a testament to their longstanding hobbyhorses.

To the Right, of course, the end of Hostess is just another great opportunity to bash unions. Although perhaps it's a sign of progress that even Fox News decided to soft-pedal this line, talking up the conciliatory position of the Teamsters while [blaming](http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/11/16/hostess-brands-to-liquidate-lay-off-18500-after-crippling-union-fight/) the recalcitrance of the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union for the closure. The idea that this is all about greedy unions is idiotic beyond belief, but sadly something we apparently still have to talk about. So if you don't believe me you can go read [Sarah Jaffe](http://adifferentclass.com/post/35839856607/we-deeply-regret-the-necessity-of-todays) or [Diana Reese](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2012/11/16/unions-did-not-kill-twinkies-but-theyll-take-the-fall/).

A line I'm seeing from liberals, meanwhile, is that this is another case of private equity vulture capitalism ruining the American dream. Hostess Brands was under the control of [a couple of hedge funds](http://www.cnbc.com/id/49853653), as is the style these days. And so one line of argument is that Hostess could have been a perfectly sustainable company with good paying jobs, if only those short-sighted PE guys hadn't showed up to loot it. A typical example of the genre is [this](http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/16/1162355/--Hostess-Brands-is-a-microcosm-of-what-s-wrong-with-America) from Laura Clawson at Daily Kos. Mark Price [puts it](https://twitter.com/price_laborecon/status/269485519417782272) more pithily on Twitter: "Private equity runs up debt, takes out fees and investment in capital goods declines leading to cost disadvantages."

There's no question that this is part of the story. The usual antics seem to be at work here, like levering up the company with debt and giving big pay raises to top management even as the business was going under. But Hostess had big problems even before the hedge fund guys showed up. Part of it was that on the marketing side, people just got less interested in eating Wonder Bread and Twinkies, and Hostess never managed to come up with any successful replacement products.

Moreover, the structure of the company's labor costs is not a completely bogus issue either. The main issue, as it often is in these cases, isn't wages but benefits, especially for retired workers. When Hostess went into bankruptcy earlier this year, *Pensions & Investments* [reported](http://www.businessinsurance.com/article/20120111/NEWS03/120119977) that seven of its eight largest unsecured creditors were union pension funds, and that the company faced $130 million per year of required contributions to these plans. And like all American companies that offer health insurance, they faced rising health care costs due to U.S.'s uniquely [irrational and inefficient](http://www.oecd.org/els/healthpoliciesanddata/49084355.pdf) system of privatized health care. It's absolutely true that these benefits were negotiated fair and square, and the workers have every right to them. But promising future benefits without worrying too much about how to pay for them is a problem for a lot of companies, and it was a way of pretending to continue the Fordist compromise of labor-peace-for-rising-wages long after it had become inoperative in reality. Continuing to fight on this terrain will always put labor on the defensive. It's worth noting that the Teamsters' own position [already included](http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/26/hostess-twinkies-bankrupt/) significant concessions on pensions.

It may or may not have been possible to keep servicing all these obligations while keeping the company profitable, under more enlightened management. But keeping Hostess in business so they can give people good pay and benefits to make Twinkies seems like exactly the style of small-minded Keynesian hole-digging that I criticized in ["Against Jobs"](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/stop-digging-the-case-against-jobs/). These workers deserve universal health care, a good pension from Social Security, and dare I say it, even a [Universal Basic Income](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/09/the-basic-income-and-the-helicopter-drop/) to support them while they try to find other jobs. The fact that we depend on a privatized welfare state where all these things are tied to jobs is bad for workers and bad for the country. It feeds into the problem Ashwin Parameswaran discusses in [this post](http://www.macroresilience.com/2012/07/05/creative-destruction-and-the-class-struggle/), a quixotic search for "a stable system where labour and capital are both protected from the dangers of failure", one which "inevitably breeds a fragile and disadvantaged working class" that is fragmented into groups of protected insiders looking to protect their status, rather than act in solidarity as a class. I can't recommend that post enough if you, like a lot of people I interact with, have any affinity for the project of "somehow recreat[ing] the golden age of the 50s and the 60s i.e. stability for all."

Another reaction I've been seeing is "I don't feel bad about Hostess failing, but I feel bad for these workers". That's more than a passing ambivalence, it's a deep contradiction in our labor politics. I don't care much about Twinkies one way or the other, but there are plenty of other areas where Leftists definitely need to be comfortable with being job-killers: coal-mining, say, or debt collection. In support of that agenda, we need to be thinking not just about creating or protecting jobs, but about the kind of expansive welfare state that Bhaskar Sunkara and I talked about recently at [*In These Times*](http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14035/for_the_welfare_of_all/). The [de-commodification of labor](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/06/de-commodification-in-everyday-life/) may be off the agenda right now, but we desperately need to bring it back.