Peter Frase

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem with this line of argument is that Drum has redefined “stealing” in a way that makes it almost infinitely expansive: whether you steal a person’s shoes or copy their album, he says, “in both cases, you’re causing [them] to take a financial loss.” But the right not to take a financial loss is not a right that capitalist societies have traditionally recognized–indeed, the notion that property owners should be guaranteed a revenue stream from their property is a rentier logic. It’s a bogus argument when it’s made by German banks demanding full payment on their crappy loans, and it’s equally bogus in this context.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first views the wealth of human culture and knowledge as something that is the shared cultural wealth of all of us. It recognizes that all new works of art and science are built on the foundation of older works, and go on to influence future works in their turn. It regards sharing, adapting, and improving older works as a positive value, and restricting access to existing culture as a negative value. Thus, in this moral economy, it is of the utmost importance that we be able to share and copy freely. Any restriction on the right to share and copy must be rigorously justified and shown to be in the interest of increasing our cultural wealth overall–as in the U.S. Constitution’s statement that copyright is allowed if it serves “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” While it isn’t inherently incompatible with intellectual property, the trajectory of this moral economy is to create a new kind of class struggle and to put us on the road to dotCommunism.

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

I think the debates about intellectual property would be a lot more productive if we recognized that they are fundamentally about two different and competing moral orders. I know that whenever I talk about these issues with normal people–i.e., not geeks who are obsessed with IP law–they aren’t very interested in arguments about economic efficiency or rentier capitalists. They’re interested in what’s right, and views about that range from the demand that culture should be free as in freedom to the insistence that above all else, you must pay the writer.*

* Which, to be clear, I’m in favor of. I just have other ideas about how the writer should get paid.

It’s pretty cool to discover that someone likes your writing enough to translate it for free. So I’m happy to report that my most popular post of all time is now available in German at systempunkte.org, which was described to me as “a blog platform with a broadly left-libertarian and anarchist focus.”

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

Yesterday I saw Doug Henwood interview the anthropologist David Graeber about his new book about debt. It was a fascinating discussion, and it made me decide that I’m going to have to read the book, despite it coming in at 500 pages and being a bit overpriced in its e-book edition.

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

Graeber cited the historian Moses Finley, who identified “the perennial revolutionary programme of antiquity, cancel debts and redistribute the land, the slogan of a peasantry, not of a working class”. And as Mike Konczal (who was also there last night) notes, “The balance-sheet recession policy for USA is basically: ‘abolish the debts, and redistribute the land.’”.

But if we seem to be returning to a millenia-old politics of debt, that only highlights the anomaly of the past two centuries. In at least some places, “cancel the debts, redistribute the land” hasn’t been the primary slogan. Rather, the demands were for “eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest”, and later for more jobs, or higher wages, or more job security.

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

In practice, of course, individual debt has always been an important part of capitalism, and debt and credit are indispensable to other parts of the system as well. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is something significant about the increasing importance of debt in our political economy. It may be indicative not merely of a short-term debt bubble, but a longer-term shift away from the canonical form of capitalism I just described. This is related to my previous discussions of rentier capitalism, since one of the problems I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about is how one could maintain relations of class power if it becomes possible for people to survive outside of wage labor. I’ve mostly been concerned with the way in which the state can create artificial scarcity through intellectual property laws and the like (e.g., anti-Star Trek). But debt is an equally important part of the picture, and one which I think I’ve tended to overlook.

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

Indeed, widespread and large debt loads are one of the most important ways in which my generation differs from those that immediately preceded it. The need to service debts–chiefly student loan debt, but also credit card debt in many cases–shapes every decision people make in their early adulthood. People who might otherwise want to sacrifice some income in order to pursue their goals are forced into corporate careers in order to pay off their debts. This has direct implications for the left: more than once, older comrades have noted to me that it has become much more difficult to live in the kind of bohemian poverty that sustained an earlier generation of young radicals and activists.

As a matter of political consciousness, it’s important to drive home the point that insofar as we are burdened with debt, we are not free people–not even in the impoverished sense in which Marx spoke of the “free” laborer. In the spirit of Corey Robin’s call to reclaim the politics of freedom, it’s time to demand freedom from debt.

And there may be some advantages to a politics centered around debt rather than wage labor. The problem confronting the wage laborer is that they are, in fact, dependent on the boss for their sustenance, unless they can solve the collective action problem of getting everyone together to expropriate the expropriators. Debt, on the other hand, is just an agreed-upon social fiction denoting an obligation for some act of consumption that has already occurred. The only way to make people respect debt is through some combination of brute force and ideological legitimacy–a legitimacy that we can only hope is starting to slip away.

Barack Obama is so full of bad policy ideas these days, some of them seem to be slipping under the radar. But this piece by Zach Carter at the Huffington Post zeroes in on one especially bizarre bit of the President’s posturing around the debt ceiling deal: his claim that one of the best ways to create jobs is for Congress to “send me a bill that would make it easier for entrepreneurs to patent a new product or idea, because we can’t give innovators in other countries a big leg up when it comes to opening new businesses and creating new jobs”.

Anyone who’s been reading my recent posts about intellectual property law can probably guess what I think about this: the last thing we need right now is to make it easier to get patents. As NPR’s Planet Money makes clear in a great follow-up to their This American Life piece on patent trolls, the flood of vague and useless patents is already gumming up the legal system with litigation and probably costing jobs. In fact, Intellectual Ventures, the villian of the TAL piece, turns up in the HuffPo piece as one of the companies lobbying against anything that weakens patent protections.

But as with most things in our political system, the patent “reform” legislation has turned into a gigantic contest of corporate lobbyists, with the rest of us left watching from the sidelines. The whole article is worth a read, but here are a few highlights.

Carter explains that this has ended up coming down to a contest between tech companies and drug companies. The tech companies are, relatively speaking, the good guys here. They’re tired of being subjected to lawsuits from patent trolls, and want some protection from Congress. Unfortunately, they seem to have lost out to the drug companies, who depend heavily on sales of patent-protected drugs to make their money. So the tech giants have given up on patent reform, and are focused instead on teaming with Pharma to demand a ludicrous tax holiday.

Meanwhile, Wall Street–in a great example of the narrow-minded selfishness of the capitalist class–managed to get a special exception dropped into the bill by their man, New York Senator Chuck Schumer. The exception would make it easier to invalidate “business method” patents–but only in the finance industry. This provision is thought to be targeted specifically at a company that holds patents on check processing, and has managed to extort a bunch of money out of the big banks as a result. This is indeed stupid, but rather than fight for a more sane system for everyone, Wall Street just wants to get special treatment and leave everyone else to fend for themselves.

What’s interesting is that this fight doesn’t really come down along partisan lines, although the Republicans are predictably the worst. Schumer is being opposed by a coalition that includes Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and a couple of Republicans, who all make the preposterous claim that invalidating business method patents in finance would “stifle innovation”. There is also an amusing story about patent-troll advocates whipping up a Tea Party astroturf campaign fronted by the likes of Phyllis Schlafly and Ed Meese.

Finally, the article also includes an amusing set piece that often appears in stories on the broken patent system: a parade of ridiculous patents. Carter recounts:

In recent years, patents have been approved for products including a wheeled flower pot (patent No. 7,908,942), the crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich (patent No. 6,004,596), a decorative box that can be placed in a casket (No. 7,908,942) and an accounting scheme that helps people dodge taxes by moving stock options around (No. 6,567,790).

This got me wondering just how easy it is to find things like this. So I wrote a little script that generates a link to a random patent from among the last million patents issued. That covers those issued in the last five years or so. (Incidentally, this is about 1/8th of all the patents issued since 1836, which itself says something about how out of control the system is.)

The first random patent I found at least seems like a plausible invention, although I don’t really have the expertise to judge. Patent 7,121,819:

Auxiliary end heating devices on an elongated, heated hot melt distribution manifold body assist in maintaining uniform temperatures throughout all portions and passageways of the manifold body. The heating devices preferably take the form of thick film electrical resistive heaters of plate-like construction. The end heaters are on their own control circuit separate and apart from the circuit for other heaters for remaining portions of the manifold body. Special isolating slots are formed in lower corners of the manifold body between supporting standoffs and overhead melt passageways in the manifold body.

The next one I got, though, was Patent 7,127,671:

A method for publishing a customized publication including an article for a customer includes obtaining information from the customer including a topic for the article and the identity of a primary source for quotable information about the topic. The method also includes establishing and following a defined schedule for a three-step process for obtaining information about the topic prior to preparing and printing the publication.

It’s hard to make sense of exactly what this is supposed to be, but to me it sure looks like someone patented the idea of being hired to talk to sources and write an article for a single person. Reading the rest of the patent didn’t really make it look any better. I did like the section that defines such “technical terms” as “article”, “printing”, and “quotable information”.

Anyone reading this is welcome to try this out themselves. If my rudimentary PHP is written correctly, the following link is randomly generated, and should go to a different patent for everyone who reads this:

Your Random Patent, Patent Number 7849859.

Reloading the page will generate a new random link. If you find any particularly good patents, please leave them in the comments.

When I wrote the first “Artificial Scarcity Watch” post, I envisioned it as an occasional feature, highlighting some of the trends that led me to cook up Anti-Star Trek. I think I’m going to have to pace myself, though, because otherwise I’ll spend all my time writing about intellectual property run amok. For instance, this story, about PayPal teaming up with the London police to shut down alleged music piracy websites, is barely worth mentioning.

I saw something else, though, that is too juicy to pass up. The latest episode of This American Life is called “When Pattents Attack!”, and NPR’s Planet Money blog also tells the story. It’s a devastating exposé of a company called Intellectual Ventures, and I highly recommend reading it if you feel that your blood pressure is too low or that you need more anger in your life.

IV is run by Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft executive who is confused about climate chage and also has a book about modernist cooking. Malcolm Gladwell had a piece about the company in the New Yorker a few years ago, in which he portrayed IV as a kind of laboratory for innovation, focused on the science of coming up with good new ideas.

That all seems pretty laughable in retrospect. The Planet Money post reveals Intellectual Ventures to be a wretched hive of scum and villainy, and Nathan Myhrvold to be that lowest of rentier-capitalist parasites: a patent troll. Intellectual Ventures does not, for the most part, come up with ideas. What it does is buy patents–often very broad, legally dubious patents–and then extort licensing fees out of companies that allegedly infringe on them. Or else it licenses its patents to shell companies that exist only to sue people, thus producing eerie scenes like this:

And, in fact, that’s what’s happening with Chris Crawford’s patent. Intellectual Venures sold it to a company called Oasis research in June of 2010. Less than a month later, Oasis Research used the patent to sue over a dozen different tech companies, including Rackspace, GoDaddy, and AT&T.

. . .

The office was in a corridor where all the other doors looked exactly the same —locked, nameplates over the door, no light coming out. It was a corridor of silent, empty offices with names like “Software Rights Archive,” and “Bulletproof Technology of Texas.”

It turns out a lot of those companies in that corridor, maybe every single one of them, is doing exactly what Oasis Research is doing. They appear to have no employees. They are not coming up with new inventions. The companies are in Marshall, Texas because they are filing lawsuits for patent infringement.

As Planet Money points out, this is a gangster business model: pay me, or I sue you.

Technology companies pay Intellectual Ventures fees ranging “from tens of thousands to the millions and millions of dollars … to buy themselves insurance that protects them from being sued by any harmful, malevolent outsiders,” Sacca says.

There’s an implication in IV’s pitch, Sacca says: If you don’t join us, who knows what’ll happen?

He says it reminds him of “a mafia-style shakedown, where someone comes in the front door of your building and says, ‘It would be a shame if this place burnt down. I know the neighborhood really well and I can make sure that doesn’t happen.’ “

Hence even companies that know they are in the right will be reluctant to go to court against IV and its patent portfolio, due to the high cost of litigation. But of course, John Gotti is deeply offended by the suggestion that he might be involved in something unsavory. Says the lawyer who coined the term “Patent Troll” (!), but who now works with Intellectual Ventures:

In an email to us, Peter Detkin called the comparison to the mafia “ridiculous and offensive.” Detkin wrote:

We’re a disruptive company that’s providing a way for patent-holders to recognize value that wasn’t available before we came on the scene, and we are making a big impact on the market. That obviously makes people uncomfortable. But no amount of name-calling changes the fact that ideas have value.

True enough. But you can see why many people feel like lots of butcher shops have been burning.

Ah, if only Al Capone had been clever enough to cloak his enterprise in business school jargon–the mafia is a “disruptive company” that is “making a big impact on the market”! Brad DeLong cites this story as evidence that the patent system is broken. But from the perspective of Anti-Star Trek, it isn’t broken, at all. It’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: create artificial scarcity and enrich a small class of parasitic rentiers.

[Update: A commenter informs me that Hanson actually does believe in intellectual property for utilitarian rather than moral reasons, so my apologies if I've misrepresented him on that point. It was totally unclear from the post I was replying to, but I should have done some more poking around before I made that assumption.]

One of the best things about having something you wrote go flying around the Internet for a few days is that you get lots of feedback and ideas from interesting people with whom you’d normally never interact. This is the promise of what Brad DeLong called the “invisible college”, and I must say I’m really enjoying it. It’s kind of like getting peer reviewed for a journal article, except that the volume and quality of reaction I’ve gotten to Anti-Star Trek has been superior to the actual peer reviews I’ve received.

Most people who took the time to write about my post were inclined to view it favorably, but of course the real fun is being told that you’re wrong on the Internet. Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias actually tried to defend Anti-Star Trek as a superior arrangement to actual Star Trek. I think Hanson is some kind of libertarian, and the tone of the post is pretty snide and condescending, but whatever; I’ve said nastier things about libertarians. It’s still worth addressing what he says. His argument has three separable components: the first misses the point, the second is irrelevant, and the third reveals an important moral disagreement about what makes for a good society.

First, Hanson wants to say that really, my portrayal of Star Trek as a communist society is wrong. There are still some resource constraints, we see market exchange (although I’d argue it’s mostly what Erik Olin Wright likes to call “capitalism between consenting adults), and so on:

Now it should be noted that Star Trek fiction has many cases of people using money and trading. Even setting that aside, replicators need both matter and energy as input, and neither could ever be in infinite supply. So even an ideal “communist” Star Trek must enforce limited budgets of access to such things. Lawyers and guardians would need to adjudicate and enforce such limits.

True enough, but this was a thought experiment. I was trying to extract the element of the Star Trek universe that is both unusual and resonant with present-day trends, and that’s the existence of post-scarcity technologies. Allocating scarce goods and resources is an old and not as interesting problem, so I wrote that stuff out of the thought experiment.

Second, Hanson claims that I’m glorifying the government/military hierarchy of Starfleet over the hierarchies that would be produced by the intellectual property-based regime of Anti-Star Trek.

After all, this might lead to unequal “classes,” where some own more than others. This even though Star Fleet displays lots of hierarchy and inequality, and spends large budgets that must come at the expense of private budgets.

The far future seems to have put Frase in full flaming far mode, declaring his undying allegience to a core ideal: he prefers the inequality that comes from a government hierarchy, over inequality that comes from voluntary trade. Sigh.

But the structure of Starfleet has nothing to do with the underlying economic basis of the Star Trek universe. The fact that people can engage in the kind of space adventure we see on the show is something made possible by abundance and an underlying communist social structure, but it isn’t a necessary consequence of it. And the fact that Starfleet is structured like a Naval hierarchy is justified by the existence of hostile alien races–which, again, isn’t the aspect of the Star Trek universe that I was interested in for this thought experiment.

Finally, Hanson wants to suggest that it is just and right that people should be rewarded monetarily for the intellectual property they create.

In both the Star Trek and Anti-Star Trek societies, the main source of long term value seems to be the accumulation of better designs. Yet Frase (and apparently Yglesias) is horrified to imagine that the people who contribute this main value might get paid for their contributions. After all, this might lead to unequal “classes,” where some own more than others.

Of course, he doesn’t really mean people should be “paid for their contributions”. That would just mean rewarding people when they come up with a good idea. Anti-Star Trek, however, adds the further requirement that the original creator should get paid every time someone makes use of their idea.

It’s hard to see why you would approve of this, unless you justify it on the grounds of morality rather than economic efficiency. In this regard, it’s interesting to contrast Hanson’s vitriol with Matt Yglesias’s favorable reaction to what I wrote. Both Hanson and Yglesias approve of a maximalist neoliberal vision of markets and commodification in a way that I don’t, although Yglesias’s politics are much closer to mine. But Yglesias approaches intellectual property in basically utilitarian terms: he views the artificial monopoly and scarcity mandated by IP law as justified if and only if it leads to more creation of knowledge and culture. This is also the view of IP that’s enshrined in the constitution: the point of copyright is “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

Hanson, in contrast, seems to be taking a position that I often see on the libertarian fringes: he thinks that people have some kind of inherent right to be showered with riches if they come up with a popular idea. One response to this is the Yglesias/utilitarian one: this is silly because it doesn’t lead to maximizing overall human well-being, and it’s clear that lots of valuable new ideas get created even in the absence of IP rights.

My response is somewhat different: I don’t think it even makes sense to obsess about who did or didn’t “create” some specific idea. The progress of human culture is a cumulative process–”standing on the shoulders of giants”, Stigler’s Law, and so on. Moreover, all creators are dependent on living in a very specific type of society–technologically advanced, low levels of violence, high levels of education, and so on–that facilitates their work. And the ubiquity of simultaneous invention suggests to me that there is little rationale behind the desire to anoint some specific person as “the creator” of a good idea. Even from a more libertarian perspective, I don’t see the point of rewarding people for coming up with ideas. As Levine and Boldrin like to argue, the trick is to successfully implement and popularize an idea. Or as the Mark Zuckerberg character says to the Winklevii in that Facebook movie: if you had invented Facebook, then you would have invented Facebook.

Nevertheless, I think Hanson’s response is worth paying attention to, because the transition to a world like Anti-Star Trek probably requires a cultural shift from the utilitarian Yglesias perspective on intellectual property to the Hansonian moralistic view, in which copying is viewed as morally equivalent to theft. Yglesias noted in a follow-up that some people objected to Anti-Star Trek on the grounds that under current IP law, things like replicator patterns might not be covered, and in any case copyrights don’t last forever. But as he then notes, laws can change, especially when powerful rentier interests want them to change. And it will be much easier to bring about the transition to eternal, all-encompassing intellectual property protections if people stop thinking of IP as a necessary evil to encourage innovation, and start thinking of it as a basic human right of “creators”.

Apparently Internet activist Aaron Swartz has been indicted for downloading articles from JSTOR, the database of academic journal articles. Note that Swartz had legal access to the database through MIT, he’s just being accused of downloading too many articles.

It’s not quite as simple as that, of course. There is some stuff in the indictment about him circumventing JSTOR’s attempts to block him, as well as entering an MIT wiring closet without permission in order to attach a computer to the network. But I think this Wired article gets at the heart of it: “In essence, Swartz is accused of felony hacking for violating MIT and JSTOR’s terms of service.” And, I might add, for doing a scaled-up version of what journalists and academics do all the time when they circumvent the JSTOR paywall by emailing articles to each other.

And what’s really scary is the charge of “theft” for copying the documents. This is the kind of thing we’ll see a lot of in the transition to Anti-Star Trek. And the New York Times account even gives us an example of the kind of warped moral reasoning that is required to equate copying copyrighted material with the theft of physical property:

“Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars,” said [U.S. Attorney Carmen] Ortiz in the press release.

In other words, “stealing is stealing whether you’re downloading an electronic file without permission or forcibly depriving people of their posessions”. Besides being despicable, this conflation also seems to pose a risk to people’s ability to correctly apprehend the nature of reality. Both this Ars Technica story and the Wired account refer to the fact that Swartz didn’t distribute the articles and that JSTOR “got the documents back” from him. But the latter statement is incomprehensible–how could they have “gotten back” the articles? He just made a copy, JSTOR never lost them in the first place. And what does it even mean to “give back” a digital file?

Hopefully this all blows up in the faces of the prosecutors, as Henry Farrell predicts. Restricting access to academic journals is particularly egregious, since almost nobody involved in their production–the authors, the peer reviewers, most of the editors–gets paid by the companies that own the journals.

In the process of trying to pull together some thoughts on intellectual property, zero marginal-cost goods, immaterial labor, and the incipient transition to a rentier form of capitalism, I’ve been working out a thought experiment: a possible future society I call anti-Star Trek. Consider this a stab at a theory of posterity.

One of the intriguing things about the world of Star Trek, as Gene Roddenberry presented it in The Next Generation and subsequent series, is that it appears to be, in essence, a communist society. There is no money, everyone has access to whatever resources they need, and no-one is required to work. Liberated from the need to engage in wage labor for survival, people are free to get in spaceships and go flying around the galaxy for edification and adventure. Aliens who still believe in hoarding money and material acquisitions, like the Ferengi, are viewed as barbaric anachronisms.

The technical condition of possibility for this society is comprised of of two basic components. The first is the replicator, a technology that can make instant copies of any object with no input of human labor. The second is an apparently unlimited supply of free energy, due to anti-matter reactions or dilithium crystals or whatever. It is, in sum, a society that has overcome scarcity.

Anti-Star Trek takes these same technological premises: replicators, free energy, and a post-scarcity economy. But it casts them in a different set of social relations. Anti-Star Trek is an attempt to answer the following question:

• Given the material abundance made possible by the replicator, how would it be possible to maintain a system based on money, profit, and class power?

Economists like to say that capitalist market economies work optimally when they are used to allocate scarce goods. So how to maintain capitalism in a world where scarcity can be largely overcome? What follows is some steps toward an answer to this question.

Like industrial capitalism, the economy of anti-Star Trek rests on a specific state-enforced regime of property relations. However, the kind of property that is central to anti-Star Trek is not physical but intellectual property, as codified legally in the patent and copyright system. While contemporary defenders of intellectual property like to speak of it as though it is broadly analogous to other kinds of property, it is actually based on a quite different principle. As the (libertarian) economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine point out:

Intellectual property law is not about your right to control your copy of your idea – this is a right that . . . does not need a great deal of protection. What intellectual property law is really about is about your right to control my copy of your idea. This is not a right ordinarily or automatically granted to the owners of other types of property. If I produce a cup of coffee, I have the right to choose whether or not to sell it to you or drink it myself. But my property right is not an automatic right both to sell you the cup of coffee and to tell you how to drink it.

This is the quality of intellectual property law that provides an economic foundation for anti-Star Trek: the ability to tell others how to use copies of an idea that you “own”. In order to get access to a replicator, you have to buy one from a company that licenses you the right to use a replicator. (Someone can’t give you a replicator or make one with their replicator, because that would violate their license). What’s more, every time you make something with the replicator, you also need to pay a licensing fee to whoever owns the rights to that particular thing. So if the Captain Jean-Luc Picard of anti-Star Trek wanted “tea, Earl Grey, hot”, he would have to pay the company that has copyrighted the replicator pattern for hot Earl Grey tea. (Presumably some other company owns the rights to cold tea.)

This solves the problem of how to maintain for-profit capitalist enterprise, at least on the surface. Anyone who tries to supply their needs from their replicator without paying the copyright cartels would become an outlaw, like today’s online file-sharers. But if everyone is constantly being forced to pay out money in licensing fees, then they need some way of earning money, and this brings up a new problem. With replicators around, there’s no need for human labor in any kind of physical production. So what kind of jobs would exist in this economy? Here are a few possibilities.

1. The creative class. There will be a need for people to come up with new things to replicate, or new variations on old things, which can then be copyrighted and used as the basis for future licensing revenue. But this is never going to be a very large source of jobs, because the labor required to create a pattern that can be infinitely replicated is orders of magnitude less than the labor required in a physical production process in which the same object is made over and over again. What’s more, we can see in today’s world that lots of people will create and innovate on their own, without being paid for it. The capitalists of anti-Star Trek would probably find it more economical to simply pick through the ranks of unpaid creators, find new ideas that seem promising, and then buy out the creators and turn the idea into the firm’s intellectual property.

2. Lawyers. In a world where the economy is based on intellectual property, companies will constantly be suing each other for alleged infringements of each others’ copyrights and patents. This will provide employment for some significant fraction of the population, but again it’s hard to see this being enough to sustain an entire economy. Particularly because of a theme that will arise again in the next couple of points: just about anything can, in principle, be automated. It’s easy to imagine big intellectual property firms coming up with procedures for mass-filing lawsuits that rely on fewer and fewer human lawyers. On the other hand, perhaps an equilibrium will arise where every individual needs to keep a lawyer on retainer, because they can’t afford the cost of auto-lawyer software but they must still fight off lawsuits from firms attempting to win big damages for alleged infringment.

3. Marketers. As time goes on, the list of possible things you can replicate will only continue to grow, but people’s money to buy licenses–and their time to enjoy the things they replicate–will not grow fast enough to keep up. The biggest threat to any given company’s profits will not be the cost of labor or raw materials–since they don’t need much or any of those–but rather the prospect that the licenses they own will lose out in popularity to those of competitors. So there will be an unending and cut-throat competition to market one company’s intellectual properties as superior to the competition’s: Coke over Pepsi, Ford over Toyota, and so on. This should keep a small army employed in advertizing and marketing. But once again, beware the spectre of automation: advances in data mining, machine learning and artificial intelligence may lessen the amount of human labor required even in these fields.

4. Guard labor. The term “Guard Labor” is used by the economists Bowles and Jayadev to refer to:

   The efforts of the monitors, guards, and military personnel . . . directed not toward production, but toward the enforcement of claims arising from exchanges and the pursuit or prevention of unilateral transfers of property ownership.

   In other words, guard labor is the labor required in any society with great inequalities of wealth and power, in order to keep the poor and powerless from taking a share back from the rich and powerful. Since the whole point of anti-Star Trek is to maintain such inequalities even when they appear economically superfluous, there will obviously still be a great need for guard labor. And the additional burden of enforcing intellectual property restrictions will increase demand for such labor, since it requires careful monitoring of what was once considered private behavior. Once again, however, automation looms: robot police, anyone?

These, it seems to me, would be the main source of employment in the world of anti-Star Trek. It seems implausible, however, that this would be sufficient–the society would probably be subject to a persistent trend toward under-employment. This is particularly true given that all the sectors except (arguably) the first would be subject to pressures toward labor-saving technological innovation. What’s more, there is also another way for private companies to avoid employing workers for some of these tasks: turn them into activities that people will find pleasurable, and will thus do for free on their own time. Firms like Google are already experimenting with such strategies. The computer scientist Luis von Ahn has specialized in developing “games with a purpose”: applications that present themselves to end users as enjoyable diversions, but which also perform a useful computational task. One of von Ahn’s games asked users to identify objects in photos, and the data was then fed back into a database that was used for searching images. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this line of research could lead toward the world of Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game, in which children remotely fight an interstellar war through what they think are video games.

Thus it seems that the main problem confronting the society of anti-Star Trek is the problem of effective demand: that is, how to ensure that people are able to earn enough money to be able to pay the licensing fees on which private profit depends. Of course, this isn’t so different from the problem that confronted industrial capitalism, but it becomes more severe as human labor is increasingly squeezed out of the system, and human beings become superfluous as elements of production, even as they remain necessary as consumers.

Ultimately, even capitalist self-interest will require some redistribution of wealth downward in order to support demand. Society reaches a state in which, as the late André Gorz put it, “the distribution of means of payment must correspond to the volume of wealth socially produced and not to the volume of work performed”. This is particularly true–indeed, it is necessarily true–of a world based on intellectual property rents rather than on value based on labor-time.

But here the class of rentier-capitalists will confront a collective action problem. In principle, it would be possible to sustain the system by taxing the profits of profitable firms and redistributing the money back to consumers–possibly as a no-strings attached guaranteed income, and possibly in return for performing some kind of meaningless make-work. But even if redistribution is desirable from the standpoint of the class as a whole, any individual company or rich person will be tempted to free-ride on the payments of others, and will therefore resist efforts to impose a redistributive tax. Of course, the government could also simply print money to give to the working class, but the resulting inflation would just be an indirect form of redistribution and would also be resisted. Finally, there is the option of funding consumption through consumer indebtedness–but this merely delays the demand crisis rather than resolving it, as residents of the present know all too well.

This all sets the stage for ongoing stagnation and crisis in the world of anti-Star Trek. And then, of course, there are the masses. Would the power of ideology be strong enough to induce people to accept the state of affairs I’ve described? Or would people start to ask why the wealth of knowledge and culture was being enclosed within restrictive laws, when “another world is possible” beyond the regime of artificial scarcity?