Peter Frase

The other day I got involved in an exchange with some political comrades about the state of manufacturing in the United States. We were discussing this Wall Street Journal editorial, which laments that "more Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined". Leaving aside the typical right-wing denigration of government work, what should we think about the declining share of of Americans working in industries that "make things"?

I've written about this before. But I'm revisiting the argument in order to post an updated graph and also to present an alternative way of visualizing the data.

Every time I hear a leftist or a liberal declare that we need to create manufacturing jobs or start "making things" again in America, I want to take them by the collar and yell at them. Although there is a widespread belief that most American manufacturing has been off-shored to China and other low-wage producers, this is simply not the case. As I noted in my earlier post, we still make lots of things in this country--more than ever, in fact. We just do it with fewer people. The problem we have is not that we don't employ enough people in manufacturing. The problem is that the immense productivity gains in manufacturing haven't accrued to ordinary people--whose wages have stagnated--but have instead gone to the elite in the form of inflated profits and stock values.

Anyway, I'm revisiting this because I think everyone on the left needs to get the facts about manufacturing employment and output burned into their memory. The numbers on employment in manufacturing are available from the St. Louis Federal Reserve, and the data on output is available from the national Federal Reserve site. Here's an updated version of a graph I've previously posted:

I like this graph a lot, but today I had another idea for how to visualize these two series. Over at Andrew Gelman's blog, co-blogger Phil posted an interesting graph of bicycing distance and fatalities. That gave me the idea of using the same format for the manufacturing data:

This graph is interesting because it seems to show three pretty different eras in manufacturing. From the 1940's until around 1970, there was a growth in both employment and output. This, of course, corresponds to the "golden age" of post-war Keynesianism, where the labor movement submitted to capitalist work discipline in return for receiving a share of productivity gains in the form of higher wages. From 1970 until around 2000, output continues to rise rapidly, but employment stays basically the same. Then in the last ten years, employment falls dramatically while output remains about the same.

This big take-home point from all this is that manufacturing is not "in decline", at least in terms of output. Going back to an economy with tons of manufacturing jobs doesn't make any more sense than going back to an economy dominated by agricultural labor--due to increasing productivity, we simply don't need that many jobs in these sectors. Which means that if we are going to somehow find jobs for 20 million unemployed and underemployed Americans, we're not going to do it by building up the manufacturing sector.

One thing that has long bothered me about many socialist and Marxist critiques of capitalism is that they presume that a system based on the accumulation of *capital* presupposes the existence of *capitalists*--that is, a specific group of people who earn their income from investment, rather than by working for wages. It is totally possible to imagine a system in which profit-making private enterprise still exists, the economy is based on profit-seeking and constant growth, and in which the entire population works as wage-laborers for most of their lives. I always figured the most likely candidate for such an arrangement was some kind of [pension fund socialism](http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/NSPensions.html). But today, Matt Yglesias gives [another similar path](http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/03/obtaining-the-returns-to-capital/). He's discussing something from Felix Salmon about how the rich increasingly have access to lots of investment opportunities that are closed off to ordinary investors, and he says:

> [T]he right thing to do is to just directly think about the issue of how best to ensure that everyone obtains the financial benefits of equity investments. And the answer, I think, is sovereign wealth funds. That’s how they do it in Singapore and conceptually it’s the right way to do it. An American version of Singapore’s Central Provident Fund would be much too large for any market to absorb, but the US share of world GDP should shrink over time and it’s conceivable that there would be some way to work this out on the state level to create smaller units. A fund like that would render the public listing issue irrelevant, since it would clearly have the scale to get in on the private equity game. This would, needless to say, entail injecting a hefty element of socialism into American public policy but I’m always hearing from smart conservatives how much they admire Singapore.

This points in the direction of an ideal type of society in which all businesses are owned by sovereign wealth funds of this type, which are used to pay for public services. So everyone works at a job for a wage or salary, and contributes some of their paycheck to one of these funds, just as they now contribute to pension funds. The returns from the funds are then used to pay for things like retirement, health care, education, and so on. Yglesias jokingly refers to this as "socialism". And by certain classic definitions, it is: the capitalist class has been abolished, and the workers now own the means of production (through their sovereign wealth funds).

But in many other ways, of course, this is not how socialism was traditionally conceived. In particular, you would still have profit-seeking companies competing with each other, and they would still be subject to the same kind of discipline they are now--the shareholders, which is to say the sovereign wealth funds, would demand the highest possible return on their investment. So at best, this is a kind of [market socialism](http://books.google.com/books?id=KWy9JbWvjywC). But while there are people who take on the task of the capitalist--the employees of the sovereign wealth funds--they don't make up a *capitalist class*, because they aren't investing for their own personal profit. Indeed, we've already moved a long way in this direction, which is why Peter Drucker was [talking about pension fund socialism](http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/07/23/socialism--american_style/) in 1972.

Of course, we do still have actual capitalists, and getting rid of them would be a long and difficult process. But the important point about capitalism without capitalists is that in many ways it isn't any better than capitalism *with* capitalists. You still have to sell your labor power and submit to a boss in order to survive, so alienation persists. Since firms are still competing to deliver the highest returns to their shareholders, there will still be pressure to exploit employees more intensely and to prevent them from organizing for their rights. Exploitation goes on as before, and it will be all the more robust insofar as it is now a kind of collective self-exploitation. And on top of all of this, the system will still be prone to the booms and busts and problems of overaccumulation that occur in today's capitalism. It was, after all, public and union pension funds that [bought many of the toxic mortgage-backed securities](http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aW5vEJn3LpVw) during the housing bubble.

All of this is why it is analytically important to separate the conceptual framework of *capital and wage labor* from the concept of *capitalists and workers*. In the system I've just described, capital and wage labor still exist, and still define how the economy works. But now each person is simultaneously a capitalist and a worker, in some degree or for some part of their life. Thinking through the inadequacy of such an arrangement is, for me, a more accessible way of thinking through the arguments of people like [André Gorz](http://books.google.com/books?id=7wxpl7sYYCYC) and [Moishe Postone](http://books.google.com/books?id=GwDxsHOxd84C). They argued that the point isn't to get rid of the capitalist class and have the workers take over: the point is to get rid of capital and wage labor.

Easily the most tiresome conversation that has resulted from the Arab revolutions of 2011 is the argument about whether these uprisings are "Twitter revolutions" or "Facebook revoutions" or whatever. On the one hand, you have lots of mainstream media organizations playing up the importance of social networks as some sort of spontaneous revolution-fuel, while ignoring the long years of organization that went into, say, the Egypt uprising. And then you have people arguing that actually, Internet communication isn't really [a good basis for political organizing](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell), or that it will [become a tool of authoritarian governments](http://www.slate.com/id/2281743/), or that Twitter is [trapping us all](http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2011/03/from-swords-unto-mindshares.html) in a neo-liberal feedback loop of circulating affects.

Today I saw this [silly op-ed](http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2011/0321/Why-the-tweet-will-never-replace-the-street), about how "the tweet will never replace the street". This is an absurd straw target, of course; as NPR media strategist Andy Carvin remarks (on Twitter!), ["Why is so hard to get that many revolutionaries in the mideast simply don't separate their online lives from their offline ones?"](http://twitter.com/#!/acarvin/status/50227708025769984)

This really gets at what I find to be the fundamental irrelevance of these debates: they ultimately depend on a questionable metaphor. They all proceed as though "the Internet" and "the Real World" were clearly separate spaces. That underlying metaphor of the Internet as a separate social space goes back at least to William Gibson's coining of ["cyberspace"](http://books.google.com/books?id=IDFfMPW32hQC). And it does a pretty good job of portraying the way the Internet felt when I first encountered it in the 1990's. But I think the most noteworthy thing about the period we're in right now is that this boundary is being erased. In another ten or twenty years, the metaphor of "the Internet" as a separate space may not even make sense to us anymore.

This is a theme that Charlie Stross has written a lot about, and he lays out some of the important themes in [this 2009 speech](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/05/login-2009-keynote-gaming-in-t.html). He notes that the spread of high-spead Internet connections, along with devices like the iPhone, is effacing the line between the Internet and the Real World. Looking forward to 2030, he says:

> Welcome to a world where the internet has turned inside-out; instead of being something you visit inside a box with a coloured screen, it's draped all over the landscape around you, invisible until you put on a pair of glasses or pick up your always-on mobile phone. A phone which is to today's iPhone as a modern laptop is to an original Apple II; a device which always knows where you are, where your possessions are, and without which you are — literally — lost and forgetful.

Now, one can be excited or terrified about this vision, or some combination of both. But what's significant about it is that it makes absolutely no sense to ask whether the Internet is important for real world politics in this context. The Internet is the world is the Internet.

To step back into the present: obviously we don't yet live in a world of always-on augmented reality. But things like Twitter are a step in that direction. There is something fundamentally different about Twitter--where you can post updates and communicate with people from anywhere, as something integrated into everyday life--compared to the way the Internet was when I was a kid, when "going online" meant going down into the basement and getting lost in the screen. Newsgroups and listservs and BBS systems and the like really did feel like separate "spaces", and so the metaphor of the internet as a place made sense. That's why that Chappelle's show sketch ["If the Internet was a Real Place"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U7HztvetQk) is funny.

The whole misbegotten debate about Internet-versus-real activism strikes me as a consequence of the inevitable generational lag in our intellectual life. The people who are now in a position to dominate the conversation are the ones who were the first to grow up with the Internet--but it was the old Internet-as-a-place. I suspect that as the generations following mine assert their own approach to these questions, they will look at these distinctions very differently.

I have a [new essay for Jacobin Magazine](http://jacobinmag.com/archive/issue2/frase.html), about what the Arab revolutions of 2011 mean for anti-imperialist politics in the United States. I'd encourage my handful of readers on this site to take your click traffic over that way--in spite of my involvement, Bhaskar Sunkara has put together a great group of writers at [Jacobin](http://jacobinmag.com).

By writing about such fast-moving events, I ensured that my contribution would be outdated as soon as it appeared. One thing I had to completely skip over in the essay was the events in Bahrain, but it's worth talking about because it's an important counterpoint to the cases I discussed in that piece. I focused on Egypt and Libya, and I argued that American leverage in those two cases was considerably less than most people--left and right--seemed to think. But Bahrain is the opposite sort of case, and it's pretty clear that Obama has more influence over the situation there than anyone in the American elite wants to admit. A comparison between the way Bahrain and Libya are being discussed in the press illuminates the contradictions and hypocrisies that characterize debates about foreign policy in the United States.

To summarize: Saudi Arabia has [sent troops](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/world/middleeast/15bahrain.html) into Bahrain to put down the escalating protests against the monarchy there. Bahrain's ruling family is Sunni Muslim, while the majority of the population is Shia--and the Saudis are clearly afraid that the uprising might give their own Shiite minority some ideas. But by sending in troops, the Saudis could make the whole situation much more volatile and deadly--already, the opposition is [denouncing the move](http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/14/bahrain-protests-opposition-idUSLDE72D16I20110314) as an "occupation" and a "declaration of war". The U.S. government, meanwhile, ["does not consider"](http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/14/bahrain-usa-invasion-idUSWNA351920110314) the Saudi action to be an invasion.

The United States is deeply implicated in all of this--there is a [major U.S. naval base](http://www.cusnc.navy.mil/) in Bahrain, while the Saudis are close American allies and [loyal customers](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/30/AR2010013001477.html) of our military-industrial complex. And as Brookings Doha Center analyst Shadi Hamid [remarked on Twitter](http://twitter.com/#!/shadihamid/status/47311059555598336), the Saudis wouldn't have gone into Bahrain without U.S. approval, or at least "lack of a red light". Former British diplomat Craig Murray gets even more specific, [reporting](http://craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2011/03/the-invasion-of-bahrain/) that "A senior diplomat in a western mission to the UN in New York . . . has told me for sure that Hillary Clinton agreed to the cross-border use of troops to crush democracy in the Gulf, as a quid pro quo for the Arab League calling for Western intervention in Libya."

All of which goes to show that when people ask what the Obama administration can do to help the uprisings in the Middle East, the sensible response is that they should start by ceasing to actively prop up the dictators there. Backing away from the Saudi and Bahraini monarchies would be far easier and less bloody than, say, invading Libya. This is the fundamental reason why I don't think we can take the pronouncements of liberal humanitarian imperialists like [Jackson Diehl](http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/will-gaddafi-reverse-the-tide-of-the-arab-spring/2011/03/10/AB6GK6T_story.html) at face value when they insist that American military intervention is the only solution to authoritarian regimes or global humanitarian crises. Take the aptly-named Anne-Marie Slaughter, who [took to the New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/opinion/14slaughter.html) to condemn Obama for not taking unilateral military action in Libya. To advocate such a dangerous and deadly course of action while ignoring the American role in fomenting human rights abuses in the Arab world is not just ill-considered, it's fundamentally dishonest. But as Matt Yglesias [remarks](http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/03/the-slippery-slope-of-unilateralism/), "there's definitely a set of people in the United States who seem to want to help suffering people in the developing world if and only if that can be accomplished by killing other people in the developing world."

As I say in the Jacobin essay, I think that the decline of American imperial power (and more proximately, the lesson of Iraq) is making people like Diehl and Slaughter less dangerous, simply because their deranged schemes are less likely to be realized. But these silly debates about no-fly zones and humanitarian invasions do still serve to distract attention from American complicity in atrocities like what's happening in Bahrain. So long as the liberal warmongers can get a hearing in the New York Times and the Washington Post, there's still a need for a forthrightly anti-imperialist left that can make the argument that the best thing for the liberation movements around the world would be an American government and military that does *less* to interfere in their affairs, rather than more.

Tahrir Square, Feb 11 2001 (Image by Matthew Cassell)

The most moving and insightful comment I've seen on the Egyptian revolution of 2011 appeared, appropriately enough, on Twitter. Last night, after Hosni Mubarak punked the nation with his non-resignation speech, Alaa Abd El Fattah said this:

don't know what will happen. pre #Jan25 I could predict tomorrow will be like today and yesterday, we revolt to gain the right to unkown

I only know what WE WANT and what I WILL DO

In ordinary times, tomorrow is like today, and the future is predictable--not just in Egypt but everywhere. The essence of revolutionary moments is not any particular set of demands or changes, but their very unknowability. And that sense that the future is unwritten--the "right to the unknown"--is a rare and thrilling and sometimes terrifying kind of human freedom.

Today, with Hosni Mubarak finally departing the scene, many are warning that the Egyptian army may yet perpetuate the old regime and snatch away the dreams of the protesters in Liberation Square. And they may yet do so. But those who issue such warnings are the same people who predicted that the Tunisian revolution would not spread, that the Egyptian protests would not grow, and that Hosni Mubarak would not give up power. They are the people who predicted that today would be like yesterday--but it isn't, not anymore.

If you predict that the improbable won't happen, you will usually be proven right. But eventually you will be wrong, and when you are you will be proven very, very wrong. Wall Street bankers made money for years by betting against improbable events--until the improbable occurred, the housing market collapsed, and we were plunged into a financial crisis. In the same way, professional Egyptologists padded their wallets and their reputations by predicting, year after year, that Mubarak could not fall.

But today none of that matters. Whatever else they may yet achieve, the Egyptian people have ensured that their future is unknown, for at least a few more months.

Mike Judge's [*Idiocracy*](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/) is a pretty smart and funny movie, which touches on some themes I've recently [written about](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/). But it's also a widely underappreciated and misunderstood film. Perhaps that's because one of the people who seems to misunderstand it the most is its own writer and director, Mike Judge.

The basic premise of the film, as per IMDB:

> Private Joe Bauers, the definition of "average American", is selected by the Pentagon to be the guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program. Forgotten, he awakes 500 years in the future. He discovers a society so incredibly dumbed-down that he's easily the most intelligent person alive.

The rest of the film is an extended satirical riff on this idiotic future society. Its residents are both unbelievably crude and endlessly capable of falling for consumerist marketing bullshit. With regard to the former: Starbucks now offers hand jobs, everyone regards reading and thinking as activities for "fags", and one of the film's set pieces involves a #1 hit film called "Ass", consisting of nothing but the image described in the title. In a climactic scene Joe Bauers (played by Luke Wilson) addresses Congress, wistfully declaring that:

> there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn't just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!

Meanwhile, everyone in the future mindlessly repeats advertising slogans as though they were a scientific consensus. The threat of famine looms because everyone insists on watering crops with a noxious energy drink called Brawndo, while insisting that "it's got electrolytes . . . they're what plants crave!" It's left to Joe Bauers to convince his moronic fellow humans of the virtues of old fashioned water.

This sounds like the sort of thing your average anti-corporate liberal might enjoy, although I'd note that liberal yuppies are [hardly](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L2fsubA2-c) [immune](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg) to this sort of irrational marketing hype. But the movie made a lot of people uncomfortable, and it has been mostly forgotten since its 2006 release. In part, that's because of the generally elitist "most people are idiots" vibe that Judge evokes. But more specifically, I think it's because of the film's overtly misanthropic, eugenics-minded opening:

This [reaction from Manohla Dargis](http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/movies/04extract.html) is typical:

> "Idiocracy" expresses the kind of fear lampooned, consciously or not, in the old joke about revolting masses. (Messenger: "The masses are revolting!" King: "You’re telling me!") It opens with a comparison between trailer-trash types, with low I.Q.’s, who freely propagate, and smarty-pants types who fret about conceiving, using every excuse to find the perfect time to have children. In the end the low I.Q.-ers overrun the intelligent, who die off, which is funny if you think that only certain kinds of people should reproduce. An equal-opportunity offender, Mr. Judge can wield satire like a sledgehammer, so it’s no surprise that he doesn’t bother with the complexities of class and representation in a bit about the dire consequences of a birth dearth.

This bit of the movie is every bit as offensive and reactionary as Dargis suggests at is, and its stupidity is pretty much summed up in this [xkcd cartoon](http://xkcd.com/603/). But the tragedy of the whole movie is that *this premise is totally unnecessary*. It's completely possible to explain the emergence of the *Idiocracy* future based on sociological and political-economic themes that have nothing to do with genetic determinism, while leaving the rest of the movie mostly unchanged.

To me, one of the most interesting and suggestive bits of the movie is the following exchange toward the end of [the story](http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~ina22/splaylib/Screenplay-Idiocracy.htm):

Joe and the Cabinet Members are gathered around a VIDEO PHONE
talking to the CEO OF RAUNCBO, who's in his office, panicking.
We hear people rioting outside his building and occasionally
bottles and debris hit his window.

RAUNCHO CEO
What happened?!

JOE
Ah... Well, we switched the crops to
water.

RAUNCHO CEO
I'm not talking about that.
(points to a computer
screen, freaked out)
Our sales are all like, down. Way
down! The stock went to zero and the
computer did auto-layoff on
everybody!

ATTORNEY GENERAL
Shit! Almost everyone in the country
works for Rauncho!

RAUNCHO CEO
Not anymore! And the computer said
everyone owes Rauncho money!
Everyone's bank account is zero now!

What does this exchange tell us about the film's implicit [theory of posterity](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/social-science-fiction/)?

1. The future economy is highly automated, to the point that even the management of companies is done automatically by a computer.
2. People nonetheless need money to pay for things, which they get by working for Brawndo (which is called "Rauncho" in this earlier version of the screenplay). It's not clear what they do for their money, but it can't be very important in light of their obvious stupidity and the above-noted automation.
3. The continued stability of this society is therefore dependent on the existence of a business which does not actually improve anyone's material standard of living--indeed, it is *decreasing* it by killing all the crops.

The theory of posterity the grounds *Idiocracy*, it seems to me, is a close cousin of [Anti-Star Trek](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/): an economy that needs humans as consumers, but makes them mostly superfluous as producers.

So how does this explain the fact that everyone is such a moron? Well, consider what would happen to education in a society like this. If the productive economy is all run by computers, then there's no need to teach people how to make things, or how anything actually works. On the contrary, it would be economically beneficial to encourage delusions about the magical properties of consumer products, the better to ensure that people will continue to drink Brawndo rather than water. In other words, there is no economic incentive to produce intelligence. We can imagine that at some point in the past, legitimate institutions of higher education were dismantled (perhaps by the people Diane Ravitch discusses [here](http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/05/17/diane-ravitch-on-being-wrong.aspx)), and replaced by things like [Costco Law School](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/quotes?qt0427921).

I really wish someone would make a movie that's as funny as *Idiocracy* without falling back on such lazy right-wing premises. On the other hand, it's intriguing that Judge could end up making a film that mostly functions as a radical critique even though it's based on a reactionary assumption. *Idiocracy* does illuminate a dangerous trend in contemporary capitalism--one that has nothing to do with the wrong people having babies, and everything to do with a system that increasingly reproduces itself by producing stupidity in the population. The movie's only mistake is to think that our genes can save us from stupidity, when it seems far more defensible to say that "intelligence" is some combination of socially nurtured ability and [statistical myth](http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html).

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](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/social-science-fiction/).

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](http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/12/diy-fabrication-hits-a-new-pri.html). 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](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/12/what-do-econ-1-students-need-to-remember-most-from-the-course.html) 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](http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/coffee.htm):

> 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"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2IJdfxWtPM), 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](http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/Main_Page), 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](http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/10/154202/Worlds-Largest-Patent-Troll-Fires-First-Salvo) 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](http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20021735-93.html).

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](http://ideas.repec.org/p/ums/papers/2004-15.html) 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"](www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/ieee-gwap.pdf): 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*](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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](http://books.google.com/books?id=xRQOcJWXRwEC&pg=PA90&lpg=PA90&dq=gorz+%22means+of+payment%22&source=bl&ots=RjZtvZ7QxG&sig=eWqhIlEDIfuXfcIaAFkh5EHtiAw&hl=en&ei=fJYHTeHIOIK88gb_3v2hBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false), "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](http://www.aei.org/book/846), and possibly in return for performing some kind of [meaningless](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11728546) [make-work](http://movieclips.com/4aBM-office-space-movie-did-you-get-the-memo/). 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?

Charles Stross hits another one out of the park today. The post attempts to explain the widespread sentiment that the masses are politically powerless: "Voting doesn't change anything — the politicians always win." Stross advances the thesis that we have been disempowered by the rise of the corporation: first legally, when corporations were recognized as persons, and then politically, when said corporations captured the democratic process through overt and subtle forms of corruption and bribery.

Playing off the notion of corporations as "persons", Stross portrays the corporation as a "hive organism" which does not share human priorities; corporations are "non-human entities with non-human goals", which can "co-opt" CEOs or politicians by rewarding them financially. The punchline to the argument is that:

In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.

I like this argument a lot, but it seems to me that it's less an argument about the corporation as such than an argument about capitalism. Indeed, Marx spoke about capitalism in remarkably similar terms. He notes that the underlying dynamic of capitalism is M-C-M': the use of money to produce and circulate commodities solely for the purpose of accumulating more capital. Money itself is the agent here, not any person. This abstract relationship is more fundamental than the the relations between actual people--capitalists and workers--whose actions are dictated by the exigencies of capital accumulation. From Capital, chapter four:

The circulation of money as capital is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.

As the conscious representative of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts and to which it returns. The expansion of value, which is the objective basis or main-spring of the circulation M-C-M, becomes his subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will.

According to Marx, the alien invasion hasn't just co-opted its human agents but actually corrupted and colonized their minds, so that they come to see the needs of capital as their own needs. Thus the workers find themselvs exploited and alienated, not fundamentally by capitalists but by the alien force, capital, which uses the workers only to reproduce itself. From chapter 23:

The labourer therefore constantly produces material, objective wealth, but in the form of capital, of an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist as constantly produces labour-power, but in the form of a subjective source of wealth, separated from the objects in and by which it can alone be realised; in short he produces the labourer, but as a wage labourer. This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the labourer, is the sine quâ non of capitalist production.

This, incidentally, is why Maoists like The Matrix.

Moishe Postone makes much of this line of argument in his brilliant Time, Labor, and Social Domination. He emphasizes (p. 30) the point that:

In Marx's analysis, social domination in capitalism does not, on its most fundamental level, consist in the domination of people by other people, but in the domination of people by abstract social structures that people themselves constitute.

Therefore,

the form of social domination that characterizes capitalism is not ultimately a function of private property, of the ownership by the capitalists of the surplus product and the means of production; rather, it is grounded in the value form of wealth itself, a form of social wealth that confronts living labor (the workers) as a structurally alien and dominant power.

Since the "aliens" are of our own making, the proper science fiction allegory isn't an extraterrestrial invasion but a robot takeover, like the Matrix or Terminator movies. But close enough.

So in light of my last post, does this make Capital an early work of science fiction? Or does it make contemporary science fiction the leading edge of Marxism? Both, I'd like to think.

Felix Salmon has an interesting post in which he notes how the Federal Reserve is being politicized by the debate over Quantitative Easing 2: Electric Boogaloo:

Bernanke "was already making a high-stakes economic bet with QE2," he says, "and now it’s a political bet, as well". If QE2 doesn’t work — Sloan raises the specter that it "could imperil the dollar and our financial system" — then it’s not just the economy which will be harmed, but also the Fed’s long-term credibility and pre-eminence. In fact, the politics of QE2 are already hobbling the Fed’s freedom of movement . . .

It's worth recalling how the Fed found itself in this position. Most Keynesian economists believe that the first-best policy choice under present economic conditions is another stimulus bill. But congress will not pass such a bill. QE2 is an inferior second-best policy, which is being employed because the Fed is able to act independently without getting permission from politicians. But this in turn exposes the Fed to the kind of political battles that Salmon is describing.

Which makes me think that we're watching as the entire American system of government is destabilized by what we might call "contagious delegitimation". What happens is that one part of the government loses its ability to act in the face of a crisis, which causes it to lose its legitimacy. This puts pressure on other government institutions to take up the slack. But because of the inability to coordinate with other, now non-functional parts of the government, these institutions are less effective than they might be, and so they to lose their legitimacy. There is a feedback loop here, as a loss of legitimacy leads to a diminished capacity to act, which in turn further erodes legitimacy.

The legitimation crisis in the United States probably begins in the states. They are required to balance their budgets, and are thus forced to make pro-cyclical budget adjustments that deepen the recession. Moreover, in big states like New York and California, existing dysfunctions of the political system have accreted over time and made the government both ineffectual and illegitimate in the eyes of voters.

The federal government was able to step in and support the states to some extent, through programs like the extension of unemployment insurance and the stimulus bill. But congress, too, is increasingly unable to act, because Republicans have realized that their best chance of winning the Presidency in 2012 is to sow chaos and intransigently block all of the Democratic initiatives.

Which brings us back to the Fed. Kevin Drum suggests that the real impact of QE2 is likely to be relatively small no matter what, which means that Republicans will be able to spin the result in their favor and thereby delegitimate the Fed. So where does the political system go after that? The Supreme Court has been somewhat insulated from the wave of delegitimation, but that's partly because the Roberts court has been careful to promote conservative policy goals quietly, while paying false deference to precedent. If the court chooses to make a major political play--by ruling Obama's health care bill unconstitutional, for example--than it will be sucked into the vortex as well.

This is the backdrop against which the 2010 midterm elections ought to be understood. Control over congress seems to be whipping back and forth between the parties--not because either party can put a compelling vision before voters, but rather because the electorate delivers one no-confidence vote after another to parties which are both captured by narrow ruling class interests. As the political scientist Thomas Ferguson puts it, "The political system is disintegrating, probably heading toward a real breakdown of some sort."

And this is not to speak of what is happening internationally, where American legitimacy also appears to be decaying even though the U.S. remains economically and militarily central to the global order.

An interesting paragraph from James Surowiecki in the New Yorker, who observes that an increase in inflation would be good for employment growth:

Unfortunately, when the Fed meets this week, it’s unlikely to be talking up the merits of an inflation boost. Central bankers are congenitally obsessed with the dangers of inflation and are more concerned with stable prices than with lost jobs. Also, the Fed, by its nature, looks after the interests of lenders, for whom inflation is generally bad news. But there’s a more basic reason, too: people really, really hate inflation. In polls, voters regularly cite high prices as one of their biggest concerns, even when inflation is low. A 2001 study that looked at the “macroeconomics of happiness” found that higher inflation put a severe dent in how happy people reported themselves to be. The distaste for inflation is such that a 1996 study (titled, aptly, “Why Do People Dislike Inflation?”), by the Yale economist Robert Shiller, found that, in countries around the world, sizable majorities said that they would prefer low inflation and high unemployment to high inflation and low unemployment, even if that meant that millions of extra people would go without work.