Peter Frase

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Disposition Matrix" sounds like a dystopian science fiction novel. And indeed it is, but unfortunately it's being written by the American counter-terrorism bureaucracy, and rolled out as the blueprint for a future of state-sanctioned death squads.

The Washington Post [prints a riveting chapter](http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/plan-for-hunting-terrorists-signals-us-intends-to-keep-adding-names-to-kill-lists/2012/10/23/4789b2ae-18b3-11e2-a55c-39408fbe6a4b_story.html) of this story, a sequel to Obama's notorious "kill list". We discover the existence of a "next generation targeting list" (the aforementioned matrix), a spreadsheet of doom which will be used to keep track of all the undesirables now targeted for elimination by the CIA.

The story expertly combines bureaucratic tedium with horrific violence, and it is full of bizarre and terrifying lines. "The database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the 'disposition' of suspects beyond the reach of American drones." Drone assasination is now the *first* resort of the state.

***

"'We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us,' a senior administration official said. 'It’s a necessary part of what we do.'" Killing is ineffectual, which is why killing must remain our business forever. "Mitt Romney made it clear that he would continue the drone campaign. 'We can’t kill our way out of this,' he said, but added later that Obama was 'right to up the usage' of drone strikes and that he would do the same." We can't kill our way out of this, so we must keep killing. [You must go on. You can't go on. You'll go on](http://www.samuel-beckett.net/unnamable.html).

"'We had a disposition problem,' said a former U.S. counterterrorism official involved in developing the matrix." The problem was that there remained some people that the U.S. government was unable to kill.

Once, a man was captured off the coast of Yemen. "'Warsame was a classic case of "What are we going to do with him?" ' the former counterterrorism official said. In such cases, the matrix lays out plans." Perhaps we require ["camps . . . used for 'suspects' whose offenses could not be proved and who could not be sentenced by ordinary process of law."](http://www.peterfrase.com/2006/02/the-state-and-the-stateless/)

"The proposal, which would need White House approval, reflects the [CIA]'s transformation into a paramilitary force, and makes clear that it does not intend to dismantle its drone program and return to its pre-Sept. 11 focus on gathering intelligence." This will be very different from the [Tonton Macoutes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonton_Macoute). There will be no rustic straw hats and denim shirts this time.

"The matrix was developed by the NCTC, under former director Michael Leiter, to augment those organizations’ separate but overlapping kill lists, officials said." This is typical of the bloated, inefficient government bureaucracy. One day they'll think to outsource the machinery of death entirely.

"'The problem with the drone is it’s like your lawn mower,' said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and Obama counterterrorism adviser. 'You’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.'" You kill them and kill them, but they just keep growing back. After a time, "Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it."

"The approach also applies to the development of criteria for 'signature strikes,' which allow the CIA and JSOC to hit targets based on patterns of activity . . . even when the identities of those who would be killed is unclear." Like Google's search algorithm, the characteristics that will make you deserving of government assasination are obscure.

"For an administration that is the first to embrace targeted killing on a wide scale, officials seem confident that they have devised an approach that is so bureaucratically, legally and morally sound that future administrations will follow suit." Barack Obama truly deserved his Nobel peace prize after all; he inaugurated the most moral campaign of wide scale killing in history.

"The number of targets on the lists isn’t fixed, officials said, but fluctuates based on adjustments to criteria. Officials defended the arrangement even while acknowledging an erosion in the caliber of operatives placed in the drones' cross hairs." Targeted killing used to be glamorous and sophisticated, but these days it's a bore. All the good targets are already dead.

"A senior aide to Panetta disputed this account, and said Panetta mentioned the shrinking target list during his trip to Islamabad but didn't raise the prospect that drone strikes would end. Two former U.S. officials said the White House told Panetta to avoid even hinting at commitments the United States was not prepared to keep." If we stop the killing, the terrorists will have won. If we say that we will stop the killing in the future, the terrorists will have won. If we hint that we might commit to stopping the killing in the future, the terrorists will have won.

***

It comes back, as it always does for me, to ["Four Futures"](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/). The fourth chapter of that essay is titled "Exterminism", and it suggests the following:

> Many of the rich . . . have resigned themselves to barricading themselves into their fortresses, to be protected by unmanned drones and private military contractors. Guard labor . . . reappears in an even more malevolent form, as a lucky few are employed as enforcers and protectors for the rich.

> But this too, is an unstable equilibrium, for the same basic reason that buying off the masses is. So long as the immiserated hordes exist, there is the danger that it may one day become impossible to hold them at bay. Once mass labor has been rendered superfluous, a final solution lurks: the genocidal war of the rich against the poor.

Until now, we have relied on the prison system to [warehouse the unemployed and unemployable](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/07/job-crisis-black-unemployment-rates), but there just seem to be more and more of them. How long until someone like Pete Peterson demands, in the name of fiscal responsibility, that we begin liquidating these stocks of unproductive bodies?

Fortunately, the disposition matrix has nothing to do with such fears. The targets of the lists are not surplus labor, after all, we are merely terrorists.

In the debate between [Alex Gourevitch](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/two-hurricanes-2/) on one side, and [Chris Bertram](http://crookedtimber.org/2012/10/10/alex-gourevitch-on-environmentalism-some-pushback/) and *Jacobin* contributing editor [Max Ajl](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/climate-change-and-the-politics-of-responsibility/) on the other, I'd put myself more on Bertram and Ajl's side. Gourevitch's essay was a bit too long on caricatures of environmentalism, and too short on critiques of the particular way in which development operates in capitalism.

I do think, though, that Ajl's opening is a bit misleading as to the substance of his argument. He ridicules Gourevitch's call for "control and manipulation of nature" as "pure ideology", and insists that "ecological problems are not resolvable through endless technofixes". But the further control and manipulation of nature by means of technology is then precisely what he goes on to advocate. What separates the two positions is that while Gourevitch tends toward an uncritical conflation of "development" and "capitalist development", Ajl outlines an explicitly ecological (though not necessarily anti-capitalist) path of development, involving things like high-speed rail networks and alternative energy systems.

Ajl's other important point is to separate the defense of advanced technological society from the praise of large scale, centralized industrialization. As Bertram notes in his post, there is a sort of stagist theory of history implicit in Gourevitch's argument, in which poor countries must pass through the same kind of industrial development that characterized the imperial metropoles in the twentieth century. In fact, it is possible for poor regions to skip over some parts of the earlier history of industrialization entirely. Hence we see countries skipping the buildout of land line telephones in favor of cellular, and the same may happen with [distributed solar power generation](http://gigaom.com/cleantech/why-power-generation-will-mirror-cell-phones-in-developing-nations/).

Thus, while the specific criticisms Gourevitch makes (on Palestinian bicycle generators and the California energy crisis) are mostly on target, he is too quick to dismiss "federated, small-scale self-sufficient production communities" entirely. As Ajl notes, a red-green vision may reject retreating into some pre-industrial past, but it is also about something more than just generalizing current rich country ways of life to the whole world.

I'm jumping into all this because it connects to my [last post](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/the-3-d-printed-future-and-its-enemies/) on 3-D printers and related small-scale fabrication technologies.* One of the appealing things about these technologies is that, as Juliet Schor notes in [this post](http://www.julietschor.org/2010/08/new-work-centers-and-htsp/), they have the potential to make high-productivity but small scale production much more viable. This implies that an increasingly productive economy need not be identical with an increasingly centralized and hierarchical one. Which is not to say that big and complex infrastructural systems can be done away with entirely, only that they can be a less important part of our material culture. It may turn out that the industrial age was actually the apex of economic "bigness", and that the post-industrial future will be both more decentralized and richer, a manifestation of what Ursula Leguin [calls](http://www.sfsite.com/03a/ul123.htm) a "genuinely mature society" that employs advanced technology but has transcended the capitalist imperative to constantly grow and expand.

This would be very fortunate, and not only for reasons of ecological sustainability. Ashwin Parameswaran, in his many posts at [Macroeconomic Resilience](http://www.macroresilience.com/), has discussed the way in which contemporary capitalism is the endpoint of the high-modernist "control revolution". In [his view](http://www.macroresilience.com/2012/02/21/the-control-revolution-and-its-discontents-the-uncanny-valley/), post-Fordism is merely a completion of the Fordist project of "systematising each element of the industrial process", and "introducing order and legibility into a fundamentally opaque environment via a process that reduces human involvement and discretion by replacing intuitive judgments with rules and algorithms." The attempt to stabilize the incredibly complex systems of a modern macro-economy then leads, he says, to a situation in which the rules and feedback loops are so complex that they render "the system fundamentally illegible to the human operator". According to this analysis, our current version of "too big to fail" crony capitalism actually has much in common with the Soviet project, which ultimately failed "due to its too successful adherence and implementation of the high-modernist ideal."

In recent times, decentralization of the economy has been rhetorically associated with the libertarian right (even if, as Parameswaran argues, their project was actually a continuation of the control revolution). There is no reason, however, for the Left to respond by fetishizing bigness, which would be no better an answer than the the fetish for smallness that afflicts some of the environmentalists Gourevitch criticizes.

* *As an aside, I should clarify that some of what I discussed in that post was speculative, and not meant to describe the current state of these technologies. In particular, I'm well aware that it's not possible to manufacture anthrax (or, to be scientifically precise, the Bacillus anthracis bacterium) in one's home. But there's no reason to believe such things won't eventually be possible.*

Lately, it seems like everyone is [talking about 3-D printers](http://www.wired.com/design/2012/09/how-makerbots-replicator2-will-launch-era-of-desktop-manufacturing/all/). Until recently, these devices have been seen either as novelties or as expensive pieces of equipment suited only for industrial use. Now, however, they are quickly becoming affordable to individuals, and capable of producing a wider range of practical items. Just as the computer became a vector for pervasive file-sharing as soon as cheap PCs and internet connections were widespread, we may soon find ourselves living in a world where cheap 3-D printers allow the dissemination of designs for physical objects through the Internet.

The line between science fiction and reality is moving rapidly. Scroll through [these links](http://boingboing.net/tag/3d-printing) at BoingBoing and you'll see 3-D printers churning out everything from guitars to dolls to keys to a prosthetic beak for a bald eagle.

Ensconced in the home, the 3-D printer is a [step toward](http://store.makerbot.com/replicator-404.html) the [replicator](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(Star_Trek)): a machine that can instantly produce any object with no input of human labor. Technologies like this are central to the vision of a post-scarcity society that I outlined in ["Four Futures"](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/). It's a future that could be glorious or terrible, depending on the outcome of the coming political struggles over the adoption of these new technologies. As the title of a [report](http://www.publicknowledge.org/it-will-be-awesome-if-they-dont-screw-it-up) from Public Knowledge puts it, "It will be awesome if they don't screw it up."

Battles over 3-D printing will be fought on two fronts, and two mechanisms of power are likely to be mobilized by the rentier elites who are threatened by these technologies: intellectual property law and the war on terror.

***

I wrote earlier this year (at [Jacobin](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/01/the-google-vanguard/), the [New Inquiry](http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/phantom-tollbooths/), and [Al Jazeera](http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/20123121415465844.html)), about the fight over laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would have given the state broad and ambiguous powers to monitor and persecute alleged copyright infringers. The intellectual property lobby is currently in retreat on this front, but the general problem of intellectual property stifling progress has not abated. Aaron Swartz, who was the victim of one of the [more ludicrous](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/07/artificial-scarcity-watch-jstor-edition/) recent piracy busts, is still facing [multiple felony counts](http://crookedtimber.org/2012/09/19/new-charges-against-aaron-swartz/). Apple and Google, meanwhile, now spend [more money on patent purchases and lawsuits](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-among-tech-giants-can-stifle-competition.html) than they do on research and development. And the next front in the war over IP is likely to [center on 3-D printing](http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/26/the-next-battle-for-internet-freedom-could-be-over-3d-printing/).

Like the computer, the 3-D printer is a tool that can rapidly dis-intermediate a production process. Computers allowed people to turn a downloaded digital file into music or movies playing in their home, without the intermediary steps of manufacturing CDs or DVDs and distributing them to record stores. Likewise, a 3-D printer could allow you to turn a digital blueprint (such as a CAD file) into an object, without the intermediate step of manufacturing the object in a factory and shipping it to a store or warehouse. While 3-D printers aren't going to suddenly make all of large-scale industrial capitalism obsolete, they will surely have some very disruptive effects.

The people who were affected by the previous stage of the file-sharing explosion were cultural producers (like musicians) who create new works, and the middlemen (like record companies) who made money selling physical copies of those works. These two groups have interests that are aligned at first, but are ultimately quite different. Creators find their traditional sources of income undermined, and thus face the choice of allying with the middlemen to shore up the existing regime, or else attempting to forge alternative ways of paying the people who create culture and information. But while the creators remain necessary, a lot of the middlemen are being made functionally obsolete. Their only hope is to maintain artificial monopolies through the draconian enforcement of intellectual property, and to win public support by presenting themselves as the defenders of deserving artists and creators.

This same dynamic will arise with 3D printing. Now, however, it is industrial designers who will be cast into the role of the artists and writers, while certain industrial manufacturers will be threatened with death by dis-intermediation. Designers will still be needed to create the patterns that are then fed into 3D printers, while the factories will be superfluous. Imagine a world in which you could download the blueprints for an iPhone 5, and print one out at home. Suddenly, Foxconn and the Apple Store are out of the picture---the only indispensable part of the Apple infrastructure is industrial designers like [Jonny Ive](http://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/online/jonathan-ive-on-apple/jonathan-ives-biography), who are responsible for the putting together the sleek and attractive design of the device. The Public Knowledge report cited above predicts that "as 3D printing makes it possible to recreate physical objects, manufacturers and designers of such objects will increasingly demand 'copyright' protection for their functional objects."

In the last issue of *Jacobin*, Colin McSwiggen [admonished designers](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/designing-culture/) to pay attention to the fact that they "make alienated labor possible". The idea of "design" as separate from production is tied to the rise of large scale capitalist manufacturing, when skilled craftspeople were replaced with factory workers repetitively churning out copies from an original pattern. But the order McSwiggen critiques is one which will be undermined by the dissemination of micro-fabrication technology.

3-D printing isn't going to restore the old craft order, in which design and production are united in a single individual or workshop. What it will do instead is make some designers more like musicians, struggling to figure out how to react to consumers who are trading, remixing, and printing their creations all over the place. At the same time, it will blur the line between creation, production, and consumption, as amateurs delve into creating and repurposing design. Like musicians, professional designers will have to decide whether to [scold their customers](http://www.spinner.com/2012/06/19/cracker-david-lowery-npr-illegal-downloading/) and join industrial interests in fighting for strong copyright protections on designs, or whether to look for [new ways of getting paid](http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-artistic-freedom-voucher-internet-age-alternative-to-copyrights/) and new ways of connecting with their fans.

***

The dark side of being able to print any physical object is that other people can print any physical object. It's all well and good when people are just making clothes or auto parts, but recently there have been stories about more unsettling possibilities, like 3-D printed guns. The first of these was ultimately [over-hyped](http://www.zdnet.com/no-you-cant-download-a-gun-from-the-internet-7000002108/), but did show that the day was at least approaching when home-printed firearms would be a reality. Then, there came a story about a 3-D printer company [revoking its lease and demanding its device back](http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/3d-gun-blocked/) after it got wind of a collective that intended to make and test a 3-D printed weapon.

This story is significant because it indicates a line of attack that will be used to restrict access to 3-D printing technologies in general. I have no particular love for the gun-enthusiast crowd. Those leftists who think access to guns is somehow useful to revolutionaries are living in the past and underestimate the physical power of the modern state, and having your own gun is more likely to lead to you getting shot with it than anything else. But guns, and other dangerous objects, will surely be used as the pretext for a much wider crackdown on the free circulation of designs and 3-D printing technology.

When the copyright cartels were still only trying to control the circulation of immaterial goods like music and software, they faced the problem that it was hard to convince people that file sharing was really hurting anyone. Notwithstanding a few lame attempts to [link piracy to terrorism](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080328/122324685.shtml), the best they could do was point to the potential loss of income for some artists, and the possibility that there would be less creative work at some point in the future. These same arguments will no doubt be rolled out again, but they will be much more powerful when linked to fearmongering about DIY-printed machine guns and anthrax.

This is where the [intensification of the surveillance state](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1680390), throughout the Bush and Obama administrations and under the rubric of the "war on terror", becomes important. The post-9/11 security state has gradually rendered itself permanent and disconnected itself from its original justification. We will be told that our purchases and downloads must all be monitored in order to prevent evildoers from printing arsenals in their living rooms, and it will just so happen that this same authoritarian apparatus will be used to enforce copyright claims as well. Meanwhile, the military will of course proceed to use the new technologies to [facilitate their pointless wars](http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/printers/). Readers who are interested in a preview of this dystopia of outlaw fabricators trying to outrun the police are referred to Charles Stross's novel, [*Rule 34*](http://www.amazon.com/Rule-34-Charles-Stross/dp/B004Y3I6XW/charlieswebsi-20).

There really *are* dangers in the strange new world of 3-D printing. I'm as uneasy as anyone would be about unbalanced loners printing anthrax in their bedrooms. But we have seen all too well that the repressive state apparatus that promises to keep us safe from terror mostly manages to [roll up a bunch of inept patsies](http://www.propublica.org/article/fact-check-how-the-nypd-overstated-its-counterterrorism-record) while remaining unable or unwilling to stop a [deranged massacre](http://www.salon.com/2012/10/01/aurora_survivor_stars_in_gun_control_ad/) from going down now and then.

Terrorism, like drugs before it, is only a pretext for ratcheting up a repressive apparatus that will be used for other purposes. Today, we are familiar with the statistics [showing that](http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/10/02/what_id_like_to_ask_obama_and_romney) terrorism has killed 32 Americans per year since 9/11, while gun violence has killed 30,000. Soon enough we will be able to add 3-D printers to the list of phantom menaces that are trotted out to justify wiretaps, raids, and indefinite detentions.

***

William Gibson famously said that the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. In the future, expect the copyright cartels and the national security state to team up to bring you a new announcement: the future is here, but you're not allowed to have it.

*Update, 2 October 2012: Corrected a mistake in the data on the charitable contributions tax deduction. An earlier version referred to the wrong table from the Tax Policy Center.*

The American plutocracy's habit of portraying itself as an oppressed minority has become a source of ongoing amusement, and Chrystia Freeland has the latest chapter of this comedy [in the *New Yorker*](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/08/121008fa_fact_freeland?currentPage=all). She presents a series of quotations and anecdotes that will be barf-inducing to anyone who hasn't had their head pickled in Ayn Rand aphorisms. I particularly enjoyed the guy who compared Barack Obama's treatment of the rich to the oppression of black Americans, and the guy who compared Wall Street supporters of the President to battered wives.

But the most illuminating and distinctive part of the essay is the way it highlights this curious argument about the "self-taxation" of the rich:

> __Many billionaires have come to view charity as privatized taxation, paid at a level they determine, and to organizations they choose. "All things being equal, you’d rather have control of the money than the government," Cooperman said.__ “Even if you’re giving it away, you’d rather give it away the way you want to give it away rather than the way the government gives it away." Cooperman and his wife focus their giving on Jewish issues, education, and their local community in New Jersey, and he is also setting up a foundation that will allow his children and grandchildren to support their own chosen causes after he dies.

> Foster Friess, a retired mutual-fund investor from Wyoming who was the backer of the main Super pac supporting the Republican primary candidate Rick Santorum, expounded on this view in a video interview in February. __"People don’t realize how wealthy people self-tax," he said. "If you have a certain cause, an art museum or a symphony, and you want to support it, it would be nice if you had the choice."__

It would, indeed, be nice if you had the choice. Obviously charitable donation is only equivalent to tax-funded government spending if you are indifferent to democratic accountability. So it's not surprising to hear this kind of rhetoric out of the ultra-rich, who tend to be committed to an [ideology of meritocracy](http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=613) that is fundamentally hostile to democracy. The less cautious apologists, like [Bryan Caplan](http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/11/06/bryan-caplan/the-myth-of-the-rational-voter/), will straightforwardly propose "relying less on democracy and more on private choice and free markets." Left unsaid is that "choice" in the private market consists mostly of the [choices of the people with the most money](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/04/hoisted-from-the-archives-a-non-socratic-dialogue-on-social-welfare-functions.html).

This is why a class compromise over the welfare state is so elusive. It doesn't matter whether the rich agree that they benefited from their society in the "you didn't build that" sense, nor does it matter whether higher taxes on the rich and more spending on social programs and jobs will ultimately promote more economic growth. This is about *power*. Even those who piously declare their desire to "give back" to society insist on doing so only on their own terms.

Traditionally, the socialist movement has emphasized the need to subject the investment decisions of capitalists to democratic accountability, but it's just as important to talk about democratic control over social welfare spending. The choice we face is not really whether there will be a social safety net, the struggle is over whether we will have a democratic welfare state or a kind of private welfare state run according to the whims of rich philanthropists. The latter, even in the improbable event that it could replace public spending in terms of overall dollars, would be both undesirable as a matter of democratic principle, and a lot less likely to consist of the kind of universal, unconditional income support that is most [consistent with individual freedom](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/03/against-means-testing/).

A more specific policy point about this issue of "self-taxing" is that it highlights what an obscenity the tax deduction for charitable donations is. The Joint Committee On Taxation [reports](https://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=4386) that this deduction (including both individual and corporate donations) cost the federal government $41.3 billion in 2012, and the cost is projected to rise to $54.7 billion by 2015. Data from the Tax Policy Center [shows](http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?DocID=3135&topic2ID=60&topic3ID=95&DocTypeID=2) that over 95 percent of this benefit goes to the to 40 percent of the income distribution, and over a third of it goes to the top 1 percent. This data also shows that repealing the deduction would be equivalent to a 0.5 percent tax rate increase on the top 20 percent, and a 1 percent rate hike on the ultra-rich top 0.1 percent.

It's bad enough that this deduction encourages the transfer of social welfare functions from the state to the unaccountable non-profit sector. But a lot of "charitable" spending is of questionable social value anyway. Leon Cooperman, described in Friedland's article as the "pope" of the whiny billionaire movement, recently gave $25 million to the Columbia Business School, which means that the government is subsidizing his efforts to help the reproduction of the capitalist managerial class. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, one of the largest charitable foundations in the country, is a [major promoter](http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/investigations/corporateaccountability/1580/selling_schools_out/) of the neoliberal "education reform" movement that played a major role in the battle between Rahm Emanuel and the Chicago Teachers Union. And large chunks of charitable donations (including Mitt Romney's) go to churches, which are more important as conservative ideological and political actors than they
are as sources of aid.

Leon Cooperman is both a signatory to the Warren Buffett/Bill Gates "Giving Pledge", which commits him to giving the majority of his assets to philanthropic causes, and a passionate supporter of Mitt Romney. There is no contradiction there. Cooperman and Romney are both committed to the same principle: there's nothing wrong with helping the needy, as long as only rich people have the right to decide when, whether, and how it gets done.

You can look at people like Gates and Cooperman as the alternative to the decaying, narrowly rapacious capitalist class I described in [this post](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/08/the-decay-of-the-capitalist-class/). They aren't altruists or class traitors, they're just demonstrating their enlightened self interest as a ruling class, and a recognition that they need to dedicate some resources to collective projects that help perpetuate the society they dominate. But they're still the class enemy, and they'll remind you of that as soon as their power is seriously threatened.

It's far to soon to say what the elections in France and Greece mean for the future of austerity in Europe. François Hollande may turn out to be a meek Sarkozy-lite---or he may be pushed in that direction by the German government, the bond markets, and the European Central Bank. Greece, meanwhile, is still in a state of flux, although the rise of the radical-left Syriza is [encouraging](http://www.leninology.com/2012/05/syriza.html) (even as the sectarianism of the Greek Communist Party is dispiriting.) Greece may be looking at another round of elections, and the rise in support for the fascist Golden Dawn party suggests that things could get dangerous if the left isn't able to come together in coalition. In any case, I'm certainly not the one to make expert pronouncements on all this, and I'd direct you instead to my *Jacobin* comrade [Seth Ackerman](http://inthesetimes.com/uprising/entry/13165/europe_in_revolt_an_interview_with_seth_ackerman/).

I hope Hollande is right, and "austerity can no longer be the only option". Whatever else it ultimately achieves, the resurgence of the European electoral Left has provoked a defensive response from the propagandists of the austerity faction, who have raced to denounce the foolish notion that our problems can be solved in any way other than by sadistically punishing ordinary people while further enriching the financial elite. The dumbed-down mass market version of this comes, naturally, from [David Brooks](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/opinion/brooks-the-structural-revolution.html):

> The recession grew out of and exposed long-term flaws in the economy. Fixing these structural problems should be the order of the day, not papering over them with more debt.

> There are several overlapping structural problems. First, there are those surrounding globalization and technological change. Hyperefficient globalized companies need fewer workers. As a result, unemployment rises, superstar salaries surge while lower-skilled wages stagnate, the middle gets hollowed out and inequality grows.

> Then there are the structural issues surrounding the decline in human capital. The United States, once the world's educational leader, is falling back in the pack. Unemployment is high, but companies still have trouble finding skilled workers.

Singing from the same hymnal, but for the [highbrow crowd](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/05/raghu-rajan-polarizes-with-his-essay.html), we have [Raghuram Rajan](http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/raghuram.rajan/research/papers/FA%20May%202012.pdf):

> With the aid of technology and capital, one skilled worker can displace many unskilled workers. . . .

> Not all low-skilled jobs have disappeared. Nonroutine, low-paying service jobs that are hard to automate or outsource, such as taxi driving, hairdressing, or gardening, remain plentiful. So the U.S. work force has bifurcated into low-paying professions that require few skills and high-paying ones that call for creativity and credentials. Comfortable, routine jobs that require moderate skills and offer good benefits have disappeared, and the laid-off workers have had to either upgrade their skills or take lower-paying service jobs.

> Unfortunately, for various reasons---inadequate early schooling, dysfunctional families and communities, the high cost of university education---far too many Americans have not gotten the education or skills they need. Others have spent too much time in shrinking industries, such as auto manufacturing, instead of acquiring skills in growing sectors, such as medical technology.

There is an odd dissonance in these accounts, however, one that's more obvious in Rajan's version than in Brooks'. First, we are told that the stagnation of wages and the disappearance of jobs is an unchangeable structural fact: globalization and technology dictate that the demand for labor will be split between a handful of high-skill, "superstar" jobs and a mass of menial, poverty-wage service work. Yet we are also told that we face a deficit of "human capital", implying that adequate education is all that anyone needs to escape the trap of unemployment or low wages.

There is an odd sort of [Lake Wobegonism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon) in this prescription, in which everyone gets to be above average in the labor market. This is, perhaps, a style of argument well-suited to appeal to Americans, who [believe they can all become millionaires](http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2011/09/19/what-are-your-chances-of-becoming-a-millionaire/) and [never get sick](http://andrewgelman.com/2012/04/clueless-americans-think-theyll-never-get-sick/). But we are given no reason to suppose that an investment in education will change the sort of labor demanded by capitalist enterprises. Just because everyone is qualified for high-skill "superstar" positions doesn't mean that we can all inhabit those positions; someone still has to fill all those "low-paying service jobs that are hard to automate or outsource". *Ceteris paribus*, more education is just a recipe for more [PhDs on food stamps](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/07/food-stamps-phd-recipients-2007-2010_n_1495353.html). It's also the setup for another round of zero-sum, beggar-thy-neighbor neoliberalism, in which countries, localities and social groups fight to take the good jobs for themselves while foisting the bad jobs off on somebody else.

A simple solution to this problem, of course, would be to compensate those forced into the bad jobs by transferring lots of money from the "superstars" to the low-waged. But I suspect that suggestion would provoke Brooks or Rajan to go all [Edward Conard](http://prospect.org/article/endless-arrogance-wall-street) on us.

Philosophically, the Brooks and Rajan essays are interesting for the way they awkwardly combine an old-fashioned style of conservatism (the poor will always be with us, accept your lot) with a more modern form of inclusive neoliberalism (accept deregulation, and you too can be rich!) By itself, the first style of argument is simply intolerable to modern sensibilities, but the crisis has rendered the second increasingly implausible. Together, however, the two arguments add up to nonsense.

The simplest response is that self-styled critics of "structural" economic problems are not [being structural *enough*](http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-parallel-universe). The existence of a hyper-polarized wage structure is not a fact of nature but is itself a structural problem, and one that has been facilitated by specific policy choices. What we need is not "human capital" but a shift away from [protecting rentiers](http://jacobinmag.com/winter-2012/four-futures/) and toward [strengthening the bargaining position of labor](http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/02/the-dialectic-of-technology/).

I don't usually write about education. I don't have any special expertise or knowledge about it, and anyway, fellow *Jacobin* writers [Andrew Hartman](http://jacobinmag.com/winter-2012/teach-for-america/) and [Megan Erickson](http://jacobinmag.com/uncategorized/a-nation-of-little-lebowski-urban-achievers/) are on the case. But [this story](http://thehappyscientist.com/blog/problems-floridas-science-fcat-test) (via [Slashdot](http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/04/16/2119219/florida-thinks-their-students-are-too-stupid-to-know-the-right-answers?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29)) touches on some of my more typical themes.

The linked post is written by Rob Krampf, a science educator in Florida who found some serious problems when he was trying to develop practice materials for fifth grade students preparing for the state's mandatory science test, the FCAT. This is one of those so-called "high stakes tests" which are the idol of the education reform movement and the bane of left-wing education critics, because they are used to dole out financial incentives or penalties to schools. But the trouble with these tests goes beyond the standard criticism of testing-focused education. In the test questions Krampf received from the state, many of the "wrong" answers turned out to be just as correct as the supposedly "right" ones. This led to an exchange with state authorities that should be read in its entirety, for the dark comedy if nothing else. Here, however, is a representative sample from the FCAT:

> This sample question offers the following observations, and asks which is scientifically testable.

> 1. The petals of red roses are softer than the petals of yellow roses.
> 2. The song of a mockingbird is prettier than the song of a cardinal.
> 3. Orange blossoms give off a sweeter smell than gardenia flowers.
> 4. Sunflowers with larger petals attract more bees than sunflowers with smaller petals.

> The document indicates that 4 is the correct answer, but answers 1 and 3 are also scientifically testable.

> For answer 1, the Sunshine State Standards list texture as a scientifically testable property in the third grade (SC.3.P.8.3), fourth grade (SC.4.P.8.1), and fifth grade (SC.5.P.8.1), so even the State Standards say it is a scientifically correct answer.

> For answer 3, smell is a matter of chemistry. Give a decent chemist the chemical makeup of the scent of two different flowers, and she will be able to tell you which smells sweeter without ever smelling them.

> While this question has three correct answers, any student that answered 1 or 3 would be graded as getting the question wrong. Why use scientifically correct "wrong" answers instead of using responses that were actually incorrect? Surely someone on the Content Advisory Committee knew enough science to spot this problem.

I'd just add that you could probably find scientists who'd call 2 a right answer as well (survey a random sample of listeners about the prettiness of birdsongs, and voila...) This would be embarrassing enough if it were merely a sloppy oversight. But when he asked for an explanation of this bad question, Krampf received the following justification:

> Christopher Harvey, the Mathematics and Science Coordinator at the Test Development Center told me:

> "we need to keep in mind what level of understanding 5th graders are expected to know according to the benchmarks. We cannot assume they would receive instruction beyond what the benchmark states. Regarding #1 - While I don't disagree with your science, the benchmarks do not address the hardness or softness of rose petals. We cannot assume that a student who receives instruction on hardness of minerals would make the connection to other materials. The Content Advisory committee felt that students would know what flowers were and would view this statement as subjective. Similarly with option 3, students are not going to know what a gas chromatograph is or how it works. How a gas chromatograph works is far beyond a 5th grade understanding and is not covered by the benchmarks. As you stated most Science Supervisors felt that student would not know this property was scientifically testable. The Content Advisory Committee also felt that 5th graders would view this statement as subjective. We cannot assume that student saw a TV show or read an article."

Here we have the ideology of testing reduced to its fatuous essence. The ritual memorization and regurgitation of a decreed list of "facts" is the paramount value, superseding all other goals of education. We simply "cannot assume" that a student might "receive instruction beyond what the benchmark states", that they could "make the connection to other materials", or that they "saw a TV show or read an article." Not only does the FCAT not assume these things, it actively penalizes them. The test is not merely indifferent but actually hostile to any understanding or learning that happens outside the parameters of the testing regime.

Krampf's commenters continue to pile on; a reading teacher reports tests full of "bad grammar, incorrect spellings, and questions that simply made no sense". You might ask what sort of system could produce the kind of pathological rationalization for these errors that I quoted above. Another commenter refers to "a culture of bureaucratic ass-coverage", which lends credence to David Graeber's claim, [which I discussed the other day](http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/04/capitalism-against-capitalists/), that much of the apparatus of late capitalism has degenerated into a sclerotic order dominated by "political, administrative, and marketing imperatives".

A slightly different question, though, is *what sort of society can tolerate this kind of dysfunctional education system?* I'm not a rigorous [structural functionalist](http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/n2f99.htm)---that is, I don't think every social phenomenon can be explained in terms of the role it plays in optimally reproducing the social order. But I'm enough of one to think that as a rule, the behaviors that are encouraged by a society are those that are useful to it, or at least not actively hostile to it. Capitalism is unusually hospitable to [sociopathy](http://thenewinquiry.com/features/why-we-love-sociopaths/), for example, because the sociopath approaches the ideal-typical personification of capital itself. Conversely, capitalism is an unfriendly place for those of us who tend to prefer [time over money](http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/03/the-scourge-of-overemployment/), because this is in tension with capital's need for ceaseless expansion.

One might think that capitalism requires workers who know how to do and make things, and that therefore our elites would not complacently accept the emergence of Florida's regime of enforced stupidity through testing. There is a narrative of cultural decline to this effect, still available in both liberal and conservative packaging. According to this lament, America neglects the proper education of its populace at its peril, as we allow ourselves to be eclipsed and out-competed by better-educated, more ambitious hordes from abroad. This is a reassuring argument, in a way, because it presumes broad agreement about the purpose of education: to produce a society full of practically skilled workers, capable of at least enough critical thought to do their jobs.

Critique from the left tends to spend its time condemning models of education that are narrowly focused on the instrumental task of creating a new generation of obedient and productive workers. Megan Erickson's [essay](http://jacobinmag.com/winter-2012/a-nation-of-little-lebowski-urban-achievers/), for instance, worries that under the influence of self-styled reformers, "social studies and music classes are commonly replaced by . . . glorified vocational training". But a farce like the Florida science exams fails even at this narrow task. A population raised to take the FCAT will be ill-prepared to be either engaged citizens *or* productive workers. Can the ruling class really be so inept, so incapable of producing the proletariat it requires?

An alternative explanation is the one I've explored in my writings on the disappearance of human labor from production---most notably, in ["Four Futures"](http://jacobinmag.com/winter-2012/four-futures/). My analysis of the political economy (recently summarized and seconded by [Matt Yglesias](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/04/05/slouching_toward_utopia.html)) is that we are experiencing a slow transition from a capitalist order in which accumulation is based on the exploitation of labor, into a ["rentist" order based on rents](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/slouching-towards-rentier-capitalism/) accruing to land or intellectual property. Such a society is not, in my view, functionally compatible with the ideals of broadly-distributed critical thinking or practical work skills.

In a rentist order, an increasing percentage of the population becomes superfluous *as labor*---but they are still necessary as consumers. For reasons of ideological legitimacy and political control, the fiction that everyone must "work" is maintained, but work itself must increasingly be pointless make-work. What kind of populace is suited to this habit of passive consumption and workday drudgery? One that accepts nonsensical and arbitrary rules---whether they are the rules of endless work or endless consumption. Students who learn to answer the questions the testing bureaucracy wants answered, irrespective of their relationship to scientific knowledge or logic, will be well trained to live in this world.

Krampf's description of the Florida science testing dystopia is a grim vindication of something I wrote in [an old post](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/01/idiocracys-theory-of-the-future/) about the Mike Judge movie *Idiocracy*. I think of that post as kind of a lost chapter in my "rentism" series---I wrote it just after ["Anti-Star Trek"](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/) and intended it as a follow-up, but it's been read by orders of magnitude fewer people. I hope you'll go read that post, but my general critique was that Judge portrayed stupidity as being inherent and genetic, even though the logic of his own movie suggested that stupidity is socially produced.

And mindless, bureaucratized testing is exactly the sort of system fit to produce the citizens of our future idiocracy. The mentality required to correctly answer the questions on the FCAT is a mentality suited to a world of pervasive marketing and advertising, in which reality is reduced to a postmodern nominalism of disconnected slogans. The students who unthinkingly repeat the assertion that smell and texture are not scientifically testable will grow up to confidently inform you that they water their crops with Brawndo---it's got electrolytes, after all, they're [what plants crave!](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1fKzw05Q5A&noredirect=1)

The *New York Times* brings us once again to Foxconn and China's manufacturing industry, in [a story](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/31/business/global/labor-shortage-complicates-changes-in-chinas-factories.html) reporting that "there is a growing shortage of blue-collar workers willing to work in China's factories". This, we are told, is "a big factor in the long shifts and workweeks manufacturers have used to meet production quotas."

The implied model of the labor market here is a strange one indeed. If an important input to production---in this case, workers---is scarce, economic theory suggests that its price will be bid upward. That would mean some combination of higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions. Instead, we are supposed to find it logical that a shortage of workers causes bosses to work their employees *harder*.

In what seems to be something of a pattern in NYT labor reporting, the giveaway line is saved for the last paragraph. "It's hard to find a good job," says a young Chinese worker. "It's easy to find just any job." The entire story is now revealed to be a slightly more orientalist version of a U.S. media standby, in which capitalists whine about being forced to offer competitive wages and working conditions. Dean Baker never tires of [lampooning](http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/the-problem-of-structrual-unemployment-really-incompetent-managers) these [stories](http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/washington-post-reports-on-incompetent-managers-in-manufacturing-industry), which credulous reporters continually trot out as an explanation for high unemployment.

My favorite recent example of this phenomenon was the flurry of coverage surrounding Alabama's anti-immigrant laws, which had the effect of driving many undocumented workers out of the state. This produced, among other things, a long magazine article about ["Why Americans Won't Do Dirty Jobs"](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/why-americans-wont-do-dirty-jobs-11092011.html). What we actually learn from the article, however, is why American citizens won't put up with the kind of working conditions that immigrants without legal protection have no choice but to accept.* And once again, the real story is saved for the final paragraph. There, we meet Michael Maldonado, a young immigrant who has remained in Alabama and gets up at 4:30 to work at a fish processor. "With the business in desperate need of every available hand, it's not a bad time to test just how much the bosses value his labor", the article observes. Maldonado himself is well aware of his increased leverage. "If you pay me a little more---just a little more---I will
stay working here,” is how he puts it. "Otherwise, I will leave. I will go to work in another state."

(\* *Lest I be misconstrued: this does not mean that I think the Alabama law was a good idea. All this story shows is that driving away immigrants can, in fact, create a situation of labor scarcity. Unlike [Walter Benn Michaels](http://jacobinmag.com/blog/2011/08/tea-party-patriots-against-neoliberalism/), I don't think that's enough to recommend an anti-immigrant politics. I still think the policy is immoral and inconsistent with a principle of internationalism, because its effects on the labor market come at the expense of Latin American workers who are generally even poorer than their American counterparts.*)

All of this is amusing, but it also raises a dilemma for those of us who would like to use labor scarcity as a cudgel to drive high wages and labor-saving innovation, and thereby [harness the drive for relative surplus value](http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/02/a-victory-at-foxconn/) in the service of increasing productivity and decreasing the burden of work. In order for the increased bargaining power of labor to have its desired effects, capitalists must actually behave the way their economic ideology claims they should---that is, they must respond to incentives, rather than whining about having to pay their workers and demanding that the state guarantee their cheap labor supply.

But it turns out that nobody hates a free market more than the capitalist class. It was Adam Smith who [observed that](http://geolib.com/smith.adam/won1-10.html) "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." The unwillingness of really existing capitalism to face market competition goes beyond a complacent assumption of the right to cheap labor. It's at the foundation of Ashwin Parameswaran's [far-reaching account](http://www.macroresilience.com/2011/12/07/the-great-recession-business-investment-and-crony-capitalism/) of our current troubles, which he traces to a "system where incumbent corporates do not face competitive pressure to engage in risky exploratory investment."

This then leads to the troubling (for a radical) notion that the operation of capitalism is too important to be left to the capitalists, and so the workers' movement must do some of their work for them. This is one of the intriguing ideas that runs through the Italian "workerist" Marxist tradition, and it's something that always bemused me. For all that *operaismo* and its descendants have become a hip, ultra-left alternative to staid traditional Marxism in certain circles, one of the tradition's core claims is that the workers' movement is historically tasked with *rationalizing capitalism*, helping Capital to achieve its own destiny. Mario Tronti, in [*Workers and Capital*](http://www.reocities.com/cordobakaf/tronti_workers_capital.html), puts it like this:

> After a partial defeat even following a simple contractual battle, __capital is violently pushed to having to come to terms with itself__, i.e., to reconsider precisely the quality of its development, to repropose the problem of the relation with the class adversary not in a direct form, but mediated by a type of general initiative which involves __the reorganization of the productive process, the restructuring of the market, rationalization at the factory, and the planning of society.__

On this reading, a big part of the historical mission of the Left was to make capitalism as revolutionary in reality as it was in its own ideological self-conception. Marx wrote admiringly of the [revolutionary élan](http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007) of the bourgeoisie, which "cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society." But according to Tronti, the capitalist must be dragged kicking and screaming into this revolutionary fervor. Just as Corey Robin argues that right wing political theory [borrows from its revolutionary antagonists in its defense of hierarchy](http://coreyrobin.com/new-book/), capitalist production adopts radical measures to defend the prerogatives of accumulation, but only in response to working class challenges. Creative destruction is only ignited by the sparks thrown off from class struggle.

The idea that dynamism and innovation must be forced on capitalism from the outside recurs in a different way in David Graeber's essay for the [re-launched *Baffler*](http://thebaffler.com/) (not online, but the whole issue is worth buying). In a move reminiscent of both Parameswaran and [Tyler Cowen](http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Stagnation-Low-Hanging-ebook/dp/B004H0M8QS), Graeber laments that we are living in an age of technological stagnation, in which "the projected explosion of technological growth everyone was expecting---the moon bases, the robot factories---fail[ed] to happen". The explanation he proposes is that the wellsprings of invention and creativity have been corporatized and bureaucratized, administered in a away that favors caution over breakthroughs. "[E]ven basic research", he argues, "now seems to be driven by political, administrative, and marketing imperatives that make it unlikely anything revolutionary will happen." Academia, meanwhile, has been transformed from "society's refuge
for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical" into "the domain of professional self-marketers." Looking back at a bygone age of rapid progress, Graeber---like Tronti---sees a system that had to be forced into innovating by a hostile antagonist; in his account, however, it is the Soviet Union rather than the domestic labor movement that plays the starring role.

Graeber concludes by insisting that capitalism is neither "identical with the market" nor "inimical to bureaucracy". He implies that capitalism today finds itself where its Soviet twin was a few decades ago---a stagnant, bureaucratized order, incapable of reinvention or reform. He is ultimately a technological optimist---he is careful to distance himself from anti-industrial strains of anarchism---but he insists a break with capitalism must precede a return to technological dynamism:

> To of begin setting up domes on Mars, let alone to develop the means to figure out if there are alien civilizations to contact, we're going to have to figure out a different economic system. Must the new system take the form of some massive new bureaucracy? Why do we assume it must? Only by breaking up existing bureaucratic structures can we begin. And if we're going to invent robots that will do our laundry and tidy up the kitchen, then we're going to have to make sure that whatever replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power---one that no longer contains either the super-rich or the desperately poor willing to do their housework. Only then will technology begin to be marshaled toward human needs.

As a long-term vision, I agree with Graeber on this. The question is whether all of these issues can be left for after the revolution, or if there is a more reformist project we can engage with in the meantime. What does it mean if Graeber is right that capitalism tends toward bureaucratic inertia, and Parameswaran is right that our economy is held back by incumbents barring the way to creative destruction, and Tronti is right that it's the workers who ultimately force innovation on Capital? Maybe it means that until we can get rid of the capitalist class, we have to force them to bend to the forces of the market, rather than cling to their [patent monopolies](http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/patents-are-not-free-trade-24567) and their God-given right to cheap labor.

Dean Baker argues, in [*The End of Loser Liberalism*](http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/books/the-end-of-loser-liberalism), that progressives should reject the notion that they are in favor of regulation while the right is in favor of free markets. He insists that, understood correctly, everything from the defense of Medicare and Social Security to the [critique of "free" trade agreements](http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/manufacturing-jobs-still-matter-as-does-the-dollar) can be understood as part of the project of ensuring that "the logic of the market leads to progressive outcomes". It's easy to see this as a kind of rhetorical trick, but maybe it's just that capitalists can never be trusted to properly run a capitalist society. The great irony of Tronti's reading of capitalist development is that it's us anti-capitalist rebels who end up animating the logic of Capital in spite of ourselves---at least until we manage to break that logic altogether.

This perspective also casts the figure of [the left neoliberal](http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/03/the-rent-is-too-damn-high/) in a different light. The arguments I've described as left-neoliberal rely on certain free market tropes: competition, deregulation, efficiency. But taking such tropes seriously is perhaps more subversive than it appears, since actually existing neoliberal capitalism is not consistently based on any of these principles. It is instead, [as David Harvey has said](http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2006/lilley190606.html), a project of class power. In another of his essays, ["Against Kamikaze Capitalism"](http://shiftmag.co.uk/?p=389), Graeber contends that "Whenever there is a choice between the political goal of undercutting social movements---especially, by convincing everyone there is no viable alternative to the capitalist order---and actually running a viable capitalist order, neoliberalism means always choosing the first." So perhaps it's not so surprising to see University of Chicago finance professors attempting to [save capitalism from the capitalists](http://www.amazon.com/Saving-Capitalism-Capitalists-Unleashing-Opportunity/dp/0609610708), while two other mainstream economists express their hope that it will be Occupy
Wall Street that ultimately helps [save capitalism from itself](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daron-acemoglu/us-inequality_b_1338118.html).

My Twitter feed is alive with the sound of indignation about an ad agency at South by Southwest that is [using the homeless as human 4G wireless hotspots](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sxsw_in_a_nutshell_homeless_people_as_hotspots.php). The idea is that you see a homeless person with a t-shirt reading "I am a 4G hotspot", and then you pay them a small fee to get online. There is definitely something unsettling about this, but there is also something a bit off about a lot of the reactions I've been seeing to it. I'll get back to that in a bit, after a detour through a familiar theme.

The [blog post](http://bbh-labs.com/homeless-hotspots-a-charitable-experiment-at-sxswi) announcing the initiative is full of gobbledygook about "charitable innovation", and it's very unclear about whether this project is supposed to be a profit-making business venture, a charity project, or some utopian neoliberal combination of both. Whatever it is, there's something undeniably creepy about it, in the way it [turns people into infrastructure](http://nytsxsw.tumblr.com/post/19145988299/getting-a-decent-data-connection-at-sxsw-can-be-a)---e.g. "I am a hotspot" rather than "I'm running a hotspot".

It's also, naturally, an opportunity for people to [project their anxieties](https://twitter.com/#!/michelledean/status/179056846961786882) about the desirability of capitalist "innovation". But the homeless-as-hotspots plan highlights a point I've been trying to make about technology. Technical change comes in two forms, one that is designed to more intensely exploit labor, and one that is designed to replace labor. Which one will dominate depends, in large part, on the condition of labor itself.

In a [recent post](http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/02/the-dialectic-of-technology/), I framed this in largely Marxist terms. But I want to return, for a third time, to the mainstream economics version of the same argument, which I still think hasn't gotten enough attention. The work I draw on is a paper by Daron Acemoglu, "When Does Labor Scarcity Encourage Innovation?". It was [published in the *Journal of Political Economy*](http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/658160), and an ungated version is [here](http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/6179). It includes lots of mathematical formalisms, which I'll admit I only barely followed; my years of taking calculus are well in the rear-view mirror. But the core of the argument is easily understandable.

Acemoglu is attempting to reconcile two different stories about the interaction between labor supply and technological change. Standard economic growth models posit that when labor is scarce and wages are high, adoption of new technology will be discouraged and growth will slow. But there are a variety of arguments to the contrary. Robert Allen [has argued](http://www.econ.yale.edu/seminars/Kuznets/allen-101007.pdf) that the industrial revolution took off in 18th century Britain because of the high price of labor there relative to other parts of Europe, which encouraged the invention and use of technologies that substituted machinery and energy for labor. The "Habakkuk Hypothesis", meanwhile, claims that the U.S. grew faster than Britain in the 19th Century because labor was scarce (and therefore more expensive) in the U.S., which in turn encouraged mechanization and other labor-saving technology.

The contribution of Acemoglu's paper is to contextualize these arguments in a general framework in which there are two kinds of technology: labor saving and labor complementary. In economic jargon, a labor saving technology *decreases* the marginal product of labor, while a labor complementary technology *increases* it. This means that with labor saving tech, businesses need to use less workers, while with labor complementary tech, they need *more* workers. This then leads to Acemoglu's conclusion about the reverse causal process: what is the effect of labor scarcity (and high wages) on the adoption of technology? From the paper:

> The main result of the paper shows that labor scarcity induces technological advances if technology is strongly labor saving, meaning that technological advances reduce the marginal product of labor. In contrast, labor scarcity discourages technological advances if technology is strongly labor complementary, meaning that technological advances increase the marginal product of labor. I also show that, under some further conditions, an increase in wage levels above the competitive equilibrium has effects similar to labor scarcity.

So here's a riddle: which form of technology should we prefer, labor saving or labor complementary? Labor saving technology is consistent with high wages and tight labor markets. But it also, of course, leads to less jobs overall in the sectors where it is deployed. Which brings us back to the homeless people with hotspots. Let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that this is a legitimately profit-making business venture rather than a weird kind of charity. (And note that even as charity, the project depends on its consumers viewing it as a kind of legitimate business, a way for the homeless to engage in "productive" labor.) Putting hotspots on homeless people has to count as a labor complementary technology. From the standpoint of the wireless company, the marginal product of a homeless person's labor is much higher (i.e., it's non-zero) once you've figured out that you can attach hotspots to them. So if you think that it's bad when machines replace human labor (which is [not what I think](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/09/conservative-leftists-and-radical-dockworkers/)), then this is just the kind of technical change you should prefer.

But labor complementary technology doesn't necessarily look so great once you're face-to-face with the kind of labor it complements. In this case, it relies upon the existence of a cheap and exploitable labor force---something that's obvious when you're looking at a homeless person in a creepy t-shirt, less so when you order from an [online retailer](http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor). And here's where I think a lot of the outrage over homeless-people-as-infrastructure goes wrong.

I don't recall seeing a lot of complaints about the problem of [homelessness in Austin](http://www.austinecho.org/) prior to this story. Which I don't mean as some kind of "gotcha"---the world is full of horrible things, and it's neither possible nor particularly helpful to try to talk about all of them all of the time. But to get up in arms about an ad agency exploiting the homeless as wifi routers strikes me as a peculiarly half-assed form of outrage. If they weren't walking around as billboards for wireless service, Austin's homeless and poor would still be homeless and perhaps a bit more poor. The fundamental problem here is not exploitation, but the condition of possibility for that exploitation, which is the fact that there are so many poor and homeless Americans in the first place.

"The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all", goes the old adage from [Joan Robinson](http://books.google.com/books?id=-8m7B0OLXg4C&pg=PA45&lpg=PA45&dq=joan+robinson+%22misery+of+being+exploited%22&source=bl&ots=gLKrk0cCVp&sig=ypYrnHkscraD1nxenDFqFYKGLow&hl=en&sa=X&ei=lA5eT-HNOMOcgwe6woCiCw&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false). Then again, says Marx, ["to be a productive laborer is not a piece of luck, but a misfortune](http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch16.htm). In the short run, labor complementary technology may employ more people, which is better than them not being exploited at all. But in the long run, the jobs thus created [tend to be terrible](http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/03/breaking-news-lots-people-really-dont-their-jobs-much), and our real goal ought to be to channel technical change toward labor saving innovation.

This leaves us with the question of what the homeless of Austin can demand, if not the right to be walking 4G hotspots. Fortunately there is a simple solution to that. There's nothing (economically) stopping us from just [giving people cash](http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/why-not-just-give-poor-people-cash-preliminary/); and as the housing activist [Max Rameau](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Back_the_Land) likes to say, the cause of homelessness is that people don't have homes, and we have [plenty of those](http://blog.amnestyusa.org/us/housing-its-a-wonderful-right/). So imagine what would happen if this pool of cheap, easily exploitable labor wasn't available. A company that wanted to sell 4G wireless services might have to invest in more transmitters to fulfill demand. Or perhaps they would deploy robots to roll around the streets selling wireless access! This would not employ as many people, since it's more a labor saving than a labor complementary technology. But it also wouldn't create the grotesque spectacle of fellow human beings serving as pieces of infrastructure.